"Freedom of the Press" in the UK

Check this out. Outright distortion and bias on the Scottish independence referendum. That’s the BBC, the state-owned media. It’s not the corporate media and I suppose it ought to be relatively free of bias. Instead it seems to be the house organ of the British state similar to the way Pravda was in the USSR. The corporate media in the UK, like the corporate media in the US, follows the corporate/state party line on many issues. Diversity of opinion, as in the US, is basically nonexistent. As is bias and a tremendous amount of lying. We already know there is no freedom of the press here in the US. All of the media outlets are owned by the same folks, and on many issues, they are pretty much all saying the same thing. There is no significant real dissident media in the US. Well, now it looks like there is no freedom of the press in the UK either. But the British they do somewhat better than the US. For instance John Pilger is a regular columnist in the Guardian. I have also received some reports out of Germany, the Czech Republic and Slovakia stating that there is no real freedom of the press there either and the entire media just sings as a chorus on many issues. For instance, virtually 10 So it looks like there might not be much of a free press in all of Europe! \ If you think this website is valuable to you, please consider a contribution to support the continuation of the site.

Nigel Lawson, Infectious Pustule!

I do not know much about British politics, but I read enough about it to be able to call this guy an utter jerkoff. A male Thatcher, this is guy one of the closest things the British have to a politician who is as rightwing as the US Republican Party. I don’t like guys like this. If I saw him in public, I would whip out my crucifix, hold it in his face to temporarily blind him and hope he would recoil and creep away.

Is Wurzel English a Separate Language?

Warren Port writes about Somerset English. See the link for a baffling sample of this strange form of English.

Admittedly it is a very bad English, and he is exaggerating for effect but I understand most of it except for the odd word. When I was twelve we moved from London to a tiny village called Cattcott ten miles from the Mendips where this recording is from. In the eighties there were some people who spoke that way, probably more diluted now.

I am a linguist. We don’t really call anything “bad English.” All dialects are as good as any other. I just figure if you can’t understand it, it’s a foreign language. I would like to split English into some separate languages because some of them pretty much are. Really Wurzel is just as much of a valid way to speak English as any others. This man speaks Wurzel, and he is able to communicate just fine with other folks who also speak it, so it is a valid lect. The only problem is that rest of us English speakers speak another English language that is very far removed from this English language, so we can’t understand him. Someone ought to write this language down. It’s cool because it seems like it has a lot of new words that I don’t have in the English language that I speak. At a minimum, as separate languages, I would probably split off: Scots. There appears to be more more than one language inside Scots. Scots itself is already split off as a separate language. There appear to be 4 separate languages inside of Scots. Doric Scots. Doric is spoken in the northeast of Scotland in Aberdeen, Banff and Buchan, Moray and the Nairn. It has difficult intelligibility with the rest of Scots. Lallans Scots. This form of Scots is spoken in the south and central part of Scotland. This is the most common form of spoken Scots. Difficult intelligibility with the other lects. Ulster Scots. This is the form of the Scots language spoken in North Ireland, mostly by Protestants. It has many dialects and has difficult intelligibility with the rest of Scots. Insular Scots. Includes the Shetlandic and Orcadian dialects. Spoken on some Scottish islands and is reportedly even hard for other Scots speakers to understand. Of all of the Scots lects, this one is the farthest from the others. Scottish English. We can probably split this off as well because it is probable that there are Scottish English speakers who can’t understand pure Scots very well. While some British English speakers can understand this lect well, others have problems with it. In particular, the dialect of Glascow is said to be hard to understand for many Londoners. Hibernian English. English spoken in Ireland. There seem to be some forms of Irish English such as the hard lect spoken by the spokespeople for the IRA and its political wing like Gerry Adams, that are very hard for Americans to understand. Some English people also have a hard time with Ulster English. Geordie and related lects from the far north of England up around Scotland. These lects are spoken around Newcastle in the far north of England on the east coast. Even the rest of the English often have a hard time with Geordie, and when people talk about multiple languages inside English, Geordie is often the first one they bring up. Scouse. Really hard Scouse is barely even intelligible outside of Liverpool, not even in the suburbs. There is a report of an American who lived in Liverpool for a long period of time, and after 8 years, she still could not understand the very hard Scouse spoken by young working class Liverpool women. While some speakers of British English can understand Scouse, this is mostly due to bilingual learning. Other speakers of British English have a hard time with Scouse. Potteries. Spoken almost exclusively in and around the city of Stoke on Trent in northern West Midlands. The hard form is not readily understood outside the city itself. The dialect is dying out. Welsh English. The hard forms of Welsh English are not readily understood outside the region. There are at least 4 separate languages inside Welsh English. South Welsh English.Welsh English is not a single language but actually appears to be four separate languages. The varieties of South Welsh English spoken in Cardiff and West Glamorgan (Swansea, Neath and Port Talbot) cannot be understood outside the region. It is not known if West Glamorgan English and Cardiff English can understand each other well. North Welsh English, South Welsh English and West Welsh English are as far apart as Newcastle, Cornwall and Birmingham; therefore, all three of them are separate languages. North Welsh English. This language is spoken in areas such as Anglesy and Llanberis. It often has a soft lilt to it that people find pleasant and soothing. Probably poor intelligibility with West and South Welsh English. West Welsh English. This is spoken in places such as Aberystwyth and Cardiganshire. Those two dialects are said to be particularly pleasant sounding. Probably poor intelligibility with North and South Welsh English. Monmouth English. This form of Welsh English reportedly cannot be understood outside of Monmouth itself. Monmouth is a city on the eastern edge of Wales towards the south. Wurzel. In particular the hard Wurzel form of West Country English spoken in Somerset at least until very recently is not well understood outside of Somerset. In addition, many younger residents of Somerset do not understand it completely. It sounds similar to Irish and has a lot of new words for things. Hard Wurzel is dying out, and its speakers are mostly elderly. The language of Bristol may be possibly be included here. Weald Sussex English. A variety of Sussex English spoken in the Weald region of Sussex was traditionally very hard for outsiders to understand. It is dying out now, but it still has a few speakers. Newfoundland English. There are reportedly some hard forms of Newfie English spoken by older fishermen on the coast of the island that are very hard for other North Americans to understand. Appalachian English. Some forms of Appalachian English from the deep hollows of West Virginia are hard for other Americans to understand. Mulungeon English. Some of the English lects spoken by Mulungeon groups in central Virginia in the Blue Ridge Mountains, particularly the lect spoken by the Monacan Indians living near Lynchburg, are very hard for other Americans to understand. They seem to have an archaic character and use a lot of new words for things that I could not identify when I heard it. This may be a type of English often said to be archaic from centuries ago that is still spoken in the mountains. The degree to which this is intelligible with the rest of Appalachian English is uncertain. Tangier English. Spoken on an island off the coast of Virginia by fishermen, this is a relatively pure West Country English lect from 1680 or so that has survived more or less intact. When they speak among themselves, they are hard for other Americans to understand. The degree to which this can be understood by West Country English speakers in England is not known. Unknown intelligibility with Harkers Island English. Harkers Island English. Spoken on Harkers Island off the coast of North Carolina on the Outer Banks. Has a similar origin to Tangier English. It is hard for outsiders to understand. The degree of intelligibility between Tangier English and Harkers Island English is not known. New York English. There is a hard form of New York English, not much spoken anymore, that cannot be well understood at least here on the West Coast. Tends to be spoken by working class Whites especially in the Bronx. In general, this lect is dying out. In my region of California, we recently had a man who moved here from the Bronx, a young working class White man. Even after 2-3 months here, people still had a hard time understanding him. He did not seem to be able to modify his speech so he could be understood better, which usually means someone is speaking another language, not a dialect. Finally he learned California English dialect well enough so that he could make himself understood. Nonatum English or Lake Talk. Spoken only in Nonatum, Massachusetts, one of 13 villages of the city of Newton, mostly by Italian-Americans. Many residents came from a certain village in the Lazio region of Italy. It appears to be a mixture of Italian and Romani, the language of the Gypsies. Not intelligible to those outside the village. Yooper. Spoken mostly in the Michigan Upper Peninsula, this lect is also spoken in the northern parts of the Lower Peninsula and in parts of northeast Wisconsin. Heavily influenced by Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Flemish and French, this lect is hard for outsiders to understand largely due to the influence of these other European languages. African American Vernacular English or Ebonics. This lect is spoken by many Black people in the US, often lower class people in ghettos or in the country. The hard forms of it cannot be understood at all by other Americans. I once had two Black women in my car for an hour or so. They were speaking AAVE. Over that hour, I do not believe that I understood a single word they said. They may as well have been speaking Greek. Forms spoken in the ghettos of Memphis and in the Mississippi Delta by rural Blacks may be particularly hard to understand. South African English. While some Americans can understand this hard dialect well, though with difficulty, others cannot understand it. It is not known how well speakers of other Englishes such as British and Australian English can understand this lect. Jamaican Creole English. Jamaican English Creole is already split off as a separate language. At any rate, in its hard form, it is nearly unintelligible to Americans. Gullah English Creole is a creole spoken on the Gullah Islands off the coast of South Carolina. Already split off into a separate language. Not intelligible to American English speakers. Nigerian Pidgin English. The harder forms of this may be rather hard to Americans to understand, but this needs further investigation. The hard forms are definitely quite divergent and seem odd to many Americans. Already split off as a separate language. Australian English. Some forms of Australian English can be hard to understand for people outside the continent. I found that a form spoken in rural Tasmania was particularly hard to understand. I even have a hard time understanding Helen Caldicott, the famous physician. Other forms spoken more in the rural areas of the main island can also be rather hard to understand. Nevertheless, I can understand “TV Australian” well. However, speakers of British English are able to understand Australian English well, so it is not a language but rather a dialect of British English. New Zealand English. This is similar but different from Australian English. While most New Zealand English is readily understandable to Americans, some of it can be a bit hard to hear. In the video below, the announcer speaks in TV New Zealand English, which I actually found a bit hard to understand, but I could make out most of it. The comedians spoke in a strong rural New Zealand accent. I could make out a lot of it, but not all of it for sure. However, British English speakers can understand all of the dialogue in this video. New Zealand English is not a language but is instead a dialect of British English. Indian English. Some of the Indian English spoken by speakers in India can be quite hard to Americans to understand. What we need to know is whether this is a first or second language for them. If they were brought up speaking this Indian English, then it is a separate language. If it is simply English spoken as a second language by a native speaker of Hindi or another Indian language then it is not a separate language. Requires further investigation. In conclusion, it seems that there are at least 25 separate languages and 3 creoles/pidgins inside of macro-English. 1 other case is uncertain.

Somerset English

Here. The Somerset English dialect. I am sorry, but this is some of the most messed up English I have ever heard in my life. I could barely make out a single word this fellow is saying. Speaker is an elderly man, about 80 years old, from Somerset County in southwest England. This area is south of Wales and east of Cornwall in a region called Exmoor. It is heavily forested with rolling  hills. This is a rural area where homes are spaced far apart. Sheep grazing is a common industry. This man’s speech was probably typical of the region 80 years ago, in the 1920’s. Nowadays few young people speak like this anymore, as most have adopted the more popular London dialect. It is said that this accent is similar to that spoken by early immigrants to America from the Mayflower era to 50 years later, who came disproportionately from southwestern England for some reason. Why? Easy access to the coast from which to sail ships? There is a town in Virgina called Tangier that retains a Restoration Era English accent to this very day. It was settled in 1670 by English form the southwest of England near where this Somerset dialect is spoken. The entire accent in this region is known globally by the term “West Country dialect.” It encompasses most of southwest England over to Cornwall, east to Bristol or so and then southeast at least to Bournemouth on the coast. It is quite a strong accent, and it is rather unique. I am not sure what this even sounds like. It might sound a bit like Scottish or possibly like Scouse from Liverpool. It is possible that Middle or even Old English sounded something like this. A commenter from Ireland said that it sounds something like Irish Gaelic for some odd reason. Why would an English accent sound like Gaelic? Because of the nearby influence of Welsh perhaps? But honestly I felt that it sounded more like German, or better yet, Frisian, than anything else. There is a dialect of Danish, actually a separate language, called Jutish spoken in the far south of Denmark that sounds something like Scots and possibly like this dialect. Danes report that Jutish, at least the hard form spoken by people middle aged and older, is not intelligible with Standard Danish. However, Jutish or Synnejysk is further from Standard Danish than Danish is Swedish. If this is true, then Jutish is surely a separate language. As Old English came from the Frisian (especially North Frisian) region of far northern Germany and far southern Denmark, it makes sense that these lects would resemble each other. Recall that three tribes, the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes, were the ones who invaded England, conquering it from decaying Roman rule. Old Saxon pretty much went to Frisian, especially West Frisian. The language of the Jutes is maintained today by the Jutish speakers.

Ex-Army on Mass Immigration

Ex-Army has a new post up reprinting one of my posts and putting up one of his own. Here it is:

Despite what they say, just about the entire political class is in favor of amnesty first of all, and then more and more and more immigration, legal and illegal. And you can extend that to the whole MAG (Media, Academia, Government). Now, they all want it for their own grubby little reasons, but they all say it will just improve the bejeezus out of the economy and everything else, to have unlimited hordes of uneducated, unskilled, Third-World immigrants pouring in over the border. It seems that even an idiot could figure out that when you have an oversupply of a commodity (unskilled labor), the price (wages) of that commodity falls. When it falls far enough, unskilled Americans can’t afford to take the unskilled jobs, because they can get more money from welfare, so that’s what they do, and they get zero work experience, and stay unemployable forever. Then the immigrants catch on to the deal, they go on welfare, and then we need to let a few million more uneducated, unskilled, Third-World immigrants in, and the cycle continues. Make no mistake about it, people. If you are a worker, or would like to be a worker, amnesty is going to hike your taxes and cut your pay. The left, of course, couldn’t care less about actual working people. They think of them as a bunch of nasty Archie Bunkers who ought to lose their stupid jobs. Serve ’em right. Racist bigots.

There are some problems with this at it is typical of the contempt that US conservatives have for liberals, who according to them are just bad people with bad motives. But that’s where the Right goes wrong. US liberals are not bad people with bad motives. They are good people with good motives. They are “do-gooders.” Now, the Right can feel free to bash do-gooders all they want to, but after all, in doing so, they are displaying contempt for people for trying to do the right thing.

Despite what they say, just about the entire political class is in favor of amnesty first of all, and then more and more and more immigration, legal and illegal. And you can extend that to the whole MAG (Media, Academia, Government). Now, they all want it for their own grubby little reasons,

This is not exactly true. The entire US political class it not in favor of amnesty. They entire US Democratic Party is. The Republican Party is divided. Before, they were against amnesty, and it is in this way that I am a conservative, as I am against amnesty. The Republican Party is under extreme pressure to cave in on amnesty, and it is only the hardliners such as the Tea Partiers that are holding the line on this issue, but it keeps coming back like a whack a mole. The political class of the Republican Party is now 10 Ex-Army is correct that the entire media class is pro-amnesty. Why this is is uncertain. Most reporters are liberals, and many are Jewish. Many newspapers are owned by Jews who have ethnic reasons for supporting mass immigration. Most other newspapers are simply owned by corporations who support mass immigration because of the wage-lowering and more consumers = more business effects. Academia supports mass immigration because they are liberal do-gooders. They really believe that the whole world has a right to come here to better their lives and that it is cruel to keep them out. They have blinded themselves to the massive downside that this will have for us as a nation because they want to think of their causes are pure good causes that will not have any downside.

but they all say it will just improve the bejeezus out of the economy and everything else, to have unlimited hordes of uneducated, unskilled, Third-World immigrants pouring in over the border. It seems that even an idiot could figure out that when you have an oversupply of a commodity (unskilled labor), the price (wages) of that commodity falls.

It is true that both the Left and the Right all insist that mass immigration is the greatest thing for the economy since sliced bread. This is probably due to the more consumers = more business line. However, something that is good for the economy is not necessarily good for labor. Obviously, mass importation of unskilled labor lowers the cost of that labor and ultimately depresses wages. We have seen it right here on the ground in California, and I don’t care how many lying studies they produce to show that mass immigration does not lower wages, we here in California know firsthand that it does. The Right is overjoyed that mass immigration lowers wages. The Left simply denies that it does as that would go against their ideology, and they blind themselves to the downside of their projects for ego-defensive needs. Do-gooders can’t exactly be pushing things that have bad effects. Then they would not be do-gooders anymore. Instead they would be do-badders. In order to protect the ego from this attack, they deny that their agenda has bad effects.

When it falls far enough, unskilled Americans can’t afford to take the unskilled jobs, because they can get more money from welfare, so that’s what they do, and they get zero work experience, and stay unemployable forever.

The Right is obsessed with welfare. That’s what they are all about. All they talk about all day and all night is welfare. Which is a good reason for the Left to never discuss it at all. Discussing it at all makes you a rightwinger. The truth is that it does not pay more in the US to “go on welfare” than it does to work. In some highly advanced welfare states such as Britain, under certain circumstances it did, especially if you were a single Mom raising kids as you got a child allowance. Get your kids on disability and into government housing, and you’re in like Flynn. I knew a woman who was scamming the British system in order to stay home and raise her kids, who by now were teenagers. She flat out told me that in she was working the system to the extent that she would lose money if she went to work. We should design welfare states so that you always make more money if you go to work than if you stay on relief. That’s the only way a welfare state makes any kind of sense. In the US, it’s never more profitable to “go on welfare” than it is to work. Forget it. First of all, in the US, you can’t just “go on welfare.” If you lose your job, you might get unemployment, but it’s a pittance, and it doesn’t last long. That’s all you get. You might be able to get some Food Stamps, but I don’t know anyone who refuses to work because the Food Stamps might end. You can stand in line and wait for 2-3 years for Section 8 to open up, but I don’t know anyone who refuses to work because they will lose their Section 8. The system is designed to reward you for working. If your income falls low enough, you can get Medicaid, but I don’t know anyone who refuses to work because they won’t get Medicaid anymore. If you don’t work, you can’t eat, pay your bills, drive your car, buy anything or pay your rent. If you don’t work in the US, you can’t survive, period, so everyone pretty much has to work at something. You can go on disability, but this is very hard, and if there is nothing wrong with you, you won’t get it. Even if there is something wrong with you, you will get turned down over and over before you get accepted. Then everyone will hate you for being on disability. You always make more money working than being on disability. I do know people who stay on disability rather than work because if they go off, they lose their medical coverage, which is either Medicaid or Medicare. The problem is that there is no national health care system in the US due to conservative opposition. So the conservatives have created this problem for themselves. But the truth is that you can’t survive on disability even if you are really disabled as it pays so little. It doesn’t even pay enough to survive to be honest. No one is living it up on disability. Most are grubbing by in a very depressing existence at a near sub-survival level. Many are working a bit on the side to supplement the disability, but most of them are not really capable of working fulltime anyway. Even those who stay on disability due to fears of losing medical care are not really capable of working as I see it. Most would not be hired by anyone, and if they were, they would soon be fired.

so that’s what they do, and they get zero work experience, and stay unemployable forever.

The number of people in the US that unemployable due to no work experience is very low. I have honestly never met one in my entire life. I know a person who was on disability for mental stuff, and they had never really worked. At one time, they got much better, and they got a job. They got fired after a few months, which is typical for people on disability for mental stuff, and then they deteriorated and apparently decided never to do that again. But they had landed a good government job even with no work experience because they had a university degree. The Right loves to talk about “unemployable” people. Perhaps there are unemployable Americans. I haven’t the faintest idea. But I am not sure if I have ever met one, and most that I did meet were already collecting disability. The unemployable Americans due to no work experience must be very small in number.

Then the immigrants catch on to the deal, they go on welfare, and then we need to let a few million more uneducated, unskilled, Third-World immigrants in, and the cycle continues.

This is not true. Immigrants to the US do not “go on welfare.” They are banned from most social programs as it is, since they only take citizens. Most legal immigrants also don’t “go on welfare.” I have never met a single immigrant, legal or illegal, who was on any kind of welfare program of any type. Most immigrants to the US have a very strong work ethic, often stronger than Americans. It is an endless rightwing trope that illegal aliens flood into the US “to go on welfare.” Go to any conservative anti-illegal website, and this is all they talk about. “They come here for the welfare!” And it’s the biggest lie on Earth. The number of illegal aliens who come to the US “to go on welfare” must by vanishingly small. First of all, that would be a very stupid reason to come to the US since illegals are not eligible for any programs, and those they are eligible for through their kids don’t even pay the bills. It is certainly not true that millions of illegals “go on welfare” creating a labor shortage, necessitating importation of more illegals. The only way this is somewhat true is that if if you legalize illegals, many of them don’t want to work in the fields anymore, so you need to import more illegals to work in the fields. But it is simply not true that there is a labor shortage in US fields. I live in the biggest agricultural region in the US, and there is no farm worker labor shortage here. In fact, farm worker unemployment is around 1 Certainly there is no need for mass immigration to combat labor shortages. These labor shortages do not exist in the US and exist only in the lying mouths of US businessmen, particularly farmers and owners of high tech companies and their lying lackeys in media and politics. The fake labor shortages are constantly conjured up by US capitalists in order to import more immigrants and guest workers to drive down wages even further.

Make no mistake about it, people. If you are a worker, or would like to be a worker, amnesty is going to hike your taxes and cut your pay.

He is correct that mass immigration will cut your pay if you are worker, but probably only if you are a low skilled worker. Some workers such as tech workers are also being impacted. However, it will not raise your taxes. Conservatives like to say that everything on God’s green Earth is going to “raise your taxes.” Lately, the Democratic Party has gotten in on it too, claiming that some rightwing projects are going to “raise your taxes.” This is stupid. Liberals should not be decrying anything that raises taxes. If you are a liberal and you bemoan things that are going to “raise your taxes” you’re not a liberal anymore. Liberals support taxes. We love taxation. We can’t get enough of it. Taxes in the US are far too low and need to be vastly increased, mostly on the rich and the corporations. The truth is that almost no political project is going to “raise your taxes.” National health care would probably necessitate some sort of a tax increase, but it is uncertain how that would work out. Most projects that increase the size and scope of government functions need to be paid for in some way or another. Mass immigration does increase the costs to government as the immigrants cost more than they produce in taxation to pay for themselves. Immigrants simply don’t pay for themselves; they cost money. The increased costs will probably just be dealt with by cutting more and more services and running up bigger and bigger deficits as raising taxes is a political death wish anymore. Bottom line is that illegals or mass immigration in general does not really raise your taxes. Instead they increase the costs of government, leading to large deficits and major cutbacks in state services.

The left, of course, couldn’t care less about actual working people. They think of them as a bunch of nasty Archie Bunkers who ought to lose their stupid jobs. Serve ’em right. Racist bigots.

This probably isn’t true. In my whole life I might have met one White leftist who felt this way. Your average middle class liberal likes proles about as much as rightwingers do. Like or dislike of the working class is a class issue, not a politics issue. Both rightwing and liberal middle class types don’t really care to hang out with proles all that much, as they both think they are low class. But the only people I have ever met who had utter contempt for low wage workers were all rightwingers, and most of them were young men. It is hard to find a liberal who expresses contempt for working class people. I am not even sure that they exist. Some of the rich have contempt for working class people, but those are mostly young rich males. Contempt for proles does not seem to be acceptable in US culture. As one moves further to the Left, you will find more sympathy for proles, so support for proles and working class people is actually a function of politics in a sense in that it is almost a requirement for being a true liberal or Leftist. There are liberals who are fairly rightwing for a liberal who are dubious about “the workers and peasants.” But they came from an upper class background, and they were not that liberal anyway. As they moved further to the Left with time, their support for and comfort with proles increased. The problem is that most of the Right’s rhetoric is simply untrue. Most of their talking points are frankly falsehoods, but they are things that conservatives want to believe, as they want to believe that the world actually works in the twisted way that their vision says it does. They don’t want to confront reality either. No one does, not the Left, not the Right, really nobody. It is much more comfortable to lie about the world than to see it for what it really is. When you see the world in realis, most of the ideology that you have carefully constructed over a lifetime is stripped bare and revealed to be either lies or nonsense, mostly set up to make you feel good about the world or your view of it in some way. Revealing your lifelong biases as a pack of lies is very painful, and most people just do not want to confront that monster, so they content themselves on comfortable illusions.

Uncle Saddam (2000)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gt9CStVF20k] Pretty poorly done movie that is probably nevertheless one of the best movies ever done about Saddam Hussein and his sick, screwed up family. The same sort of epic corruption and horrific abuse of power was seen with Ben Ali in Tunisia, Gaddafi in Libya and Mubarak in Egypt, though Saddam was more murderous than all of them. I do think that Saddam tried to take care of his people pretty well at the end of the day, but that’s down to his philosophy of Baath socialism more than anything else. The hospitals were ruined and the people impoverished mostly due to the UN sanctions. The sanctions killed at least 1.5 million Iraqis, mostly via untreated water. The parts to fix the water treatment system were deliberately denied by the US and UK crackers on the UN committee. The only possible reason apparently was to slaughter as many Iraqis as possible. In addition, imports of most medical treatment was denied under “dual use” rules which were horribly abused by the US and UK. Turns out he already got rid of all of his WMD’s anyway. The sanctions were to make him get rid of his WMD’s, and he already got rid of them long ago. Then followed the fake inspections, the fake lies about the WMD’s cooked up by the imperialist worms in the US and UK and Zionist dogs in Israel. After that, the fake war, the criminal, Nazi like war of aggression against the Iraqi people launched by the imperialist dog Bush. Saddam was the scum of the Earth, but things are way worse with him gone. The war was nothing but a colonialist war of aggression. In true colonialist fashion, the Anglo imperialists and their mostly White lackeys attempted to take over the Iraqi economy and siphon most of the wealth out of the country under the flag or “free market capitalism.” Up to $9 Billion was simply flat out stolen from the Iraqi people’s oil revenues. The theft was accomplished in plain site, and the imperialist US media simply refused to report on it. In addition, much of the Iraqi people’s property was stolen at the beginning of the invasion right under the approving eyes of the Anglo imperialist dogs. A lot of it was shipped straight to Kuwait as revenge war booty. Anglos aren’t the only thieving colonialist criminals in the area, and the Arab mind is primitive and brutal, unwashed with modernist and civilizing pretensions. Nevertheless, that’s no excuse for outdated colonial wars of aggression and thievery. It’s shameful that most Americans are not sickened by the criminal conduct of their state in that war. The only conclusion is that apparently most Americans are simply down with US imperialism and neocolonialism. Thank God for the Iraqi resistance, horrific though they were, for driving the imperialist conquering army out of the land. Regarding Western colonial/imperial invasions and conquests, along similar lines, after the Western imperialist conquest of Libya, the Western criminals, who had frozen most of the Libyan people’s money in their banks, apparently just flat out stole hundreds of billions of the Libyan people’s money. War under capitalism is always about the booty, the loot. Just forget everything else. All the rest is jingoistic bull and political lies, but the yahoos fall for it every time.

Glasgow, the Most Violent and Depraved City in All of Europe

There are articles all over the Net now about Glasgow, the most violent and disordered White city in Europe. Much hand wringing is going on about gangbanging, heavy drinking with resulting disease, spousal abuse and knife crime, especially knife homicide. It’s Whites who are engaging in almost all of this “ghetto” behavior. But there is a problem with this argument, and that is a relative one. In 2011, Glasgow had 20 homicides in a city of ~700,000. That is a rate of 2.85 per 100,000. Glasgow has the second highest homicide rate in Europe, the Whitest continent on Earth. It’s the nadir of Whiteness. The most recent figure for Black male homicide in the US is ~26 per 100,000. So the rate for Black America as a whole is fully 9 times higher than the most homicidally violent city in all White Europe. Blacks in other nations in the Caribbean, Latin America and Africa have similarly sky-high rates of violent crime and homicide. Even well-ordered and heavily Black nations such as Barbados have very high violent crime rates. So, Black people “acting normally” here in the US (their background rate – forget their much higher rates in big cities) commit 9 times as much homicide as European Whites at the very worst of their very worst. In general, any given large area with lots of White folks will be vastly less disordered and violent than any given large area that has lots of Black people. Most folks, even Leftists and liberals, know this instinctively, which is why there exist such things as White Flight, gated communities, White suburbs, anti-Busing protests, etc. Bottom line, Whites are simply vastly less likely to engage in violent crime and general disordered activity than Blacks are. Violent and disordered areas are the exception to the rule among Whites. Calm, peaceful, orderly areas with little violent crime are the exception to the rule among Blacks, to the extent that they even exist at all. Now, all of this certainly cries out for an explanation. My explanation is that Blacks and Whites are simply different. Now whether that differences is biological or environmental, it exists. I lean towards biological, but I acknowledge that we have no hard evidence for it yet. But the observational evidence surely suggests that there is something biological going on. If you think this website is valuable to you, please consider a contribution to support the continuation of the site.

A Debate About Communism and Capitalism

Steve wrote:

‘The system is already killing at least 4 million and probably a lot more anyway.’ [citation needed] ??? ‘Communist countries have done great things as far as feeding and housing people, giving them basic education and health care and putting in essential sanitation. India has failed at all of these things, mostly because they haven’t even tried.’ North Korea- questionable on health care and food sufficiency. Cuba- I don’t know much about Cuba, but the life expectancy is slightly higher than the US and people are well fed, so it must be doing something right. U.S.S.R.- sure it achieved those things but it was poor, and they only managed the basics. Compare it to the western half of Europe. China- I might address that on the other post. In any case, supposing you have a generally good point, I’d still say so what? Capitalist countries have achieved those things too. Europeans achieved all those things on both sides of the divide. The question is would a Communist government achieve them in India? India is not Europe or North East Asia. It is a tropical, caste ridden country with rampant corruption. Oh…watch the bodies pile up as they try to stamp out caste. ‘As they became more capitalist, they became much more corrupt.’ Really? I don’t know how you would measure it or prove that but I don’t think it is controversial to say that there was plenty of corruption in Soviet Union. And do you think Indian officials/politicians/police will stop being corrupt because they are communist? Really? “There won’t be any “economic development that will eventually lift millions of out poverty.” It’s not going to happen under neoliberalism. Don’t you ever get tired of neoliberals telling us to wait around for the “economic development that will eventually lift millions of out poverty?” Don’t you realize that under neoliberal capitalism reduction of poverty is a goal that has zero value, and I do mean zero value.” Economic growth is already happening in India. The economy will keep growing, as long as there isn’t a big war or global financial collapse or something. As the economy grows, the small middle class will grow and per capita incomes will rise generally. Incomes are already higher than in sub Saharan Africa. (The malnutrition is a separate problem related to Indian culture.) Income inequality is less in India than in China or America. Why won’t the economy keep growing? Maybe poverty reduction has no intrinsic value in capitalism but it happens anyway. It can anyway. If you are practical, the question is what will work? Compare North Korea to South Korea, Eastern Europe to Western Europe. And look at the Chinese economic growth in the past 30 years. It has been meteoric. The fastest industrial revolution in history. I only have to look at my own country and think of it 100 or 200 years ago. There was widespread poverty and squalor. People lived with terrible hardship. How did it get from that to this? This being high levels of development and widespread material wealth and comfort, probably unimaginable to my great great grand parents. Capitalism. Capitalism is better for economic development, or at least a strong element of capitalism. I’m not advocating libertarianism or neoliberalism. The public sector (in health care and education for example) and government regulations (like minimum wage, working hours etc) are important and have been important to my country. Capitalism must be harnessed. And poor countries must not be forced into structural adjustment policies. When capitalism is harnessed, it is more effective at providing economic growth and development than Communism, as it was in the 20th century. Let people get on with enterprising and they will produce growth. How big the public sector should be and what it should encompass is open for debate.

If the USSR is so poor and capitalism is so much better for Russia, why have only two republics recently surpassed the USSR in per capita income. Agricultural production is still far below the USSR. If capitalism is so much better for Russia, then why did the USSR produce more crops than Russia does now? The problem is you are comparing socialism to socialism. They haven’t had pure capitalism is Western Europe for many decades. You are comparing state socialism of the USSR with social democracy in Europe. They are both socialism – just different kinds. One would think that if a tropical country like China or Cuba could do great things, why wouldn’t India? India can’t even provide the basics for its people. I don’t give a flying fuck about “economic growth.” The capitalists have been saying sit back and watch the economic growth as the rising tide lifts all boats in trickle down, supply side economics forever now. The 3rd World has always been pure capitalist or colonialist, which was a form of mercantilism. When is it supposed to start working? When is capitalism in the 3rd World supposed to start working so this rising tide can lift all boats and raise everyone out of poverty? It hasn’t happened, and a lot of us are getting tired of waiting around. Poverty in the capitalist 3rd World is horrific, and capitalism has utterly failed to alleviate the problem in any way, shape or form. Yes, corruption skyrocketed as China, the CIS and Eastern Europe went to capitalism, and no, there was not a lot of corruption in the USSR or Eastern Europe compared to now. There is always vastly more corruption in a capitalist society than in a Communist one, and always far more crime too. Capitalism causes incredible amounts of crime and corruption. Neoliberalism only benefits the top 2 Why is this economic growth acceptable in China? Millions of people are dying every year in China from lack of health care. That wasn’t happening under Mao. Why is this ok? Why was it ok to shut down hundreds of thousands of schools. You realize that the privatization of health care and mass shutdown of schools all over China was part of Deng’s project that you are now cheering on? Why is that ok? Was it ok to do that just to get some “economic growth?” You know what? Fuck economic growth. If you have to kill millions every year and shut down hundreds of thousands of schools so tens of millions of children don’t even get a primary school education, why is that worth it? I say it’s not worth it! That so many live so well in the UK now is testament to social democracy. And keep in mind that the UK was a very socialist place until recently. The state even ran mines and all sorts of “commanding heights of the economy” type things. You argue for capitalism, but all over the world, the capitalists are all 10 The problem is that the only people who are advocating that capitalism should be harnessed in any whatsoever area us socialists. Almost all capitalists agree that capitalism should not be harnessed in any way whatsoever. Capitalists are all radical neoliberal, neoclassical Libertarians. Almost all of them are. They all oppose regulation in any way, shape or form, and they always will. That’s why capitalism is unreformable. Anyway, hardly anyone on the Left is advocating USSR style Communism anymore anyway.

"Three Million Shipwrecks, Billions of Dollars," by Alpha Unit

In February of 1941, the SS Gairsoppa, a British steamer, was returning from a voyage to India. It left its convoy to sail for the Bay of Galway, on the west coast of Ireland, according to author C. Michael Hogan. Unarmed and unescorted, the Gairsoppa was fired upon by the German U-101 boat commanded by Korvettenkapitän Ernst Mengersen, now known for sinking over 67,000 tons of Allied shipping during the War. The last reported position of the Gairsoppa was slightly to the west of the Celtic Sea shelf, southwest of the Irish coast. Last month the shipwreck was found by Odyssey Marine Exploration, based in Tampa, Florida. There were about 240 tons of silver aboard the Gairsoppa, worth $200 million in today’s prices. Contracted by the British government to recover the wreckage, Odyssey will get 8 According to a news report:

In recent years, cash-strapped governments have started looking to lost cargoes as a way to raise money. They do so because the latest generation of robots, lights, cameras, and claws can withstand the deep sea’s crushing pressure and have opened up a new world of shipwreck recovery.

The United Nations estimates that there are about 3 million shipwrecks on the ocean floor. There are billions and billions of dollars worth of treasure that have yet to be hauled up. Odyssey Marine is the company that just found the shipwreck of another British steamer, the SS Mantola. It was sunk off the coast of Ireland in 1917 by a German submarine. The Mantola had been carrying 20 tons of silver. Like the Gairsoppa, the Mantola had been owned by the British Indian Steam Navigation Company. In 1917, the British Ministry of War Transport paid a War Risk Insurance Claim for £110,000 (in 1917 value). Today we are looking at approximately $18 million, most of which will go to Odyssey. Private companies like Odyssey put their own money at risk to recover these treasures. But what they do is controversial. They’ve come in for some heavy criticism from archaeological societies and charities, and are accused of “ransacking” these shipwrecks for their own gain while pretending to be engaged in archaeological research. The case of the famous “Black Swan” discovery back in 2007 illustrates the controversy. Odyssey Marine found the wreck of a ship which sank in the North Atlantic. Which ship and its exact location have been in dispute, though. The company discovered an estimated $500 million worth of silver and gold coins, along with worked gold and other artifacts. Some say this particular shipwreck may be that of the British merchant ship Merchant Royal, which sank while returning to England in 1641. The Spanish government filed a claim that the silver and gold came from a Spanish vessel, the Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes, a frigate that sank off the coast of Portugal in 1804. The government of Peru laid claim to the treasure since some of the coins were minted in Lima. (That claim was later dismissed; Peru was a Spanish territory when the coins were minted.) Descendants of some of the people onboard the different ships have filed claims, as well. Spain ratified the UNESCO 2001 Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage, and asserts that these ancient shipwrecks should be protected and placed in museums, not bartered or sold. In a case that made it to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, a lower court ruling was affirmed that the U.S. federal court lacked jurisdiction over property recovered in the Black Swan Project. The court found that the recovery was the sovereign immune shipwreck Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes and ordered Odyssey to turn everything over to the Spanish government. Nothing has to be handed over, though, until all appeals have been exhausted. And you know they will be.

“Riotous Nonsense”, by Harry Powell

Warning: Long, runs to 36 pages.

Harry Powell is a British Maoist who has written an excellent piece about the riots in the UK that goes against the typical arguments of the Left about the riots. He argues that the riots were not motivated by class or racism, but were instead spearheaded by primarily criminal lumpen elements that had been preying on low income and working class people in their neighborhoods for a long time.

The riots had little political consciousness. Many of the lumpen elements among the rioters buy into the capitalist project and revere the rich. The riots were a chance for them to get rich too.

It is very nice to see such a heterodox view coming from a hardline Marxist.

Riotous Nonsense

A great deal has been written about the recent urban disturbances in Britain and a lot of it is nonsense. For example, Robert Borba of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA wrote:

What is taking place on Britain’s streets is a revolt against an oppressive state apparatus that is enforcing an unjust society, an apparatus that has lost much of its legitimacy in the eyes of millions. It is a revolt against state-backed racism. It is refusal by hundreds of thousands of youth to accept a world where they are destitute, with no jobs and no future.

The general idea being put forward here, and by some others, is that the disturbances were a widespread, conscious revolt against the capitalist system. I do not think that the evidence supports this assertion.

The incident that sparked off the rioting was the police shooting Mark Duggan in Tottenham, North London on 4th. August. After an unsatisfactory response from the police to their inquiries the family and friends of Duggan held a protest outside a police station. This attracted other people and developed into more general disorder involving fighting with the police, damage to buildings and looting from shops.

This sort of disorder spread to other areas of London and outside in cities such as Birmingham, Manchester and Nottingham. Just as suddenly as these outbursts had begun, they came to an abrupt end on 10th. August when the weather turned wet. As someone commented, “I don’t recollect that the Russian Revolution came to a sudden halt when the weather turned bad.”

Chairman Mao said, ”No investigation, no right to speak.” The present writer does not claim to be some sort of expert on urban disturbances but for forty years in Nottingham I have lived in and near the localities where such outbursts have occurred, both past and present. I have carried out political work in these areas, particularly anti-racist, anti-poll tax, anti-war and anti-voting campaigning. Thus I have some first hand experiences I can draw upon in assessing the reports and analyses of other people.

For the most part the riots occurred in urban areas where there is much unemployment and underemployment, large numbers of ethnic minorities, poor housing and limited social facilities. It is the young people in these areas, particularly black ones, who have high rates of unemployment and very limited opportunities.

The class composition is largely working class (proletarian) with some middle strata elements such as small shopkeepers and business proprietors (petit bourgeois) and gentrified enclaves of more affluent business and professional people (manageriat).

Racism?

One interpretation is that the disturbances were at least partly a reaction by black youth against the discriminatory racist treatment of them by the police. In particular the prevalence of “stop and search” operations by the Metropolitan Police in London is seen as generating resentment on the part of black youth. Mark Duggan was black and the police shooting him certainly sparked off the disturbances.

However, from the incomplete picture we have of the circumstances of the killing it does seem that Duggan was carrying a gun. In Britain, unlike America, very few people habitually carry handguns and most of those who do so are criminals. The fact of the matter is that knife and gun crime carried out by young people is a serious problem in many British cities, especially London.

The police have been criticized, not least by people living in the affected areas, for not doing enough to contain and reduce such crime. (In the Meadows area of Nottingham some years ago the residents were fearful of armed gangs of drugs dealers and demanded that the police institute regular patrols of armed officers.) This is a major reason for police stop and search operations.

True, black youth are disproportionately targeted, not always sensitively handled and many perfectly innocent young people caught up in such operations come to feel victimized and resentful towards the police.

Borba and others highlight the racist attitudes and behaviour of the police. Certainly the police are far from being free of racism as they are drawn from the wider society in which racist attitudes are still widespread. Thus some of the police are racists but not all of them. There were similar urban disturbances in Britain in 1981 and in subsequent years.

Then almost certainly the main factor was resentment by black and Asian people against racist treatment by the police. As a result much action has occurred within the police forces to try to combat their racism and in my view with some success.

Even so there are still many instances of police racism. It is also the case that the Metropolitan Police have seriously bungled operations leading to the deaths of innocent people as in the cases of Jean Charles de Menezes and Ian Tomlinson. It is hardly surprising that many young people, especially in London, treat the police with suspicion.

But it does not necessarily follow that all the black and Asian people participating in the riots were protesting about racist police. Back in 1981 in Hyson Green Nottingham I witnessed a group of mainly black people laying siege to the local police station. At the same time around the corner other people, many of them black, were busy looting the local shops.

The former group were probably motivated by resentment of police racism while the latter group were clearly simply out for personal material gain. Back in August in Nottingham several police stations were attacked.

An acquaintance lives near one of the targets. She saw a gang of black youth come up her street, on their way to attack the police station, and as they proceeded they trashed every car parked in the street. These belonged to the residents, predominantly council tenants, mostly on lower incomes. (My acquaintance’ s car was so badly damaged that it was written off by the insurance company.) It is not plausible to try to explain this incident as a protest against police racism.

It is easy to see why the family and friends of Mark Duggan were upset by the police’s insensitive handling of that case and why some other people interpreted this as a case of police racism. But this is hardly an adequate explanation of the widespread disturbances that occurred in many parts of Britain.

Lack of Opportunities?

Of course, by no means all of those active in the recent disturbances were black and Asian. Many ”white” people were actively involved and arrested, especially young ones. Some people, such as Robert Borba, claim that it is the lack of opportunities for young people, of all ethnic groups, in these deprived areas which explains the riots: ”It is refusal by hundreds of thousands of youth to accept a world where they are destitute, with no jobs and no future.”

It is objectively true that in these areas there are limited educational and employment opportunities for young people. Many of them are demoralized and bored and some of them drift into gangs and criminal activities. Many do hold a vague resentment against the system which degrades them. However this hardly constitutes a definite class political consciousness in the Marxist sense.

Having tried to politically engage with such young people, my impression is that most of them have no real conception of who are their rulers and why they are in a disadvantaged position in this society. Indeed many of them at least partly embrace the media’s definition of them as inadequate and undeserving in various ways. Many admire rich people such as footballers.

The Coalition Government elected in May 2010 has been introducing a draconian programme of cuts in public spending so as to pay off the massive government deficit brought about by the need to bail out the banks three years ago. These include cuts in welfare benefits, support for disadvantaged people, spending on education and training etc.

These will particularly impact on the deprived area where the riots occurred. Some people suggest that this is a cause of the August disturbances but this is not very plausible because the cuts have not yet really begun to have a serious impact.

It is hardly surprising that some of these people should seize upon an opportunity to relieve the monotony and boredom of their lives by going on the rampage. Also we live in a capitalist society where there is constant pressure to acquire material possessions beyond the means of unemployed youth. Here was an opportunity to grab some goodies such as flat screen televisions, laptops, ipods, etc. for free.

Even so, it is unlikely that those doing the looting saw themselves as taking their revenge upon the bourgeoisie, as ”expropriating the expropriators” . Given the temporary breakdown of civil order an unexpected opportunity arose. It was just sheer opportunism.

Having fun?

As people arrested appeared before the courts it became clear that they were not all poor and oppressed. Many of the rioters were in education and employment, some in well-paid jobs. They are not in serious poverty nor are they lacking opportunities. So why did they get caught up in the disturbances?

There is nothing new about sudden, spontaneous outbreaks of civil disorder in modern Western societies, especially involving young people. Back in the nineteen fifties and sixties there were many cases of ”youth disturbances” in countries such as Britain and Germany.

A well-known example was the Mods and Rockers disturbances in Britain in 1964. (See the film ‘Quadrophenia‘ ) Rival groups of teenagers congregated in seaside resorts on holiday weekends engaging in rowdy behaviour and a certain amount of violence and vandalism, probably somewhat amplified by the attention it received from the media. This was a period of full employment and rising living standards, especially for young people.

These rioters could afford motorbikes, scooters and expensive trendy clothes. Some commentators tried to interpret their behaviour as a youth protest against the system but it was not plausible. The disturbances stopped just as suddenly as they had begun. Another example is the soccer hooliganism present in Britain during the nineteen seventies and eighties. Again, attempts to explain it in terms of class conflict are not very convincing.

The fact of the matter is that spontaneous civil disorder, on a small or large scale, has been a recurrent feature of modern capitalism. Quite often the initial ”spark” which gets it going remains unclear. In certain circumstances people who are normally law-abiding can get caught up in the excitement and do things which they would not normally do.

A case known to me in Nottingham was a young man, an apprentice electrician, who during the 1981 riots found himself in the thick of it, picked up a stone, threw it at a shop window, got arrested, convicted and fined in court. He had never been in trouble with the law before and has not been so since that time. In the recent disturbances it seems that many of those rioting were engaging in this sort of impulsive, spontaneous behaviour.

A lot of the riotous behaviour was not to obtain desirable consumer goods but simply to destroy property. The proprietor of a shop in Manchester selling expensive Bang und Olufsen hi-fi equipment was somewhat put out because the rioters did not steal his goods but simply destroyed them. It might be claimed that the culprits were somewhat inarticulately expressing their resentment at the rich who could afford such luxuries.

However a lot of the damage in the riots was inflicted on small local businesses and cars parked in the streets. The victims were not multinational corporations but local residents. Some of these business will not reopen and this will further economically depress these already deprived areas. In Dalston, East London where many Turkish and Kurdish comrades live, people mobilized to defend the local shops against the rioters. I hope that the Turkish and Kurdish Maoists who live there participated in this defensive action.

The truth is that in the right circumstances most of us are capable of getting caught up in riotous, anti-social behaviour. The ruling class are no exception. Consider the hooligan behaviour of people such as David Cameron and Boris Johnson during their student days in the Bullingdon Club at Oxford University. This sort of spontaneous release of normal constraints on personal behaviour is not a revolt against the system.

Criminality?

It is undoubtedly true that capitalism spits out people at the bottom of society. Its economic contradictions operate such that a section of the proletariat are relatively lowly paid, regularly unemployed and underemployed, have poor standard housing and live in areas with limited social facilities.

These people are the lower sections of the working class and it was only during the thirty year economic boom following World War ll that their numbers proportionately diminished. Both before and after this period they have constituted a significant minority of the population in Britain who are now disproportionately drawn from non-white ethnic minority groups.

Given the lack of legitimate opportunities for personal improvement, it is hardly surprising that some of these people become involved in crime, both against property and persons This is the lumpenproletariat, criminal and anti-social elements which prey off other people living in the same area. These are the burglars, muggers, pimps, drug dealers and street gangs who often make their neighbours’ lives a misery.

Yes, I know that these are people whose behaviour largely results from their class position at the bottom of capitalist society just as surely as the behaviour of swindling financiers is determined by their position at the top of capitalist society. None the less, the great majority of people living in these areas for very good reasons regard the lumpen elements as an enemy.

The victims of these crimes are mostly people living in the same areas and not middle strata and bourgeois elements who live elsewhere. There is rivalry among the criminal gangs involved in these activities and they usually arm themselves with knives and guns. The macho gang culture so generated in these areas spreads among local young people who are not necessarily directly involved in criminal activity.

It is difficult for children growing up in such areas not to be influenced, They engage in much anti-social activity to the distress of other local residents. Injuries and deaths caused by the use of weapons by rival gangs are quite common. Some years ago at the school at the top of my street two criminals involved in a car chase pulled into the school forecourt and proceeded to shoot guns at each other. A bullet lodged in the windscreen of a coach waiting to transport some of the pupils.

For twelve years I lived in the St. Ann’s area of Nottingham, an inner city area largely consisting of council housing with high levels of unemployment and many black and Asian residents.

My house was burgled on three occasions and I had to install window bars, toughened glass panes, a burglar alarm and security lights. Anything left outside in the garden, however trivial, would be stolen. My experience was typical throughout the area. Cars parked in the streets were broken into in broad daylight and people passing who dared to remonstrate with the thieves were threatened, often with knives.

An acquaintance of mine was confronted by muggers who then beat him up because he had no money. The victim spent many weeks in hospital recovering from his injuries. The criminals committing these acts lived locally. Prostitutes were soliciting on the street outside my house. Many of these women were being run by pimps and many of them needed the money to feed their hard drugs addiction.

The pimps and drug dealers lived in the area and when they fell out with each other would use knives and guns to settle scores. Also youth gangs made peoples’ lives unpleasant by harassment on the streets and damaging property.

It is hardly surprising that the great majority of residents in St. Ann’s and in another similar area of Nottingham, the Meadows were demanding action by the City Council and police to deal with these scum, the criminal and anti-social elements. One response by the Council has been to introduce all sorts of security measures to these areas. These include installing burglar alarms in dwellings, building walls and steel fences to make entry by burglars more difficult.

Residents wanted more police patrols, especially on foot, for their protection. In the Meadows residents felt so intimidated by armed gangs that they requested the police to start regular patrols by officers openly carrying firearms, something which had never been done before in Britain.

It is an unpalatable fact for most leftists that the main problem with the police that most people in deprived areas in Britain have is that the police are not doing enough to protect residents. The police are not generally regarded as oppressors. Many surveys carried out in such areas in Britain during the last forty years bear this out.

Some anarchists see professional criminals as engaging in some sort of rebellion against capitalism. This is nonsense. These criminals are informed by a crude, caricatured version of the dominant bourgeois ideology. They aspire to a lifestyle based around expensive cars, jewelry and clothes. In order to achieve their aspirations they are prepared to oppress and exploit the people in their own localities in the most vicious and crude manner making the worst capitalist employer seem like a saint in comparison. They are the scum of the earth.

The police try to clamp down on criminal and anti-social behaviour, not least at the insistence of local residents who are the main victims of such conduct. However well local people organize themselves in community groups they are not equipped to take on vicious, armed criminals.

Only armed police can do this and clashes between the police and criminal/anti-social elements can take on a racial character given that the police are predominantly white and those they are dealing with are disproportionately, although by no means exclusively, from black and Asian groups. This is not to deny that some police officers hold racist attitudes and thus have negative views of black and Asian people.

Even so, the police, who are drawn from the wider society are not uniformly racist and the proportion of them with such an outlook is less than in the past. Now there are a significant number of black and Asian police officers.

On the street where I live we had a problem with a hooligan youth gang harassing residents. We had to form a residents’ association to try to deal with the problem and we went to the police and insisted that they take action. The gang was multiethnic in composition and some of their parents accused the residents and police of being racists.

Some of the police officers involved were of Asian background and they were not impressed by these allegations, the charge of police racism being a common defence put forward by delinquents. I was somewhat amused one day when I saw the gang leader, from an Asian family, who had broken his bail conditions being taken away by two Asian police officers.

Yes, the police are an important part of the repressive apparatus of the capitalist state. Their main function is to control the working class so as to maintain capitalism. This was very clear during the Miners’ Strike during 1984-5 when they used all sorts of illegal methods to contain the miners.

But it is also true that a secondary function of the police is to uphold general public order so that civil society can effectively function. Unless the criminal and antisocial elements who prey off the working class and middle strata are combated and contained then everyday life would become very difficult. Ordinary people have neither the organization or skills to deal with criminals and street gangs.

Now it is becoming clear that many of the people arrested in the riots had previous criminal convictions. So at least some of the rioters were delinquents who seized the opportunity to engage in thieving, not just from commercial premises but from anybody who happened to be around as well. In no way were these people protesting against the rule of capital. As for attacks on police stations in Nottingham, the word on the street is that these were carried out by criminals, especially drug dealers, who seized the opportunity to get back at the police who pursue them.

Approaching the Working Class

In Britain the objective conditions upon which a growth of revolutionary consciousness could be based are becoming more favourable. The financial crisis three years ago and the subsequent unemployment, falling living standards and cuts in public services are impacting on millions of people, especially the lower sections of the working class.

For some years inequalities of income and wealth have been widening to greater differences than they were a century ago. The legitimacy of the state has been undermined by the scandal two years ago of Members of Parliament enriching themselves by blatantly fiddling their expenses claims.

There is widespread disaffection with the war in Afghanistan. A new financial crisis brought about by problems with the Eurozone could occur. And yet the subjective conditions for taking advantage of this situation in Britain do not exist. There is no Marxist-Leninist- Maoist political organization in Britain.

The lower sections of the working class – the sort of people who live in the areas where the riots occurred – are, given their objective conditions of life, potentially open to influence by revolutionary ideas. However most leftists avoid these people like the plague. As for the few people of Maoist sympathies in Britain, they are not organized so cannot really do anything.

I was active in the anti-poll tax struggle in the St. Ann’s area of Nottingham in 1989 to 1991. (The poll tax was a change in local taxation brought in by a Conservative Government which massively shifted the burden of paying for local services from better off people onto those with low incomes.)

In over fifty years of radical political activity in Britain the anti-poll tax campaign is the only occasion on which I have seen large numbers of working class people – many millions – become actively involved in a political campaign. Throughout Britain anti-poll tax groups were formed and these campaigned for people to refuse to pay the tax.

This did not happen spontaneously. It was necessary to campaign door-to-door to persuade people to withhold their poll tax payments. In St. Ann’s we held public meetings which attracted quite large audiences of working class people. This was most unusual.

In March 1990 a large national demonstration against the poll tax was held in London. This was attacked by the police but the demonstrators fought back. They held the police at bay and damaged expensive cars, upmarket shops and offices of large companies. The media dubbed this occurrence the “Poll Tax Riot” but the outcome of it and the mass non-payment was the Conservative Government backing down and scrapping the tax.

Also it was an important factor in bringing about the downfall of the apparently impregnable Margaret Thatcher as prime minister. Unlike the recent riots, this was a real political rebellion informed by the conscious aim of stopping this iniquitous tax.

Although the Labour Party said it was against the poll tax, it urged people “not to break the law” and to pay it. Indeed, in Nottingham the Labour-controlled City Council boasted about the zeal with which it set about prosecuting those refusing to pay. Meanwhile with the poll tax abandoned the Trotskyites and revisionists urged people to vote Labour in local elections.

In Nottingham some of the other activists stood in the local elections as protest candidates against the Labourites’ persecution of poll tax defaulters. By then the campaign had largely dissipated but we did attract a respectable number of votes.

The poll tax was a serious blunder by the Conservative Government because they enacted an obviously unjust measure clearly aimed at the working class and which directly impacted on all of them. Thus it was relatively easy to mobilize people to not pay the tax. Even so this only happened because of deliberate efforts by activists to raise people’s political consciousness. From a Maoist perspective it was not possible to secure any lasting political influence because we had no revolutionary organization.

Another type of campaigning in deprived areas of Nottingham I have been engaged in is urging people not to vote in national and local elections. This receives a largely positive response because the majority of people in these areas do not usually vote and so do not need much encouragement to abstain. It is noticeable that since the first term of New Labour government, which ended in 2001, many working class people have finally abandoned their support for Labour. Working class voters are now no more likely to support Labour than other parties.

However people’s alienation from the capitalist political system, bourgeois democracy, does not mean that they think it is possible to get rid of capitalism and replace it with something better. While they have no confidence in the existing order, they feel powerless to do anything about it.

Half a century ago in Britain there were millions of people, both working class and middle strata, who thought of themselves as “socialists”. This did not mean that they had a sophisticated grasp of Marxism but it did mean that they held a basic conception of the class division under capitalism, the iniquity of it and the need to change the system to one more equitable, to some sort of socialism.

This political consciousness has considerably diminished, and now only a small minority of people call themselves socialists. Very few working class people identify as socialists and there are probably more middle strata people who do so. The level of class political consciousness of the working class in Britain has greatly diminished during the last fifty years.

When campaigning for abstention in elections, some people do ask what is the alternative to the present system. If one says that it is socialism, then usually this does not meet with a positive reception. Most people see it as something that was tried and failed in Russia.

Also as a result of intense anti-communist propaganda in the media, especially during the last twenty years, many people – probably a large majority – see socialism and communism as highly undesirable, oppressive systems. It is very difficult to combat this negative perception in the context of street campaigning. Better propaganda materials are needed to educate people about socialism and communism.

However the most effective way in which people would become interested in revolutionary ideas is by revolutionaries taking the lead in generating popular struggles against the oppression and exploitation of capitalism. This can only be done really effectively if revolutionary communists are organized and in Britain they are not.

Conclusions

1. The disturbances in Britain during August 2010 were not a revolt against capitalism and neither were they primarily a protest against police racism. For leftists to try to make out that they were is a case of what Lenin called the ‘worship of spontaneity’.

2. Lumpenproletarian criminal elements were prominent in the disturbances much to the disgust of other residents in the affected areas. These criminals are thoroughly reactionary and enemies of the working class.

3. The low level of political class consciousness among the working class in Britain could be raised by sustained agitation, propaganda and practical political campaigning among such people. In the right circumstances they are capable of taking conscious political action against the system as was demonstrated by the anti-poll tax struggle of twenty years ago.

4. The experience of Britain during the last few decades demonstrates the essential correctness of Lenin’s thesis that a political class consciousness cannot spontaneously arise among the working class. It has to be developed by a revolutionary political party persistently and consistently agitating, propagandizing, organizing and leading working class people in struggles against capitalist oppression and exploitation.

I Like the National Front – Is There Something Wrong with Me?

Marine Le Pen has it or Far Right as everyone else calls them. I’m all for rightwing socialists. More rightwingers should start calling themselves socialists. Even better, more rightwingers should start adopting socialist politics. At that point, I would probably start voting rightwing for the first time in my life.

I think I have figured out the European Right. It’s socialist. Why? Because Continental European politics in general is socialist. The Right is socialist, the Far Right is socialist, the center is socialist, the Left is socialist, Hell, everyone is socialist. What a great continent!

As long as everyone is socialist, what sense to the Right and Left labels mean? I guess they mean something, but is the Right then really so bad? My understanding is that the BNP is now to the Left of both Labor (sic), the Liberal Democrats (sic) and of course the Tories. Ok, since the BNP is now the most socialist major party out here, give me a reason why not to vote BNP as opposed to the Neoliberal Capitalist Flavor of the Month.

The National Front is often called fascist. Well, they look pretty socialist to me. If “fascists” wish to adopt socialist policies, why would I oppose them? Hell, I might even vote for them.

On the Continent, there is a general agreement that Big Government is a wonderful thing. Of course, we socialists can’t get enough Big Government. I love telling asshole White Americans that I love Big Government. They always look at me like I just told them that I love molesting children or eating corpses. I say it just to piss them off, plus, it’s true. Big Government is great. Up with Big Government!

When “fascists” are really just socialists with some funny ideas about culture and immigration, why shouldn’t I vote for them?

Here in the US, you get to choose which rightwing neoliberal capitalist party you want to vote for. We socialists have no choices. We have to swallow one painted turd or the other. Voting Democrat or Republican is like having to reach into the toilet and pick out which turd you want to eat. They keep saying that the Democratic turd tastes better and is better for your system. I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of eating shit period. Let me vote for someone I believe in without throwing my vote away for once.

IRA Video

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyDOQ63agJw&feature=player_embedded]

Good stuff. Freedom fighters resisting the British occupation of Ireland, just like the Palestinians resist the Israeli occupation of their homeland. The Irish people deserve the right to self-determination. The Good Friday agreement will never allow that, so it’s crap. The IRA often gives warnings for its bombs too, but of all of the armed movements of Europe, they’ve been the most hardcore. They kill young Catholic cops, apparently as “traitors.” That’s messed up.

 

Racial Breakdown of the English Riots

I kept wondering what the stats were on the English riots, since the media did not seem to be doing a very good job of telling me. I did a bit of figuring on my own, but it wasn’t easy.

The riots in London are heavily Black. Nevertheless, there are many Whites mixed in. There are also some South Asians involved.

In Birmingham, the riots are very heavily Black and Asian. The Asian component is quite large. However, there are some Whites mixed in.

In Liverpool, the riots are mixed Black and White. There are many more Whites rioting here.

In Manchester, rioters appear to be 10

Looking through some photos of rioters from London and Birmingham on  British newspaper page, I was able to identify the race of 150 rioters (it was hard to identify race of many rioters since they tended to cover themselves in clothing from head to toe). Of those, 84 were Black, 55 were White and 11 appeared to be Asian. With some, admittedly, race was hard to determine.

Try the experiment yourself here.

English Riots

Race    Number  

Black   84       5
White   55       3
Asian*  11       

*Asians generally = South Asians (Indians,
Pakistanis, etc.

As you can see, Blacks are overrepresented among rioters by 23X (2,20

Just under 2/3 of rioters are Black or Asian, and  a bit over 1/3 of rioters are White.

Considering that only 5

The instances of Blacks randomly assaulting random Whites on the street, much played up by racist media, do not seem to be the norm. If the purpose of the riots was to attack Whites, why are the Black rioters not assaulting the White rioters who are rioting alongside them?

A Voice from the Chinese Revolution

Chinese revolutionaries (Maoists) used to say:

The emperor can burn villages, but the people are forbidden to even light a candle.

But is it not true? Looking at the riots in the UK now, and the structural violence that the elites and the rich wage on us day and day out, violence which often has misery, homelessness, immiseration, disease and death as its end result. And the rich say they are not violent? Only the poor are violent?

What’s driving the riots? From Laurie Penny’s excellent blog, British Riots: Elites “Shocked” The Poor Are Rising Up Against Brutal Austerity Measures.

Angry young people with nothing to do and little to lose are turning on their own communities, and they cannot be stopped, and they know it. In one of the greatest cities in the world, society is ripping itself apart.

Violence is rarely mindless. The politics of a burning building, a smashed-in shop or a young man shot by police may be obscured even to those who lit the rags or fired the gun, but the politics are there.

No one expected this. The so-called leaders who have taken three solid days to return from their foreign holidays to a country in flames did not anticipate this. The people running Britain had absolutely no clue how desperate things had become. They thought that after thirty years of soaring inequality, in the middle of a recession, they could take away the last little things that gave people hope, the benefits, the jobs, the possibility of higher education, the support structures, and nothing would happen. They were wrong. And now my city is burning, and it will continue to burn until we stop the blanket condemnations and blind conjecture and try to understand just what has brought viral civil unrest to Britain. Let me give you a hint: it ain’t Twitter.

What do you think of these riots? Ruling classes armed with nuclear weapons screech over kids armed with rocks.

I would say that the riots are not so racial as one might think. These are not the race riots that we had in the US in the 1960’s.

The looters were about 7

It would be very interesting to see some sort of a racial breakdown on the rioters, or of those arrested. I think calling this a race riot is a bit simplistic. As of today, the riots are ongoing and have spread to a number of other English cities and towns. There was small scale rioting in Birmingham, Wolverhampton and West Bromwich in central England. In northwest England, there was low level rioting in Manchester and Salford. There was rioting in Liverpool and Bristol.

In London, rioting hit Hackney, Croyton, Clapham Junction, Peckham, Lewisham, Ealing and Camden. Rioting even hit upscale Notting Hill. Youth armed with clubs raided a fancy restaurant and robbed all the patrons of their jewelry.

Deficit hawk morons in the UK slashed police forces badly, and the much reduced forces are having a hard time coping with the riots. This is the Third Worldization of the West – in the 3rd World, police forces are typically cut to the bone, such that cops resort to crime to supplement their incomes, even holding up cars on the highway. You see, in the 3rd World, the rich won’t even pay for the police. The new austerity hawk model for the West is the 3rd World.

Eat the Rich

“Eat the Rich,” an anthem for the London riots.

Eat the rich. Their gated communities are our smorgasbords. Roast them on our pitchforks over our torches.

Prune the limbs that have grown too heavy for the good of the tree. It’s simply good social hygiene. Groom ourselves free of those greedy bloodsuckers.

How would you like your billionaire done? If taste tells anything, they’re chicken.

Marxist Leaders on the Lumpenproletariat

That’s basically who I live with.

The question was brought up about whether the riots in the UK are the beginning of the revolution. Tottenham erupted in riots yesterday. Tottenham is a heavily Black and Caribbean part of London. The population is heavily Black or more properly, mulatto, as the Black population of the UK is heavily mulattized. I was surprised however to see many Whites on the street of the area. There were also some Hispanics.

The riots involved quite a bit of looting. A large department store was set on fire, and a number of police cars were set ablaze. Some policemen were injured. It all started when a mulatto man was stopped by police and reportedly opened fire on cops. The cop was only saved by a radio which deflected the bullet. Later it turned out that the bullet that almost killed the cop was actually fired by other police. The mulatto man was killed by return fire by police.

I read about the riots over at American Renaissance. The readers on this racist site pretty much said, “Niggers riot everywhere and at all times for any and no reason. Rioting: it’s what niggers do.” This is the “niggers gotta nig” argument. The fact that the Indians and Pakistanis are starting to join complicates that analysis some.

On Ian Welsh’s site, he sees a tie-in with the massive austerity cuts that the UK has engaged in lately. The cuts have completely wrecked the British economy, but the austerity stuff was all about class war anyway. The coalition UK government believes in something called “The Big Society.” The way I see it, it means big profits for corporations, and everyone else is on their own. Welsh sees these people as rioting due to the austerity cuts. I’m not sure if these rioter clowns are smart enough to figure that out.

One thing is for sure, if rulers continue with this rightwing neo-feudalist project, the people won’t just sit back and take it. There will be a lot of crime, much of it directed against the moneyed classes, and there will be riots. At some point, there may be armed opposition. You can only smash people down so much.

Look at Latin America: there is a ton of crime, much of it the poor stealing from those who have money, there is a lot of rioting and street demonstrations, often violent, and there are people with guns fighting the state. The rich think they can wage class war against us and we won’t wage class war right back. Class war is theft. You steal from the poor, and they will try to rip you off right back. That’s called “crime.” The class nature of it is so much more obvious in a place like Peru, Brazil or the Philippines, but it’s probably often a motivating factor in many places.

Some have also noted that the rioters used social networking sites and devices such as Blackberries to plan their riots.

Last I heard, last night,  the riots were spreading to other parts of the city, and Indians and Pakistanis were joining in. At the same time, riots spread to Birmingham, Liverpool and Bristol.

Peter Tobin, a friend, correctly points out that the rioters are lumpenproletariat, a problematic social class that can go right or left and was often viewed as having little revolutionary potential.

Mao on lumpenproletariat:

“One of China’s difficult problems is how to handle these people, brave fighters but apt to be destructive, they can become a revolutionary force if given proper guidance.” (Analysis of Classes in Chinese Society)

Lenin also dealt with the tendency of the lumpenproletariat to spontaneously take up undirected struggle against the status quo, and condemns communists who, pace Marx and Engels, declare:

“We are not anarchists, thieves and robbers, we are superior to all this.” (Guerilla Warfare)

He further attacks this approach, which sees lumpen ‘mob rule’, and is relevant to the present situation, as:

“anarchism, Blanquism, the old terrorism, the acts of individuals isolated from the masses, which demoralizes the workers, repel wide strata of the population, disorganize the movement, and injure the revolution.” (ibid)

and further states it is not their violent eruptions:

“…which disorganize the movement, but the weakness of a party which is incapable of taking such actions under its control.” (ibid – my emphasis)

Fanon and later, the Black Panthers developed this line of march, but we have to recognize that it differs from Marx and Engels’ view of this strata, who regarded their recruitment by reaction, specifically in 19th century France, as irredeemable proof of their counter-revolutionary character. Thus they were ‘social scum,’ a ‘passively rotting class thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society’, and differentiated them from the proletariat, advising that class to inscribe on its banners:

“Mort aux voleurs” (death to thieves).

(Vide; Class Struggles in France, 18th Brumaire and Prefatory Note to The Peasant War in Germany)

However, it has been pointed out that they never made a detailed Marxist analysis of this strata, and, in fact gave contradictory accounts of its social base, tending to judge it from an ethical position.

Muslims in France

Repost from the old site.

Clearly, the North African, mostly-Caucasian Muslims in France (primarily Algerians) have been a disaster. They are the ones that are rioting all the time and tearing up the country. Contrary to popular rumor, the N African Muslim population in France is ~1

The North Africans are there primarily due to French colonialism and imperialism. Algeria was a former French colony, brutally ruled by France for 134 years, from 1830 to 1964.

The Algerians fought a horribly brutal war of independence, in which 25,000 French and 1 million Algerians were killed. Incredibly, the anti-Communist Right in the US still sings the praises of French colonialism in this war, and makes the revolutionaries out to be the bad guys.

It’s true that the Algerian revolutionaries did not fight a very nice or pretty war. Yet they paid for it with 40 times the casualties of the French. To the dead person, I don’t think it really matters how they got killed (an accusation against the revolutionaries is that they killed people in brutal ways such as beheadings).

It’s true that you can go on the Internet, usually to Zionist sites, and see some horrible photos of those killed by the Algerian revolutionaries. A specialty was chopping the head off, chopping the genitals off, and stuffing the guy’s dick in his severed head.

Anyway, colonialism is always wrong, period. The French were wrong, and they lost. After the war, Algerians started showing up in France in large numbers. White nationalists (who, by the way, never met a White imperialist or colonialist project they did not adore) claim that the Algerians are in France due to insane liberals bringing them there to diversify France and I guess to dilute the European Whites.

The French may be liberal, but they are not retarded like liberal Americans and liberal Scandinavians.

I would like to point out that none of this White nationalist bullshit is true.

First of all, the Algerian Muslim immigrants were not brought in as some loony liberal experiment in diversity, but instead as pro-French refugees fleeing soon before or after the FLN won the war. Think of the fall of Saigon.

The White nationalist line is that the French used to be hardcore and nasty and brutal (after all, the guillotine was still used until the 1970’s) and the French Foreign Legion was brutal as Hell in the Algerian Civil War, but now the French have gone soft and wimpy, and they are letting Muslim punks run all over them.

That hardcore France the White nationalists love so much was rejected by none other than the French people themselves after the criminal colonial wars of Algeria and Vietnam. There was a big scandal about all the murdering and torturing the French Foreign Legion was doing in Algeria.

The US anti-Communist Hard Right, to this very day, sees this humanist sentiment, and its attendant rejection of colonialism, and even, to some extent, at least in popular culture, embrace of national liberation movements (see Fanon’s seminal work appeared in 1961, the year of his death, in the midst of the Algerian revolution, and that Debray started pushing his foco theories right around this time ( Revolution in the Revolution appeared in 1967).

The rebels were even worse than the Foreign Legion, but the French did not want to see themselves as brutal, colonialist maniacs.

This was also a period when France was supporting other imperialist and colonial powers in the Suez War in 1956, where British and French colonialism, with their colonial Jewish puppet state, attacked Egypt and tried to grab the Suez Canal back from Nasser, who had rightly and properly seized the canal as Egypt’s property.

After that, the French turned their backs on colonialism (more or less – they still, to their discredit, hold colonies in the South Pacific), and to some extent on imperialism – but not totally – see the crucial French role in the armed coup that threw out President Aristide in Haiti – elected with the support of 9

France as a colonial and imperial power was more or less finished by the late 1960’s, Situationists and other crazies were rioting in Paris in the summer of 1968, and the torch of imperialism passed to the US after the British lost stomach for it after Suez.

Suez pretty much led to a “peasant revolt” in the UK against British imperialism due to the blatant and sickening imperialism of the Suez War. British imperialism, of course, continues today, even, outrageously, in the Labor Party, really the last place anyone would hope to find it. See British support for the imperialist invasion and colonial occupation of Iraq for more.

To the dismay of White nationalists, who assume any criminals rioting in the streets must be a bunch of niggers*, the problem kids are North African Caucasians, not Blacks. These Arabs don’t act this way in North Africa. The whole mess is really because they are Muslims and refuse to assimilate. All other theories seem to fall flat on their faces.

White nationalists try to blame this mess on France being taken over by multiculturalist liberal idiots, but France has always been extremely assimilationist and anti-multiculturalist, so this isn’t a failure of multiculturalism at all. In fact, France has been brutal and cruel towards the Bretons, the Basques and the Corsicans, all of whom have every right to take up arms against the French state.

The Algerians are just a problem immigrant group that flat out refuses to assimilate.

One problem here is that the French have always assumed that all immigrants would just lose it all and become Frenchmen. There was never much racism in France and everyone was French anyway, so there was no need for affirmative action.

There is good evidence that the Muslims experience widespread discrimination in employment. The French refuse to remedy this with the only working remedy for discrimination – affirmative action and enforcement of anti-discrimination laws.

White nationalists argue that the discrimination is to be expected based on the behavior of so many of the Algerians, but that misses the point. If amelioration of discrimination against Algerians makes them happier, would they not riot less?

The Muslim areas are not particularly dangerous, unless maybe if you’re a cop. They give off instead the impression that Little Italys used to give off in this country, of a safe zone where the state does not rule and someone else does instead. In the Little Italys, it was the Mafia, and they did keep the crime rate down.

If one were not a resident, people knew that, and you were being watched, but everyone left you alone. The Islamists have, in a similar fashion, taken hold over Algerian zones. Therefore, the Islamist shadow state in the banlieus has a lot of responsibility for the insane rioting that goes on there just about every night.

There is not much to be done at this point except for France to quit importing Algerians. White nationalists like to scream that the French should deport all the Muslims. But I believe that most of these rioting idiots are citizens and hence un-deportable.

If I were running France, I am not sure what I would do.

The Muslims are yet only 1

*used sardonically.

Who Killed Rafik Hariri?

Repost from the old site.

One wonders where to begin with a post like this. Rafik Hariri, of course, was the Prime Minister and self-made billionaire who ruled Lebanon for a time recently. He was assassinated in an expertly planned car bomb attack, but no one really knows who did it. All suspicion fell on Syria, and Syria did have good reason to kill Hariri.

You really need a lot of background in Lebanese and Middle Eastern politics to even begin to understand the twists and turns of this sinuous murder mystery.

Hariri was elected head of Lebanon and proceeded to go on a borrowing spree, mostly with Saudi money, and rebuilt Lebanon after the Civil War destroyed it. He did this by playing all factions off each other. He also instituted a Lebanese version of free market economics, an economic system that, thank God, is largely absent from the Middle East because it contradicts Arab and especially Islamic values.

Hariri is a Sunni, but a fairly secular one. The Sunnis make up maybe 1

The Christians used to be the majority – in fact, Lebanon was originally split off from Syria by the French to give the Christians their own country. Partly for this reason, it’s very existence is resented by a number of Lebanese Muslims, especially Sunnis, who figure that Syria and Lebanon are all one country.

Syria itself has long regarded the severance of Lebanon from Mother Syria as illegitimate, and her behavior in recent years has been motivated in part by these feelings. The Shia were long-downtrodden, especially by the Sunnis. The Sunnis were the Muslims who were pretty much in charge of the place in terms of who was in charge of the Muslims in the country. The Sunni held the reigns, and discrimination against the Shia was rife.

Shia were regularly attacked by Sunni gangs in Beirut up into the 1970’s. The Shia complain that the Sunnis would only allow them to be garbagemen – that was the best job they could get. After the late 1950’s, when a Christian lost the election and Lebanese Christians feared that their power would be constricted, there has been a power-sharing agreement in place.

The Prime Minister must be a Sunni, another high post must be a Christian, etc, etc. As the Christians have gone from majority to minority, this system has become less and less fair. In particular, Muslims, especially the Shia, are dramatically underrepresented. The Christians did not want to give up their power in the late 1950’s, so the US Marines landed to enforce illegitimate Christian rule over Lebanon.

The Civil War began in part once again over demands that Lebanese democracy be derived more on one man one vote and that the excessive power of the Christians be curtailed. Further, the Christians have always run the Lebanese economy, at least in recent years.

I say all of this because in the US there is a strong tendency to side with the Lebanese Christians against the evil Muslims. Further, the Lebanese Maronite Christians (the largest sect) have made an important alliance with the Zionist Jews in Israel, an alliance that helped to drive the Civil War.

So US Zionist propaganda, which floods our media night and day, strongly favors the Maronites once again. As an example of this alliance, one of the highest ranking neoconservatives of all is a Maronite Lebanese lawyer named F. Michael Maloof who is very close to uber-neocons Douglas Feith and Richard Perle. He is up to his eyeballs in the planning of the war on Iraq.

With the Lebanese Civil War and the rise of Hezbollah, the Shia have finally been given a place at the table of Lebanese politics. The Druze are a real wild card. They shift all over the place on the whim of their erratic leader, Walid Jumblatt, from anti-Israel and anti-US to anti-Syrian and pro-US.

The Shia, and Hezbollah along with the more secular Amal Party, are allied with Syria and Iran. Syria keeps Hezbollah armed in Southern Lebanon as a tool to threaten Israel with in order to try to get the Golan Heights back. That’s all Syria gets out of the game. If Hezbollah is disarmed in Lebanon, Syria loses it’s most powerful weapon and may never get its land back.

Hezbollah has since taken up the cause of Lebanese nationalism, agitating for the return of the Shebaa Farms and some nearby hills that they say Israel is occupying. It is probably Lebanese land, but Israel seems to have captured that land from Syria when it grabbed the Golan.

For its purposes, Syria wants to say that the Shebaa is Lebanese for purposes of keeping Hezbollah armed, and to say it’s Syrian as soon as Hezbollah tries to make peace with Israel or vice versa. So Syria must play a double game here, but everyone is in this crazy part of the world.

As a condition of ending the Civil War, Syria was tasked with ruling the place. Syria had actually entered the war to save the Maronite Christians from defeat, but the Christians soon forgot about this and turned on the Syrians. The Taba Agreement, constructed with the help of the US and other powers, put Syria in charge until the Lebanese could figure out how to stop killing each other.

Syria quickly started meddling in Lebanese politics bigtime, and an independence movement arose to get Syria out of Lebanon. This was ignored by the US until George Bush came to office. Now the same US that put Syria in power started demanding that Syria leave. Not only that, but there were increasing demands on Lebanon to “disarm all militias”, code words for disarm Hezbollah.

Now, Syria needs Hezb in Lebanon until it gets the Golan back, so them’s fighting words to the Syrians. At the same time, the US invaded Iraq and threatened Iran, Libya, and Syria, while Israel killed Arafat by poisoning him.

This whole process was set into motion by the neocons who were operating in the interests of the Israeli government. It was an UN Security Council Resolution 1559, calling for Syria to get out of Lebanon and for the disarming of Hezbollah. Note that France is still an imperialist power in the region, defending the interests of the Christians who they put in charge of their former colony.

Also, the US Congress pushed a bill called the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act of 2003, a bill that may as well have been written by the Israeli Knesset. It’s so pro-Israeli, it’s almost impossible to comprehend that the US Congress wrote it. Apparently, it imposes sanctions on Syria for a variety of mostly-bullshit reasons.

The US is in Iraq, apparently forever, threatening Syria and Iran, for the most part in order to benefit the Israelis, since Syria and Iran have no particular beefs with the US. Iran and Syria clearly want the US out of Iraq and US guns away from their doorstep. They have no interest in keeping the US in Iraq at all.

Anyway, the US status of forces agreement that they are trying to negotiate with the Iraqis is explicitly meant to use Iraq as a base for attacking neighboring countries, mostly Iran but possibly Syria too. So rage at Syria and Iran for not being overjoyed about the US military in Iraq is misplaced. No sane Syrian or Iranian leader would want us there.

Amidst this backdrop, Hariri supported UN Resolution 1559, probably because finally even the Lebanese Sunnis were getting fed up with Syria’s high-handedness. They had supported Syria for a long time, but Syria kept trying to push people to their limits.

It was the Maronite Christians who really hated the Syrians being there. Why is uncertain. The Maronites despise the Shia and Hezbollah and want the Palestinian refugees gone too.

By the way, the reason that the Palestinians have never been allowed to work or become citizens in Lebanon is because of the Maronites. The Maronites fear that allowing the Pallies to become citizens will increase the Muslim population at the expense of the Christians.

So the Hariri crowd was riding the wave of anti-Syrianism. At the same time, he was closely allied with the Saudis. The Saudis’ whole role in the region is to support the Sunnis and screw the Shia, in a word. So the Saudis were backing Hariri solely because he is Sunni, and also to stop Iran and Hezbollah and increasingly Syria, who is allied with Iran and Hezbollah and hence in the enemy camp as far as the Saudis see it.

There really is not much sane reason for the Saudis to fear Iran. All the hate in the region goes from Sunni to Shia, pretty much. Perhaps the Iranians could energize the long-downtrodden Saudi Shia to rebel against the Saudis, but the Saudis ought to give them more rights anyway. Sunni fears of Iran attacking the region are simply insane, kind of like Nazi fears of the USSR overrunning Europe, so the Nazis had to attack first.

Iran has never attacked another state in at least 100 years and possibly longer. The Shia are on the outs in the Arab World, and the Sunnis have all the power. There are no nefarious Shia plots to evangelize Shia Islam and convert all the Sunnis – this is just mad Sunni paranoia. But the Saudis do work hard in Iran to convert the Shia Ahwaz Arabs to Wahhabi Sunnism, and they have had some success at this.

The Shia have been killing a lot of Sunnis in Iraq, but the Sunnis started it. Saddam Hussein, a Sunni, started the war against Iran for no good reason, and received volunteers and money from most of the Sunni states in the region.

Against this backdrop, as Syria was leaving Lebanon (though a spy network remains behind) Hariri was killed in the very professional car bomb attack. An Al Qaeda type radical Salafist Islamist associated with Jund al-Sham (Army of the Levant) was promptly fingered in the attack, though there were a lot of questions about whether or not Syria was actually involved.

The US and France got a UN commission to actually send a law enforcement team to investigate the killing. A couple of teams were sent out there and a couple of reports came back. One team was headed by Detlev Mehlis, a German.

Jürgen Cain Külbel, a journalist in Germany, is an acquaintance. He’s a former member of the STASI and is associated with the former East German government and the political party that came afterwards. Külbel is a Leftist, and for a long time he was pushing theories saying that US imperialism was in back of a lot of the shenanigans in the ME, including I guess the invasion of Iraq.

He showed a profound disinterest in investigating any Israeli or Jewish Lobby involvement in many of the conflicts over there. This is standard Leftist line that absolves Israel of everything and pushes it all off on imperialism.

So it is interesting that Külbel has now come around to the notion that Israel killed Hariri and then tried to pawn it off on Syria. He has also shown links that Mehlis had with the US AIPAC. Mehlis, as it turns out, used to work for WINEP, which is nothing AIPAC as a research arm. So his finding that Syria was involved has been attacked by Külbel.

Külbel was subsequently imprisoned for ten days for violating a court order by printing some East German STASI papers on his website. I’m not sure of their contents, but it may have shown how Mehlis was associated with WINEP. So the Voltaire Network has taken up the cause of Külbel, about which I feel they are making a mountain out of a molehill.

Of interest to our Maronite discussion above, a group called UNIFL, which has interests that are almost precisely in line with the Israeli government, figures in all of this. These are the most hardcore radical rightwing Maronites, who are for all intents and purposes a quasi-fascist movement.

They were deeply involved in the War Against Iraq and other great big messes. They’ve been selling this BS story about how the Christians are so persecuted in Lebanon, and the persecution is being done by evil fundamentalist Islamic Syria (run by ultra-secular Alawis).

It’s mostly just a pack of lies, but there were arrests, tortures and killings under Syrian rule, it is true. That’s all over now, and the Maronites did tons of killing in their own day.

After all, they committed the most and worst massacres of all during the Civil War.

Maloof is in with these guys, so is a guy named David Wurmser (Israeli agent neoconservative with dual citizenship) and his evil witch of the West wife Meyrav (read Hebrew for “Mary”, no? Israeli agent neoconservative with dual citizenship).

So is Richard Pele (Israeli agent neoconservative. Dual citizenship?), and worst of all, Daniel Pipes (Israeli agent neoconservative. Dual citizenship?) of Middle East Watch and Campus Watch and all of that Zionist fascist censorship, harassment and firing crap leaping up all over our land). Nice long sentence.

Pipes, whose father was an evil Cold War maniac and professional liar about the Soviet Union, inherited the evil maniac part, but all he cares about is Israel. Paul Wolfowitz (Israeli agent neoconservative with dual citizenship) is also in deep with these guys.

Harold Rhode (Israeli agent neoconservative. Dual citizenship?) is another one, but no one has ever heard of him, so I will make him famous today for all time. Rhode is a Jewish guy who is religious and was obsessed with attacking Iraq. He was in on the plot to attack Iraq with all the rest of them from the very start.

Afterward, he became obsessed with the Jewish religious relics that the evil anti-Semitic Arab-Nazi government had somehow, through a sudden stroke of anti-Semitism, managed to preserve, despite their genocidal intentions towards all the world’s Jews.

Saddam wanted to kill every Jew on Earth, of course, but damn right he was going to save those Jewish holy books. That proves Saddam was a madman all right, just like the yahoos screamed before the invasion.

Rhode ran over to Iraq as soon as the war was done and got himself a big team put together right away while the museums and archaeological relics of the nation were being devastated. After all, the history of Jews receives precedence of the history of those lowly, dirty Arabs and over the very history of mankind itself, right? Jews take precedence over Arabs. Jews take precedence over humanity. You get the picture.

Well, anyway, a lot of money was spent grabbing every single Jewish relic in Iraq and “storing” it away in the US (in Jewish hands, I guess). Well, that’s sort of illegal. Now that Iraq is more stable, the Iraqi government wants their Jewish stuff back. It belongs to Iraq, not to the world’s Jews. Whoops, I forgot. No nation is allowed to own Jewish relics. Jews take precedence over all real nations on Earth.

Also, it’s funny that the US (Are we the second Jewish state?) bent all over backwards to grab all that old Jewish stuff, while we sat back and watched, first, while the whole non-Jewish history of Iraq was looted and destroyed to Hell, in particular the History of the Ottoman Empire.

Well, screw the Ottomans, they were just evil Muslims who ruled the Arab World and treated the Jews like crap, right? Or they were just scummy Muslims, screw em. Anyway, obviously the Jewish history of Iraq got nabbed by the nimble hands of the Jewish “Americans”, but the non-Jewish history of Iraq was scatted to the Seven Winds and the Seventy Thousand Thieves.

After all, in any country with lots of Jews, only the Jewish history matters ,and the non-Jewish history is just, pshaw! Right? Trash the museums and the libraries and re-burn the Library of Alexandria if the US and Israel are in the book-burning and library-sacking business, which apparently they are.

Funny how the US can’t spare a soldier to save the history of Muslim Ottoman Iraq from being ruined. Those records have been flooded and subjected to all sorts of abuse, and the US can’t spare one sentry to guard that stuff. Wow, gee, why do they hate us anyway?

They must be jealous of all of our stuff, and our freedoms, and you know, our stuff.

Ever notice that the far-Right jingoist dickheads who scream the loudest about “our freedoms” and “they hate us for our freedom” are the first ones to start shutting freedoms down? catch one Mossad agent, and they just sentenced him to death after one of the shortest trials in recent history. If he’s really Mossad, hang him high, go ahead.

And I know that Iran is full of US spies and even US undercover troops (500 total? How many?). Same with British spies. Iran can’t catch these guys? The US guys are running around blowing up stuff up, and the British are giving bombs to Iranian rebels, including Al Qaeda types called Jundallah in Balochistan.

I guess Mossad, the US and probably the UK too, are all trying to get at Iran’s nuclear sites, and yes, I am certain the Iranians are making a nuclear bomb right now. I think they already have one, but it’s just a uranium bomb, and that isn’t good for anything but making one square mile of Earth uninhabitable for 70 years.

Actually, just to be a completely evil and horrible scumbag and make people hate me even more than they already do, I will right now officially support Iran’s efforts to get a nuclear bomb.

Is that an evil position or what?! Not to shoot one, just to get one.

Also to make a whole bunch of evil biological and chemical weapons and WMD-this and WMD-that. Also, just to be even more of an ass and arouse more hatred, I will say that I was deeply sad when North Korea blew up their reactor, because I wanted them to make more nukes to threaten people, namely the US, my country with. Not to shoot at us. Just to even it up.

Why be an ass? Long argument, but it has to do with imperialism’s gross abuse of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Agreement.

I’m not saying this is what happened or anything, Maronites and Mossad killing Hariri. No one on Earth will ever know what happened. Figure it out yourself, I give, and I spent many long hours reading and poring over this mystery until I finally just gave up and don’t want to read about it anymore.

Such are the homicidal intrigues of the Middle East, like vines in a jungle, no beginning, no end, no middle, nothing much to grab, and every new lead carries you off on more red herrings and impossibilities and possibilities, and everything seems possible, but still nothing ever totally adds up. God I love a mystery. To a point.

Sorry this went on, but I never wrote a Hariri post. Now it’s done, and hopefully I won’t need to write any more. Believe it or not, I could have written way more, but I’m not into putting readers to sleep. I’m long-winded enough, as it is.

Try the Angry Arab blog (I’ve talked to this guy; As’ad, a Leftist Arab nationalist professor at a university very close by) if you can’t get enough of this maddening Lebanon stuff.

Or Joshua Landis’ (an acquaintance) great Syria Comment if you want to dip into the Syrian mystery casserole, where nothing makes sense either, and you think you can see the fish in the bowl, but the more you look, the more you can hardly make them out, and plus they always change.

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.

UK Grime Music

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyLkLHY2LuQ]

Interesting stuff. UK Blacks have created their own type of gangsta rap which is quite a bit different from the US stuff. About midway through the set, the group splits into two, but not after a huge round of hugs and all-around loving. Then one group goes outside. The camera follows them as warmth, love and kindness flow lazily through the scene. It was a 1960’s Love-in all over again, just missing the incense. Love makes the world go round!

Listening to these grime videos, why is it that I find ghetto looking Black guys with thick London British accents so funny? For some reason, every time I think of a thick British accent, I think of a White person, or at the outside a South Asian, Pakistani or Indian. I’m not sure if I have ever heard a Black person with a think British accent before. Especially a ghetto nigga type, which I associate with the US, with a think urban London accent, sounds totally hilarious!

An Apologetics For Zionism

Repost from the old site. This comment was left on my site by a fellow who called himself “Apologist for Zionism”. He makes some very interesting points on here. We have dealt with his notion that every ethnic group deserves a state on this blog previously. Non-territorial nations certainly do not deserve a state at all, unless someone wants to donate one to them. These comments are interesting because in many ways they are straight of out of Theodor Herzl himself. Herzl has been accused by anti-Zionists of being a Jewish anti-Semite, and he was a serious critic of the Jews. He felt that Jews and Gentiles could not live together and he felt that the fault was equally divided between the two groups. He originally favored Jewish assimilation, but after the Dreyfus Affair in France in the late 1800’s (this shocked many people because they thought that anti-Semitism in France was history by this time) he changed his mind and figured that the only way forward was for Jews and Gentiles to live in permanent separation. He noted that when Jews did well, they become very successful businessmen and aroused the envy and wrath of the Gentiles, and when they sank into poverty, they bred radicals like rabbits.

When we sink, we become a revolutionary proletariat, the subordinate officers of all revolutionary parties; and at the same time, when we rise, there rises also our terrible power of the purse. Herzl, Der Judenstaat, 1896, p.91.

The commenter points out that many early Zionists were socialists who felt that one of the problems of the Jew was that he had gotten out of touch with the land itself (however, Jews were forbidden to own land for most of their stay in Europe). To cure this defect, these socialist Zionists supported a sort of back to the land thing that would get Jews’ hands dirty and make them into salt of the Earth again. The question of whether or not nations have carrying capacities for Jews is most interesting, but I don’t even want to go there. The author suggests that the US is presently reaching such a capacity. Another very successful minority similar to Jews is the Overseas Chinese. There have been some pogroms against the Overseas Chinese, but it’s nothing compared to what Jews have been through. Only about Now, no group of people, no matter how kind-hearted or progressive, is going to put up with that kind of bullshit for long, and there is no way that the Overseas Chinese work 23 times harder or are 23 times smarter than Indonesians or Filipinos. At the outside, perhaps they are 3.5 times more intelligent than Indonesians or Filipinos. This would entitle them, with The problem with capitalism is that in amasses such insane fortunes in the hands of small groups who frankly have not earned it due to either their genes or their harder work. In so doing, capitalism virtually guarantees endless racial conflict. There are differences between Jews and Overseas Chinese. The Overseas Chinese tend to keep their heads down, keep out of politics, and are not endlessly meddling in the cultural and political affairs of the nation – they just focus on making money. Jews focus on making money too, but they can’t seem to help trying to change society, a habit that arouses mountains of anti-Semitism. This is an interesting comment:

In fact, some theorists and historians even believe that it was the general emancipation of the Jews in the early-to-mid 19th Century that led to the Industrial Revolution in The West and the consequent rise of modern industrial-capitalism, which Jews also played and still played a large part in.The countries in Europe where Jews had the most political and economic freedom, especially England and Germany, were also the first to industrialize on a large scale…coincidence?

That paragraph is most interesting, and led another commenter to rebut that Jews were never a part of industrialization in Germany and Britain; instead they were associated in Britain anyway with finance capital. The commenter then said he was reading a book by a guy named William Engdahl, A Century of War. Engdahl is no anti-Semite, but he felt that the predominance of finance capital in Britain led to colonial adventures instead of building up domestic industry, to the eventual detriment of Britain. He then noted that in the 1920’s and 1930’s, German products were said to be better than British products. I don’t know about Jewish emancipation leading to the Industrial Revolution in Britain and Germany, but I believe that Jews played an essential role in the development of capitalism itself. I also don’t agree with the “German socialist” viewpoint that Hitler later picked up – along with Israel Shamir – that the Jews are a virus-like people, a race of rootless cosmopolitans without ties to the blood and soil and without loyalty to the nation, as the German capitalists supposedly had. It’s my understanding that in the 1920’s, many top German capitalists, including factory owners, were Jews. Jews are now heavily involved in industry here in the US. Jews do not limit themselves anymore to finance capital, and they are not very big players in it anymore anyway, as it all seems to be taken over by multinational banks in the US, Europe and Asia with few to no Jewish connections. The role of the Jews in finance capital in the past was quite large (they almost controlled European banking from ~1850-1930 or so). The big players in the UK 110 years ago were not Jews but a couple of cabals, one centered around a man named Cecil Rhodes. This cabal also had ties to top UK universities like Oxford and Cambridge. They went to the top boys schools like Eaton. They were active in colonialism and in groups such as the Oriental Society. They actually formed secret societies. It’s true that Lord Rothschild was a member (at the periphery) of one of these secret societies, but he seems to have been the only Jew. I really doubt that the dominance of finance capital (= Jewish money) in the UK 110 years ago is what led to colonial adventures. This group centered around Rhodes was very much into colonialism, and Britain was a huge industrial power in those days, mostly due to her Navy and her colonies. Britain ruled the world from 1588 (the defeat of the Spanish Armada – and also the first stirrings of English nationalism – one of the first manifestations of classic European nationalism) all the way up until about 1935, when air power, notably German, successfully challenged British sea and colonial power. German products have always been better than British products, especially fine machinery. I doubt the superiority of German fine machined products over such British products has much to do with Jewish money. There was plenty of Jewish money floating around Germany around that time too. This cabal around Rhodes, I believe, continues to run The London Times to this very day, or at least they did in the mid 1960’s. At this point, the Jews are in Israel and they are not leaving. Radical Palestinians want to throw out every Jew who came after 1916 (The Balfour Declaration was in 1917). As a settler-colonist myself whose ancestors were still stealing Indian land for our settler-colonial project as late as 1873 in California (see Modoc Wars), this sort of thing makes me really uneasy. Any settlement to the conflict in the Holy Land must take into account the safety of the Jews already there. I would hate to see a situation similar to Iraq where maniacal insurgents are running around slaughtering Jews at will and setting off car bombs and killing 100-200 Jews at a time. Arabs are Arabs, and I don’t think Palestinians and Iraqis are all that different, except one comes from the Levant and the other from Mesopotamia. I’m also not sure that Jewish-led industrialization in Germany (assuming it is a fact) led to the alienation and impoverishment of the rural people and the rise of Nazi blood and soil German ethnic nationalism, but it’s a complicated question to be sure. The followers of the Nazis were mostly petit bourgeois, lower middle class office workers and the like. Rural dwellers were not so supportive. Zionist Apologist writes:

Every ethnic group has a right to a state. It’s a shame that the Jews had to steal Israel, but at least they have a place to call home now. Imperialism is unfortunately a part of humanity’s dark history – and we now have to deal with the dark consequences. A homeland for Jews (whether in Israel or wherever else) is the ONLY WAY to ‘heal’ the Jews, and it’ll take many generations. I’m sure you’ve heard the oft-repeated phrase [paraphrasing]: “Diaspora is the disease, and Israel is the cure.” The Zionists were considering places like Uganda or Argentina early on, and places like those would have been a better choice than Israel in the long run since the Jews would have then been able to develop an agricultural base economy, which is the root of a settled and stable nation-state. However, those places were very rural and undeveloped and hence probably wouldn’t have been successful (as the Jews saw many of their ‘agricultural colony’ experiments in Argentina and Africa and the USA and Canada collapse in dismal failure). I have noticed that Ashkenazi Jews have a definite inability to settle anywhere in any substantial numbers that hasn’t already been fairly heavily settled or where they don’t have access to a nearby network of fellow Jews. It is telling as well that the early Zionist ideals of hard work, agricultural and manual labor, and other mainstays of key Zionist doctrines are now being filled by imported (!) labor (often Asian or Arab) since so many Israelis ‘dislike’ that kind of work and all want to be lawyers and doctors and professors and journalists and bankers (surprise, surprise) rather than just another cog in Israeli society. Israel is even having problems with their military draft now. But, you see, THE WHOLE POINT of the Zionist experiment was for Jews to become cogs in a stable Jewish society instead of always being the perpetual Jewish ‘Other’ in the societies of foreign peoples. The Zionists also noticed that sometimes Jews tended to take advantage of often-times gullible non-Jewish peoples because of their general intelligence and capacity to facilitate commerce, and they wanted to fix that too. In fact, some theorists and historians even believe that it was the general emancipation of the Jews in the early-to-mid 19th Century that led to the Industrial Revolution in The West and the consequent rise of modern industrial-capitalism, which Jews also played and still played a large part in. The countries in Europe where Jews had the most political and economic freedom, especially England and Germany, were also the first to industrialize on a large scale…coincidence? The problem with this, though, is that this Jewish-inspired industrialization tended to slowly choke the lifestyle and economic systems of the rural/agrarian people of those countries who obviously weren’t Jews, thus leading to resentment (antisemitism) – hence the Nazi doctrine of “blood and soil” and their desire to eventually resurrect the German peasantry in the Slavic lands of Eastern Europe. I have also noticed that every nation has a sort of Jewish ‘carrying capacity,’ i.e. it is unable to manage, hold, or absorb Jews in very large numbers until antisemitism starts to break out (for instance, history shows that antisemitism in Germany grew very quickly as more and more Jews from Eastern Europe fled to Germany and Western Europe trying to escape poverty or antisemitism or whatever). And in some ways I think that the saturation point may be close to being reached in North America.I must say that an island nation might actually be best for Jews, as long as it could be mostly self sufficient. As Ezra Pound once said in one of his infamous WWII radio broadcasts: “Sell ’em Australia.”

References

Herzl, Theodore. 1896. The Jewish State. New York: Dover Publications reprint in 1988. Originally published, 1946, New York: American Zionist Emergency Council, edited, original translation by Slyvie d’Avigdor revised by Jacob M. Alkow.

An Interesting NE Asian Phenotype

Repost from the old site. White Nationalists like to go on and on and on about the glorious color of their skin: white. For some odd reason, this white skin is superior to darker-colored skins of folks who evolved in hotter zones. Truth is, darker skin color is a perfectly rational evolutionary response to high rates of UV radiation in areas where it is very hot. And in some areas of the globe, people can have fairly light skins if they stay out of the sun, but they get dark quite easily if they go out in the sun. Italians and Greeks come to mind. Here are photos of Italians, Greeks and Spaniards who have stayed out of sun, and then the same folks after they got tanned. The same page also shows identical phenotypes commonly seen as European-only, like Nordics, Mediterraneans and Alpines, in both their European and extra-European forms from Arabia, North Africa and Central Asia. Often the darker skin you see in a lot of Southern Europeans is nothing but a tan. On the other hand, Northern Europeans, and possibly other Northern types, don’t tan very well (they often burn) and even when they do, they don’t get all that dark. The very dark skin of Blacks, Papuans, Melanesians, some Aborigines and some South Indians is simply a result of evolving in those parts of the Earth where the sun shines brightest of all. But Whites ought to give up the fantasy of about their white skin being best of all – because other races have some very white skin too. See the Korean woman in the photo below for example.

A Korean woman. She has a shade of White on her skin that is lacking in almost all Caucasians – it is probably only seen in Ireland and Scotland and it’s probably even lacking in Sweden and Norway. But this very White phenotype seen in some Koreans and Northern Chinese differs from that of European Whites in that it is more glossy. European White skin looks more chalky or powdery. This phenotype also has skin that looks more like porcelain and is reflective of light. The very light European skin tends to be less light-reflective.

Here’s a pretty cool chart showing degrees of skin lightness versus darkness around the world.

UV radiation chart along with zones of skin color. Zone 1 has the darkest skin of all . Zone 2, which includes Italians and Spaniards, has skin that tans easily. Zone 3 contains light skin that enables residents to absorb as much Vitamin D as possible from the sun due to lack of sunlight at higher latitudes. Note that there is also pretty high UV radiation in parts of South America (Peru), in the heart of Mexico, in Southwest Arabia (especially Yemen), in Southern India and Sri Lanka and in Indonesia, Malaysia, Southern Philippines and New Guinea. Indonesians and Malaysians are known for being darker than many other SE Asian groups. According to this chart, the darkest people of all are Blacks from Mozambique and Cameroon in Africa and Aborigines from Darwin in North Australia. A look at the same chart, much expanded, in the original paper, shows that the next darkest are Blacks, the Okavango in Namibia and the Sara in Chad (Table 6, p. 19). The chart shows that the lightest people are in Netherlands, followed by Germany and then the northern parts of the UK. Note on the map that Tibet and parts of the Amazon should have some very dark-skinned people, but those who live there are lighter than you would expect based on UV. The paper suggests that the Tibetans are lighter because it is so cold there that most of their body is covered up all the time and only the face is uncovered. The face is lighter to collect what Vitamin D it can as so much of the body cannot collect Vitamin D due to clothing. The Amazonian Indians are known to be shade-seeking and the paper suggests that this may account for their lighter skin.

Most Whites don’t really have White skin anyway. I am looking at my own skin here as I type, and it looks more pink than White.

References

Jablonski, N. and Chaplin, G. (2000) The Evolution of Human Skin Coloration. Journal of Human Evolution. Available on this blog here.

Time to Take Back “Nigger”

Repost from the old site.

Some Black folks been busy lately trying to bury the word nigger once and for all – recent months have seen symbolic funerals and burials of the n-word by mainstream Black organizations. This movement probably stems from the OJ Simpson trial in the mid-1990’s, when n-word was substituted for nigger.

Nowadays, nigger is as taboo as can be.

Can you say, “That racist jerk called a Black man, ‘Nigger!’?”

Nope.

Can we use the word nigger to describe the word widely used amongst Blacks themselves?

Nope.

One may not use the word nigger under any circumstances.

This is strange.

First, it implies that nigger is either an obscenity or like one’s private parts, ok to be spoken or revealed in privacy but certainly not in public. But nigger is neither obscenity in word nor flesh.

Second, banning the word nigger implies that it is so horrible, and that Blacks are so sensitive, that even the sight or sound of the word will drive these oversensitive Black souls either to tears or to rage. Now, Blacks have never struck me as a cringing, hypersensitive race of inhibited crybabies.

The Black man can take an insult. Why not – we kept him in a cage for centuries, only let him out to be policed like an animal in an open air zoo for another 100 years, finally liberated him via bullets and water hoses 40 years ago, and oppression and discrimination yet linger.

Through it all, the Black man has stood up and taken it like a man. By implying that Black men can’t bear to see the word nigger without dissolving into wimpy tearfulness, we insult their masculinity and fortitudinous nature.

Now that we have settled the absurdity of killing, let alone burying, a word, let us see how we may resurrect the comatose patient.

Who should be allowed to use the word?

Obviously, Blacks will keep on using the word themselves, as is their right. Further, Blacks can decide how, where and why they use the word, if at all. It’s only fair to give Blacks ownership over this word, which is really their word.

Blacks are perfectly correct that Whites should not use this word, and don’t give us that phony, “Well, Blacks use it, so why can’t we?” nonsense.

Semantics is a subfield of Linguistics. In Semantics, we say that words mean whatever people who use them say they mean. End of story. Nigger has one set of meanings when Blacks use it and another set when Whites use it. That’s not Black hypocrisy; it’s the way humans use language. Should racists be granted the right to use the word? No, they use it as a weapon to attack others.

I would like to request that we resurrect the word for journalistic and historical writing integrity. If a non-Black calls Blacks niggers, let’s write out the word. Forget this weasel-word n-word. We should have the right to say, “In the South 50 years ago, most Whites referred to Blacks as niggers.”

What are we accomplishing by refusing the write the evil word? Are we preventing its spread in society, sort of like a disease control agency? Let’s let non-racist creative writers, journalists, social scientists, historians feel free to use the word, sparingly, like seasoning on food, as needed. How about one more case? Why can’t we put the word nigger in the mouths of racists? Why can’t we refer to David “Send the niggers back to Africa” Duke? Or Newt “Cut the niggers off welfare” Gingrich? Or Philippe “I like to measure nigger penises” Rushton?

Let’s boil down some of these racist arguments just a bit and give them some nigger-seasoning.

Why do the same racists who love to rant about supposed Black genetic stupidity love to rave on about Black basketball skills? What’s the real message here? How about, “Niggers sure are good at basketball! They better be, cuz they sure ain’t got no brains!”

What’s the real message of the scientific racism that says that Blacks are genetically stupid, that this stupidity is irremediable by any environmental means, and that attacks any signs of Black intellectual progress (Like, for instance, this vile and wicked blog, recently referred in an New York Times piece by Amy Harmon as a “popular science blog”)? Isn’t it really, “God-damn, niggers are dumb!”

Why don’t we call the Murrays, Rushtons and Lynns the “Niggers sure are stupid!” academics? After all, that’s what they are selling, right?

Have you noticed that endless obsession that the media has with Zimbabwe? Zimbabwe – formerly Rhodesia – used to be run by virulently racist White criminals who were then evicted by a Black liberation movement.

Zimbabwe did all right for quite some time – in fact, throughout the 1980’s, it was regarded as a model of democracy, good governance, and multiracial harmony, and it weathered the African famines of the 1980’s quite well – until it started seizing the land of White farmers in the 1990’s. And why did it seize the land of the White farmers?

Because land reform was a necessity, but Britain had quit funding the “willing buyer, willing seller” fake land reform that never really worked well anyway since so few White farmers were willing to sell land. 5,000 White farmers, a tiny percentage of the population, had almost all the good land, all stolen at gunpoint from Blacks decades earlier.

Meanwhile, Blacks had the worst land and only tiny plots of it anyway, such that they barely had rocks to eat.

They were overcrowded onto this crappy land, so it naturally started to erode. The racist Whites then derided the Blacks for “poor nigger farming methods.” The racists then blamed the livestock of the Blacks for the erosion, and stole 1 million head of “the niggers‘ (ill-disciplined) cattle”. The real cause of the land erosion was the racist feudal farming system.

After the willing seller, willing buyer game ended, it was replaced by a project whereby Zimbabwe tried to come up with money to buy out willing Whites. But an economic crisis occurred (caused by an IMF structural adjustment and the free marketization of the economy) during the 1990’s, and Zimbabwe lacked the cash to purchase White farms.

Whites weren’t selling anyway, and the Brits were backing them to the hilt. Angry Blacks who had fought in the liberation war began clamoring for the land to which they were entitled.

Mugabe, suffering a crisis of legitimacy at the time, gave into them. Hence, the “land invasions” began. The media rails about how “all of the land went to Mugabe’s cronies” – the message here: “Niggers are lying, cheating thieves”.

To some extent, this is true (that land went to cronies). Initially, the land reform was decentralized and handed over to local party officials, which was actually a good idea. Unfortunately, the local officials promptly turned it into a spoils system, just like the corrupt cronyism we see in every African country!

For some reason, the cronyism of Mugabe’s party was worse than that of the rest of Africa, which is ignored by the imperialist media. The important point here is that Mugabe was not really involved in this corruption. After a while of this, Mugabe got a hold of the process, and now most of the land is just going to poor Black farmers.

The next part of the media lie is that since all the land went to Mugabe’s buddies, the poor Black farmers crowded into the cities, where Mugabe promptly took them on in a fake urban renewal campaign called “Drive Out Trash,” which was really just a campaign to destroy the homes of his political opponents and render them homeless.

First of all, most of the land is now going to small Black farmers, so there is no need for landless Black farmers to crowd into the cities. This is why small rural farmers are one of Mugabe’s main support bases, the other being the Shona tribe, the largest tribe in the country.

Second of all, the unfortunately named “Drive Out Trash” campaign was really just an urban renewal campaign where horrible Black slums were destroyed to make way for 120,000 much better government housing units. The urban renewal campaign is going on right now and much nicer government homes are replacing squalid hovels. The urban renewal has been hampered by sanctions, though.

True, the land reform has been chaotic, as land reforms often are in the beginning, especially when too much land reform is done too quickly. The old system has been crushed, and the new one often has not yet gotten going yet. The result is sometimes one or more years of famine harvests. But all this BS could have been prevented if Britain and the White farmers had gone along with a sane land reform program in the beginning.

At the same time, after Zimbabwe had been devastated by a decade of IMF-led imperialist looting combined with terrible droughts of the 1990’s, Mugabe logically told the IMF to go to Hell and refused to pay off his debts.

With the land invasions and the IMF nose-thumbing, all Hell broke loose in US and UK imperialist circles, especially in the former colonist, Britain, where the press went nuts and has never recovered. Devastating sanctions were quickly slammed on Zimbabwe. Foreign investment plummeted by 9

Even UNICEF is in on the brutal punishment – whereas in other African lands, AIDS sufferers get $74 per sufferer per year, Zimbabwe only gets $4 per sufferer per year from UNICEF. Then Mugabe, as AIDS devastated the land – the “dumb, murderous nigger Mugabe” – morphs into “genocidal nigger Communist Mugabe”. Really it’s just an AIDS epidemic devastating the country, as it is wrecking surrounding nations.

The land invasions were a predictable mess, and a few Whites were killed. These deaths have been insanely blown out of proportion by a leering media. In Britain, the media fairly screams “White genocide!” You can imagine the clamor on White Nationalist sites. In truth, a whole nine White farmers have been killed over an eight-year period. The death of one White farmer yields vastly more breathless Western prose than the deaths of 30 Zimbabwean Blacks might.

Another media obsession is “Mugabe the dictator.” Mugabe is authoritarian, but as such folks go, he is pretty lightweight. The opposition leaders regularly give interviews in which they call for armed struggle against Mugabe’s regime or invasion by imperialist countries. It is amazing how this “evil dictator” allows those who call for his very head to speak out and run free.

The West has funded the opposition, which has little support, for years now. The opposition is totally tied to imperialism and pushes an extreme free market program that is not only the last thing that Zimbabwe needs right now but is the very thing that caused so many problems for the nation in the 1990’s.

The opposition has led a number of violent campaigns, and some of their leadership has been arrested and beaten. The Western media has gone nuts over these minor transgressions.

The opposition has also historically allied at various with the White farmers in Zimbabwe, White apartheid supporters in South Africa, and the vicious, apartheid-supported RENAMO guerrillas in Mozambique. Obviously, they are rejected by the vast majority of Zimbabweans.

The main opposition party was clearly involved in a coup attempt that tried to kill Mugabe in alliance with UK imperialism, but a court of the Mugabe “dictatorship” somehow refused to convict the plotters.

Truth is that the opposition is essentially run and funded by UK and US imperialism. Zimbabwe sees the UK and US as enemy nations, and in fact they are. As such, I would argue that the opposition are in effect traitors and spies for openly working the enemies of the nation. Mugabe is too kind. I am amazed he even lets the opposition walk around free at all. Mugabe the “dictator” has held several elections, which are now monitored by international monitors, and monitors have upheld all of the results. At the same time, opposition protests caused the “dictator” Mugabe to cancel several proposed Constitutional amendments.

The sanctions are the cause of almost all of the economic decline and ruin that the country has suffered since 1999. There is no a priori reason to suggest that Zimbabwe should be the most devastated country in Africa. The nasty racist suggestion is: “Niggers can’t run a country.”

In particular, the suggestion is worse: “Niggers are so stupid and childlike that they are incapable of running a country and quickly destroy any country given to them. Look at Zimbabwe. It was doing great when the nigger children had White grown-ups to take care of them. Then they threw Whitey out and tried to run it by themselves, and look what happened.”

The sneaky riff: “Niggers destroy any country they run. The only way that nigger countries can succeed is if the niggers are colonized by superior Whites.” The particularly nasty aspect of this vicious line is that it both supports White colonialism and White apartheid at the same time.

Another line is taken by many “race realists” such as the noxious crowd over at GNXP.

It is interesting that these “race realists” are almost always from the more “superior” races and rarely from the more “inferior” races.

Anyway, these folks take the objectively racist line that the chaos in Zimbabwe is because…”niggers are too stupid to run a country!” IQ scores in Africa are then used to prove that idiocy is what is killing Zimbabwean Blacks.

It is true that, as James Watson noted, IQ scores in Africa are markedly low. These IQ scores are valid. However, IQ scores in Zimbabwe are about 67, which is precisely the African average.

The other African nations, despite their low IQ’s, seem to muddle along, and at least are not experiencing Zimbabwean disaster. Minus crippling sanctions, Zimbabwe would be expected to muddle along about as well as any African nation.

Another problem is that much of the chaos in Zimbabwe is being caused by one of the worst AIDS problems on Earth. This is conflated by imperialism’s media to mean “socialist Mugabe is slaughtering his people.” Truth is it’s mostly AIDS that is killing them, not Mugabe, and there is not much Mugabe can do about AIDS anyway.

Blacks did not destroy Zimbabwe – sanctions did. Zimbabwe was doing fine on its own for 19 years until it started grabbing the White farms. De facto White Supremacist countries like the US and UK then went nuts, slammed devastating sanctions on Zimbabwe, and it’s been screaming in the ruins ever since.

Viewed in this light, cheat sheet version of the destruction of Zimbabwe ends up as a (deliberate or not) White racist plot-scam to make Blacks look like genocidal incompetent children that need White adults to take care of them. I do not think imperialism intended the message to come out that way, but that’s how it came across.

Even worse, the line is: “Look! Niggers are so stupid and incompetent they can’t even grow food!” Black people grow food all over Africa and have been growing food for centuries. They don’t necessarily grown enough of it to feed their countries, but they do ok.

Africans are resourceful and hardy folks; humans have been there for 120,000 years, and they haven’t gone extinct yet. Fire and tools came out of Africa, and 73,000 years ago, when a volcano killed almost all humans on Earth, only a small band of 600 or so survived and kept the human race going.

Guess where the holdouts were? Africa, near Mount Kilimanjaro. Afterward, these Africans underwent extreme evolutionary changes called the Great Leap Forward, probably invented art and language, and exploded out of Africa to colonize the entire planet.

Yet these same folks are so stupid they can’t even grow food! Come on. There is yet one more snarky and wicked riff running through this whole imperialist aggression. It’s a lesson to the niggers in South Africa. It says, “Listen up, South African niggers! Look at Zimbabwe! This is what will happen to you if you try to do a land reform with those White farmers in your country! We will destroy you just like we did Zimbabwe! Don’t even think about it, niggers!”

Now, South Africa, which we will deal with below, desperately needs a land reform. 50,000 White farmers occupy 8

In the end, there is no reason why Zimbabwe should not at least be able to do just as well as the rest of the Africa. Zimbabwe is a disaster not because it is run by Blacks but because economic warfare has been declared on it.

Now let’s look at South Africa. Yes, the crime rate is very high. But it is in general much higher than the rest of Black Africa. Now why is that?

The racist line is: “Niggers are animals and criminals. They murder, rape and steal anything in their path, and their innate criminality destroys any country. They especially like to prey on White people because they are so hateful and racist towards Whites. And they love to rape White women because their own nigger women are so damn ugly. Look at South Africa, and peer into the heart of the nigger criminal beast.”

But South Africa is anomalous. Decades of criminal White apartheid against Blacks built up mountains of hate and resentment amongst impoverished Blacks who seethed with rage as the Whites lived in luxury while Blacks wallowed in miserable slums.

The insane gap between the rich and the poor in South Africa and the Black face of the poor combined with the White face of the rich insures racial-based redistributionist crime, often violent crime, for the foreseeable future. Barring South Africa’s unusual circumstances, we should not expect its crime rate to be much worse than the rest of Black Africa’s.

Once again, the nasty subtext: “Niggers need apartheid. The nigger can’t make it on his own. He’s an animal and he needs the White man’s paternalistic boot on his neck in order to survive and not destroy himself and his land.” As in Zimbabwe, it’s yet another argument to bring back settler-colonial apartheid and White rule.

Let’s take a look at another “race realist” obsession: Haiti. Haiti is said to be “the only Black country in the Americas,” and it is rightly described as a devastated place. The subtext: “There is only one nigger country in the Americas, and they have of course destroyed it.” But this is not the case. First of all, most of the Caribbean islands are primarily Black or mulatto, including Cuba. A number of these islands are still colonies, but others are not. And while Dominica, Jamaica, and Grenada have plenty of problems, they are not Haiti by a long shot.

The reasons Haiti is a wreck is due to its ultra-reactionary mulatto ruling class that has confiscated almost all of the wealth of the land since independence, in cooperation with frankly White racist White countries like France, the US, and Canada.

The elite have the army and cops, and they have been slaughtering the people to keep their feudal stranglehold over the place for 100 years now. France is still furious about independence in 1804, when Black slaves, under Desallines, rose up and killed all 25,000 White French slavers and their families on the islands. To this day, 200 years later, White racist France demands reparations for this admittedly bloody episode.

Unfortunately, as so often happens, the revolution was quickly usurped by a bunch of fake revolutionaries, who ended up turning it on its head and putting a version of the old system back in.

There were a group of light-skinned Blacks who were often freed slaves and had allied with the White slaveowners. These Blacks quickly wormed their way into power, installed feudal brutality over the wretched masses, and it’s been that way ever since. One more stolen revolution. Now this Haitian ruling class, in collaboration with imperialism, continues to keep Haiti under the boot.

Aristide was elected with 9

He tried to raise the abysmal minimum wage, gave a million kids a lunch a day (probably their only meal) and built more schools in eight years than had been built in the previous 200. The people experienced real, tangible gains under Aristide, the best they had seen in two centuries.

For these crimes, imperialism (the US, France, and Canada) destroyed Aristide and forced him to leave with a gun at his head. The imperialist operation may as well have been called Operation Enduring Sweatshop.

The only solution for Haiti is armed revolution. The army of the ruling class needs to be overthrown. Then the ruling class themselves need to be informed of the new program and encouraged to go along.

Those that do not need to be arrested, and then either thrown in prison or re-education camps, kicked out of the country, or as a last resort for some of the most bloodthirsty and criminal Duvalierists and Tonton Macoutes, shot. Their hands are dripping with blood anyway, so it’s not like innocent people would be persecuted or killed.

A dictatorship of the proletariat may be necessary for a while, or at least a democracy with a well-armed revolutionary army, police and citizenry. This is one thing Hugo Chavez has right – arm the people and revolutionize the military.

Until that happens, Haiti will continue to be Hell on Earth.

When racists use arguments like these against Blacks and Black nations, they are not really talking of Blacks or Black countries. We give them too much credit when we say they are talking about Black people or nations – they are not – they are talking about niggers and nigger countries. Let’s shove the n-word in their mouth, leave it there for all to see, force them to eat it, and make them tell us what it tastes like.

Admittedly, we are taking some risks with this approach, namely the risk of legitimizing the term nigger. But most sane people already understand the difference between Blacks’ use of the word and Whites’ use of it. I don’t see why we can’t extend things a bit.

Note: Inspiration for this post came in part from a Michael Eric Dyson show on the radio. Dyson is a brilliant and gifted Black academic (though a bit too lenient on rap culture). Check out this great book, will get your brain moving! A bit hard to read, but a lot of my readers can handle him, I think. Awesome stuff. I wish all these racist and White nationalist idiots who rant on about how stupid Black people are could read this most challenging Black scholar.

Thanks also to the outrageous Black blog Look at This Nigger for additional humor and inspiration along the same theme.

References

Elich, Gregory. Zimbabwe and Pan-African Liberation. Elich, Gregory. The Battle over Zimbabwe’s Future. Elich, Gregory. Zimbabwe’s Fight for Justice. Gowans, Stephen. Ethiopia, Zimbabwe and the “Politics of Naming”. Gowans, Stephen. Zimbabwe’s Lonely Fight for Justice.

Do Capitalists Support Pubic Health and Education?

Repost from the old site. In a response to my post, The Paradox of Capitalist Regulation, brilliant British commenter huy suggests that capitalists nowadays are enlightened enough to see that public health and education are needed for the workforce. I argue otherwise below. Huy:

I would say that history has taught capitalism that free education and law and order run by the state is essential for capitalism to work, as without those things capitalism fails.It looks like capitalism is learning across the globe that free and equal health provided by the state is also essential for capitalism to run (from a free market economic point of view). Socialism wants national health and education for the benefit of the people, while capitalism wants national health and education for the benefit of the market and growth of the economy, An economy with higher-skilled, more versatile workers who are in good health is a more productive one. I consider myself vey leftwing and technocratic, and I’m deeply in favour of the free market, but only if the state provides good free education and health for all, minimum wage, poverty benefits, unemployment benefits and the chance for adults to get apprenticeships and qualifications for free when ever they need to or want to (within reason) so as to allow the lower-skilled workers to keep up with the fast pace of the free market and all the job cuts and creations that come with it. The free market is humanity’s best hope for destroying poverty, but only if it is galvanized by the state properly, whereby social mobility and equal opportunity and social justice and lack of social deprivation is followed through. This makes both moral and economic sense.

I respond: If you look at the 3rd World, the capitalist classes there do not want public education and they certainly do not want state health care. Even here in the US, the capitalist class has waged all-out war on public education and national health care through the Republican Party, although the Democratic Party also now seems to oppose national health care. In parts of the world where national health care has been put in, the capitalists and their rightwing parties quickly wage ideological warfare to get rid of it. Europe is an unusual case, probably due to circumstances discussed in my earlier post, For Justice, A River of Blood. Europe was a very rightwing place in the 1930’s. WW2 completely destroyed most of the European Right, defeated all rightwing governments, killed, wounded or imprisoned many of the rightwingers themselves, destroyed or made illegal their organizations and dissolved much of their wealth and power, and more importantly, humiliated them and completely discredited rightwing ideology. As a consequence, the Right was in disarray for decades after WW2 in Europe, and they have not yet regained their power. After the war, there was a Cold War threat from the USSR and from Left groups all over the rest of Europe. In order to co-opt the Soviet model and the West European Left, the ruling classes in Europe cut deals with workers, consumers and society in which a Social Contract was erected in the form of a socialism called variously the social market or social democracy. Due to the decimation and discrediting of the European Right, even European elites and media bought into social democratic ideology. Hence we see in France large Leftwing papers like Liberation, huge Euro-Communist parties getting 10-3 Elites in Scandinavia formed collegial relations with Communist and Leftist states and Leftist guerrillas on the basis that they were all socialists. For instance, Scandinavian governments had friendly relations with Sandinista Nicaragua, Cuba and Vietnam, along with the FMLN and FARC guerrillas in El Salvador and Colombia. Scandinavian governments gave generous aid to the Third World, often in pro-people forms with no capitalist or reactionary strings attached. This had the effect of taking the wind out of the sails of West European Communists. In a relatively just social democratic society, most saw little need for revolution. In Europe, even the capitalists have gone along with national health care, although in the UK they have been whittling away at it since Thatcher. European executives love their free national health care and paid six week vacations. However, in much of the rest of the world, capitalists have rolled back national health and education. In China, national health care is apparently gone as a right. In Russia, too, it scarcely exists anymore, while education has been decimated along with educated persons and professions. In some East European states like Bulgaria, health care has been devastated. The first thing the hero of both US parties, Nicaraguan President Violeta Chamorro, did when the Sandinistas were voted out was to get rid of free public education and free national health care. In Canada right now, the rightwing party and the business class have declared war on the national health care system (an ongoing project for a good 15 years or so now), but it is popular, so they have to tread lightly. If the business classes in the US supported public education and national health care, we would not have a decades-long war against both of them waged by the party of business, the Republican Party, and supported by the business class in its entirety. It is true that some more enlightened US capitalists (especially big businesses) do support public education and even national health care, but they are an exception. In this sense, the US small business class is even more reactionary than US big businesses. The US small business class supported Ross Perot and Ron Paul and are often far to the Right of the corporate guys. This rightwing populism can and does lead to fascism. Small business and the petit bourgeois were the army behind fascism in Nazi Germany and have led many far-right movements in the US too. The petit bourgeois resents the plutocratic elites for screwing them, but on the other hand also resents the working classes for being unionized and making good money via union wages. They feel oppressed by both groups. Also, many petit bourgeois did not go to college, so they resent those white collar workers (seen as intellectuals and professionals) who got degrees and the resulting higher-paying jobs. The petit bourgeois work in offices, banks and stores as clerks, tellers, low-ranking managers, etc. This class sector is often equated with something like the lower middle class. They often have no class consciousness at all, which is why they are often fodder for the Far Right. What you are advocating above, huy, is not the free market at all, since the free market advocates getting rid of most to all government spending and regulation. Instead, you are advocating for socialism in one of its many forms. This form being the social market or social democracy. I am a strong supporter of social democracy along the lines of the European model. The social market is a regulated capitalism with many government programs as a safety net and considerable government involvement in and even ownership of parts of the economy. In Sweden, 9 Government involvement in the economy takes the form of industry guidance as a corporatist element. Ownership of aspects of the economy takes the form of ownership of large industries like aircraft and ship building, national airlines, vehicle manufacturing, national rail, etc. It’s worked quite well. Keep in mind that capitalists are loath to invest in industries like ship building in which it may take 100 years to make your first profit. These industries need to be state-run for a long time. Further, passenger rail is almost never profitable for the private sector, so they just don’t run passenger trains. Since it operates at a loss as its nature, it must be run by the state. This is what is so sick about the endless demands on Amtrak to make a profit – it is almost impossible for Amtrak to make a profit, because large passenger rail networks almost never do. In order to profit, they would have to charge so much money that they would hardly get any passengers. In the same way, city buses never run at a profit either, hence we never see the private sector running passenger buses inside cities. Do you see any private rail lines running passenger rail in any areas of the US? Of course not. Why? Because it’s not profitable. Passenger rail must be run by the state for it to exist at all. Demands for Amtrak to run a profit are perverse, dishonest and wrong. How many Americans think Amtrak needs to run a profit? Of those with an opinion, possibly most. This is what rightwing propaganda will do to you.

Black IQ Gains in Britain, Kenya and Dominica

Repost from the old site.

A recent post of mine noted that the Black IQ in the US has shown gains of about 5.5 points against Whites in both children and adults. At age 12, the Black IQ is now 90.5, as opposed to 85 30 years ago. Black adult IQ’s have risen from 79 to 84.5 during the same period.

At the same time, Blacks have shown major gains in achievement test results relative to Whites. They narrowed the achievement gap by about 3

Rising IQ’s over time are referred to as the Flynn Effect (FE). In Britain, the results are even better. West Indian Blacks in the UK now have an IQ of about 93.5 at age 11. Scores for adult Caribbeans in the UK are not known. Studies from 1960’s-70’s showed an IQ of 85 for these same children, but now it has moved up by 8.5 points. Young Caribbean Blacks in the UK have closed the IQ gap by more than half.

Interestingly, this IQ increase has coincided with a spectacular increase in crime among these British-born Jamaicans. The first generation that came in the 1950’s and 60’s were mostly hard-working and law-abiding. But their offspring in many ways have been a disaster.

Here we see once again the phenomenon discussed on this blog before, that the male children of low-wage immigrants to the West are often criminals. This even held for the offspring of Irish, Italian and some Jewish Whites to the US over 100 years ago. With a rising IQ coinciding with a skyrocketing crime rate, again we see the disconnect between the simplistic game that White Nationalists play called “low IQ = high crime”.

Most Caribbean Blacks in the UK are Jamaicaans. In Jamaica, the Black IQ is about 71.5.

A counterargument to these rising Jamaican IQ gains is that these Jamaicans are heavily intermarrying with Whites. In the first generation, up to 2

But let us look at the argument. If base Jamaican IQ is 71.5, then a 2

A good analysis of the UK Jamaican data is that, if assuming the benefit of increased White genes, the more complex modern environment in the UK is raising Jamaican IQ by 5-10 points. In another score 92 at that age, both scores in comparison to a White score of 100. The Black US score then declines to 85 (a 10 point drop) and the African Black score drops to 67 (an incredible 25 point drop). Black scores decline as children age, and this recent post suggests that an initial high score followed by sharply declining scores are indicative of earlier maturation among Blacks. I do not know to what extent early Black maturation (Blacks do mature earlier, and this has a genetic basis) explains the strange phenomenon of high Black IQ’s in small children which rapidly decline into adulthood.

But it is interesting that Tizard’s group raised together in an institutional setting, the young Black kids had even higher IQ’s than the Whites.

In the Caribbean nation of Dominica, there has been a stunning rise in IQ over a 36 year period from 1965-2001. There was an 18 point rise during this period, which rose their IQ’s from 61 to 73 (the IQ’s did not rise by 18 points because other groups’ IQ’s were also rising during this period). This represents a gain against UK Whites of 12 IQ points.

The test used was Raven’s Progressive Matrices, a test that is said to be the best available for measuring pure “g” intelligence.

A schematic of the g, or general intelligence, factor. The ovals represent subtests on an intelligence test. G is a correlation coefficient of various tests. It measures the tendency of superior test takers (and someone who has a brain that works a bit better), where if they do well on one test, they also tend to do well on all other tests. The
FE is generally not on g because some tests have risen dramatically, others moderately, and still others little or not at all. Therefore, intelligence has not risen in a general, across-the-board kind of way. However, certain aspects of intelligence have definitely risen, and those aspects would seem to me to have quantifiable benefits in modern society occupationally, academically, and in other ways.

 

It also predicts success in life in various ways pretty well and is not culturally biased in any way. The researchers gave a vocabulary test to the group and found a similar rise of about 18 IQ points on that test.

Researchers tried to tease out which factors were most related to the IQ rise. The only factor that explained the rise fairly well was schooling, so it appeared that improved schooling was a major cause of the IQ rise. The IQ rise occurred at the time of a major expansion of the school system in Dominica.

Socioeconomic status of parents explained about 1

These findings are interesting for many reasons. This post suggests that most of the FE is due to increased caloric intake among children, resulting in earlier maturation. Improved nutrition has often been suggested as a reason for the FE but did not seem to be a factor here.

Those who favor a genetic explanation for racial variations in IQ (nearly all of whom are White racists) disparage all societal interventions to increase IQ as worthless. In particular, they oppose spending any more money on educating “inferior” Blacks and Browns, as it is just throwing good money after bad. This study indicates that increased educational spending can indeed have IQ benefits for Blacks.

Some other findings in this study are of interest. One is that the rise is on the Raven’s test, which is the most heavily g -loaded test in existence. Critics of the FE claim that the rise is not on g, or general intelligence, and hence it is worthless. The Dominican rise was definitely on g.

In the West, while there have been major rises in tests of problem-solving, visual analysis, visual intelligence, and verbal analysis, there have been little to no gains in general knowledge, vocabulary, arithmetic, and mathematical analysis.

Some interpret this to mean that there has been no rise in general intelligence – only a rise in “factors subject to environmental bias.” Such an analysis is false – but it is interesting that in Dominica such huge gains are being seen in vocabulary, while in the West, vocabulary gains have only been 4.4 points over 80 years.

A study out of Kenya in 2003 looking at 7 year old children found an incredible 26 point gain over 14 years from 1984-1998 in rural Kenya, leaving them with an IQ of 89 (Daley et al 2003). This apparently represented a 21 point IQ gain over British Whites from the previous IQ of 68.

The rise was correlated with schooling, family structure, nutrition, and the health of the children. Schooling seemed to be the major factor and once again coincided with a major educational expansion by the government. The test used was the children’s version of Raven’s, the Children’s Progressive Matrices, once again a very g-loaded test, so the Kenyan rise was also on g.

The Kenyan, UK, and Dominican studies are important because they show Blacks reducing the Black-White IQ gap by 10-15 points in a few decades. Hereditarians argue that the Black-White gap is permanent in all areas of the world, and that Blacks are a hopelessly stupid race – a drain on humanity. All money spent on raising Black IQ’s is wasted for this reason.

The three studies above show purely environmental factors causing major reductions in the Black-White IQ gap.

Another study found massive gains, that I have not been able to quantify, in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, over a 72-74 year period. The gains were probably at least on the order of 20 points. Researchers suggested that increased cognitive stimulation in the form of a more complex world was responsible for the rise.

A common complaint of all of these studies showing rising Black IQ’s, both in tandem with Whites and in closing the Black-White gap, is that the studies are done only on children. But most IQ tests are done on kids. Taking African studies as an example, we can see here that 6

In my opinion, testing kids is probably a better way to measure pure neurological efficiency without throwing in all sorts of potentially confounding extraneous variables.

Adults are much more likely than kids to have physical and mental diseases (schizophrenia and depression lower IQ), to be in jail, prison, or homeless, to abuse alcohol and drugs, or to have suffered serious head injuries. All of these factors throw a monkey wrench into tests that should be trying to show us real differences between races.

Just today, the White Nationalist blog Majority Rights posted a well-done article by Richard D. Fuerle, A Possible Explanation for the Flynn Effect. The article’s interesting premise is that the FE is due to increased caloric intake and even increasing obesity in our modern world. This increased food intake would result in earlier maturation and higher IQ’s among children, which would then level off in adulthood.

The author suggests that the FE is not really an IQ increase but an effect of this early maturation, and that people are getting less intelligent, not more so.

I believe this theory is wrong, though it has an interesting premise. James Flynn also disagrees with Fuerle’s article, saying that the author was led astray, as he did not have good knowledge of the literature. Flynn also disagreed with the notion that the FE was only in children and that it leveled off in adulthood, saying that he had refuted this in an article his famous article published in JEM: The Journal of Educational Measurement, in 1984 (Flynn 2008).

Some of the comments following Fuerle’s article are also not correct.

First of all, IQ’s have been rising among all age groups, not just kids. It’s really a cohort effect. James Flynn agreed with me (Flynn 2007) that Black adults of today have the same IQ scores (100) as the Whites of 1957. Blacks of today have somewhat higher scores than the Whites of WW2.

This brings up a conundrum as one wonders if today’s US Blacks would have been able to beat the Japanese in WW2, since they can’t even seem to run Detroit (Taylor 2007). This long and rather involved post of mine deals with a lot of the arguments around the FE, including some of the misconceptions about it. My post theorizing that Blacks of today equal the Whites of 1957 is here.

Here, I show that Black children and adults have indeed made about a 5.5 IQ point gain on Whites over the past 30 years, coinciding with the liberation of Blacks via Civil Rights laws. The notion that IQ has risen due to increased caloric intake is interesting but probably invalid. Flynn himself says that after 1950, gains due to nutrition were minimal to nil in the West.

Furthermore, the gains should have been across the board, not just in the certain areas that the FE is in. As we see above, the FE is also occurring in 3rd World countries like Kenya and Dominica where excess nutrition is certainly not an issue. In those countries, it is related to better education, if anything. Much of the FE remains mysterious.

The notion that gains are occurring only in certain areas that are “subject to environmental bias” is not correct. First of all, in Dominica, huge gains were seen in vocabulary, one of the areas that is not seeing much gain in the West.

Vocabulary, general knowledge, basic math, and mathematical analysis are all subject to environmental influence too, but Western society has not been promoting these areas so much.

The areas that the FE is occurring in – verbal analysis, analytical reasoning, visual analysis, visuospatial reasoning, on-the-spot problem solving for which no previous method was known, etc. – are areas that our increasingly sophisticated society has been promoting.

We have promoted this in terms of an increasingly complex society and the mass promotion of scientific thinking. The visuospatial aspect may be due to video games, cell phones, computers, and many things that need programming – boom boxes, car radios, microwaves, answering machines, thermostats, on and on.

My personal opinion is that TV has a lot to do with it. TV shows are increasingly complex, and kids sit in front of TVs with clickers clicking through 50 different channels one after the other. The camera usually only focuses on something for a short time, then moves on. Even jokes and dialog on TV come at a rapid pace. Movies seem to have gotten a lot more complex in recent decades too.

Lastly, the FE is only ending or reversing in Scandinavia. It is still going full blast in the US and in the 3rd world.

The notion that IQ is rising while “real intelligence” – general knowledge, math and vocabulary – is not cannot be supported. Those three things are no more “real intelligence” than the stuff that is going up in the FE.

Another argument advanced later in the discussion has to do with Malcolm Gladwell’s misreading of the FE. Gladwell says that the gains have been almost exclusively on a subtest of the WISC called Similarities. Although gains on Similarities reflect increased use of scientific thinking in our society, these gains are disparaged in the comments section as showing a phony effect of increased intelligence when there has been none.

First of all, the commenters are wrong in that gains on Similarities are a meaningless artifact. Similarities tests for the ability to solve problems on-the-spot without a previously learned method. Raven’s tests for the same thing – it is said to test for the “ability to make sense of the buzzing confusion of life.” Second, Gladwell is wrong. Major gains have occurred on many tests, not just Similarities:

Look at the gains:

Similarities         23.45
Picture Arrangement  21.5
Coding               18
Object Assembly      17.35
Block Design         15.9
Picture Completion   11.7
Comprehension        11
Vocabulary           4.4
Arithmetic           2.3
Information          2.1

A nice photo of James Flynn, along with Richard Lynn and Philippe Rushton, from an obscure document reporting on a conference on intelligence in Amsterdam last year, is here. The link also features a short, interesting interview with Flynn along with some interesting abstracts on intelligence.

Some abstracts I found interesting were those showing that the more intelligent people are, the less likely they are to believe in God. Also, among believers, the more intelligent people were, the more liberal and less literal they were in their beliefs. These findings also applied at a national and ethnic level.

Other abstracts showed that the more intelligent people are, they longer they live and the healthier they are. A recent finding not in the document was that in the West, the smarter you are, the more likely you are to be a vegetarian.

References

Daley, Y. C.; Whaley, S. E.; Sigman, M. D.; Espinosa, M. P.; and Neuman, C. (2003). “IQ On the Rise: The Flynn effect in Rural Kenyan Children.” Psychological Science 14, 215-219.
Flynn, James R. (November 2007). Personal communication.
Flynn, James R. (January 2008). Personal communication.
Keita, Lamin. (December 2007). Personal communication.
Nisbett, R. E. (1998). “ Robert LindsayPosted on Categories Africa, Americas, Asia, Blacks, Brazil, Britain, Caribbean, China, Civil Rights, Crime, Culture, Dominica, East Africa, Europe, Europeans, Flynn Effect, Genetics, Health, History, Immigration, Intelligence, Jamaicans, Kenya, Latin America, Nutrition, Psychology, Race/Ethnicity, Racism, Regional, Religion, Reposts From The Old Site, South America, White Nationalism, White Racism, Whites27 Comments on Black IQ Gains in Britain, Kenya and Dominica

IQ and Achievement in British Black Children

Repost from the old site. It has been noted that British Black children do poorly in school. But the purpose of this essay is to give lie to the theory that they do poorly in school due to low intelligence. In fact, it is not true that British Black kids to age 15 have low intelligence at all. After age 15, it is possible that they may have low IQ’s that prevent many of them from reasonable school achievement.

British Black Children
Age   Grade      IQ
4     Preschool  106
7     2nd        97.5
8     3rd        96.5*
9     4th        95.5*
10    5th        94.5*
11    6th        93.5*
12    7th        92.5*
13    8th        91.5*
14    9th        90.5*
15    10th       89.5
16    10th       88.8?
17    11th       88?
18    12th       87.2?
24    ----       85?
* indicates an estimation
? indicates a sheer guess based on
available data and studies of US
Blacks

All scores are from here. The quoted study is West et al 1992. That study found an 8-point IQ differential between UK Blacks and UK Whites in 1992. I believe that that worked out to an average and aggregated UK Black IQ of 93.5 for 7-15 year old’s. It turns out that the gap is about 4 IQ points at age 7 and extends to about 12 IQ points by age 15. As you can see, UK Black IQ is highest among kids and declines as individuals age. Unfortunately, this does seem to be the case with Blacks. I lowered UK Black IQ down to 85 by age 18 because that is what Black IQ does in the US between ages 15-18-24. For instance, in the US, Black kids seem to start out high and then crash down to ~85 by adulthood. But see my recent post suggesting that the US Black adult IQ may now be ~87. The figures tend to vary depending on which IQ tests are being used for comparison. The 106 score is from a recent study of preschool children in the UK, which showed approximately 108 IQ for British East Indians and 106 IQ for UK West Indian (Black) children, both at age 4. Both scores exceeded scores from UK Whites of ~102. This study has  upset hereditarians, who have countered with an argument about selective immigration, but James Flynn has stated that selective immigration from Jamaica at least could not possibly have raised IQ more than a few points or so. Another argument is that UK Blacks are now heavily admixed with Whites, but this is not the case. UK Blacks are 1 As you can see, up until age 15 or so, British Black kids have perfectly adequate intelligence. Much has been made of the very high homicide rate of British Black youth, but in minors at least, it cannot possibly be due to low intelligence. There must be other factors at play here, which may indeed be genetically mediated, at least in part. The notion that the high failure rate of British Black youths in schools is due to low intelligence must be abandoned. We should also note that in only the past four years, UK Blacks have closed the achievement gap in school with UK Whites by fully 1/3. This mirrors a similar drop in the achievement gap in the US for US Blacks, over 30 years, of a similar 1/3. The notion that there are permanent achievement gaps, set in stone, that are purely genetic, and that cannot be remediated in any way must be rejected. The achievement gap between Blacks and Whites, whatever it is, is not permanently and genetically fixed at any known number. It is a flexible boundary that is subject to movement towards closure by Blacks, especially in the last 40 years of Liberation. There is no permanent Western Black IQ called “85”, as hereditarians insist. The Western Black IQ varies with age and is rising. This rise can no longer be denied.

UK Blacks 15 yrs 89.5      
Croatia          90
Bosnia           90
Albania          90
UK Blacks 14 yrs 90.5      
Serbia           91
UK Blacks 13 yrs 91.5      
Cyprus           91.5
Chile            91.5
Greece           92
UK Blacks 12 yrs 92.5      
Macedonia        92.5
Ireland          93
Bulgaria         93
Armenia          93.5
UK Blacks 11 yrs 93.5 
Georgia          93.5
Israel           94
Romania          94
Argentina        94.5
UK Blacks 10 yrs 94.5
Portugal         95
Portugal         95
Slovenia         95.5
UK Blacks 9 yrs  95.5
Moldova          95.5
Uruguay          96
Slovakia         96
Malta            96
Russia           96.5
Belarus          96.5
UK Blacks 8 yrs  96.5
Ukraine          96.5
Spain            97.5
Czech Republic   97.5
UK Blacks 7 yrs  97.5 

As you can see, obviously, UK Black students to age 15 do not have low IQ scores. The notion that low IQ holds back UK Black students and that their IQ’s are so low that they cannot be properly educated in British schools  needs to be challenged. This theory cannot be supported. Whatever the problems of the Black students in the UK, low IQ cannot be one of them. An analogy may suffice here about the variance between Black and White IQ’s. Suppose you and I are running away from a tiger. It also may be true that if I am racing with you away from the tiger, I need not run faster than the tiger. I need only run faster than you. Therefore, if rising Black IQ’s are countered by rising White IQ’s we run into an IQ arms race and Black IQ gains are in a sense nullified in terms of White competition. Hence: As UK Whites consistently score from 4 points ahead at age 7, to 8 points ahead at age 12, to 12 points ahead at age 15, the IQ differential between Black and White youths will only grow with age, surely discouraging the Blacks. But differentials are real and obvious, and in terms of test scores anyway, as long as those differentials are there, UK Whites will continue to outscore UK Blacks, and misguided British laws such as the newly passed Race Relations Act which mandate equal educational outcomes by race will always fall short of their requirements.

References

Mackintosh, Nicholas. (1998) IQ and Human Intelligence. OUP.West, A., Mascie-Taylor, C., and Mackintosh, N. (1992) Cognitive and educational attainment in different ethnic groups. J. Biosocial Science, 24, 539-554.

Response to Zionist Apologist

Repost from the old site. Always-excellent commenter James Schipper responds to Zionist Apologist from a previous post. Pretty good stuff here. The notion that the problem with Jews is Judaism itself is similar to the arguments of Gilad Atzmon and Israel Shamir. However, Kevin MacDonald points out that Jewish ethnocentrism does not go away in the absence of Judaism. A good document that makes that clear is his book review of Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century. I disagree with a lot in that review, but all you have to do is look around at a lot of Jewish radicals, and it’s clear that they have not yet, and never will, make a complete break with their Jewish identity. So pulling the Judaism out of the Jew does not solve the problem. As my physician noted when I told him that according to Jewish law, you never quit being a Jew, “So they get a piece of you, eh?” In an unpublished interview with me, I asked Kevin MacDonald if the Jews would ever become less ethnocentric with time. He said emphatically, “No. The Jews will always be ethnocentric..” Incidentally, I found MacDonald to be a warm, friendly, sane, intelligent and gracious man. I also did not think he was the slightest bit anti-Semitic, but maybe I am mistaken. He seemed to be a Judeophile in a sense; he was totally fascinated with Jews. Jewish dual loyalty has been a problem everywhere there are Jews and is a direct consequence of their extreme ethnocentrism and nothing else, although James’ suggests that Judaism also plays a role. James’ comments: Giving Uganda to the Zionists would have been just as unjust as giving Palestine to them. Uganda wasn’t empty territory either. As to Argentina, it was a sovereign country and at the time of Herzl it had just learned to develop the pampas. Why on earth would they give some of their pampas to outsiders from Europe? The best territory to cede to the Zionists would have been Western Australia. At the time it was sparsely populated — it still is — and unlike Palestine, it could easily have accommodated all the Jews of the world. Granted, Western Australia is mainly arid or semi-arid, but so is Palestine, with the difference that WA is huge. Unfortunately, the stinking British imperialists preferred to be generous with Arab land. A diaspora is simply the result of emigration. Since 1880, there has been an Italian diaspora. Are these diaspora Italians sick? No, and their diaspora will soon disappear through assimilation because Italians do not have a tribal religion which tells them that Italians are God’s chosen people and that Italy is their sacred homeland, to which they should one day return. The problem of Jews can be summed up in one word: Judaism. It is because of their religion that Jews can’t be fully assimilated and will always remain a foreign or semi-foreign body in Gentile societies. Judaism tells Jews that they are a people, not a religious community. Nobody refers to Lutherans. Orthodox, Sikhs, Mormons as a people because those religions are non-tribal. Consider the difference between Presbyterians and Jews. Most Presbyterians in the world have at least some Scottish ancestry, but Presbyterianism is not at all about Scots or Scotland. Nearly all Sikhs are Punjabis or descend from Punjabis, but the Sikh religion is not in the least about Punjabis. By contrast, Judaism is all about Jews and their promised land. If people sincerely believe in Judaism, one can have some sympathy for them, in the way that one can sympathize with a Jehovah’s Witness who sincerely believes that a blood transfusion is against God’s will. It is much harder to have sympathy for atheists who remain proudly Jewish and become Zionists. To stop believing in Judaism while continuing to believe that Jews are a people and that Israel is their sacred soil is like stopping to believe in Catholicism but continue to obey the Pope. In one way, Israel made life more difficult for Jews in Gentile countries because the existence of Israel makes Jews vulnerable to the charge of dual loyalty. This charge is more than a figment of anti-Semitic imagination.

References

MacDonald, Kevin. 2005. Stalin’s Willing Executioners: Jews as a Hostile Elite in the USSR – Review of Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century. The Occidental Quarterly: 5(3), 65-100.
error

Enjoy this blog? Please spread the word :)