Alt Left: As a Rule, In Civil Wars, Nations Never Say They’re Own People Are Rebelling against Them

NATO and Ukraine have been lying and saying it’s been the Russian Army fighting in Donbass all these years. The Ukrainians are lying because they don’t want to admit their own people are fighting against them. The US and many other countries always do this in any civil war. The state never admits that it’s own people are rebelling against it.

It’s always just some outsiders who came in and stirred things up. The Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian, Thai, Filipino, Greek, Turkish, Salvadoran, Peruvian, Brazilian, Chilean, Argentine, Colombian, Nicaraguan, Guatemalan, Honduran, Venezuelan, and Dominican people were never revolting against their leaders. They were fat and happy.

It was all just evil Soviets going in there and starting revolutions. The locals weren’t revolting at all. In the Western Hemisphere, it was always Cubans who were doing the revolting. Later on it was Nicaraguans. And now in Colombia it’s Venezuelans attacking the state. In Asia it was all China and the USSR. The Vietnamese, Cambodian, Thai, and Lao people were happy as clams. They weren’t fighting. We were always just fighting Russians and Chinese over there.

Our enemies do this crap too. Syria says all the people fighting against it are foreign fighters. That’s not the case. There are quite a few foreigners over there, but 7

The Lebanese people are perfectly happy and they love Israel so much. There’s no such thing as Hezbollah. It’s all just Iranians. Same thing in Yemen. There are no Houthis waging a popular rebellion. It’s all nothing but Iranians. Iraqis love us so much that they ordered us out of the country. Of course we refused to leave and Trump threatened to have the president killed if he pushed the issue. Of course those Iraqis attacking our bases couldn’t possibly be Iraqis because Iraqis love us. It’s all just a bunch of Iranians. Same thing in Syria.

Syrians love the US. We’re over there stealing all their oil and a lot of their wheat and burning what wheat fields we don’t steal. We bomb their bakeries and water tanks. We bomb their factories so they can’t rebuild. We occupy their land against international law. Isn’t all that just wonderful? How could any Syrian be upset by that? They could not of course. So the people attacking our bases in Syria are all just a bunch of Iranians. Boy those Iranians sure get around, don’t they?

As you can see there is a human need for peoples and states to lie every time there’s a civil war and insist that their people are happy as kings. They couldn’t possibly be taking up arms against  the wonderful country! It’s always just a bunch of evil foreigners.

The Ukrainians are doing the same thing. They won’t admit that their own people in the Donbass have taken up arms against them. How could that be possible. Top Ukrainian figures have gone on the biggest Ukrainian TV stations and openly called for the extermination of 1.5 million Russians in the Donbass. How could people not love a group that wants to kill 1.5 million of your own people? They couldn’t! So it’s always just these evil Russian foreigners invading their land and killing Ukrainian soldiers.

India won’t admit that Kashmiris are miserable in India and want to go independent. They’re fat and happy. Turns out all the fighting is nothing but Pakistan trying to steal Indian land.

Alt Left: Repost: “Why Growing Up in India Makes You a Nasty, Cruel, Desensitzed Faux-nationalistic Gold-digger,” by Novusipsum

An older article that has aged quite well. It’s as true today and the day it was printed fully eight years ago. Not even one thing has changed even one bit. I hate to talk like this but I really think that India is hopeless. I hope I’m wrong but I gave up on this Dystopia of Damnation some time ago.

This is a great piece by an Indian blogger that he left on my blog as a comment. The original is here. It’s very good, and it’s actually quite well written. He takes on his country in a way that is not often seen in Indian writers.

I particularly enjoyed the bit about Kashmir because it rings so true. Almost every Indian I know goes nuts when I mention Kashmir. They raise their voice and start pounding on the table as their faces gets red. They tell me that the problem is 10

However, when I tell them that most Kashmiris hate India and that many Kashmiris have taken up arms against India, they insist that I am wrong. Most every Indian I met was exactly like this. They are like drones, utterly indoctrinated by some Borg. They are brainwashed on this subject as bad as a North Korean.

Most of these folks are what you might call middle class or upper middle class educated people. A number of them had university degrees and were quite intelligent. One man used to be a university professor.

Why Growing Up in India Makes You a Nasty, Cruel, Desensitized, Faux-nationalistic Gold-digger

1. School

While people remark on shortage of functional schools in India, I say the kids who don’t go to school have it good. The national curriculum is odious and objectionable, seeing as it is designed for kids who bow down before all authority and the various empty suits regardless of whether they make any sense at all. You cannot contest your teacher. At all. Ever. Such behavior is simply unacceptable. Put another way, the system is a hundred percent authoritarian.

School kills all your creativity. Creativity, especially of the extroverted kind, is not encouraged. There are tried and tested methods to break the will of those who are too free. The system is based on rote-memorization. You must bend your mind a certain way to do that: it means all the rules are already laid out and decided for you. You do not need to think. Your brain must function in a certain way. Any challenge to the established order will make you a pariah.

Kids learn how to secretly and openly hate each other over the grades they are given for breaking their own will and doing pointless mind-numbing work that will be of no use to them at any point in their later life. The focus is on merit – on who is better at following rules. No wonder India has not produced a single India-based world-class scientist, technician, engineer. Science, technology, and engineering after all,re fields where your ability to think is highly valuable.

Barack Obama does not need to worry about Indian kids out-smarting American kids. If they do, it will be by doing hours of grinding and rioting, and when they do, the rest of the world need to start worrying.

This system is evil!

2. Parents, Teachers, Peers

All these people are the product of evil Indian schools and other cramming establishments and will force you to succeed in a way that they deem appropriate. You must resist this but you can’t. They are everywhere.

Your peers will pressure you to bow down, submit, and ‘teach you the value of money’. In other words, how to be a vicious gold-digger. Money is nice but being a nasty, evil, little scummy gold-digger is a degeneration of your soul that even Indian’s ascetic scat-munchers do not attain.

Indian people are therefore nasty and selfish to the extreme. It is of no surprise, seeing their upbringing and their environment.

3. The environment

Your average Indian city, town, village is a primitive clusterfuck without running water or proper sewage disposal. Casteism is rampant; stupid people need little motivation to be proud of what is after all a genetic accident. They think their bloodline is ‘pure’ and grind the ‘lower’ caste people down into the dirt. Respect for human life and dignity in India has to be the lowest in human civilization.

The streets are narrow and dirty, usually overflowing with broken sewage and water lines (which frequently mix), and the garbage the average Indian household does not feel ashamed of throwing on the streets. Any kind of social grace is completely absent, people shove and push each other, vehicles honk incessantly and without reason, and the local temple’s loudspeakers blare out shitty religious hymns.

Living and growing up here, you will learn little by little to let go of your humanity. You will get desensitized to the beggars and lepers in the street: emancipated, poor and trodden down. You will see old men and women driven out of their homes by their sons, eyes pleading for mercy and trying to make sense of the plethora of people around them who ignore their plight and pass right by.

Your average Indian will not even notice the squalor on the street or the helpless human beings on the street. He will simply accept these things as a part of life, which is why things never improve. He is the selfish product of a callous, heartless, and evil system. He will never change, and western democracies should not allow such people into their homelands. Not even for a ‘visit’.

4. The Media

Catering to a large middle class that pretends to be educated, some people have taken the initiative to bring them these people latest news of the world. These people are funded by rich business interests with their own agenda as well as Hindu nationalists. They make the usual salutary noises about bad governance and bloated bureaucracy, things that are so odious that it even permeates the thick bourgeois skull. This is why the middle class types buy newspapers and watch news—they can relate to it.

But the most vicious thing the media does is to fill the average Indian with a sense of pride and nationalism, something that certainly goes against all basic logic and sanity. What people would be proud of a country like this? Only brain-washed, selfish jerks that the education system produces and the media maintains.

The average Indian is full to the brim with national pride that he has no logical reason to feel. His ideas on casteism and the workings of the society are reinforced by editors of the national dailies and the news channels.

His stance on Kashmir, a truly beautiful place inhabited by beautiful people, has been drilled into him incessantly. The parable of Pakistan exporting its terrorists (not that it doesn’t – and it turns out the Americans knew about it all along) to India and that the Kashmiris love India (Huh?) has been in print for thirty years now. Of course, India is always the poor, helpless victim.

5. College

Most people in India never even graduate from their high schools, let alone college. And I say good for them. Because the system feels the need to grind out all kind of potential competition it may get from any future thinkers.

If school doesn’t manage to turn you into a humanoid selfish fuck, your college certainly will. India’s unemployment problem is vast. Of the colleges that ‘guarantee’ any jobs such as professional degree mills like IIT, NIT, AIIM, etc., it is interesting to note that only Indians think these places are good. An independent peer review ranked the ‘best’ IIT at around 350th at world level. Yet the middle-class scramble for securing a seat there so intense it simply has to be seen to be believed.

Millions (you heard that right, millions) of middle-class Indians right now are rioting, grinding, and chewing equations, formulas, and facts for entrance exams that maybe a hundred of them really understand. These people aspire to be ‘engineers’ and ‘doctors’.

The workload is so immense that you can’t find time at age 16 and 17 to ogle girls (or boys), party, learn how to drink beer without making a face, or hang out with your friends. But what am I saying? Hell, most Indian people don’t find time to do that ever in their lives anyway.

College itself is a turdfest -professors with massive egos, an anal-retentive and callous administration, and overall awkward social interaction between the sexes. Girls hanging out with boys are labeled ‘hookers’ and ‘sluts’. Massive sexual repression is the hallmark of this point in your life, and given the pressure to rote more equations and secure a job, you’d be lucky escaping the place without a drug habit or a drinking problem.

Is there anything good about India at all? With fertile plains to the north, large iron ore deposits to the south, the biggest aluminum stores in the world and 3

The only thing wrong with India is Indians.

Alt Left: Treatment of Official Minority Groups in China

SHI: They are forcing the Uyghurs, what remains of the Tibetans and the Mongols in Inner Mongolia to intermarry with the Han population so that the country’s Sinicization is complete. They’re already 9

I haven’t heard about that. Perhaps that is because those ethnicities are in rebellion.

There are ~80 officially recognized ethnic groups in China. They represent millions of people. They have full cultural rights. They all also have a right to native tongue education in school – that’s right, most Chinese minorities get to take their education in their native language.

For the larger ethnicities like the Uyghurs and Tibetans, I believe they even have universities in their languages. They are allowed to have TV, radio, newspapers, and magazines in their native languages. I’m not aware of any efforts to wipe out any other ethnicities by marrying them into the Han. Mostly they just live in their ethnic areas (which are often autonomous zones), and everyone just leaves them alone to do what they want.

All of those ethnicities were in terrible shape before the Communists took over. The CCP improved things dramatically for all of those groups. A lot of them were living in feudalism or near-slavery. Also the CCP dramatically improved all of these groups in terms of economics. There was a webpage up for a while from the Chinese government that over in great deal how the  Chinese government had improved matters for each ethnic group. It was very convincing.

China has long been at the forefront of good treatment for its minorities. The USSR was too.

The thing is that a Kashmir-type episode probably would never happen in China. Kashmiris would have been given full cultural rights and right to education in their native tongue in China. Also they would have given them an autonomous zone. It doesn’t sound like India has done anything like this to Kashmir, right?

Are you aware the current fascist leadership of India is planning to send 2 million people in Assam to detention camps?

2 million Assamese to camps? Wow.

SHI: I just feel a large nation state like PRC is too powerful for its own good.

The problem is that the enemies of China are the ones who want to break it up. They want to do this in order to weaken it. See how that works? Why break up your country to make it weaker when that’s nothing but a plot via your enemies?

Identity Politics or Tribalism Was Behind Many of the Most Horrific and Genocidal Crimes of the 20th Century

Zamfir: “Having a collective interest is not the same thing as a hard and fast identity like race, ethnic group, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, or even religion.”

Okay, I didn’t understand that “identity” for you has to do with only these kinds of characteristics. But then I’d put it this way: Any group of people that share collective interests can have good reasons to organize politically in defense of their interests. It doesn’t matter whether the reason has to do with their “identity” in your sense or instead something less “hard and fast” such as economic class.

Because people who organize around more banal everyday political issues are typically not as insane and flat out deranged, homicidal, paranoid, hypersensitive and even genocidal as IP types? I mean do you see Democrats running around screaming about the Republicans “They hate us! They hate us! They’re out to kill us! We need to fight back!” Do you see environmentalists or pro-abortion people saying that anti-environmentalists and anti-abortion people, “They hate us! They hate us! They oppress us and dominate us! They’re out to kill us!”

Ordinary politics is not tribal like IP is. Few people would say they are member of a tribe called Democrats, Social Democrats, Bolivarians, Sandinistas, environmentalists, gun control activists, anti-free trade types, anti- or pro-immigration activists, liberals, workers, or poor or low income people? Hell no.

And the people in the paragraph above don’t scream, carry on, act paranoid, have a huge chip on their shoulder and accuse everyone of hating them all the time.

Haven’t you noticed that IP people are all insane? They all say my group is completely innocent and good, and we are being persecuted, oppressed and dominated by this evil other group. They’re all hypersensitive to any slights, always accusing everyone of hating them. They hate us! They hate us! They hate us! They’re trying to kill us! And there’s often genocidal language, sometimes towards the hated group and other times it’s, “They’re trying to kill of us!” Often it’s “they’re trying to kill all of us…we need to kill all of them!”Haven’t you noticed that IP people are all insane? They all say my group is completely innocent and good and we are being persecuted, oppressed and dominated by this evil other group. They’re all hypersensitive to any slights, always accusing everyone of hating them. They hate us! They hate us! They hate us! They’re trying to kill us! And there’s often genocidal language, sometimes towards the hated group and other times it’s, “They’re trying to kill of us!” Often it’s “they’re trying to kill all of us…we need to kill all of them!” Before the Tutus slaughtered 800,000 Tutsis, the radio played non-stop that the Tutsis had just murdered the Hutu president and were organizing a war to kill all the Hutus. The solution? Kill them first. Remember Hitler said the Jews are trying to kill us all? Solution? Kill them first. Notice how the Israelis are always screaming that their enemies are exterminationist Nazi type anti-Semites? They’re out to kill us all! Solution? Oppress them, dominate them, wage war on them, kill their soldiers and their politicians, assassinate their leaders. Can’t you realize that almost all of the horrible things that are going on today are all based on IP to some degree or another. In the ME, they are slaughtering each other over religion or even factions of a religion or even factions of factions. In Turkey, this is behind Turkey’s war on the Kurds and their conquest and annexation of Syrian land to expand the “Turkish nation.” The ethnic cleaning wars of the Balkans were all wrapped up in IP. The Islamist insurgencies in the Caucasus, Turkestan, Thailand, Sudan, East Timor, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Egypt, Nigeria, India and to some extent Syria and Iraq are Islamist jihads against the infidels; in the cases of Nigeria and Sudan, take exterminationist proportions. The Hindu Buddhists wage an exterminationist jihad against the Hindu Tamils. The Myanmar Buddhists wage an exterminationist jihad against the Rohinga. The Hindus oppress the Muslims of Kashmir and wage war on them. The Jews oppress the non-Jews of Palestine and wage war on them and conquer and annex their land. Muslims and Christians wage exterminationist wars against each other in the Congo. In Rwanda, Burundi and Zaire, Hutus, and Tutsis wage exterminationist wars against each other. Saddam said the Persians were plotting to kill all the Arabs (and most Sunni Arabs still say that the Iranians are plotting to at least conquer all the Arabs). Solution? Kill the Iranians first. The Young Turks started their jihad against the Armenians by saying that the Armenians were plotting to kill all the Turks. Solution? Kill the Armenians. Similar things were said of Greeks and Assyrians. Solution? Kill 500,000 Greeks and Assyrians before they can kill us first. Nazism was nothing but Aryan Germanic IP against non Aryans such as Gypsies, Jews and Slavs. The war in Northern Ireland is a pure IP war. Notice how all of these groups employ the IP extremism – “They’re trying to kill us all so we need to oppress/kill of them first!” Our tribe is 10 Notice how paranoid they all are and how hypersensitive they are to any slight and how they all immediately accuse you of hating them if you even look at them wrong? Notice the insane, “They hate us! They hate us!” all the while when the people screaming about people hating them are horrific haters themselves. But their hate and racism/bigotry is good and justified and the other people’s hate and bigotry is evil. We just want liberation and to be free! They want to oppress us and dominate us! IP turns genocidal and exterminationist or at least slaughtering quite easily.

Alt Left: “The Venom of the Hindu Radicals, with Additional Reports from Goa, Kerala and Nagaland,” by Alfred Fernandes

I received this very nice piece by a Goan Christian. I do believe that my Christian brother speaks the truth!

The Venom of the Hindu Radicals, with Additional Reports from Goa, Kerala, and Nagaland

By Alfred Fernandes

Western governments and news media are targeting Islamic radicals because Islamic radicals are targeting White people. If Hindu radicals had also targeted White people, be 10

US Pastor Terry Jones has no problem with Hindu radicals burning Bibles in India. Hillary Clinton has no problem with Hindu radicals vandalizing churches and graveyards in India. Barack Obama has no problem with Hindu radicals encroaching on land belonging to Christians in India. Ban-Ki-Moon has no problem with Hindu radicals preventing Christians from getting government jobs and facilities. The United Nations Security Council has no problem with Hindu radicals threatening and attacking Christians in India.

Hindu radicals not only have a large number of sympathizers in the police, army, judiciary, intelligence, IAS/IPS, and administration but also have a very large number of sympathizers among middle/upper class Hindus, Brahmins and OBC Hindus.

The only three states in India where the Christians have not experienced the venom of Hindu radicals are Goa, Kerala, and Nagaland, but not for long, as Hindu radicals are expanding their networks in those states.

The only state in India where Hindu radicals don’t dare to spread their venomous tentacles is Kashmir. Even the Indian Government does not allow people from other parts of India to encroach on land in Kashmir because the angry Kashmiri youth will not tolerate migrants.

If the natives of Kashmir succeed in getting independence from New Delhi, then the natives of Goa, Konkani, Assam, Punjab, Tamil Nadu, and the northeastern states will also start agitating for independence from New Delhi. This explains why the Indian government is doing whatever it can to prevent the Kashmiris from getting freedom from New Delhi.

The Indian government, armed forces, the police forces, intelligence agencies, judiciary, IAS/IPS officers, and local administration are not prepared to crush Hindu radicals. Under such circumstances what are the options left for Christians in India?

Should Christians migrate to Christian countries as suggested by Hindu radicals? Should Christians convert to Hinduism to avoid persecution? Should Christians in India undergo commando training and arm themselves with guns and bombs for self-defense purposes? Should Christians continue suffering at the hands of Hindu radicals?

The Indian Prime Minister, President, and Supreme Court need to advise Christians in India on which option is best to choose. The secularization of the church by the clergy and the separation of church and state are the two main reasons why 9

Wealthy Hindus in America donate millions of dollars to the Vishwa Hindu Parishads Branch in America, which is registered in the United States as a charitable organization in the 1970’s, where it has received and continues to receive funds from a variety of individuals and corporate organizations run by Hindus. The VHP also has registered charitable branches in Canada, UK, Australia, and various other Christian nations.

The VHP transfers the foreign funds to the various Hindu radical organizations in India which are involved in various Hindutva missions including attacking Christians and bringing down churches in India. Hindus left India to earn big money in the USA, UK, Europe, Canada, and Australia, and yet, while enjoying the relative tolerance of their new countries, fund hate campaigns in India against minorities, including Christians. Due to fear of Hindu radicals, some Christian parents with Christian names have given their children Hindu names in order to protect their children’s Christian identity.

In the last two decades there has also been a deep infiltration of Hindu radicals into the press, as well as other institutions – political, military, bureaucratic, civic, business, educational, and law and order – of India.

All senior leaders and Chief Ministers of BJP are selected by the people at the RSS headquarters at Nagpur. These senior BJP people in front of the media may talk of secularism but officially they do exactly the opposite. They give away government land for building temples and training camps to Rashtriya Swamyamsevak Sangh, Vishwa Hindu Parishad, Bajrang Dal, and other rightwing Hindu organizations. They authorize the Hinduization of school textbooks. They select Hindutva sympathizers in the administration, bureaucracy, police, and judiciary. They do whatever is necessary to achieve the ultimate goal of making India a Hindu Rashtra.

When one Congress Party Minister talks of banning Hindu radical organizations, other Congress Party Ministers talk of losing Hindu votes if Hindu radical organizations are banned. Hindu radicals are absolutely right when they say that no party in India can come to power without the votes of Hindus, and of course a vast majority of Hindus in India sympathize with Hindu radicals, especially the middle class and OBC Hindus. Whether Hindus vote for Congress or BJP is irrelevant because both parties are two sides of the same coin.

Governments have failed to create infrastructure, industries, and job opportunities in rural and backward districts due to which millions of people from those districts will continue to pour into cities and towns of India for jobs, with the resulting growth of slums and illegal construction.

Governments have failed to strictly enforce the two-child policy, so the Indian population will continue to increase, with a corresponding increase in the stock of poor and unemployed people.

Governments have failed to set up fast-track courts to deal with divisive politicians, rioters, arsonists, black marketers, scammers, hoarders, marauders, female-aborting doctors, slumlords, black money Swiss account holders, slumlords, unscrupulous builders, money launderers, Hawala operators, corrupt IAS/IPS officials, bureaucrats, government servants, politicians, and municipality ward officers, etc. due to which these unscrupulous people who should have been behind bars are instead out on bail , living a luxurious lifestyle, and are also carrying on their unscrupulous activities without any fear.

Hindu radicals are absolutely right when they say that Christianity and Islam are foreign religions on Indian soil, but when Hindu radicals are reminded that Hinduism is also a foreign religion on Indian soil brought from Persia some 2,500 years ago by the Indo-Aryans (ancestors of present day Brahmins and Upper Caste Hindus), Hindu radicals go into a defensive mode.

Some Tribal/Dalit Christians have formed an association called the Poor Christian Liberation Movement (PCLM) and are demanding that the Christian missionaries stop conversions in India for the next 100 years and utilize the foreign funds for the benefit of the Tribal/Dalit Christians. The PCLM also wants the Christians/Catholic institutions in India to reserve seats for Tribal/Dalit Christians. Because of the various demands of the PCLM, the bishops, cardinals, and priests are at loggerheads with the PCLM. The PCLM has also urged the government that no clergy (bishops, priests and nuns) be appointed in government committees, commissions, etc.

It has been observed that due to such appointments, bishops, priests, and nuns are deviating from their original work of the church and misusing their positions and funds. Instead, the government should appoint ordinary Christians as the members in such committees and commissions. The PCLM also wants Dalit/Tribal Christians appointed in the various committees of the Church and its institutions (schools, colleges, hospitals, etc).

The PCLM has also urged the Union government to institute a law allowing the Christian minority institutions to admit 5

The PCLM has also claimed that due to the illegal sale of church properties in various dioceses, the Union government should set up national/state boards similar like the Waqf Board to protect church properties.

The PCLM has also urged the church leaders to prepare the laity for more responsibilities so that the real message of Christ becomes acceptable to all without offending any other religions. The key concept is to respect all religions equally.

The PCLM has made allegations that foreign funds coming into India are being misused by a section of church. The PCLM wants the church to use these foreign funds properly for the development and uplifting of Dalit/Tribal Christians.

St. Peter has two keys. One for Heaven and other one for the Treasury. The Treasury key must be handed over to the laity for transparency. Economic committees should be formed to oversee the fund’s expenditure. In every diocese, the treasurer must be a layperson appointed on rotational basis for two years. After that term is up, it must be changed.

Hindu fundamentalists have brainwashed the Hindu majority with a five-decade campaign that portrayed Muslims and Christians as disloyal, anti-national, or criminal. Militant nationalists always need an enemy in order to grow. Hitler had the Jews.

In India there are the minority enemies within alongside enemies on the outside in Pakistan, China, and the West. Hindu fundamentalists pack all the national parties with their people so they will be in command no matter which party comes to power. This explains why the Congress-led UPA has not banned any of Hindu fundamentalist groups (RSS, VHP, BAJRANG DAL, SHIV SENA, etc).

Hindu fundamentalists are evolving new ways of humiliating, marginalizing, and crushing their opponents (Muslims, Christians, Tribals, Dalits, etc ). They humiliate and disarm their critics by accusing them of being foreigners and anti-nationals. They provoke them beyond endurance and any self-defense is described as violent. They keep spreading misinformation in a studied and systematic way so that at least half of it will be believed. For this, they take inspiration from the manuals of the Nazis whom they greatly admire. They harass minorities with court cases so as to wear them down.

Hindu fundamentalists use the print, celluloid, audio, and video media to further their cause, especially during elections. One cannot underestimate the vastness of their designs. If you send a Christian or Muslim explanation to the press against false accusations, it is ignored.

The organs of the state bureaucracy, judiciary, police, and armed forces are polarized. When one officer takes action, another rushes to the rescue of Hindu fundamentalists. Anti-democratic attitudes are today widespread in the same urban middle class in India that was the backbone of democracy. Gone are the days of slogans like “Unity in Diversity”.

Hindu Fundamentalists’ (Sangh Parivar, RSS, VHP, BAJRANG DAL, SHIV SENA, etc) clear-sighted aim is to establish Aryan rule in India and impose the Manu Code with its caste norms. Just as for the Nazis, the Jews were a great threat, so Hindu Fundamentalists consider the Muslims, Christians, Dalits, Tribals, Socialists, Communists, and Modern Hindus a great threat.

Hindu Fundamentalists’ definition of nation is not acceptable. It is monocultural, negating other religions and people. The struggle between the Brahminical forces under the disguise of Hindu nationalism on the one hand and the dream of an egalitarian, pluralistic, and democratic Indian state and society on the other hand will determine the direction and destiny of the Indian state and society.

Why the Christians? Have Hindus so run out of Muslims and Sikhs that a small and insignificant minority should be threatened, attacked, and burned at will by rightwing Hindutva forces? This may sound strange, but in a real sense, the saffron mob has in deed if not in words run out of options. This is why they have now turned against Christians. They are the last soft target.

The Sikhs set the retaliation game in motion. They hit out, often randomly, at designated targets, making it known to Hindu sectarians that taking on a Sikh will not be a picnic any longer. This stopped further attacks against the Sikhs. The Muslims picked up this lead and set their own pace by orchestrating the Mumbai blasts of 1993, and several after that in quick succession. So the Muslims can no longer be hunted down either for casual Hindu amusement.

This only leaves the Christians. It must be borne in mind that Hindutva activists are at their predatory best when the kill is easy and their own safety assured in advance. This is why where Christians are in sizable numbers, such as in Nagaland, Kerala or even Goa, Hindutva sectarians dare not touch them. Instead they turn to areas like the Dangs in Gujarat or Kandmahal in Orissa where Christians are scattered and isolated. In these places it is easy to kill without the fear of being killed.

Hindu extremist parties and organizations all the way to the BJP can encourage, condone, and organize mobs to kill for Hindutva, but none of them are willing to die for it. Muslim terrorism in India has nothing to do with Al Qaeda, Taliban, Palestine, or even Iraq. These terrorists are home bred and are direct outcomes of Babri Masjid and Godhra.

Why don’t Hindutva activists go to Nagaland or somewhere else where Christians are a majority? Why is it that Hindutva activists are active only where their safety is guaranteed, like BJP ruled states? In places where there is no administrative encouragement, sanction, or connivance, Hindutva activists of whatever description dare not strike any minority community. Wherever Hindutva presence is built into the state administrative system, saffron forces are assured that every ethnic attack will be a picnic.

When it comes to linguistic and caste wars, there is social science involved, as jobs are to be won or lost on these grounds. But when Muslims or Christians are killed, nobody wants their income or livelihood. They are attacked only to make Hindutva organizations look good and nothing else. This is why, in such contexts, social science of any kind is irrelevant.

Indians Angry at Indian Hindus

Jerome writes:

Just for the record, the Goans were and continue to remain unhappy about India’s occupation of their land. If India’s ‘liberation’ was in any way legal, then so was what Hitler did to the Jews and Pol Pot to his countrymen. The following are a list of people who seriously have a problem with Hindus and their oppressive regime: 1) Northeastern peoples: Who want’s to be known as a ‘chinky’? Who want’s their women raped and stereotyped as loose? Why should these people love India? They rightfully deserve independence or deserve to be merged with China. What good are the Hindus doing them? 2) Sikhs: It’s a well-known fact that Nehru promised these people freedom from India. Just like he did for Goa. He lied – a common Hindu ‘strategy’. Since independence, the Sikhs have been murdered and killed and forced to serve the Hindus. Research the 1984 anti-Sikh riots instigated by Hindus to get a glimpse of what this is about. They continue to fight for their freedom. Research – The Khalistan Movement. 3) Kashmir: Every Indian knows that Kashmir doesn’t belong to India. Typical Indian strategy – create a religious problem where there isn’t one, then say Hindus are being oppressed – then walk in and destroy the indigenous peoples while encouraging native Hindus from India to settle there. The same strategy was used in Goa. 4) Lower Caste Hindus: Interestingly enough, the group with the biggest issues against Hindus are their own lower castes. Many are now converting to Christianity (this pisses of the upper castes who won’t give them a fighting chance at a decent life but want them to remain lower caste slaves) or even Islam (Maybe this is a better option for them?) Research ‘Lower Caste Oppression’ 5) Groups of organized militia throughout central, eastern and western India known as the Naxalites: These people are disgruntled villagers of every religion who have decided to throw off the shackles of a nation that does nothing for them and fight for their own independence. They are communist and often resort to Violence. A few weeks ago over 100 (!!!!) policemen were killed by them. Research the ‘Naxalite movement’. 6) South Indian Tamils: For decades, these people have been fighting for independence from India. They rightly claim that India has forced cultural attitudes, an official north Indian language, etc. while doing little to educate or help the people. Interestingly enough, it is the Catholic Church that has and continues to play an influential role in educating the poor here, caring for the sick, dying and homeless and helping people in general live decent lives. The Christians are hated for this. Research the ‘Tamil Eelam’ movement. 7) Muslims: India is 1 8) Christians: Last, and certainly the least since they’re the smallest and most helpless minority, the Hindus have now begun attacking us – the Christians. They allege forced conversion of Hindus – a laughable allegation. Christians have had to face genocides in Orissa in 2008 and Karnataka, Goa and Madhya Pradesh more recently. Interestingly, each of these states were run by the Hindutva fascist BJP government which directly advocates the killing of minorities and the imperialist expansion of India’s territory. Research ‘Hindus killing Christians’. Hindus – Do you still wonder why India is such a F*****G mess? Readers – Don’t fool yourself – Hinduism will spread in your country and then attack you using the freedom and liberties you’ve bestowed upon them. Do no underestimate the hate of the Hindu. You will be sorry that you did.

Northeasterners: I think there is a lot of truth to this. I never knew that the Hindus hate their very own northeastern people. The term “chinky” and their belief that the women are loose applies to their very own Northeasterners who are apparently hated. Sikhs: It is true that many Sikhs do not want to be part of India. However, I live in an area where there are many Sikhs and I have spoken about this with many of them. Most of them are anti-independence at this point, possibly because they think it is a lost cause. There were more pro-independentists around in the 1990’s. Worse, many of the anti-independentist Sikhs are wild Indian nationalists, which is really tragic. Kashmir: I think it is clear that Kashmiris do not want to be a part of India. That is obvious. India never had a right to it in the first place, but neither did Pakistan. Most Kashmiris apparently want independence, and only Lower caste Hindus: Some lower caste Hindus have become members of the Hindutva movement, but many others are estranged from Hinduism and seem to hate the religion. Thing is on the Net you will see almost exclusively high caste Hindus, and you will almost never see a low caste Hindu, so it is hard to get a feel on how these people feel. It is true that many of them are converting to Christianity and this infuriates high caste Hindus who accuse Christians of “proselytizing.” Naxalites: For the time being, these are mostly tribals in the forests of India who have been oppressed since time immemorial by their Hindu overlords who consider them as worse than Dalits because they are not even Hindus. Most of them still practice tribal religions and they are outside of the caste system. The Naxals have not done a very good job of expanding their movement to at the very least Dalits, not to mention the cities as a whole. South Indian Tamils: I am not aware that there is a big independence movement among this group. Notice the rage and fury the Hindus have for the Catholic Church since it cares for the sick, the hurt and the dying. Muslims: I did not know that Hindus do not allow Muslims to settle amongst them. Interesting fact. I also did not know that public services are cut off to Muslim ghettos. The Jews of Israel do this same thing to the Muslim towns and areas of their own cities. Yes, there are frequent pogroms against Muslims in Indian cities and towns. Christians: The Hindu hatred for Christians is absolutely off the charts. I have never in my entire life met a single group that hates Christians as much as Hindus do. In recent years, pogroms have been organized against Christians in many villages, and many Christians have been murdered. I doubt if Hindus will attack us in our own country, but this people are so morally depraved that we really should not be letting them into our country.

I Made the Composite List Anti India Hate and Propaganda Websites

Here. Excellent. Though I must say, I am not in the same boat as most of those sites. Most of the real hate sites are coming out Pakistan and Kashmir. When it comes to bashing, India, Pakistanis should talk. Kashmiris have more of a beef with India, but most of that ranting is just hate. It’s not really constructive criticism.

“Why Growing Up in India Makes You a Nasty, Cruel, Desensitized Faux-nationalistic Gold-digger,” by Novusipsum

This is a great piece by an Indian blogger that he left on my blog as a comment. The original is here. It’s very good, and it’s actually quite well written. He takes on his country in a way that is not often seen in Indian writers.

I particularly enjoyed the bit about Kashmir because it rings so true. Almost every Indian I know goes nuts when I mention Kashmir. They raise their voice and start pounding on the table as their faces gets red. They tell me that the problem is 10

However, when I tell them that most Kashmiris hate India and that many Kashmiris have taken up arms against India, they insist that I am wrong. Most every Indian I met was exactly like this. They are like drones, utterly indoctrinated by some Borg. They are brainwashed on this subject as bad as a North Korean.

Most of these folks are what you might call middle class or upper middle class educated people. A number of them had university degrees and were quite intelligent. One man used to be a university professor.

Why Growing Up in India Makes You a Nasty, Cruel, Desensitized, Faux-nationalistic Gold-digger

1. School

While people remark on shortage of functional schools in India, I say the kids who don’t go to school have it good. The national curriculum is odious and objectionable, seeing as it is designed for kids who bow down before all authority and the various empty suits regardless of whether they make any sense at all. You cannot contest your teacher. At all. Ever. Such behavior is simply unacceptable. Put another way, the system is a hundred percent authoritarian.

School kills all your creativity. Creativity, especially of the extroverted kind, is not encouraged. There are tried and tested methods to break the will of those who are too free. The system is based on rote-memorization. You must bend your mind a certain way to do that: it means all the rules are already laid out and decided for you. You do not need to think. Your brain must function in a certain way. Any challenge to the established order will make you a pariah.

Kids learn how to secretly and openly hate each other over the grades they are given for breaking their own will and doing pointless mind-numbing work that will be of no use to them at any point in their later life. The focus is on merit – on who is better at following rules. No wonder India has not produced a single India-based world-class scientist, technician, engineer. Science, technology, and engineering after all,re fields where your ability to think is highly valuable.

Barack Obama does not need to worry about Indian kids out-smarting American kids. If they do, it will be by doing hours of grinding and rioting, and when they do, the rest of the world need to start worrying.

This system is evil!

2. Parents, Teachers, Peers

All these people are the product of evil Indian schools and other cramming establishments and will force you to succeed in a way that they deem appropriate. You must resist this but you can’t. They are everywhere.

Your peers will pressure you to bow down, submit, and ‘teach you the value of money’. In other words, how to be a vicious gold-digger. Money is nice but being a nasty, evil, little scummy gold-digger is a degeneration of your soul that even Indian’s ascetic scat-munchers do not attain.

Indian people are therefore nasty and selfish to the extreme. It is of no surprise, seeing their upbringing and their environment.

3. The environment

Your average Indian city, town, village is a primitive clusterfuck without running water or proper sewage disposal. Casteism is rampant; stupid people need little motivation to be proud of what is after all a genetic accident. They think their bloodline is ‘pure’ and grind the ‘lower’ caste people down into the dirt. Respect for human life and dignity in India has to be the lowest in human civilization.

The streets are narrow and dirty, usually overflowing with broken sewage and water lines (which frequently mix), and the garbage the average Indian household does not feel ashamed of throwing on the streets. Any kind of social grace is completely absent, people shove and push each other, vehicles honk incessantly and without reason, and the local temple’s loudspeakers blare out shitty religious hymns.

Living and growing up here, you will learn little by little to let go of your humanity. You will get desensitized to the beggars and lepers in the street: emancipated, poor and trodden down. You will see old men and women driven out of their homes by their sons, eyes pleading for mercy and trying to make sense of the plethora of people around them who ignore their plight and pass right by.

Your average Indian will not even notice the squalor on the street or the helpless human beings on the street. He will simply accept these things as a part of life, which is why things never improve. He is the selfish product of a callous, heartless, and evil system. He will never change, and western democracies should not allow such people into their homelands. Not even for a ‘visit’.

4. The Media

Catering to a large middle class that pretends to be educated, some people have taken the initiative to bring them these people latest news of the world. These people are funded by rich business interests with their own agenda as well as Hindu nationalists. They make the usual salutary noises about bad governance and bloated bureaucracy, things that are so odious that it even permeates the thick bourgeois skull. This is why the middle class types buy newspapers and watch news—they can relate to it.

But the most vicious thing the media does is to fill the average Indian with a sense of pride and nationalism, something that certainly goes against all basic logic and sanity. What people would be proud of a country like this? Only brain-washed, selfish jerks that the education system produces and the media maintains.

The average Indian is full to the brim with national pride that he has no logical reason to feel. His ideas on casteism and the workings of the society are reinforced by editors of the national dailies and the news channels.

His stance on Kashmir, a truly beautiful place inhabited by beautiful people, has been drilled into him incessantly. The parable of Pakistan exporting its terrorists (not that it doesn’t – and it turns out the Americans knew about it all along) to India and that the Kashmiris love India (Huh?) has been in print for thirty years now. Of course, India is always the poor, helpless victim.

5. College

Most people in India never even graduate from their high schools, let alone college. And I say good for them. Because the system feels the need to grind out all kind of potential competition it may get from any future thinkers.

If school doesn’t manage to turn you into a humanoid selfish fuck, your college certainly will. India’s unemployment problem is vast. Of the colleges that ‘guarantee’ any jobs such as professional degree mills like IIT, NIT, AIIM, etc., it is interesting to note that only Indians think these places are good. An independent peer review ranked the ‘best’ IIT at around 350th at world level. Yet the middle-class scramble for securing a seat there so intense it simply has to be seen to be believed.

Millions (you heard that right, millions) of middle-class Indians right now are rioting, grinding, and chewing equations, formulas, and facts for entrance exams that maybe a hundred of them really understand. These people aspire to be ‘engineers’ and ‘doctors’.

The workload is so immense that you can’t find time at age 16 and 17 to ogle girls (or boys), party, learn how to drink beer without making a face, or hang out with your friends. But what am I saying? Hell, most Indian people don’t find time to do that ever in their lives anyway.

College itself is a turdfest -professors with massive egos, an anal-retentive and callous administration, and overall awkward social interaction between the sexes. Girls hanging out with boys are labeled ‘hookers’ and ‘sluts’. Massive sexual repression is the hallmark of this point in your life, and given the pressure to rote more equations and secure a job, you’d be lucky escaping the place without a drug habit or a drinking problem.

Is there anything good about India at all? With fertile plains to the north, large iron ore deposits to the south, the biggest aluminum stores in the world and 3

The only thing wrong with India is Indians.

How I Came To Be an "India-Hater"

Seriously? writes:

If you’re looking for an Indian to go out of his way to proclaim love for Christians and Muslims, you’re not going to find one. My Brahmin Hindu mother has four best friends, whom she spends all hours of the day talking to: two Pakistani Muslims, a Sikh, and a white Christian. No Hindus. She has no need to go around showing this off to prove her tolerance. What you’re asking for is unreasonable. Indians don’t run onto the streets, trumpeting their respect for other groups of people. No one does. It’s true some Indian American communities are insulated, but much less than Muslim and East Asian ones. You guys kind of remind me of newly converted high school atheists, who, upon hearing not everything they’ve been told about Christianity has been accurate, go out of their way to make Christians (in this case Indians) much worse than than they really are. It’s all really just an angry reaction to what you perceive as a lie. I’m sure you’ve heard of the lost tribes of Israel, the Parsis, etc. who found refuge in India. I’m sure you can also imagine few other places, much less Europe, would have absorbed these diverse groups and accepted them so fully. There’s no denying that, while not all Indian Hindus are tolerant, India has been much more tolerant than other civilizations have been. India may very well have been the first truly multicultural society on Earth. Think about it, India has all the major religions (along with many minor ones), perhaps a hundred different ethnic groups, all coexisting. It’s been that way for thousands of years and still is now. Now think about Pakistan which was once the same way, where all the other major religious groups have since been all but wiped out. But I guess when you found out that India wasn’t entirely the land of peace, and there have been a few attacks against Muslims, you suddenly brandished this next to meaningless piece of information. You wanted to make Hinduism and India look as bad as Christianity and Islam do. It’s understandable, but both wrong and an exercise in futility.

Not at all. I have known about attacks on Indian Muslims for years. I was always suspicious of Hindus and Indians, but I let it pass because I am a liberal and we are supposed to love everyone. My close friendships with a couple of Indian Hindu Brahmins were very eye opening. Very nice guys, good people, but Hindutvadis and Indian nationalists. They hate the British, Pakistan, Muslims, Christianity, the White man, Europeans, European civilization, on and on. There was a rage there that was very hard to describe. And they believed the most profoundly anti-scientific non-theory, like rejection of IE and the Aryan Migration Theory. They tossed about all sorts of antiscientific tripe. They both supported the caste system to the hilt, while saying it didn’t exist anymore, while railing against reservations. Before that, I knew a few others. I had a good relationship with a couple of Hindu guys from Delhi who worked for me, except the programmer grossly oversold his abilities to me in a typical Indian fashion. His brother was so profoundly classist that I had to school him on how that was not cool in the USA to act so classist like that. He arrogantly dismissed my concerns. I knew a Hindu woman from Pune who hated the US and Pakistan. She was kind of a trip though. Always bugging me to send her dirty pics. I kept sending her dirty pics, but she said they weren’t good enough. She wanted pics of me fucking various women, but to tell the truth, I didn’t have any! She was pretty kooky and emotional. Every Hindu I ever met was stark raving nuts on the subject of Kashmir. They all insisted that all Kashmiris loved India and that the whole problem was Pakistan stirring up shit among content and happy Kashmiri Muslims. I told them that Kashmiris themselves wanted to go free and be independent and not join either country, and they all acted like I was speaking Greek. They were brainwashed worse than a North Korean, and this was in the world’s biggest democracy. Then I met a lot of Hindutvadis on the Net and that was a real eyeopener. Then I read a lot about US programmers losing their jobs to Indians and the hatred these Hindus had for the White West, and that was really eye-opening too. The rage, really the impotent rage, of Indian nationalists and Hindutvadis is very frightening and reminds of other ultranationalists the world over and throughout history. Honestly, Hindutvadis remind of me Nazis in the 1930’s. They done us wrong! We are getting back at them! I’ve met only a few Hindus here in the US. Mostly I have met Sikhs, who I am starting to think are just Hindus are disguise! Mind you, I made some Sikh friends here of a sort (one was one of my physicians, a Sikh nationalist), and some of them were ok. The best and most progressive Sikhs are the Sikh nationalists – the rest of them are just typical backwards and reactionary Indian nationalist types, little different from Hindus. The more I dug into the Sikhs, the more I figured out they are just as backwards and barbaric as the Hindus. Really disappointing. The few Hindus I met here were odd. A couple were doctors. They could be very, very friendly until you asked them something about their country. Then they got very bizarre and suspicious, shut up immediately and often left the room. One guy was a physician. Between visits, I looked up his name and it turned out he was some mid caste from Andra Pradesh. Next time I saw him towards the end of the visit, I asked him if he was from Andra Pradesh, and he flipped out, said yes and left the room. Then he turned cold and hostile when we had to have some dealings afterwards. He acted like I was an enemy spy. The few regular Hindus I have met around town are Gujaratis (Patel) and Punjabis, and they are profoundly arrogant. I do not know why. They get incredibly weird if you ask them anything about India, and even weirder with me because it’s obvious that I understand the place more than 9 Not that I let Islam off the hook. I already think that Islam is backwards, barbaric and reactionary. But many Muslim societies are quite stable and even prosperous. There is little crime or social disorder. Things work, in an odd way. It’s really up for grabs which religion is worse – Islam or Hinduism. Both are reactionary, backwards, sexist and barbaric. Hinduism tosses in feudal to make it a full monte. Islam is expansionist and treats minorities very poorly, but Hinduism doesn’t treat minorities well either. Prejudice against Muslims in India is profound. There are routine pogroms and mass murders committed against Indian Christians. Sikhs were treated to a near genocide a couple of decades ago. Hindu tolerance leaves much to be desired. Further, as Hinduism hardly accepts converts, it doesn’t even absorb minorities via conversion, which is at least one nice thing about Islam. Secular Muslim societies, now under attack all over the Middle East, worked very well and were very tolerant towards minorities. Much more tolerant than Hinduism. Of all religions, Hinduism cares about human beings the very least of all. It’s quite possibly the most backwards and barbaric remaining ancient religion. We can theorize this as all ancient religions seemed to resemble Hinduism in their polytheism, nature worship and caste system. Monotheistic Judaism was advance upon Hinduism, but as a tribal religion that hardly accepts converts and preaches hatred for those outside the tribe, it’s still an ancient tribal religion in some ways similar to Hinduism. It’s a typical tribal anti-universal religion. Monotheistic Islam which held out the branch of conversion to all of humanity was an advance upon amoral and casteist Hinduism. There is also a socialist feature to Islam, and at its root, it is a law and order religion par excellance. No Muslim was above any other Muslim; all were part of the ummah. Monotheistic Christianity represented a further advance upon Islam, holding out the branch of conversion to all of humanity. Heathen were to be loved and saved, not declared war on or converted by force. Modern Christianity preaches pacifism and no longer converts by force, which was never common anyway. Christian pacifism was an advance upon militaristic Islam, and Christian socialism went beyond the rudimentary socialism of the Koran. At the end of the day, I just feel that there is something terribly wrong with Indian people in general and with their whole society. It’s fucked up something bad. And as long as that’s going on, I am going to continue writing about it.

More to Punjabi Sikhs Than Meets the Eye

Beartrix wrote:

Hey Robert, did you hear anything about this murder suicide of a Mr Avtar Singh in Selma, CA? ‘From Kashmir to California: in the footsteps of a wanted killer-Journalist Zahid Rafiq tells how he tried to reach Avtar Singh, a former Indian military man living outside Fresno with a dark past in Kashmir. On Saturday, Mr. Singh killed his family and himself.’ It’s quite interesting, Mr Singh was a former Indian Army officer wanted for ‘atrocities’ committed during his service in Kashmir.

Yes we heard something about it. What’s funny is that around here most Sikhs are rabid Indian nationalists. They are almost Hindutvas too, because they won’t let you say two words against Hinduism before they get mad and shut you down. I have tried to talk to a few of them about Kashmir, but they always take a strong Indian nationalist line on that. One family started pounding on their table and ranting about Pakistan. I asked why they cared so much about Kashmir, and they said a lot of Sikhs including their relatives had served in the Army in Kashmir. Around here, Sikh separatists are quite rare. I have met a few of them, but they are not common. Sikh separatists are critical of their own society, and they really hate India. They are sympathetic to Kashmiri and the separatist rebellions in the Northeast. I thought I would get somewhere saying shit about India and how Punjab would be better off separate. That typically doesn’t work at all. One guy got mad and started ranting and raving about how great India was, and then he went on this crazy tirade against the West, especially America. He was a Sikh! But he may as well have been a Hindu for all intents and purposes. Most Sikhs will tell you they don’t believe in caste, that caste sucks, and that Sikhs don’t believe in caste. But that’s as far as they will go against Hinduism. You get the impression that Sikhs think they are part of Hinduism or at least a branch of it. Sikhs seem extremely cool at first until you scratch the surface a bit. I noticed the same callousness and selfishness that I have seen in most other Indians. All Sikhs insist that Punjab is very rich, and there are no poor people. I told one guy that there was 2 Some of them around here can be friendly enough, but typically anything other than the most casual conversation is quickly shut down. A few will be friendlier than that, but that’s the minority. One guy lied and told me he was a Mexican when he was really a Sikh. I asked a couple of them about their religion and they just shut me down. They said there’s a temple if you want to go and learn about it. They clearly don’t want converts at all! The truth is that they are pretty difficult people to get to know, and I think they really only want to socialize with their own kind. I will say that they are model citizens, and they commit almost no crime. They have very strong families with strong emphasis on discipline in children. The men are good family men who work hard and help their kids every day after school with their homework. The kids are quite studious and seem to do well in school. Many around here are either in college or headed to college. You see them in coffee shops crowded around their books. Punjabi women are very beautiful, and the guys are handsome too. But it seems that they only date their own kind. I haven’t been able to get any Punjabi women to say more than a few words to me in general. However, there are some young Sikhs now who are born in the US. They are extremely assimilated, and most of the bad qualities of their immigrant brethren are gone. I met a few of the guys, and they are very cool. They are also quite smart and intellectually curious, which is pretty rare around here. They become full-fledged Americans very quickly.

Does Multilingualism Equal Separatism?

Repost from the old site.

Sorry for the long post, readers, but I have been working on this piece off and on for months now. It’s not something I just banged out. For one thing, this is the only list that I know of on the Net that lists all of the countries of the world and shows how many languages are spoken there in an easy to access format. Not even Wikipedia has that (yet).

Whether or not states have the right to secede is an interesting question. The libertarian Volokh Conspiracy takes that on in this nice set of posts. We will not deal with that here; instead, we will take on the idea that linguistic diversity automatically leads to secession.

There is a notion floating around among fetishists of the state that there can be no linguistic diversity within the nation, as it will lead to inevitable separatism. In this post, I shall disprove that with empirical data. First, we will list the states in the world, along with how many languages are spoken in that state.

States with a significant separatist movement are noted with an asterisk. As you can see if you look down the list, there does not seem to be much of a link between multilingualism and separatism. There does seem to be a trend in that direction in Europe, though.

Afterward, I will discuss the nature of the separatist conflicts in many of these states to try to see if there is any language connection. In most cases, there is little or nothing there.

I fully expect the myth of multilingualism = separatism to persist after the publication of this post, unfortunately.

St Helena                        1
British Indian Ocean Territories 1
Pitcairn Island                  1
Estonia                          1
Maldives                         1
North Korea                      1
South Korea                      1
Cayman Islands                   1
Bermuda                          1
Belarus                          1
Martinique                       2
St Lucia                         2
St Vincent & the Grenadines      2
Barbados                         2
Virgin Islands                   2
British Virgin Islands           2
Gibraltar                        2
Antigua and Barbuda              2
Saint Kitts and Nevis            2
Montserrat                       2
Anguilla                         2
Marshall Islands                 2
Cuba                             2
Turks and Caicos                 2
Guam                             2
Tokelau                          2
Samoa                            2
American Samoa                   2
Niue                             2
Jamaica                          2
Cape Verde Islands               2
Icelandic                        2
Maltese                          2
Maltese                          2
Vatican State                    2
Haiti                            2
Kiribati                         2
Tuvalu                           2
Bahamas                          2
Puerto Rico                      2
Kyrgyzstan                       3
Rwanda                           3
Nauru                            3
Turkmenistan                     3
Luxembourg                       3
Monaco                           3
Burundi                          3
Seychelles                       3
Grenada                          3
Bahrain                          3
Tonga                            3
Qatar                            3
Kuwait                           3
Dominica                         3
Liechtenstein                    3
Andorra                          3
Reunion                          3
Dominican Republic               3
Netherlands Antilles             4
Northern Mariana Islands         4
Palestinian West Bank & Gaza     4
Palau                            4
Mayotte                          4
Cyprus*                          4
Bosnia and Herzegovina*          4
Slovenia and Herzegovina*        4
Swaziland                        4
Sao Tome and Principe            4
Guadalupe                        4
Saudi Arabia                     5
Cook Islands                     5
Latvia                           5
Lesotho                          5
Djibouti                         5
Ireland                          5
Moldova                          5
Armenia                          6
Mauritius                        6
Lebanon                          6
Mauritania                       6
Croatia                          6
Kazakhstan                       7
Kazakhstan                       7
Albania                          7
Portugal                         7
Uzbekistan                       7
Sri Lanka*                       7
United Arab Emirates             7
Comoros                          7
Belize                           8
Tunisia                          8
Denmark                          8
Yemen                            8
Morocco*                         9
Austria                          9
Jordan                           9
Macedonia                        9
Tajikistan                       9
French Polynesia                 9
Gambia                           9
Belgium                          9
Libya                            9
Fiji                             10
Slovakia                         10
Ukraine                          10
Egypt                            11
Bulgaria                         11
Norway                           11
Poland                           11
Serbia and Montenegro            11
Eritrea                          12
Georgia*                         12
Finland*                         12
Switzerland*                     12
Hungary*                         12
United Kingdom*                  12
Mongolia                         13
Spain                            13
Somalia*                         13
Oman                             13
Madagascar                       13
Malawi                           14
Equatorial Guinea                14
Mali                             14
Azerbaijan                       14
Japan                            15
Syria*                           15
Romania*                         15
Sweden*                          15
Netherlands*                     15
Greece                           16
Brunei                           17
Algeria                          18
Micronesia                       18
East Timor                       19
Zimbabwe                         19
Niger                            21
Singapore                        21
Cambodia                         21
Iraq*                            21
Guinea-Bissau                    21
Taiwan                           22
Bhutan                           24
Sierra Leone                     24
South Africa                     24
Germany                          28
Namibia                          28
Botswana                         28
France                           29
Liberia                          30
Israel                           33
Italy                            33
Guinea                           34
Turkey*                          34
Senegal                          36
Bangladesh                       39
New Caledonia                    39
Togo                             39
Angola*                          41
Gabon                            41
Zambia                           41
Mozambique                       43
Uganda                           43
Afghanistan                      47
Guatemala                        54
Benin                            54
Kenya                            61
Congo                            62
Burkina Faso                     68
Central African Republic         69
Solomon Islands                  70
Thailand*                        74
Iran*                            77
Cote D'Ivoire                    78
Ghana                            79
Laos                             82
Ethiopia*                        84
Canada*                          85
Russia*                          101
Vietnam                          102
Myanmar*                         108
Vanuatu                          109
Nepal                            126
Tanzania                         128
Chad                             132
Sudan*                           134
Malaysia                         140
United States*                   162
Philippines*                     171
Pakistan*                        171
Democratic Republic of Congo     214
Australia                        227
China*                           235
Cameroon*                        279
Mexico                           291
India*                           415
Nigeria                          510
Indonesia*                       737
Papua New Guinea*                820

*Starred states have a separatist problem, but most are not about language. Most date back to the very formation of an often-illegitimate state.

Canada definitely has a conflict that is rooted in language, but it is also rooted in differential histories as English and French colonies. The Quebec nightmare is always brought up by state fetishists, ethnic nationalists and other racists and nationalists who hate minorities as the inevitable result of any situation whereby a state has more than one language within its borders.

This post is designed to give the lie to this view.

Cyprus’ problem has to do with two nations, Greeks and Turks, who hate each other. The history for this lies in centuries of conflict between Christianity and Islam, culminating in the genocide of 350,000 Greeks in Turkey from 1916-1923.

Morocco’s conflict has nothing to do with language. Spanish Sahara was a Spanish colony in Africa. After the Spanish left in the early 1950’s, Morocco invaded the country and colonized it, claiming in some irredentist way that the land had always been a part of Morocco. The residents beg to differ and say that they are a separate state.

An idiotic conflict ensued in which Morocco the colonizer has been elevated to one of the most sanctioned nations of all by the UN. Yes, Israel is not the only one; there are other international scofflaws out there. In this conflict, as might be expected, US imperialism has supported Moroccan colonialism.

This Moroccan colonialism has now become settler-colonialism, as colonialism often does. You average Moroccan goes livid if you mention their colony. He hates Israel, but Morocco is nothing but an Arab Muslim Israel. If men had a dollar for every drop of hypocrisy, we would be a world of millionaires.

There are numerous separatist conflicts in Somalia. As Somalians have refused to perform their adult responsibilities and form a state, numerous parts of this exercise in anarchism in praxis (Why are the anarchists not cheering this on?) are walking away from the burning house. Who could blame them?

These splits seem to have little to do with language. One, Somaliland, was a former British colony and has a different culture than the rest of Somalia. Somaliland is now de facto independent, as Somalia, being a glorious exercise in anarchism, of course lacks an army to enforce its borders, or to do anything.

Jubaland has also split, but this has nothing to do with language. Instead, this may be rooted in a 36-year period in which it was a British colony. Soon after this period, they had their own postage stamps as an Italian colony.

There is at least one serious separatist conflict in Ethiopia in the Ogaden region, which is mostly populated by ethnic Somalis. Apparently this region used to be part of Somaliland, and Ethiopia probably has little claim to the region. This conflict has little do with language and more to do with conflicts rooted in colonialism and the illegitimate borders of states.

There is also a conflict in the Oromo region of Ethiopia that is not going very far lately. These people have been fighting colonialism since Ethiopia was a colony and since then have been fighting against independent Ethiopia, something they never went along with. Language has a role here, but the colonization of a people by various imperial states plays a larger one.

There was a war in Southern Sudan that has now ended with the possibility that the area may secede.

There is a genocidal conflict in Darfur that the world is ignoring because it involves Arabs killing Blacks as they have always done in this part of the world, and the world only gets upset when Jews kill Muslims, not when Muslims kill Muslims.

This conflict has to do with the Sudanese Arabs treating the Darfurians with utter contempt – they regard them as slaves, as they have always been to these racist Arabs.

The conflict in Southern Sudan involved a region in rebellion in which many languages were spoken. The South Sudanese are also niggers to the racist Arabs, plus they are Christian and animist infidels to be converted by the sword by Sudanese Arab Muslims. Every time a non-Muslim area has tried to split off from or acted uppity with a Muslim state they were part of, the Muslims have responded with a jihad against and genocide of the infidels.

This conflict has nothing to do with language; instead it is a war of Arab Muslim religious fanatics against Christian and animist infidels.

There is a separatist movement in the South Cameroons in the nation of Cameroon in Africa. This conflict is rooted in colonialism. During the colonial era, South Cameroons was a de facto separate state. Many different languages are spoken here, as is the case in Cameroon itself. They may have a separate culture too, but this is just another case of separatism rooted in colonialism. The movement seems to be unarmed.

There is a separatist conflict in Angola in a region called Cabinda, which was always a separate Portuguese colony from Angola.

As this area holds 6

The Cabindans do claim to have a separate culture, but language does not seem to be playing much role here – instead, oil and colonialism are.

Syria does have a Kurdish separatist movement, as does Iran, Iraq, and Turkey – every state that has a significant number of Kurds. This conflict goes back to the post-World War 1 breakup of the Ottoman Empire. The Kurds, with thousands of years of history as a people, nominally independent for much of that time, were denied a state and sold out.

The new fake state called Turkey carved up part of Kurdistan, another part was donated to the British colony in Iraq and another to the French colony in Syria, as the Allies carved up the remains of the Empire like hungry guests at a feast.

This conflict is more about colonialism and extreme discrimination than language, though the Kurds do speak their own tongue. There is also a Kurdish separatist conflict in Iran, but I don’t know much about the history of the Iranian Kurds.

There is also an Assyrian separatist movement in Iraq and possibly in Syria. The movement is unarmed. The Assyrians have been horribly persecuted by Arab nationalist racists in the region, in part because they are Christians. They have been targeted by Islamo-Nazis in Iraq during this Iraq War with a ferocity that can only be described as genocidal.

The Kurds have long persecuted the Assyrians in Iraqi Kurdistan. There have been regular homicides of Assyrians in the north, up around the Mosul region. This is just related to the general way that Muslims treat Christian minorities in many Muslim states – they persecute them and even kill them. There is also a lot of land theft going on.

While the Kurdish struggle is worthwhile, it is becoming infected with the usual nationalist evil that afflicts all ethnic nationalism. This results in everyone who is not a Kurdish Sunni Muslim being subjected to varying degrees of persecution, disenfranchisement and discrimination. It’s a nasty part of the world.

In Syria, the Assyrians live up near the Turkish and Iraqi borders. Arab nationalist racists have been stealing their land for decades now and relocating the Assyrians to model villages, where they languish in poverty. Assad’s regime is not so secular and progressive as one might suspect.

There is a separatist conflict in Bougainville in New Guinea. I am sure that many different tongues are spoken on that island, as there are 800 different tongues spoken in Papua New Guinea. The conflict is rooted in the fact that Bougainville is rich in copper, but almost all of this wealth is stolen by Papua New Guinea and US multinationals, so the Bougainville people see little of it. Language has little or nothing to do with it.

There are separatist movements in the Ahwaz and Balochistan regions of Iran, along with the aforementioned Kurdish movement. It is true that different languages are spoken in these regions, but that has little to do with the conflict.

Arabic is spoken in Khuzestan, the land of the Iranian Arabs. This land has been part of Persia for around 2,000 years as the former land of Elam. The Arabs complain that they are treated poorly by the Persians, and that they get little revenue to their region even though they are sitting on a vast puddle of oil and natural gas.

Iran should not be expected to part with this land, as it is the source of much of their oil and gas wealth. Many or most Iranians speak Arabic anyway, so there is not much of a language issue. Further, Arab culture is promoted by the Islamist regime even at the expense of Iranian culture, much to the chagrin of Iranian nationalists.

The Ahwaz have been and are being exploited by viciously racist Arab nationalists in Iraq, and also by US imperialism, and most particularly lately, British imperialism, as the British never seem to have given up the colonial habit. This conflict is not about language at all. Most Ahwaz don’t even want to separate anyway; they just want to be treated like humans by the Iranians.

Many of Iran’s

There is a separatist movement in Iran to split off Iranian Azerbaijan and merge it with Azerbaijan proper. This movement probably has little to do with language and more to do with just irredentism. The movement is not going to go very far because most Iranian Azeris do not support it.

Iranian Azeris actually form a ruling class in Iran and occupy most of the positions of power in the government. They also control a lot of the business sector and seem to have a higher income than other Iranians. This movement has been co-opted by pan-Turkish fascists for opportunistic reasons, but it’s not really going anywhere. The CIA is now cynically trying to stir it up with little success. The movement is peaceful.

There is a Baloch insurgency in Pakistan, but language has little to do with it. These fiercely independent people sit on top of a very rich land which is ruthlessly exploited by Punjabis from the north. They get little or no return from this natural gas wealth. Further, this region never really consented to being included in the Pakistani state that was carved willy-nilly out of India in 1947.

It is true that there are regions in the Caucasus that are rebelling against Russia. Given the brutal and bloody history of Russian imperial colonization of this region and the near-continuous rebellious state of the Muslims resident there, one wants to say they are rebelling against Imperial Russia.

Chechnya is the worst case, but Tuva reserves the right to split away, but this is rooted in their prior history as an independent state within the USSR (Tell me how that works?) for two decades until 1944, when Stalin reconquered it as a result of the conflict with the Nazis. The Tuvans accepted peacefully.

Yes, the Tuvans speak a different tongue, but so do all of the Siberian nations, and most of those are still with Russia. Language has little to do with the Tuvan matter.

There is also separatism in the Bashkir Republic and Adygea in Russia. These have not really gone anywhere. Only 2 Adygea speak Circassian, and they see themselves as overrun by Russian-speaking immigrants. This conflict may have something to do with language. The Adygean conflict is also peripherally related the pan-Caucasian struggle above.

In the Bashkir Republic, the problem is more one of a different religion – Islam, as most Bashkirs are Muslim. It is not known to what degree language has played in the struggle, but it may be a factor. The Bashkirs also see themselves as overrun by Russian-speaking immigrants. It is dubious that the Bashkirs will be able to split off, as the result will be a separate nation surrounded on all sides by Russia.

The Adygean, Tuvan and Bashkir struggles are all peaceful.

The conflict in Georgia is complex. A province called Abkhazia has split off and formed their own de facto state, which has been supported with extreme cynicism by up and coming imperialist Russia, the same clown state that just threatened to go to war to defend the territorial integrity of their genocidal Serbian buddies. South Ossetia has also split off and wants to join Russia.

Both of these reasonable acts prompted horrible and insane wars as Georgia sought to preserve its territorial integrity, though it has scarcely been a state since 1990, and neither territory ever consented to being part of Georgia.

The Ossetians and Abkhazians do speak separate languages, and I am not certain why they want to break away, but I do not think that language has much to do with it. All parties to these conflicts are nations in rebellion announced that they were not part of the deal.

Bloody rebellions have gone on ever since, and language has little or nothing to do with any of them. They are situated instead on the illegitimacy of not only the borders of the Burmese state, but of the state itself.

Thailand does have a separatist movement, but it is Islamic. They had a separate state down there until the early 1800’s when they were apparently conquered by Thais. I believe they do speak a different language down there, but it is not much different from Thai, and I don’t think language has anything to do with this conflict.

There is a conflict in the Philippines that is much like the one in Thailand. Muslims in Mindanao have never accepted Christian rule from Manila and are in open arms against the state. Yes, they speak different languages down in Mindanao, but they also speak Tagalog, the language of the land.

This just a war of Muslims seceding because they refuse to be ruled by infidels. Besides, this region has a long history of independence, de facto and otherwise, from the state. The Moro insurgency has little to nothing to do with language.

There are separatist conflicts in Indonesia. The one in Aceh seems to have petered out. Aceh never agreed to join the fake state of Indonesia that was carved out of the Dutch East Indies when the Dutch left in 1949.

West Papua is a colony of Indonesia. It was invaded by Indonesia with the full support of US imperialism in 1965. The Indonesians then commenced to murder 100,000 Papuans over the next 40 years. There are many languages spoken in West Papua, but that has nothing to do with the conflict. West Papuans are a racially distinct people divided into vast numbers of tribes, each with a separate culture.

They have no connection racially or culturally with the rest of Indonesia and do not wish to be part of the state. They were not a part of the state when it was declared in 1949 and were only incorporated after an Indonesian invasion of their land in 1965. Subsequently, Indonesia has planted lots of settler-colonists in West Papua.

There is also a conflict in the South Moluccas , but it has more to do with religion than anything else, since there is a large number of Christians in this area. The South Moluccans were always reluctant to become a part of the new fake Indonesian state that emerged after independence anyway, and I believe there was some fighting for a while there. The South Moluccan struggle has generally been peaceful ever since.

Indonesia is the Israel of Southeast Asia, a settler-colonial state. The only difference is that the Indonesians are vastly more murderous and cruel than the Israelis.

There are conflicts in Tibet and East Turkestan in China. In the case of Tibet, this is a colony of China that China has no jurisdiction over. The East Turkestan fight is another case of Muslims rebelling against infidel rule. Yes, different languages are spoken here, but this is the case all over China.

Language is involved in the East Turkestan conflict in that Chinese have seriously repressed the Uighur language, but I don’t think it plays much role in Tibet.

There is also a separatist movement in Inner Mongolia in China. I do not think that language has much to do with this, and I believe that China’s claim to Inner Mongolia may be somewhat dubious. This movement is unarmed and not very organized.

There are conflicts all over India, but they don’t have much to do with language.

The Kashmir conflict is not about language but instead is rooted in the nature of the partition of India after the British left in 1947. 9

The UN quickly ruled that Kashmir had to be granted a vote in its future, but this vote was never allowed by India. As such, India is another world-leading rogue and scofflaw state on a par with Israel and Indonesia. Now the Kashmir mess has been complicated by the larger conflict between India and Pakistan, and until that is all sorted out, there will be no resolution to this mess.

Obviously India has no right whatsoever to rule this area, and the Kashmir cause ought to be taken up by all progressives the same way that the Palestinian one is.

There are many conflicts in the northeast, where most of the people are Asians who are racially, often religiously and certainly culturally distinct from the rest of Indians.

None of these regions agreed to join India when India, the biggest fake state that has ever existed, was carved out of 5,000 separate princely states in 1947. Each of these states had the right to decide its own future to be a part of India or not. As it turned out, India just annexed the vast majority of them and quickly invaded the few that said no.

“Bharat India”, as Indian nationalist fools call it, as a state, is one of the silliest concepts around. India has no jurisdiction over any of those parts of India in separatist rebellion, if you ask me. Language has little to do with these conflicts.

Over 800 languages are spoken in India anyway, each state has its own language, and most regions are not in rebellion over this. Multilingualism with English and Hindi to cement it together has worked just fine in most of India.

Sri Lanka’s conflict does involve language, but more importantly it involves centuries of extreme discrimination by ruling Buddhist Sinhalese against minority Hindu Tamils. Don’t treat your minorities like crap, and maybe they will not take up arms against you.

The rebellion in the Basque country of Spain and France is about language, as is Catalonian nationalism.

IRA Irish nationalism and the Scottish and Welsh independence movements have nothing to do with language, as most of these languages are not in good shape anyway.

The Corsicans are in rebellion against France, and language may play a role. There is an independence movement in Brittany in France also, and language seems to play a role here, or at least the desire to revive the language, which seems to be dying.

There is a possibility that Belgium may split into Flanders and Wallonia, and language does play a huge role in this conflict. One group speaks French and the other Dutch.

There is a movement in Scania, a part of Sweden, to split away from Sweden. Language seems to have nothing to do with it.

There is a Hungarian separatist movement, or actually, a national reunification or pan-Hungarian movement, in Romania. It isn’t going anywhere, and it unlikely to succeed. Hungarians in Romania have not been treated well and are a large segment of the population. This fact probably drives the separatism more than language.

There are many other small conflicts in Europe that I chose not to go into due to limitations on time and the fact that I am getting tired of writing this post! Perhaps I can deal with them at a later time. Language definitely plays a role in almost all of these conflicts. None of them are violent though.

To say that there are separatists in French Polynesia is not correct. This is an anti-colonial movement that deserves the support of anti-colonial activists the world over. The entire world, evidenced by the UN itself, has rejected colonialism. Only France, the UK and the US retain colonies. That right there is notable, as all three are clearly imperialist countries. In this modern age, the value of retaining colonies is dubious.

These days, colonizers pour more money into colonies than they get out of them. France probably keeps Polynesia due to colonial pride and also as a place to test nuclear weapons and maintain military bases. As the era of French imperialism on a grand scale has clearly passed, France needs to renounce its fantasies of being a glorious imperial power along with its anachronistic colonies.

Yes, there is a Mapuche separatist movement in Chile, but it is not going anywhere soon, or ever.

It has little to do with language. The Mapudungan language is not even in very good shape, and the leaders of this movement are a bunch of morons. Microsoft recently unveiled a Mapudungan language version of Microsoft Windows. You would think that the Mapuche would be ecstatic. Not so! They were furious. Why? Oh, I forget. Some Identity Politics madness.

This movement has everything to do with the history of Chile. Like Argentina and Uruguay, Chile was one of the Spanish colonies that was settled en masse late. For centuries, a small colonial bastion battled the brave Mapuche warriors, but were held at bay by this skilled and militaristic tribe.

Finally, in the late 1800’s, a fanatical and genocidal war was waged on the Mapuche in one of those wonderful “national reunification” missions so popular in the 1800’s (recall Italy’s wars of national reunification around this same time). By the 1870’s, the Mapuche were defeated and suffered a devastating loss of life.

Yet all those centuries of only a few Spanish colonists and lots of Indians had made their mark, and at least 7

Because they held out so long and so many of them survived, they are one of the most militant Amerindian groups in the Americas. They are an interesting people, light-skinned and attractive, though a left-wing Chilean I knew used to chortle about how hideously ugly they were.

Hawaiian separatism is another movement that has a lot to do with colonialism and imperialism and little to do with language. The Hawaiian language, despite some notable recent successes, is not in very good shape. The Hawaiian independence movement offers nothing to non-Hawaiians (I guess only native Hawaiians get to be citizens!) and is doomed to fail.

Hawaiians are about 2

There are separatists in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh, but I doubt that language has much to do with it. Like the myriad other separatist struggles in the NE of India, these people are ethnically Asians and as such are not the same ethnicity as the Caucasians who make up the vast majority of the population of this wreck of a state.

This is another conflict that is rooted in a newly independent fake state. The Chittagong Hill Tracts were incorporated into Bangladesh after its independence from Pakistan in 1971. As a fake new state, the peoples of Bangladesh had a right to be consulted on whether or not they wished to be a part of it. The CHT peoples immediately said that they wanted no part of this new state.

At partition, the population was 98.

I don’t know much about the separatist struggle of the Moi in Vietnam, but I think it is more a movement for autonomy than anything else. The Moi are Montagnards and have probably suffered discrimination at the hands of the state along with the rest of the Montagnards.

Zanzibar separatism in Tanzania seems to have nothing whatsoever to do with language, but has a lot more to do with geography. Zanzibar is a nice island off the coast of Tanzania which probably wants nothing to do with the mess of a Tanzanian state.

The conflict also has a lot to do with race. Most residents of Zanzibar are either Arabs or descendants of unions between Arabs and Africans. In particular, they deny that they are Black Africans. I bet that is the root of the conflict right there.

There were some Talysh separatists in Azerbaijan a while back, but the movement seems to be over. I am not sure what was driving them, but language doesn’t seem to have been a big part of it. Just another case of new members of a fake new state refusing to go along for the ride.

There were some Gagauz separatists in Moldova a while back, but the movement appears to have died down. Language does seem to have played a role here, as the Gagauz speak a Turkic tongue totally unrelated to the Romance-speaking Moldovans.

Realistically, it’s just another case of a fake new state emerging and some members of the new state saying they don’t want to be a part of it, and the leaders of the fake new state suddenly invoking inviolability of borders in a state with no history!

In summary, as we saw above, once we get into Europe, language does play a greater role in separatist conflict, but most of these European conflicts are not violent. In the rest of the world, language plays little to no role in the vast majority of separatist conflicts.

The paranoid and frankly fascist notion voiced by rightwing nationalists the world over that any linguistic diversity in the world within states must be crushed as it will inevitably lead to separatism at best or armed separatism at worst is not supported by the facts.

"Joys of Muslim Women," by Nonie Darwish

Some of this stuff is a bit over to the top, and I edited out about 1 Some of the stuff I removed: that Muslims are preparing a jihad against the West, apparently to convert us to Islam? I don’t agree with that. They think some of us are attacking Islam, so they are counterattacking. Another line said that in 20 years, there will be enough Muslims in North America to elect the President and Prime Minister of the US and Canada. No way is that true. It isn’t really true that non-Muslims are supposed to be killed or subjugated by Muslims, though there is a bit of truth to that. Under Muslim rule, non-Muslims are clearly subordinate. But where Muslims are the minority, that is not the case. Muslims are supposed to try to convert and increase their numbers so they can be a majority. Apparently conquest in the name of Islam – aggressive jihad – we have not seen that much in recent years. One exception is Southern Sudan. There have been some genocides of non-Muslims too – Greeks, Assyrians and Armenians in Anatolia, Catholics in East Timor. In areas with a Muslim majority trying to secede from the state, it’s typically “kill the non-Muslims.” This is the case in the Southern Philippines, Thailand, the Moluccas, Chechnya and Kashmir. There have been localized massacres of non-Muslims in India, Iraq, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Bangladesh and Pakistan. Muslim jihad is a complicated subject, and saying they want to kill us or convert us is a bit ridiculous, though that was more or less what was going on South Sudan, and there have been some cases of that in Iraq and Pakistan recently.

Joys of Muslim Women

by Nonie Darwish

In the Muslim faith a Muslim man can marry a child as young as 7 year old, consummating the marriage by 9. The dowry is given to the family in exchange for the woman (who becomes his slave) and for the purchase of the private parts of the woman, to use her as a toy. To prove rape, the woman must have (4) male witnesses. Often after a woman has been raped, the family has the right to execute her (an honor killing) to restore the honor of the family. Husbands can beat their wives ‘at will, and the man does not have to say why he has beaten her. The husband is permitted to have 4 wives and a temporary wife for an hour (prostitute) at his discretion. The Shariah Muslim law controls the private as well as the public life of the woman. In the Western World (America), Muslim men are starting to demand Shariah Law so the wife can not obtain a divorce and he can have full and complete control of her. It is amazing and alarming how many of our sisters and daughters attending US and Canadian Universities are now marrying Muslim men and submitting themselves and their children unsuspectingly to Shariah law. Ripping the West in Two. Author and lecturer Nonie Darwish says the goal of radical Islamists is to impose Shariah law on the world, ripping Western law and liberty in two.

Ripping the West in Two

Nonie Darwish recently authored the book, Cruel and Usual Punishment: The Terrifying Global Implications of Islamic Law. Darwish was born in Cairo and spent her childhood in Egypt and Gaza before immigrating to the US in 1978, when she was eight years old. Her father died while leading covert attacks on Israel. He was a high-ranking Egyptian military officer stationed with his family in Gaza. When he died, he was considered a “shahid,” a martyr for jihad. His posthumous status earned Nonie and her family an elevated position in Muslim society. But Darwish developed a skeptical eye at an early age. She questioned her own Muslim culture and upbringing. She converted to Christianity after hearing a Christian preacher on television. In her latest book, Darwish warns about creeping sharia law – what it is, what it means, and how it is manifested in Islamic countries. Westerners generally assume all religions encourage a respect for the dignity of each individual. Islamic law (Sharia) teaches that non-Muslims should be subjugated or killed in this world. Peace and prosperity for one’s children is not as important as assuring that Islamic law rules everywhere in the Middle East and eventually in the world. While Westerners tend to think that all religions encourage some form of the golden rule, Sharia teaches two systems of ethics – one for Muslims and another for non-Muslims. Building on tribal practices of the seventh century, Sharia encourages the side of humanity that wants to take from and subjugate others. While Westerners tend to think in terms of religious people developing a personal understanding of and relationship with God, Sharia advocates executing people who ask difficult questions that could be interpreted as criticism. It’s hard to imagine, that in this day and age, Islamic scholars agree that those who criticize Islam or choose to stop being Muslim should be executed. Sadly, while talk of an Islamic reformation is common and even assumed by many in the West, such murmurings in the Middle East are silenced through intimidation. While Westerners are accustomed to an increase in religious tolerance over time, Darwish explains how petro dollars are being used to grow an extremely intolerant form of political Islam in her native Egypt and elsewhere. It is too bad that so many are disillusioned with life and Christianity to accept Muslims as peaceful…some may be but they have an army that is willing to shed blood in the name of Islam…the peaceful support the warriors with their finances and own kind of patriotism to their religion.

All Politicians are Sociopaths, and All States Are Sociopathic By Nature

AJ asks about the rebellions in the Northeast of India, which have been going on nonstop since the birth of the state.

The imperialist state of India has no right to any of those lands. All of those places refused to join India in 1947. They only joined after India attacked them militarily or threatened to. Most of those states have been in armed rebellion ever since. How come we never hear about it? Do you think it is because they are brown, so journalists don’t want to paint them as imperialists?

They have no right to Kashmir either. The imperialist state of the USA, along with almost all other (objectively fascist) states on Earth, is generally opposed to separatism. Only Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba and a few other places give support to any separatists. It’s because all states stick together, and the enemy of all states is the separatists. On this line, I am with the anarchists. Most of these separatist rebellions are justified, and I support them. But no state wants to break up. Mostly the various imperialist states of the world at best cynically support the separatism of their enemies and the often brutal of separatism of their allies. There are no good people in politics. Most politicians are sociopathic, and most states are sociopathic by nature. The only reasonable position is a principled one. Either separatism is generally justified or it is never justified. To support the separatism of your enemies on moral grounds while promoting the brutal suppression of separatists by your allies is the most cynical and disgusting politics. Of course a Jew gave a name to it: Realpolitik. But before Kissinger there was Machiavelli. I will say that one great thing about Whites is that we are the only race civilized enough to break up our states on civil grounds without committing mass genocides like all the other barbarian races do. Only Whites could have broken up the USSR (one of the greatest acts of emancipation and liberation of the 20th Century), only Whites could have broken up Czechoslovakia, and only Whites are willing to break up the UK and Canada. Only Whites!

Is India a Democracy?

A commenter asks me to read a news article today quoting neoliberal corporatist shill Barack Obama saying that India is a “thriving democracy.” I suppose compared to places like the Arab World, Iran, most of Africa, Guatemala, Honduras, Colombia, Indonesia, Brazil and Paraguay, it’s a relatively democratic place, considering the nightmarish conditions of your average Third World shithole country, an assemblage that India is a part of. First of all, I would like to commend the commenter for his interest in democracy, provided it is sincere. Is it? Do high caste Hindus really want a democracy in India? When in human history have upper class elites ever supported democracy? Leaving that aside, the notion that Indian democracy should safeguard what it has and build on it is a noble one. India’s handling of the language question was a superb showcase of democracy, especially compared to the utter failure of neighbors like Myanmar, Pakistan and Nepal on the language question. India’s handling of the language issue, after a false start, was a par exemplar for the Third World. Let us give credit where it is due! I acknowledge that India is a relatively democratic place. But let’s face it, at the rural level, India is not very democratic and never has been, possibly ever in its entire blighted history. Rural India is a horrid dictatorship of high caste thugs and their private armies. They have the state, cops and courts on their side, and peaceful protest is useless. This is after all why the Maoists took up guns in the first place, after decades of futile peaceful protest. Almost all of the Congressmen in India are known criminals – thieves who have stolen typically millions of dollars. My understanding is that peaceful demos are regularly attacked by police. Is this true or not? And there is some pretty nasty stuff going on Kashmir. Young men being abducted off the street, tortured and murdered, then dropped on the side of the road. Their crime? Throwing rocks I guess. Hindu nationalist gangs regularly run rampant through India’s cities and rural areas, threatening, beating and even murdering Christians and Muslims, burning down their property and even their villages. They have the full support of the local Hindu police and state in these actions. How is this democracy? Here in the US, rural America is not ruled by a dictatorship of upper class thugs. The vast majority of Congress are not obvious thieves and criminals. The bribery that goes on 100 million times a day in India is a crime in the US. In Indian state hospitals, you either bribe the doctors to take care of your sick relative, or they will leave them to die. What’s so “democratic” about that? What good is my marching off to vote once every few years if I have to bribe state doctors not to kill my relative? Good Lord. At Indian universities, Dalits have their own gangs of thugs. Professors are threatened to pass on Dalit students with good grades. If they do not comply, they are beaten or worse. Hence, India’s education system is largely a joke, its degrees watered down with threats, fake marks and mass bribery. In the wonderful Indian democracy, we have recently heard that most large Indian newspapers are charging politicians for favorable coverage. No bribes to journalists, and you get negative stories. Pay off the Fourth Estate and expect plenty of nice fat puff pieces.We have not even descended that far here in the US yet, and we’ve sunk pretty low. This is democratic? How is it democratic that “supporters” of the Maoists are regularly beaten, tortured, raped and murdered? Exactly what crime have they committed? Can you cite the crime that says it is illegal to be a “supporter” of the Maoists? What does it mean to be a “supporter?” Can you spell it out for me please? If it’s illegal to be a Maoist supporter, why can’t you just arrest them and put them on trial? If it’s a crime deserving of death to be a Maoist “supporter” (Define please), why should the Maoists not have a right to kill ever government “supporter,” whatever that means? What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, no? My understanding is that journalists who merely report on Maoist rebels are now being accused of violating Emergency Laws. For instance, Arundhati Roy is being threatened with arrest by the high caste criminal gangsters who run Chattisargh. Please tell me exactly what crimes Mrs. Roy has committed in writing in her articles. Specify the precise laws she violated, how and why. Say I want to go to India as a journalist. Explain to me, if I plan to write about Maoists, how it is I can do so without violating the law. Explain what the laws are and how we journalists can somehow not run afoul of them. Thanks! Meantime, I will have to think over that “Indian democracy” bit just a little.

Why Is Indian Nationalism So Dangerous?

fpy asks why I think that Indian nationalism is particularly dangerous.

What makes Indian nationalism uniquely malignant?

They are basically all ultranationalists. They’re fanatics. Seriously, horribly brainwashed fanatics. They’re about as brainwashed as your average North Korean.

I have never met an Indian who was not livid with rage over Kashmir. And their heads were filled with lies. 9

The truth as I studied it in the early 1990’s was that maybe 9

I have talked to many Indians on this subject, and they are almost all insane. Dangerously insane. These views are typical: All Kashmiris want to stay with India. Or, following Golda Meir, there are no such thing as Kashmiris. 10

Even now this War of the Stones, which is so obviously a grassroots popular rebellion, is being blamed 10

It’s hard to believe that educated people could believe this crap, but they do. Ignorance and rage on that level are frightening. Your average Indian reminds me of an Israeli, or a Turk. Basically a flaming, lying, brainwashed, ultranationalist, militant, militaristic kook.

And they are seriously filled with hatred and rage, especially towards the West. They are dangerous people. The place has nuclear weapons!

Full of rage at the failed nature of their society, yet at the same time filled with tremendous pride. Their whole thing is that India was the greatest state on Earth until evil Muslims and British took over and ruined it. They’re furious at the West. We came in there, told them their religion was shit, told them their culture was crap, told them their science was garbage, and they’re still pissed.

Failed nations that are full of pride yet and full of rage at their fall, especially at the scapegoats who ruined their glorious nation, who dream of the Lazarus rising from the fire to reclaim to glories of old, are very dangerous states. These are the essential ingredients of fascism. And Indian nationalists have that in spades.

They remind me of Germans in the interwar period. Very fascist-like people.

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

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

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

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

The Left hates:

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am talking about the Western Left.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Musings on Dual Loyalty, Judaism as Zionism, and Anti-Semitism

Repost from the old site.

Always-perceptive commenter James Schipper makes some astute, terse and cut to the chase comments on my post, The “New Anti-Semitism.” In it, he moves beyond the typically vulgar anti-Semitism that much modern anti-Zionism descends into and offers a perfectly logical explanation for the dual loyalty accusation leveled at Jews.

He also brings up some very difficult questions about the differences between Judaism and Zionism and whether there is really any difference at all.

Schipper:

If criticism of Israel = anti-Zionism = anti-Semitism, then we should be proud to call ourselves anti-Semites.

What is really wrong with Israel? It is not such a bad country for Jews, or even for the Arabs in Israel proper. I would rather be a Jew in Israel than an Arab in any Arab country. Israel was born in sin, but so was every country in the Western hemisphere. Israel is oppressive in the occupied territories, but by historical standards, this oppression is hardly unique.

The real reason for opposing Israel is that it does not see itself as the country of its citizens but as the country of all the Jews in the world. According to Israel, Jews in other countries are living in exile, are really Israelis and should be loyal to Israel.

In other words, Israel expects the Jewish citizens of other countries to behave like Israel’s fifth-columnists, and that is exactly what Zionists outside Israel are.

No political party outside Israel should accept Zionists as members, and no government outside Israel should appoint Zionists to a senior government job. Instead, Zionist should be encouraged to put their bodies where their loyalties are: in Israel.

Suppose that Italy saw itself as the country of all Catholics in the world and expected Catholics everywhere to defend Italian interests, then it would be behaving exactly as Israel does. That would also be a good reason for non-Catholics in other countries to look at Catholics with suspicion and to regard Italy with hostility.

The late Arthur Koestler wrote in an essay that after 1948 all Jews should choose one of two options: go to Israel or abandon Judaism altogether. He is right insofar as Judaism implies Zionism.

Judaism has always posited that Jews are a people and that Israel is their promised land, which is also the position of Zionism. If Judaism implies Zionism, then Jews outside of Israel, it they want to remain Jewish, should emigrate to Israel or else detribalize and deterritorialize Judaism, which may be denaturing it.

Theological question: Why does Obama allow bad things to happen and evil people to prosper?

More seriously, why did Obama appoint a hard Zionist as his chief of staff? It is not a good sign.

I agree with several things in this post.

First of all, he attacks some of the usual broadsides leveled at Israel and dismisses them.

What I find disturbing, and many Zionists have noted this, is the particular vehemence many Israel-critics level at Israel’s oppression of Jews inside Israel, while they are silent or even supportive of even worse oppression by states against minorities outside Israel.

White nationalists think it’s awesome for Whites to treat non-Whites like shit, except when it comes to White Jews versus “muds” in Israel. Kurds in the Arab World are treated awfully bad, Berbers less so but still poorly, and the Shia are oppressed all over the Arab World. There is open oppression and violence against Christians in Egypt and Iraq.

Baha’i are treated horribly in Iran, Sunnis less so but still poorly, and the Ahwaz have some good beefs. Turks treat Kurds horribly in Turkey. Russia has massacred 2

Japan treats its Koreans, Burakumin and Ainu pretty badly. The Hmong are still treated like shit in Laos, and the Montagnards are not done well by Vietnam. Pygmies are openly genocided and cannibalized as a matter of custom in Zaire, and the Khoisan are nearly murdered at will in SW Africa.

There is a real genocide of Arabs against Africans in Darfur, and another one, Arabs versus Christians, has just ended in South Sudan. Africans are routinely enslaved by Arabs in the Sahel.

We could go and on, but you get the picture. What is disturbing about all of this is that most Israel-critics are either indifferent to, ignorant of or even supportive of, the maltreatment of minorities above. Zionists are correct that this is either ignorance or anti-Semitism.

All, or most all, modern nations were born in sin.

This was due to the nature of the modern nation-building exercise, which typically involved ethnic cleansing or some sort of mass killing or genocide of any existing indigenous people, sidelining, subjection, forced assimilation (cultural genocide) or outright genocide against anyone not part of the dominant nation of the nation-state, and forced destruction of all languages but the one chosen by the nation-state or that is the dominant nation.

The Modern Left in the West, which has adopted Third-Worldism, minority-hugging and European hatred with gusto, errs in singling out Europeans for particular abuse in terms of nation-building. It’s been bloody and awful everywhere and at all times.

Schipper also points out that although Israel is oppressive in the Occupied Territories, by comparative standards, they are relatively mild. Considering the outrageous provocations and attacks of the Palestinians, I am amazed Israel has gone as easy on them as it has.

Arabs do not believe in fighting wars in a civilized manner, and the Geneva Conventions are regarded by them as Western comedy. Any Arab state faced with Palestinian-type provocations by non-Arabs would have been vastly worse than Israel.

Truthfully, just about every nation fighting an insurgency has been more horrible that Israel by orders of magnitude.

Consider this: according to counterinsurgency doctrine, enshrined by the US military and state and promoted by the US media and both US political parties, any civilian who “supports” an insurgency needs to be arrested, beaten, tortured and killed. All counterinsurgencies supported by the US have routinely massacred, mutilated and tortured to death insurgency “supporters.”

This has been true in every counterinsurgency in Latin America, in Indonesia in 1965, the US counterinsurgencies in SE Asia during the Vietnam War, the counterinsurgencies in Mozambique, Algeria and Angola, Russia’s counterinsurgency in Chechnya, India’s counterinsurgencies in India proper and Kashmir, in Sri Lanka against the Tamils, in Indonesia against the Acehese and East Timorese, in the Philippines against the NPA, and in Nepal’s recent Civil War.

In these counterinsurgencies, hundreds of thousands of “supporters” of insurgencies were murdered, tortured and mutilated, while the US cheered, poured in money and looked the other way.

In contrast, almost 10

Considering the provocations of the Palestinians, Israel has fought one of the cleanest counterinsurgencies in modern times.

Zionists are correct that these criticisms of Israel, combined with support for to indifference to much worse behaviors by non-Jews, are evidence of either ignorance or anti-Semitism.

But Schipper does hit it on the head.

The reason to oppose Israel is that it is not a state of its citizens. Israel openly says that it is the state of all Jews on Earth, not of its citizens. Hence, it is perfectly reasonable for non-Jews in every nation on Earth containing Jews to look upon their Jews as possible traitors and dual-loyalists. Dual loyalty, rather than being an “anti-Semitic canard” as many Jews shrilly screech, is actually grounded in immaculate reason.

Schipper also suggests that the wall between Judaism and Zionism may be little more than a wall of sand, and one that has been hit by so many waves that there’s almost nothing left.

Although anti-Zionist Jews offer various reasons for their non-support of Israel, the fact remains that Judaism has always said that Israel is the land of the Jews. Assuming the Messiah returns tomorrow, even Naturei Karta is willing to head to Israel and become fervent Zionists.

Hence the uncomfortable notion, typically parroted by ferocious anti-Zionists and some vulgar anti-Semites, that it is not just Zionism that is the problem, but Judaism itself, is lent some troubling weight. I don’t want to go near this thesis because to be honest, I’m a pussy when it comes to the Jewish Question.

Schipper finally suggests that the Jews of the world either renounce Judaism or practice what you preach and head to Israel. Once again, troubling stuff.

There’s nary a trace of anti-Semitism in Schipper’s comments, but the issues he raises are toxic as Hell.

Just some thought-meals.

Enjoy.

India Has No Right to Exist

In the India Is a Shithole piece, James Schipper suggests that India has been free of significant civil strife:

Another thing for which India deserves credit is that, despite being one of the most multinational states in the world, it has managed to avoid serious internal conflicts. In terms of national composition, India should not be compared with the US but with Europe, which is of course divided in about 40 different states.

This is not true. Kashmir has been on fire since 1968 or so. There are now 500,000 troops locking the place down, and every day, another young Kashmiri or two at least is killed.

India was born in blood and sin, like the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, Israel and various settler-colonial states.

The difference is that the Indian state, incredibly, attacked her very own people from the start of the Indian state enterprise, and has been at war with them ever since. In this sense, India is an utterly failed state like Myanmar or Indonesia, two other former colonial states who have been battling insurgencies from the start from parts of the former colony who never wanted to join the new state.

India has about as much right to exist in its current form as Myanmar does. India is a failed state. It’s has failed to properly rule or provide for its people, and tens of millions of its citizens never consented to join the new state in the first place, but were dragged in kicking and screaming amidst slaughters.

Parents who can’t raise their children get their kids taken away. India’s children are its nations and peoples, whom it can’t and won’t care for because its ruling class is negligent and doesn’t care, like a crack-addicted Mom. Hence, India has no right to rule the peoples of the Northeast, Kashmir and Punjab and the Indian state in its current form should be dissolved as surely as Israel should be.

The Northeast has been in rebellion, often armed rebellion, nearly from Day One. There have been scores of armed groups fighting the state in that region, and many are still active. Bottom line is that India has no right to rule the Northeast, and as India is a cesspool anyway, why should the NE people be forced to live in a sewer? Let them secede and negotiate their way to modernity.

There is now a huge Maoist rebellion going on the East. There are easily 100,000 Maoists, and they have millions of supporters.

There was a huge rebellion in the Punjab a while back. It’s over, but it was nasty.

There is a continuous low level conflict going on with India’s Muslims, who regularly set off horrible bomb attacks on India’s Hindu cities. The Hindus are now responding by bombing India’s Muslim cities. Further, there have been many cases of inter-religious violence, mostly pogroms of Muslims by India’s Hindus and sometime riots by put-upon Indian Muslims. These pogroms started with the birth of the Indian state and the splitting of Pakistan, and to be honest, have never stopped.

In addition, there have been hundreds of killings of Christians in the East by Hindus, including burnings of churches and entire towns, pogroms, etc. This is ongoing as I write this.

Riots in Kashmir

Some good video of heavy duty riots in Kashmir in the past few days. Six people were wounded when security forces opened fire on the rioters, who were throwing stones and attacking the Indian forces with sticks.

There are few things more infuriating than discussing Kashmir with a typical Indian. I’ve discussed this subject with many Indians. Most of them were upper class Hindus, but a few were actually Punjabis. It’s a sad comment that after the failure of the Sikh Rebellion, many Punjabis have descended into the rank sewer of Indian nationalism.

The reaction when discussing Kashmir with an Indian is always the same. First, they start getting very angry, pounding the table, and raising their voice. They insist that all Kashmiris love India and want to be a part of India. The entire Kashmiri rebellion, such as it were, is being fomented from this evil behemoth called Pakistan. The Kashmiris themselves, loyal patriotic Indians, have nothing to do with it and even hate the Pakistani invaders.

One particularly brainwashed fellow insisted that there were no such thing as Kashmiris, there were only Indians. This brings to mind Golda Meir’s comment that there are no such thing as Palestinians.

Indians are about as stark raving batshit nuts on the subject of Kashmir as your average Israeli Jew is on the subject of Palestine. There’s no reasoning with them, no room for conversation, nothing.

Try to bring up the history of Kashmir and you get more defense, blockage, diversion and bluster.

Here is the history of Kashmir.

When India was granted its independence in 1947, there were about 5,000 princely states in India. Each one was in effect its own state with its own government, leadership, etc. The terms of the independence protocol were that each of the 5,000 states would have a right to decide their own future. Join India, be independent, join with some other princely states in another state, etc. The overwhelming majority of the states opted to join India. However, the entire Northeast, Kashmir, and a number of other states around India did not.

Very quickly, most of the small states that refused to join India were attacked by the Indian military and overrun.  Many people were killed by the Indian military in these blatantly imperialist endeavors. The entire Northeast was invaded, overrun and occupied. Many Northeasterners resisted, and they have been fighting the state off and on ever since. Pakistan was partitioned off, which was a good idea (Who wants all those hostile Muslims?) and this resulted in horrendous massacres on both sides as Hindus fled Pakistan and Muslims fled India.

Kashmir, in the northwest mountains, had few natural resources and was mostly known as a vacation spot, the Switzerland of India. The population was 9

The people of Kashmir wanted to join Pakistan, but the ruler of Kashmir was a Hindu prince. The prince wanted to join India simply because he was a Hindu. No one seemed to be able to make up their minds about what to do.

In the midst of this steamy stasis, Pakistani propaganda rallied many Pakistani tribesmen, mostly Pashtuns, over the mountain passes into Kashmir. This was basically an armed invasion of Kashmir by Pakistani forces, but the use of “independent irregulars” absolved Pakistan of responsibility. The prince called for the Indian army to come in and help him and joined India so he could officially call the army in. The Indian line is, “We were only trying to help.”

A messy war ensued, the end result of which was that Kashmir was split in half between Pakistan and India. India placed Kashmir under a lockdown of military rule, a dictatorship, that lasted for decades.

In the following decades, Kashmiris patiently tried to petition the state with their grievances. Mostly they wanted a UN Resolution to be implemented which called for elections in Kashmir so the people could decide what to do – join Pakistan, stay in India, or go independent. India has been flouting this UN resolution since 1948. As far as outlaw rouge states go, shitty big India is up there with shitty little Israel.

Peaceful protest was crushed for decades by the Indian state in the Dictatorship of Kashmir and real elections were banned for fear that Kashmiri nationalists would win. During this time, all politicians in Kashmir were appointed by India. Finally, some controlled elections were allowed, but only India’s handpicked candidates were allowed to run.

After decades of repression, some small Kashmiri independence groups began to be formed. At one point, there were more than 50 different armed groups fighting the Indian state. They were Muslim, but they tended to be pretty secular within the Kashmiri tradition.

By the 1990’s, the repression from the Indian state was in full swing. At this time, it was estimated that 9

There was mass rape of Kashmiri Muslims, death squads roamed the streets, homes were routinely invaded and either shot up or searched for captives who were disappeared never to be seen again. Kashmiris were rounded up in huge detainment camps. Entire neighborhoods would undergo lockdown, and hundreds of young men would be handcuffed to the ground while hooded informers roamed through the group, pointing out insurgents. It was a typical Hellish insurgency.

At the same time, there was almost zero reporting of this insurgency in the US, as the US has always been slavishly pro-India. There are various reasons for this, but the main one is that about 9

At some point in the 1990’s, Pakistan got involved in the Kashmir issue. Mostly the Pakistani state, nearly as vile as the Indian state, just used Kashmir to whip the public into idiot jingoism and support for a state that few Pakistanis in their right minds should support. In this way, support for Kashmir was used to defuse national tensions in the same sickening way that Arab dictatorships use the Palestine issue to rally support around an elitist state that avoids serving their people properly.

The Pakistanis funded radical Muslim jihadi groups who sneaked into Kashmir, set up bases in the area and engaged in armed fights with the Indian forces. Many of these groups were very hardline radical fundamentalist radicals who were not particularly popular with Kashmiris. But gradually the insurgency shifted from the local Kashmiri groups to the Pakistani jihadis.

Now, if you ask your average Indian dipshit, the entire phase leading up to the involvement of Pakistani jihadis in Kashmir simply never occurred. I tell them about this period of history and they act outraged, as if they are being told toweringly offensive lies. It’s clear that they have never heard of the entire phase of the struggle leading up to Pakistan’s involvement.

The only conclusion is that almost all middle class and higher Indians have been ridiculously brainwashed on this issue. One wonders how this occurred. Clearly, the Indian mass media, long controlled by an ultranationalist high caste Hindu elite, has never  told the Indian people the real story of Kashmir. Nor has the school system, as I assume that Indian students are heavily brainwashed even in school on Kashmir.

The Pakistanis are not innocent on this issue, but most of the ones I talked to are a lot saner than the Indians. Pakistanis tend to be calm and level-headed about Kashmir, if somewhat deluded.

But most Pakistanis do not want Kashmir to go independent or stay with India. They only want it to go to Pakistan. So in their own way, they are as contemptuous of the Kashmiris’ right to self-determination as the Indians are. If you tell Pakistanis that Kashmiris don’t want to join Pakistan (only ~

Things have calmed down in Kashmir these days, and even the Pandits, the Kashmiri Hindus, are returning to Kashmir. They were ethnically cleansed, it is true, mostly in the early 1990’s. Most Kashmiris now seem ashamed of this act, and try to distance themselves from it, but it happened, and many Pandits were killed in the process. However, at the time, many Kashmiris opposed the ethnic cleansing of the Pandits.

The Pandits, 1

The insurgency is now at a very low level, but that’s because there are 500,000 Indian troops in Kashmir, which is not a large area. Keep in mind that at its peak, the US had 150,000 troops in Iraq which is twice as large as Kashmir. It would be as if the US had 1 million troops in Iraq.

Consequently, Kashmir is now one of the world’s pre-eminent garrison states. While the insurgency has died down, street protests have become the latest form of resistance in the past few years. The scene has an Intifada feel about it. Huge throng of Muslim youths fight it out in the streets with Indian forces on at least a weekly basis. This Intifada style rebellion is almost completely absent from the US press. On rare occasions, one glimpses a startling article to remind you that all’s not ok.

Try to tell an Indian about these huge throngs of Muslim youths regularly protesting and rioting and you will get a violent bluster. They insist, incredibly, that this is simply not occurring.

At some point, a sane state would give Kashmiris the right to vote on their self-determination. Support for independence has withered from 9

There’s a little Kashmir backgrounder for you. You’re sure to never find that anywhere in the US or Indian media.

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.

Are Only Euro-Whites Capable of Peaceful Seccessionism?

In this modern era, one of the ultimate litmus tests for extreme liberalism or humanism is the completely selfless permission that a state grants when it allows a part of itself to secede without starting a bloodbath.

Since the Peace of Westphalia, Europe initiated the notion of the nation-state, a brand-new concept. Before, there had only been empires at most, if that in most places. The notion of the nation-state gradually grew until the present moment, when it is unfortunately the status quo. If empires disallowed succession, nevertheless it did occur quite a bit, since empires never had much legitimacy in the first place.

The problem with the nation-state is that it has built up a nonsensical and undeserved legitimacy, even among the most liberal folks. As soon as lines are drawn on a map, they are instantly there for all time, never to be redrawn.

Except that imperialist maggots like the US and the UK, while paying lip service to the inviolability of borders, nevertheless, scumbags that they are, cynically pursue seccessionism and border violability against any states that are deemed enemies.

Look at how quickly the world recognized the states that emerged out of the USSR. While the breakup itself was testament to the USSR’s ultimate morality, its internationalism, a moral spear that split the heavens while the capitalist world wallowed in nationalist mud, the new states were only recognized by the capitalist shits because they were so eager to disaggregate their old socialist foe.

At the moment, the US cynically promotes the breakup of Iran, Venezuela and Bolivia. In the past, the US supported seccessionism in China. Kurdish secessionism in Iraq was promoted by the US and then its suppression funded by the US, depending on the whims of the day. At the moment, the US funds Kurdish secessionism in Iran while funding its crushing by the Turkish state in Turkey.

The truth is that under capitalism, imperialist states like the US have no morals whatsoever, only interests. That 9

Anyway, let us take this as a litmus test of the ultimate in civilized behavior in 2009: a state that will peacefully allow parts of itself to secede, if they so choose.

Most states, being governed by uncivilized animals, react to secessionism with violence, often extreme violence. The legion of the primitives is vast: Russia, France, Spain, Turkey, Russia, India, China, Indonesia, Burma, Georgia, New Guinea.

No non-White state will ever allow peaceful secession. They are simply too primitive and uncivilized to allow such a thing. By White I mean European Caucasians. Caucasians outside of Europe are incapable of peaceful secession either, because they are still relatively uncivilized compared to Europeans.

Asians, despite their high IQ’s, are still primitive in some ways, and even NE Asians are incapable of dealing with peaceful seccessionism. The response of 105 IQ China is instructive. Secessionist movements in Taiwan, Turkestan and Tibet have been dealt with via repression that can only be called fascist, while similar movements in Inner Mongolia are never allowed to see the light of day.

Indonesia’s response to secessionism in East Timor, Aceh and West Papua, areas it has a weak, if any, claim to, have been characterized by horrific violence.

India has behaved criminally, even genocidally, in Kashmir. India has little legitimate claim on the entire Northeast, yet they will never let an inch of it go.

Burma has no legitimate claim on any of its territory at the moment, as a criminal state loses the legitimacy of its governance. Nevertheless it continues to commit genocide against its secessionist movements, as it has since 1947.

For the moment, Pakistan and Iran can be excused their backwardness in violently assaulting secessionism, as imperialism, Indian and US, is conspiring to break up both states.

No Black African nation will ever allow secessionism, though they may as well. Most all of them can’t even govern their own territory responsibly, so they don’t have much right to the land in the borders. Failed states revoke the right to inviolability of borders.

Sudan has reacted with typical extreme brutality to the legitimate demands of Darfur and Southern Sudan for secession. The response to secessionism, typical of Arabs, was genocide. Since independence, most Arab states have reacted to secessionist demands with genocides of varying degrees.

Somalia is the ultimate failed state. There is no government, and anarchy has held sway for 15 years. Obviously, in the case of the collapse of the state and the onset of anarchy, the inviolability of borders principle is revoked. After all, a state that no longer exists can hardly invoke inviolability of borders.

Two new states, Puntland, and Somaliland, have emerged, but no one will recognize them due to the inviolability of borders crap. This is sad because these new states seem to have their shit together more than Somalia (whatever that means) does.

The nation of Georgia had no legitimacy before its birth in 1991. The day it was born, its fake borders were deemed inviolable forevermore. South Ossetia and Abkhazia have already broken away, as was their right. Georgia will never allow this transgression. Abkhazia has been de facto independent since 1991, but almost no one on Earth will recognize it, all because Georgia is a pro-Western state.

In contrast, the moment Kosovo declared independence, the West showered it with recognition, since they were splitting from Serbia, whom the West hates.

As I said earlier, Western capitalist states have no morals.

Yugoslavia did allow itself to be broken up, but violence followed. Slovenia had little violence, and Macedonia and Montenegro had none.  The Turks are not really European Whites, and Turkey’s always been the sick man of Europe. Since Ataturk, it’s been a fascist state. That’s not changing anytime soon.

In Spain, there are secessionist movements, but the Spaniards have always been fascist and backwards, and they will never allow anyone to secede.

So who will? The UK and Canada. Those are the only two states that allow secession based on a simple vote. There are movements in Scotland and Quebec, but they don’t have majority support yet. Yet still it seems by this litmus test, the UK and Canada are the most civilized states on Earth.

Czechoslovakia broke itself up soon after the fall of Communism, a great moment in human progress. Yet this was only possible due to decades of Communist internationalism and anti-nationalist propaganda. Since, then, fascist-like nationalism has set in in both new states.

The USSR allowed itself to break up. In a number of cases, idiot nationalist violence followed the breakup, but most states left peacefully. Anyway, the state did allow itself to be broken up, something almost no other state will allow. This feat of ultimate civilization only occurred in the USSR due to 78 years of internationalism.

Some of the states that broke up were part-Caucasian, part Asian in stock (some of the Stans), so they seem to be an exception to our rule that only Euro Whites will allow a state to break up, but possibly USSR internationalism overrode the racial stock. The only Asiatic or part-Asiatic states that have allowed themselves to dissolve were socialist in character.

Historically, we can see that only Whites seem to be able to secede without massacring each other like wild animals.

For instance, 100 yrs ago, 99.

In 1920, a plebiscite was held in Schleswig in northern Germany. The area north of Flensburg, 8

It’s an open question whether non-Europeans will ever be civilized enough to allow secessionism without committing genocidal massacres in the name of some lines on a map. I don’t think it will happen in my lifetime.

In case you haven’t guessed, this is one more reason I think we European Whites are better than other people. We’re simply more civilized, and this is a prime example.

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