Alt Left: “The Explosion in Lebanon Has Been Delayed: Until When?”, by Elijah J. Magnier

Very nice article that lays bare a lot of the bullshit surrounding the Lebanon protests. Of course they are being manipulated by the US and Saudi Arabia to turn them into anti-Hezbollah demonstrations with the aim of overthrowing the Hezbollah government.

Yes, you heard me right. The Lebanese government right now is controlled by Hezbollah and its allies. This has been the case since 2018 when they won the elections. Hezbollah has 5

So we have yet another case here of a minority trying to overthrow a majority as was recently done in Bolivia, Honduras, Brazil, Ecuador, Haiti, Paraguay, and Ukraine, and as the US is attempting to do in Venezuela and Nicaragua, with regime change operations in Dominica and probably Mexico coming soon. The Dominica operation is already well underway.

There has long been an attempted regime change operation in effect in Syria and there is an ongoing one in Yemen, Iraq, and Iran. There also appears to be a regime change operation in effect in Hong Kong. Of course, Cuba, North Korea, Zimbabwe, and Eritrea are victims of long term regime change operations. So is Venezuela for that matter – the operation against Venezuela has been ongoing for 17 years now. I don’t support those rightwing protestors at all.

Everywhere around the world, anti-US regimes are being overthrown with regime change operations, often coups of one variety or the next. The US simply does not believe in democracy at all. It only likes democracy if its favored groups win. If the groups it does not like are in power, the US will always try to overthrow them even if they have majority support. And we’ve been doing for over a century now.

The Explosion in Lebanon Has Been Delayed: Until When?

Europe is concerned about the Lebanese political crisis and its potential spillover consequences in case of a civil confrontation. Even if the European states do not have differing strategic objectives in Lebanon from the US, a civil war will affect Europe directly, as refugees will be flocking from the neighbouring continent. 

Reaching an agreement over a new government to prevent further unrest is proving difficult. Sources in Beirut believe it may take several months to form a new government as was the case in forming the last government. Some wonder if it might not be better to wait for the results of the US elections before forming a new government.

Or perhaps a new government will only emerge after a major security event, like the assassination of the late Prime Minister Rafic Hariri which triggered a political tsunami in the country. All indications on the ground point to the prospect of a civilian confrontation arising from the absence of a robust central government that can take in hand the security of the country. Can Lebanon avoid a civil confrontation?

The closure of the main roads and the “deliberate” incompetence and inaction of the security forces – due to US requests to tolerate the closure of main axes linking Lebanon with the capital – is no longer surprising behaviour.

The main roads now closed have been carefully selected: closed are the roads linking the south of Lebanon to Beirut and linking Baalbek and the road to Damascus with the capital Beirut. These areas are mainly inhabited and used by Shia. The roads are being blocked mainly in certain sectarian areas controlled by Sunni supporters of the caretaker Sunni Prime Minister Saad Hariri and his Druse ally Walid Joumblat.

The closure of other roads in the Christian-dominated Dbayeh by the pro-US Christian leader Samir Geagea, leader of the “Lebanese Forces”, and in Tripoli seem to be diversions of attention from the main goal: challenging Hezbollah.

Sources in Beirut believe the objective is to exasperate the Shia who represent the society that protects Hezbollah. The goal is to force the organisation into the streets. Hezbollah is aware of this and is trying to avoid responding to provocations. The closure of these roads is an invitation to Hezbollah to take the situation in hand and direct its weapons against other Lebanese citizens, as indeed happened on the 5th of May 2008.

In 2008, Druse minister Marwan Hamadé – directed by Walid Joumblat – and pro-US Prime Minister Fouad Siniora asked Hezbollah to cut its fibre optic private communication system linking all corners of the country.

Israel never ceased to monitor the Hezbollah cable that, due to its high-security system and regular control, had managed to neutralise all Israeli tapping devices attached to it by Israeli Special forces during their infiltration to Lebanon for this exact purpose.

An effort was made by the Lebanese government in May 2008 to cut the cable to break through Hezbollah’s high-security system, the key to its command and control in time of peace and especially in time of war. This insistent attempt – despite repeated warnings – provoked two days later a demonstration of force by Hezbollah occupying the entire capital in a few hours with no serious victims.

Lebanese pro-US armed mercenaries who gathered and hid in Beirut to trigger a civil war on this day, anticipating Hezbollah’s possible reaction, were neutralised in no time despite hundreds of millions of dollars spent on their supposed readiness for war against Hezbollah in the streets of Beirut.

Today the goal is to see Hezbollah controlling the streets and arming anti-government Syrians and Lebanese. The goal is to take the Lebanon issue to the United Nations. The aim is not to see Hezbollah defeated by the initial clashes: the firepower, training, and military organisation of Hezbollah cannot be defeated by enthusiastic mercenaries and locals.
Their aim is to deprive Hezbollah of its legitimacy and pay a heavy price for its “unforgivable” victories in Syria and Iraq and its support to the Palestinians and the Yemenis.

Lebanon’s financial problems are not the primary issue.

In Congressional testimony, the former US Under Secretary of State and Ambassador to Lebanon, Jeffery Feltman, told the US Congress that “Lebanon’s entire external debt (around $35 billion) is in line with the estimates of what Saudi Arabia is bleeding every year in pursuing a war in Yemen ($25-$40 billion).”

Regional and international financial support to Lebanon will be injected with one purpose: to trigger a civil war in the hope of defeating Hezbollah in the long term. This might also save Israel from a severe political crisis by provoking a war against Lebanon rather than an internal conflict among Israelis, as seems possible after two failed attempts to form a government.

Most Lebanese are aware of the sensitive and critical situation in the country. Most fear a civil war, particularly in view of the behaviour of the Lebanese Army and other security forces who are now standing idle and yet refusing to keep all roads open. These actions by the security forces are greatly contributing to the possibility of an internal conflict.

Sincere protestors with only a domestic agenda have managed to achieve miracles by crossing all sectarian boundaries and carrying one flag: an end to corruption and associated poverty and the return of stolen capital to Lebanon.

Protestors are asking the judiciary system to assume its responsibility and for the country to head towards a secular ruling system. But sectarian elements and foreign intervention are managing to divert attention from the real national demands that have been overwhelming the Lebanese since decades.

The foreign intervention is not relying on the justified demands of protestors in its confrontation with Hezbollah. It is relying on sectarian Lebanese who want to contribute to the fall of Hezbollah from the inside.

This is not surprising because Lebanon is a platform where the US, EU, and Saudis are strongly present and active against the Axis of Resistance led by Iran. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander Hussein Salame warned in his most recent speech that these countries risk “crossing the line.”

Since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, Iran has not initiated a military or preventive war on its neighbours but has limited its action to defending itself and in building its “Axis of Resistance”. Recently, Iran proposed – to no avail – a HOPE (Hormuz Peace Endeavor) to its neighbours, seeking a commitment to the security of the Middle East separately from any US intervention.

Iran defeated the mainstream international community when it helped prevent the fall of the government in Damascus after years of war. It has effectively supported Hezbollah and the Palestinians against Israel, favoured ally of the US; Iran stood next to Iraq and prevented a hostile government reaching power; Iran has also supported the defence of Yemen against Saudi Arabia’s useless and destructive war.

Iran’s enemies are numerous and have not given up. They tried but failed to achieve their objectives in 2006 in Lebanon, in 2011 in Syria, in 2014 in Iraq, and in 2015 in Yemen. Today a new approach is being implemented to defeat Iran’s allies: the weaponization of domestic unrest motivated by legitimate anti-corruption demands for reform at the cost of “incinerating” entire countries, i.e. Lebanon and Iraq.

Protestors have failed to offer a feasible plan themselves, and caretaker Prime Minister Hariri is trying to punch above his parliamentary weight by seeking to remove political opponents who control more than half of the parliament. Lebanon has reached a crossroads where an exchange of fire is no longer excluded. The conflict has already claimed lives. Thanks to manipulation, Lebanon seems to be headed towards self-destruction.

All images in this article are from the author

Alt Left: Repost: Why Trump Is a Disaster: (((Middle Eastern Foreign Policy)))

People are commenting on this post from a year ago. It’s a nice post but it has a lot of complex ideas floating around that it hammers away at the reader in brief fashion. It should be good for a slow read.

At any rate it is quite relevant to the current turn of events in Syria with Turkey invading Syria to fight the Kurds, the US leaving all of Northern Syria, and Assad moving in to take over everywhere the US is leaving. Oh, and there are Russian troops on the ground and Russian planes in the air. The Kurds are holding out a lot better than anyone thought, and pretty soon Turkey is going to have to fight Syria and maybe even Russia too. It’s all getting pretty interesting.

I actually think this was a brilliant move on the part of Trump. Unfortunately in the course of carrying out this plan, a lot of people got killed and wounded, but people were getting killed and wounded all the time anyway. I don’t think Trump really abandoned the Kurds. He just handed them off to Assad and to some extent to Russia.

Anyway, this is probably good for a post on its own.

Zamfir: I’m surprised you have a strong preference for Democrats over Republicans. To me it seems like a hopeless choice. If you vote Republican you’re voting for one set of evil elite interests, but not explicitly against your biology and cultural heritage; if you vote Republican you’re voting for another set of evil elite interests, and explicitly against your biology and cultural heritage.

Hard to pick between those two! What is the real advantage in voting Democrat in your opinion? (I guess I’d vote for Bernie, but then again I’d vote for Trump for similar reasons… Not that I expect either one would ever do much on anything I care about.)

His foreign policy is literally insane. He’s an ultra-rightwinger. Venezuela. Syria. Iraq. Nicaragua. Trump resigned from the UN Human Rights Committee. Trump jacked up the military budget to the extreme.

((Trump))) hates all the enemies of Israel. (((Trump))) ought to just move to Tel Aviv already. (((Trump)))’s the most pro-Jewish and pro-Israel President we ever had. (((Trump))) has caused serious harm to the Palestinians, and he has uprooted decades of somewhat sane policies in the Holy Land in order to back Israel to the hilt.

The reason Israel has been acting so bad lately, cracking down on domestic dissidents, and massacring Palestinians demonstrating at the border, is because Trump gave them the green light to do so.

Trump loosened the the ROE (Rules of Engagement) in Syria and Iraq, and civilian casualties increased by 10 times. Trump’s deliberately murdering civilians by the tens of thousands. Just the other day, Trump bombed Iraqi forces on the border of Syria, killing 30 of them. Trump loosened the ROE in Mosul, and we and the Iraqis killed 40,000 civilians as a result.

Trump openly states that he wants to steal other countries’ oil.

Trump supports ISIS. The Pentagon is protecting ISIS right now. We train ISIS fighters at a base in Abu Kamal. Every time Syrian troops try to attack ISIS, we bomb them! Trump claims he’s fighting ISIS? Trump is supporting ISIS. We are allowing ISIS to have a large swath of territory in Syria that covers some oil fields. We have bases over there and we refuse to attack ISIS. Sometimes ISIS patrols even drive right by our forces.

Obviously US forces have been embedded with these groups, including ISIS, for some time now. We coordinate attacks against the Syrian military with ISIS. When Syria attacks ISIS, Trump’s military (the air force of ISIS) rushes in and bombs the Syrian army in support of ISIS!

Trump tricked a group of Russian, tribal and Christian militias into thinking an oil field was going to be handed over to them. When these forces went to occupy the oil field, Trump lied and said they were attacking our allies.

Our allies, the SDF, were nowhere in sight. We had told them to leave the oil field. As soon as this group reached the oil field, we started bombing them. At the same time and apparently coordinated, ISIS attacked these forces.

This is where this madman Pompeo chortles about killing hundreds of Russians. Yeah. They murdered those Russians in cold blood along with a lot of anti-ISIS militiamen, including many Christians.

At other times in this war, ISIS killed a few Russian officers, including generals, with very precise targeting. They also targeted the Russian embassy with very precisely. They could not have done these things on their own. The only reason they were able to kill those Russian officers and attack the embassy is because we must have had Special Forces helping ISIS carry out those attacks.

We are using the Kurdish YPG and SDF to occupy a large portion of Syria, including most of its oil. So we are helping the Kurds steal Syria’s oil. We are trying to ruin the Syrian economy by starving it of oil funds.

But when the Turkish military attacked Afrin as part of an invasion of Syria to conquer Syrian land and annex it to Turkey, the US supported them to the hilt. Many brave Kurdish fighters were killed by these invaders.

The Turkish military was accompanied by militias they called the Free Syrian Army, but all they were were radical Islamists. Many were ISIS and Al Qaeda who just changed their uniforms to fight alongside the Turks.

The Turks have been supporting ISIS to the hilt for a long time now, and we have not lifted one finger to stop them. At the same time we are helping Kurds steal Syrian land, we are helping Turkey slaughter Kurds in Afrin in Syria and supporting their genocidal war against the Kurdish people in Turkey.

Most of the funding for ISIS and Al Qaeda comes from Qatar, UAE, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. Qatar quite openly supports Al Qaeda. ISIS was a project of Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia from Day One.

When the Saudis and UAE invaded Yemen, they airlifted thousands of ISIS and Al Qaeda fighters from Syria to go fight alongside the Gulf invaders. The Houthis fired a missile at a ship full of ISIS and Al Qaeda militiamen and blew up the ship. Trump lied and said it was a civilian ship and accused the Houthis of endangering shipping in the area. Our ships then fired on the Houthi area that shot at the ship.

When Trump attacked Al Qaeda in a botched mission in Yemen, our military came under very heavy fire. Trump responded by leveling the small village we were attacking and killing almost everyone in it, including women and children. Our forces also deliberately blew up houses that had nothing but women and kids in them. But America was freaking out about one dead Special Forces fighter, who probably deserved it if you ask me.

We are occupying land in Syria which we stole and will never leave. We support Turkey conquering part of Syria and annexing it!

Trump has been involved in one fake false flag after another in Syria. Trump has been told that these are false flags, and he bombs Syria anyway. His administration is directly involved in the planning and carrying out of these false flags with the British and the French.

Trump has an alliance with the Saudis, which has resulted in supporting their awful invasion of Yemen. Trump’s also been assisting the Saudis in funneling guns and weapons to the Al Qaeda-type Islamists in Syria as part of an alliance with Saudi Arabia.

Qatar, UAE, Jordan, Turkey, the US, Israel, the UK, and France have all been supporting the radical Islamists in Syria, including Al Qaeda and even ISIS. All of those countries had intelligence and military advisors directly embedded in those groups, in particular in Al Qaeda. An Al Qaeda commander told us this in an interview with a German journalist.

Trump has helped the Saudis and UAE literally invade Yemen, where they have been conducting a genocidal campaign against the Yemeni people. Trump sold a huge amount of weapons to the Saudis.

Trump verbally attacked Qatar and helped the Saudis to isolate them. Trump accused Qatar of supporting terrorism, which is true, but so are our allies Saudi Arabia, UAE, and more broadly Jordan, Turkey, France, the UK and even our own government.

Trump did this because Qatar had opened up friendly relations with Iran, which caused Saudi Arabia to almost declare war on Qatar. We verbally attacked Qatar because Trump hates Iran. All of this is to screw Iran. He dismantled the Iran deal and put sanctions back on Iran.

Alt Left: The Muslim World Is for the Most Part Virtually Socialist

Semi-feudalism was eliminated in the (Arab) Muslim world at least 60-70 years ago; granted it existed prior.

It was fairly easy to take out semi-feudalism in the Arab World because it is very hard to justify such a system under Islam. The semi-feudalists had used distorted readings of the Koran to justify their oppression. For instance the fact that Mohammad said that some are rich and some are poor and this is a normal thing was given as an excuse for semi-feudalism.

Most Muslims knew intuitively that this excuse didn’t fly well in an Islamic sense, so the new Arab nationalist (mostly socialist) regimes found it easy to dismantle semi-feudalism.

I know that Palestine was semi-feudal in the 1930’s, and Iraq and Egypt were in the 1940’s. Massive land reforms in the 50’s Egypt and Iraq took out semi-feudalism. But it lingered elsewhere. In  the early 60’s, your average peasant in Yemen had a picture of Nasser on his wall. Nasser was seen as a great hero of the Arab working and peasant classes.

When the Arab nationalist and socialist Ba’ath Party came into power in  Syria and Iraq, one of the first things they did was a land reform. It was easy to do as the semi-feudal system was hard to justify Islamically, and a more equitable or socialist economics was very easy to sell in an Islamic sense.

This is because if you read the Koran, you can see the Mohammad, for all his flaws, was basically a socialist. This is why even hardline Islamist organizations like Hamas are virtually socialist. When the PLO ran Gaza, Hamas ran the social services that should have been but were not run by the state. Now that Hamas is in power, they have a huge social safety net.

Semi-feudalism will be seen as very un-Islamic nowadays, except in the case of Pakistan, where a huge substrate of Indian and Hindu culture virtually neuters whatever socialist advantages Islam may bring.

Alt Left: The US: All Guerrillas We Don’t Like Lack Agency and Are Simply Pawns and Puppets of an Enemy State

In guerrilla wars nowadays, all guerrilla groups who the US says are enemies are labeled by the US as being pawns of some dastardly foreign power. The revolutionaries themselves are deprived of all agency and reduced to mere puppets who carry out orders from some large state sponsor. The puppets probably don’t even want to do these attacks! They’re probably being being forced to by their diabolical patrons!

In the Latin American revolutions of recent years, all of the revolutionaries were deprived of agency and reduced to mere puppets, first of Satanic Cuba and ultimately from the Devil itself, the USSR. Of course these revolutions were not started by internal politics, vast differences between the rich and poor, grotesquely unfair systems, murderous death squad states who torture and murder any dissidents on the Left!

Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Colombia were all wonderful countries. There weren’t any starving masses living in tin shacks with no water, sewage systems, jobs, or access to medical care, education, transportation or even money to buy food or anything like that!

You see, all the countries got let off the hook, and the US got to say that it wasn’t the horrific conditions inside the far rightwing country that were producing the obvious armed Left guerillas that such states often logically produce. The guerrillas were just idiots, useful ones to be sure, or even puppets on a string. Everything’s fine in these countries, and not one single progressive change needed to be made.

Instead this was just Castro’s Cuba – boo, hiss – exporting revolution to these poor innocent Latin American countries who are trying their best to serve their people! Oh, poor countries! These sad, pathetic, ignorant guerrillas are being made into pawns and puppets of malign Commies against their will! Oh, poor guerillas!

And ultimately of course the revolutions were all coming from the USSR. The motive was always nothing  more than Soviet expansionism. The Soviets were trying to export Communism all over the world to every country, rich and poor, leftwing and right, those who served their people and those who left them to die without a nickel! Bad Soviets! They were so mean!

In other words, all leftwing revolutions had nothing to do with the objective conditions inside the country. They were all caused by the deplorable Soviets exporting their depraved Communism the world over.

By saying that the Houthis are just Iranian puppets, useful idiots, and fools without any gripe who are mercenaries on the payroll of the Iranians, we are saying that conditions are just fine in Yemen, and the Houthis took arms for no reason.

According to the US and various Sunni Arab states in the region, the Houthis are revolutionary pro-Iranian crazies who are trying to take over the country as part of a sneaky Iranian project to take over all of the Arab countries, oppress and lord it over them, steal their resources and leave them penniless, and worst of all, force all of them all to convert to Shiism.

See how this “puppets of X regime” nonsense plays out? It’s usually nothing but a flat-out lie. Most civil wars happen for a reason. What sort of reason? An internal reason based on the objective conditions in that country, conditions that the guerrillas think are wrong or unfair – that’s what reason. Of course guns don’t grow on trees, and most guerrillas need to have state sponsors in order to acquire their weaponry. They have to buy them somewhere.

Alt Left: More on the Framing of Iran for the Houthi Attack on Saudi Arabia

Is Iran Responsible?

In a way, Iran is responsible for the attack but only in a roundabout way. Obviously the Houthis did it from Yemen. God knows how they pulled it off. The Houthis are absolutely able to pull of this sort of thing.

In recent months, Houthi drone technology has absolutely exploded. I believe that in the past few months, as the US tried to stop Iran from exporting oil, Iran has radically ramped up the supply of technology to the Houthis. Because their technology has exploded in a short period of time.

Under Obama, Iran wanted to keep a bit of distance from the Houthis due to the nuclear deal. Trump blew up that deal and Iran had no reason to keep distance from the Houthis anymore, so they ramped up support for the Houthis. Iran absolutely exports weaponry to the Houthis. I am not sure how much gets in. It comes in on small boats. It starts on large boats but around the east end of Oman at the end of the Straight of Hormuz they shift to small boats.

With the drones I understand that Iran may be actually flying them in from boats off the coast of Yemen! There are probably some Iranian advisors working with the Houthis on the battlefield. I have no idea if Iran is helping the Houthi build the rockets.

However, there is now a unified command center in Iran consisting of IRGC, Iran, Houthis, Iraqi militias, Hezbollah, and Islamic Jihad. Not sure if Syria has a seat too. So Iran probably heard about the operation and said fine.

The Houthis are not really proxies. They do what they want. Earlier Iran ordered them not to take Sa’ada, but the Houthis told Iran to stuff it and took the city anyway. On occasion they do carry out orders from Iran. One was to hit a ship off the coast of Yemen with a missile. I doubt that this refinery attack was due to an Iranian command or order.

The Missing Link – Hezbollah

When you think of Houthi technological capabilities, there is a part to the equation that is being left out. Because we are talking about not “Houthi” abilities but “Houthi + Hezbollah” abilities. I guess you could argue that some attack or manufacture is beyond the Houthi, but is it beyond Hezbollah?

Because I know how those drones are made, and they are all made in factories in Yemen.

An Iranian prototype is supplied directly by Iran for most models. The rocket and missile builders are none other than Hezbollah. Hezbollah are now experts at building missiles and rockets. Hezbollah builds drones, rockets, etc. for the Houthis using the Iranian prototype, but it is always modified somewhat, often in an ingenious way.

For instance the Saudi display included a Quds-1 which is a Houthi cruise missile built off the prototype of an Iranian Soumar cruise missile. According to the US lie, Iran fired two Houthi cruise missiles from its base in Iran to attack those refineries. How likely is that? Why would Iran have Houthi cruise missiles in their arsenal and why would they launch Houthi cruise missiles from their own territory? That makes no sense at all.

After the initial prototype is built, I am not sure if Hezbollah makes new ones or if the Houthis just use a schematic.

There are also Hezbollah advisors advising the Houthis on the battlefield.

This attack surely came from Yemen. The US is lying through its teeth that the attack came from Iran. It’s Iraqi WMD all over again. There are various reasons for blaming Iran which you may be able to figure out yourself.

The US States that Somehow West = North

The US says the attack came from the north. Nope, it came from the west. Everyone who looked at the damage photos and saw the damage said the damage showed that the attack came from the west. Furthermore there are Youtube videos out there of Saudis living to the west of the oil refineries where you can hear the sounds of the drones coming in. The Saudis state in these videos that they can see the drones coming in from the west due east towards the refineries.

In the later photos presented at the Saudi press conference, the compass on the map was actually changed to make north point towards the east so the west-facing damage would appear to be north-facing damage. They actually changed the position of their compass on the photo!

Drone Sirens are Not Cruise Missile Sirens

Also the whine you hear in the attack videos is a drone siren, not some other type of siren. It’s activated in a drone attack. It would not be activated in a cruise missile attack.

No One Shoots a Gun at a Cruise Missile

You can hear gunfire of Saudi forces shooting at the attacking objects. This proves they were drones because you can shoot at a drone with a gun. You can’t shoot at a cruise missile with a gun. No one does that. It’s on top of you as fast as you see it.

Possible Casualties in the Refinery Attack

Also Reuters reported that a witness stated that there were 15 ambulances at one refinery that was attacked, so the Saudis may be covering up some casualties.

The Saudis Point Their Radars away from the Real Threat

The US says the radars were turned to the south and west, so they did not see the swarm. Nope, they were turned towards the north and east, towards Iran. Why on Earth would the Saudis turn their radars away from their worst enemy of all, Iran, and point them towards the Houthis, whose air force the US and Saudis claim does not have any planes that are capable of attacking as far as the objects those radars are protecting?

Iran Has Stealth Technology No One Else Has, and Billions of Dollars in US Radars Are Worthless

If Iran launched 27 missiles at Saudi Arabia from their land, they would have been seen on the some of the 50 US and countless Saudi radars that are pointed right at Iran. Unless Iran has some stealth technology for drones and cruise missiles, this didn’t happen. And no one has that tech.

The US Can Hear Everything on Earth – They Even Have a Spy in Khameini’s Palace

The US says Khameini approved of the attack with the qualification of deniability. How would we know? We have spies right next to Khameini in his palace? Forget it. Obviously we have no spies next to Khameini or anyone in the Iranian leadership and we have no idea what any of them are saying anytime.

American Spies Can Hear when People Are Plotting Attacks, but They Are Somehow Unable to Warn Anyone Ahead of Time, Stop the Attacks before They Occur, or Even See Them When They Happen

Also if we are monitoring the Saudi leadership all the time with spies, wiretaps, or bugs, and we heard that they were planning this attack, why didn’t we warn the Saudis or the media or even attack the base from which they were to be launched? If we knew the attack was coming because our spies heard about it, why when Iran launched the attack, did none of our 50+ best radars on Earth see the missiles and drones? None of this makes sense.

Mike Pompeo Can Figure out Who Did Any Attack  Immediately after It Happened before any Investigation Has even Begun

Pompeo insisted that this was an Iranian attack very soon after the attack before he could have possibly known such a thing. You can tell when the US is trying to frame an innocent party for an attack someone else did (and we do this sometimes) because the patsy nation or group is blamed almost immediately after the attack, before anyone could possibly have known who did it, before any investigations. They are working off a script.

The CIA Speaks out of Both Sides of Its Mouth: Disinformation to the Media and State for the Sucker American Citizens and the Truth Internally

Lies for the people; truth for itself. The disinfo may be cooked up by the CIA. Quotes from “US intelligence sources” may be from CIA people sending disinfo to their sources in the media.

The CIA itself says different things. Internally they want to know what really happened. They don’t want to believe lies or crap. I am sure that they know that the Houthis launched this attack.

Internal CIA knowledge is sometimes leaked to a few select journalists such as Seymour Hersch. For instance, Hersch’s CIA sources told him that half of the CIA thinks a Ukrainian fighter jet shot down the M-17 jet in Ukraine, and the other half thinks it was a missile shot by Donbass rebels but not a Buk missile as the fake lie narrative goes. That is because the CIA says the rebels never had any Buk missile in Ukraine. So that is what the CIA believes internally.

But the CIA put out disinfo about this attack almost instantly after it went down when Kerry started saying the rebels shot it down with a Buk missile supplied by Russia. This was the lie story that was supposed to go out. So the CIA talks out of both sides of its mouth.

The US Can’t Keep Its Story Straight and Keeps Changing It all the Time

Another thing a fake patsy US lie to frame someone does is it often changes too fast. Pompouseo said the attack came from Iraq at first. Then he met with the Iraqis, and the story changed to launched from Iran.

When a criminal suspect keeps changing their story, we know they are probably lying or at any case their story is not to be trusted. When a victim keeps changing their story, we know that this person is either lying or at least is an unreliable victim. Typically this results in a non-prosecution of the case.

US Evidence is Vague, Unsourced, and Ultimately Never Released

Also the “intelligence material” is typically very vague and often never released. The intelligence confirming that the Donbass rebels shot down the jet has not been released to this day. That’s because there is none. Predictably the US has no evidence in this refinery attack.

Delays in the US Story Are Because They Are Fabricating a Story, and That Takes Time

Also a delay in evidence is often due to a US lie frame story. The US is “trying to find the evidence to connect Iran to this attack.” Really they are trying to fabricate the evidence that Iran did it. This often takes a while, hence the long delays in confirming the evidence.

No One Does Attacks and Tells Other People to Claim Them and No One Claims Attacks That Others Do

A few other things. Iran has never conducted an attack and then had one of its proxies claim it. Iran claims all of its attacks and denies all false claims of attacks directed at it. The Houthis have never taken credit for an attack that was actually launched by Iran. In fact, no Iranian proxy has ever claimed an attack that was launched by Iran. The proxies claim their own attacks, and they claim all of them.

Cruise Missiles Manufactured in Yemen Are Actually Iranian Weapons Made in Iran

The photo of the wreckage of a Quds-1 cruise missile in the Saudi desert appeared mysteriously on the net soon after the attack. No one knows who put it up or what it is. Houthis have used Quds-1’s to attack Saudi Arabia in the past.

Attacks That Happened a Year Ago Really Happened Yesterday

They were not used in this attack, so the photo is from earlier attack. The Quds-1 wreckage in the Saudi display being called an Iranian weapon is not an Iranian weapon but a Houthi weapon. I know the Quds-1 and the Soumar and how to tell them apart. That is absolutely a Quds-1.

Houthi Weapons Are Made in Yemen and then Smuggled back into Iran to be Fired from Iran

The Quds-1 is a Yemeni cruise missile manufactured only in Yemen in Houthi factories. According to the US a Quds-1 was used in this attack, and a Quds-1 is an Iranian weapon. That’s false right there. For this story to be true, the Houthis would have had to have made a Quds-1 cruise missile in Yemen and then Smuggled it out of Yemen and into Iran so Iranians could use it in an attack. That scenario is so absurd it is ridiculous.

Drones Used in Attacks in May Come back to Life and Are Used Again in Attacks in September

That black drone in the front of the display is apparently from a Houthi attack on a pipeline back in May. I know because there are photos of the drone used in that attack and it is this very drone. I believe the rest of the wreckage is simply wrecked drones from past Houthi attacks recently.

Alt Left: The Iranians Are Behind the Rapid Development of Drone Technology by the Houthis

From the excellent Moon on Alabama blog.

It occurs to me that the Houthis started the rapid improvement in capabilities around the time they disposed of Saleh and resolved their internal disputes. Very rapid improvement since then. It would be interesting to get to know the people behind that, making it happen. Is Seulimani in there somewhere? Nasrallah and his minions? I’ll bet.

The tech is coming directly from Iran which has dramatically ramped up their technology transfer in recent months. Hezbollah takes the new tech and helps the Houthis build drones and missiles out of it or modifies existing flying weapons.

The critical factor was the US threats to Iran. Under Obama Iran had a vested strategic interest in keeping at arms distance from Yemen – any overt help to Yemen would result in strategic threats to Iran; the risk to Iran would be too great.

After Trump pulled unilaterally out of the JCPOA and threw back ever more and mare sanctions on Iran, the strategic interest of Iran in holding off Yemen was transformed into a strategic interest in assisting Yemen as a way of putting pressure on the US.

Once the US put really high pressure on Iran and tried to cut Iranian oil exports to zero, the steady stream of technology flow to the Houthis suddenly became a mighty river, quickly leading to a huge surge in capability.

With every turn of the screw against Iran, we can clearly see step-wise advances in technology, quality, quantity, range, and performance of Houthi weapons. The timeline of Houthi advances set against the US pressures on Iran shows this with crystal clarity.

Beyond question, if Trump had never withdrawn from JCPOA the Houthi attack on Abqaiq would have been impossible.

Exactly. The only reason that refinery got attacked in the first place was due to the United States.

USA! USA! USA! USA! USA!

God patriotards are morons.

Have you noticed that ~7

One thing I like about Blacks and Hispanics is most of them are not patriotards. Patriotards are almost all White people. I don’t blame Black people for not being patriotards. This country has not been very kind to them. Why love a nation that has treated you so cruelly?

Alt Left: The US Is Lying through Their Teeth about the Refinery Attacks in Saudi Arabia

After the attacks on the Abquaiq refinery in Saudi Arabia by a drone swarm claimed by the Houthis in Yemen, the US immediately said that Iran did it. But they didn’t have any evidence. That’s because there wasn’t any because Iran didn’t do it. They said they would have to wait to gather the evidence. That means it will take a little while to manufacture the evidence, which is pretty much all we ever do when we blame an enemy party for attacks anymore.

The US and Saudi Arabia Israel are lying through their teeth about this attack trying to pin it on Iran and saying it was launched from Iran.

So far, the French, the Japanese and the Saudis themselves all state that the attack did not come from Iran. So the US is all alone with that lie. The Saudis are simply saying that Iranian weapons were used. Even that’s not true. The weaponry was probably all Houthi, albeit knockoffs from Iranian prototypes.

This is fake. Think The Maine. Think Gulf of Tonkin. Think babies on Kuwaiti incubators. The Iraqi WMD’s. Think the endless fake chemical attacks in Syria. Think the M-17 shootdown, immediately blamed on Russia-linked rebels but actually a false flag attack by Ukraine.

Most wars are started by fake attacks or false flags or falsely blamed attacks, all sort of the same thing. They need these fake attacks to have a casus belli for a war since most countries aren’t stupid enough to attack another nation in such a way as to give a casus belli for a war.

First the attacks came from an Iraqi militia base. Then after Pompouseo talked to the Iraqi government, that fake story had to be dropped and a new fake story had to be made up.

The attack changed to a launch directly from a base on Southwestern Iran. There is supposedly a satellite photo of IRGC getting ready to launch the attack from this base. It is almost surely faked.

Also they are trying to reconstruct the path of the missiles post-attack. Hey fakers, it doesn’t work that way. How about tracking the attacking objects in real time with real radar data.

In addition, the US said that Khameini approved the attack but said there had to be deniability. Well, how do they know that? They have spies next to Khameini? I doubt it.

Next we have a video a what is said to be a cruise missile flying over the head of a Kuwaiti fisherman. You can hear the sound and see the trail of what indeed does appear to be a cruise missile. The cruise missile footage could be anything. The Houthis said they did not use a cruise missile.

Next there are vague reports from the US government of Kuwaitis seeing cruise missiles flying south.I believe them. But no attack was spotted on radars from the north. Would a launch of 10 cruise missiles from Iran not have been seen by the 50 radars we have in that area and the countless Saudi radars?

Also everything was hit from the west, and the damage was rather minor. We would expect a lot more damage with a cruise missile. The US insists that the attacks came from the north. But all of the damage is on the west side.

Further there are a number of videos from Saudis who live west of the refinery. They show the sounds of drones coming in from the west. These witnesses report that they saw drones flying in from the west headed east towards the refinery. The Saudi radars all point to the north and east towards Iran which makes an attack from the west likely.

Next there is a report that the Saudis shot down one of the cruise missiles. No word from the Saudis on that, so that’s dubious.

Next we have mysterious footage of a downed cruise missile in the desert of Saudi Arabia uploaded by unknown persons. First of all, that’s a Houthi cruise missile, not an Iranian cruise missile. And no one knows who put those pics up or even when they were taken. I think they are from an earlier Houthi attack.

More importantly why would Iran use Houthi cruise missiles to attack Saudi Arabia? That’s just stupid.

Next we have a display of what are supposedly Iranian weapons by the Saudis. There is a lot of wreckage of what looks like drones in that footage. No one, including me, knows that that wreckage is a picture of. They’re drones, but they could be anyone’s drones.

In the rear there is the wreckage of two cruise missiles said to be Iranian cruise missiles. I assure you 10

First of all, Iran is not stupid enough to do an attack like that. They would have to be insane to do something that suicidal. Also Iran does not do attacks and then have its proxies claim them. Iran claims its attacks. The proxies claim their own attacks. The proxies never claim attacks that Iran really did. It hasn’t happened once.

I will tell you though that a unified command has been set up in Iran recently with Iran, IRGC, the Houthis, the Iraqi militias, Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah. I am not sure if Syria has a seat at the table. So in a sense they are all one organ. An attack by one of them was sort of done by them all in way. But I doubt if Iran had much of a direct role in this attack in any way, shape, or form. Maybe they knew it was going to happen and signed off on it. The Houthis do whatever the Hell they want. They don’t take orders from Iran.

Here is how it works, ok? All of those Houthi missiles and drones were originally built from Iranian prototypes. They take the Iranian weapon and modify it somewhat. Who modifies it? Hezbollah! All of those weapons built on Iranian prototypes are being built in Yemen by Hezbollah who have a lot of drone/missile experts. Hezbollah work alongside the Houthi to make these missiles.

All of these drones, missiles, rockets, etc. are made right in Yemen. Keep in mind that the Houthi is really the Yemeni military. 7

Hezbollah advisors may also be helping the Houthi on the battlefield. Iranians are probably not helping to make the missiles, but they are smuggling the prototypes in via small boats. Also the drones can be launched from these Iranian boats to fly into Houthi territory and land, delivering them in that way. There may be a few Iranian advisors on the battlefield.

After the initial models are made, I am not sure if Hezbollah continues to make the subsequent models or if the Houthis operate off a schematic. These models are being modified and perfected all the time, surely with the help of Hezbollah.

Everyone is looking the wrong way. When you think of “Houthi capabilities”, you have to add in “Hezbollah capabilities” to that equation. “Houthi capabilities” are actually “Houthi + Hezbollah capabilities”.

The Houthi immediately claimed this attack and provided massive details about how it was done. They had previously launched 100 attacks on Saudi Arabia.

Occam’s Razor says the simplest and most elegant solution is that the Houthis did it exactly as claimed. There’s no need for far-fetched conspiracy theories such as the US and others are putting out about these attacks.

Alt Left: Labour Isn’t Working: A Radical Program for the Party to Reacquaint Itself with Victory

A most interesting text out of the UK but a group calling itself Alt Left. Though I don’t agree with them on everything, in a broad sense what they are arguing for is more or less within the broad scope of what I had in mind when I founded the Alt Left. This group calls itself Alt Left Publishing.

I had to cringe at some of the more rightwing things this group wants Labour to do, but the fact is that Labour needs to win elections, and if they have to be a bit more conservative to do that, well so be it. As long as we are not electing Blairites, Labour will always be much better than the Conservatives, and UKIP doesn’t look very good either (sort of neoliberal Trump Republicans-lite).

As usual with the Democratic Party here, the Left is shooting itself in the foot with massive overreach by being wildly SJW in ways that the majority of people do not support, and by being fantatically anti-immigration when 7

Labour is getting massacred on this issue, as many working class folks are anti-immigrant and feel that immigrants are taking their jobs and in addition, these people feel that they are losing a sense of their country.

Working class Labour voters are left on economics while being rather socially conservative, and that’s the Alt Left right there. What’s the point of alienating working class voters, screaming racist at them, shoving hundreds of thousands of unwanted immigrants down their throat, and bombarding them with SJW extremism that most of them reject as too radical?

As the piece points out all this is doing is making more and more of these socially conservative working class Labour voters defect to UKIP, mostly over the immigration issue.

Labour is also alienating people by being openly unpatriotic. I’m not a patriotard myself, but I do want the best for my country, so I suppose I love my country more than a corporate types who deliberately harm our country. I certainly don’t want to do my country any harm! I may disagree with domestic and especially foreign policy, but I’m not so angry about it that I want to screw the country over. I mean I have to live here too you know.

At any rate, the people around Corbyn are openly unpatriotic and do not pay proper deference to national symbols and institutions. Most British people are patriots, particularly socially conservative working class folks.

While I love Hezbollah myself and even have a soft spot for Irish Republicans, most British people despise both Hezbollah and in particular the IRA. The latter is heavily due to anti-Catholic sentiment in mostly Protestant UK, a tendency that goes back to at least the 19th Century to “anti-papist” and “anti-Romist” sentiment at that time. At any rate it does no good when Corbyn lauds these groups. All it does is create more UKIP voters.

What’s the point? Politics is after all the art of the possible.

While I love Jeremy Corbyn of course, most British people dislike him, and Labour has been shedding votes since he took over. It doesn’t matter whether I love Corbyn or not. What matters is that most British people hate him. And a leader hated by most of the population should definitely go in favor of someone more popular.

There are other good suggestions here about being tough on crime and the causes of crime. This is an issue near and dear to socially conservative working class voters, and Labour, like the Democratic Party, suffers from a soft on crime problem. That’s not necessary and anyway, crime hurts the working class.

This is a very long document, 12,000 words and 25 pages. I edited it quite heavily. The Alt Left Publishing website can be reached by clicking on the title below.

Happy reading!

Labour Isn’t Working: A Radical Program for the Party to Reacquaint Itself with Victory

Labour Isn’t Working in many ways lays the foundations for the Alt-Left. It establishes fundamental principles like the importance of group identity, the need to restrain the free market, and rejection of radical social justice.

It’s my view that whether your interest in politics is keen or fair-weather, you’ll be intrigued by the book, though I do recommend it particularly strongly to Labour party members and to those interested in the Alt Left and what it stands for.

The transcript can be read in full below, or alternatively downloaded for free here.

If you’d like to purchase the text in E-book format you can do so here.

T. James

Cover JPEG

Preface

The modern Labour party is out of touch with the working class whom it exists to represent, and many of whom turn increasingly to the Tories and UKIP for answers. Labour has been too scared to address immigration, too complacent to address jobs and too divided to address Europe.

The working class is dead. Long gone are the days of the Welsh miners’ choir and the workplace union meetings. The flat cap is worn now by avant-garde members of the rural middle class, men too old to shake a habit, and metropolitan hipsters.

Blackface isn’t the inevitable consequence of a day spent hewing coal from the center of the earth, but is now a racial faux pas. Where once a hard day’s work involved forging world-class steel, for many it’s now manning a call center in order to best resolve Mrs Smith’s broadband issues.

The modern economy necessitates that even the bricklayer has his own local advertising, Facebook page, and website. He doesn’t consider himself part of a homogeneous working class, but instead an entrepreneur, and rightly so.

The production and harvesting of real resources has been shamelessly outsourced to third-world countries. We allow the rest of the world to grow our food, forge our steel, and sew our shirts, and in doing so, we not only deprive our own people of work, but we impose it on others without the benefit of health and safety, a minimum wage, regulations, or any semblance of automation.

Britain’s economy is overly reliant on the financial sector, leaving us vulnerable to the next U.S.-born crash. Where people once took pride in their work as builders, now they are resigned to employment in this coffee chain or that.

Nationalism now rises in tandem with uncontrolled migration leading to names like Le Pen, Wilders, and Farage taking the establishment by storm. What appeared to be a consistently declining level of global violence has begun to reverse itself in recent years, as the wildfire of extremism continues to ravage the Middle East, prompting the worst migrant crisis yet seen in human history.

Humanity is on the precipice of upheaval, there are new questions, and few answers. Left-wing parties across the West are struggling to rally support, caught between the relentless march of globalization and the toll it takes on workers the world over.

The British Labour party is no exception to this trend, and its inability to mount a competent opposition to the government is enabling a period of unchecked Conservative rule. Exerting scrutiny on the executive is essential to ensure that its policies reflect national needs and not self-serving ends. Thus it is in the interests of both Conservative and Labour supporters that the Labour party resurface as a government in waiting and not persist as a party of protest.

In the wake of the 2015 shock general election defeat, long-time backbencher and maverick Jeremy Corbyn, assumed power in the Labour party. Propelled by an anti-establishment appeal and left-wing policies thought to have been consigned to history, he easily defeated his three opponents.

His unprecedented victory prompted a surge in party membership, from some 200,000 to over 500,000, making it notable for being the largest left-wing party in Europe. It appeared that the man to reverse Labour’s fortune had made himself known.

Yet at the time of writing, far from arresting the party’s decline, the Corbyn administration has only exacerbated it. Polling shows Labour now trail the Conservatives by as much as 1

Owing to resignations, the shadow cabinet is more of a skeleton crew, much of it manned by newly elected and inexperienced MPs.  The vast membership, which was seen as the formation of a campaigning vanguard, has since been shown to be in large part idle, indicative of a niche opinion in the country, and a thorn in the side of the parliamentary party.

That’s not to say that Jeremy Corbyn killed the Labour party. He merely sits atop its coffin. The party has been in a state of managed decline since de-industrialization stripped it of a clear reason to exist. The program detailed herein will therefore not lay blame exclusively at Corbyn’s door, though it will do so where appropriate, but instead will lay blame where deserved, and offer remedies where needed.

It’s not enough to insist that the electorate are deficient or suffering from a false consciousness when they reject you time after time. Nor is it good enough to abandon the values upon which the party was founded in order to pursue public opinion at the expense of all else.

Instead the party must align its core principles with the will of the people, conceding ground on either side where necessary. It’s essential that in order to recover, the party enter a period of reflection, and in doing so it must produce a meaningful answer to the question so many are asking: “Just what is the Labour party for?”.

If it’s to defend the NHS, then that’s an insufficient reason for the electorate to eject a sitting government. No doubt the creation of the NHS was Labour’s finest hour, but to relentlessly invoke its name at every public rally like a war cry is to cement in the mind of the public the idea of Labour as a one-trick pony.

If it’s to be a nicer version of the Tories, this too is inadequate. Aside from the fact that the Liberal Democrats already occupy that ground, the public at large will always opt for competency over compassion.

It’s vital that should Labour ever seek to win again, it must first rediscover its identity. It should reforge its raison d’être from an anti-Tory think tank to a government in waiting, able to steady the nation through what promises to be a turbulent future. Drawing from various tendencies within the party, significant research, personal experience, and observable reality, what follows is a detailed roadmap for Labour’s return to government.

Chapter I – The New Working Class

Labour once had a core demographic on which they could rely: the working class – a monolithic block who worked almost entirely in heavy industry. Commonly united in tight-knit communities centered on a factory or pit, they were class conscious and proudly so.

To inherit one’s father’s job was not just an expectation but a de facto right. The membership of the Labour party and consequently its leadership still holds to these antiquated views of what it means to be a worker. So long as they fail to recognize the nature and needs of modern workers, they will fail to produce policies that appeal to them.

This isn’t a failure exclusive to the left of the party. After all, Blair did once assert that, “We’re all middle class now”, a view still manifest among those of his ilk who exist in substantial number within the parliamentary party.

It’s not so much that this view denies the existence of the poverty-stricken or the manual worker but that it sidelines them. It relies on those people to vote for Labour consistently and is unconcerned when they stay at home, since most such people live within Labour safe seats won on a minimal turnout.

This leads us to a divergence in approach: one that caters to a romanticized and now largely deceased working class and the other which overlooks it entirely. To portray the party as these two schools of thought and nothing but would be disingenuous, but they do have the most to say on the subject. The so-called ‘soft left’ offers little thought on the matter, and the Kendallites have been too preoccupied with plots in recent times to set out any clear views at all.

In order to identify those whom Labour must bring into the fold, we must first establish those who vote for it currently:

Old Labourites. Blue-collar chaps for whom the memories of Thatcherism are still all too vivid. Formerly miners and manufacturers, many now live in the deprived post-industrial communities of Wales, the Midlands, the North, and Scotland. Increasingly, their inherent social conservatism and skepticism regarding immigration has led them to vote Conservative and UKIP in increasing numbers.

Londoners. Labour enjoys ever-growing support within London, a crowd often misidentified as being part of the ‘metropolitan elite’. While much of this demographic could be characterized by the sort of person who hangs a picture of Marx in their parents’ Kensington 4-bed, such people are a minority. Labour’s London support base can be differentiated by its social liberalism, particularly in its concern for LGBT rights, feminism, and police practices.

Public sector workers. Over 56.

Ethnic minorities. This demographic can be more or less divided between those of African and Asian descent. The black British demographic is concentrated predominantly in London and Birmingham, the product of a generation who were invited to the UK to rebuild in the wake of the Second World War.

Now living in overwhelmingly deprived communities, over 7

As these groups continue to move out into the suburbs and expand their businesses, it’s likely their transition from being staunch Labourites to reliably Conservative will only accelerate.

Entryists. Often hailing from Trotskyist outfits, their influence is at a peak within the Labour party since the days of militant expulsions. Such people are self-professed associates of groups such as the Alliance for Workers Liberty and the Socialist Workers Party. Though not great in number, it seems Tom Watson had it right when he suggested there are some “old hands twisting young wrists”.

This coalition cannot win elections; it lost in 2010, 2015, and it will do so again in 2020, if not before. Where previously Labour had a clear platform that spoke directly to workers the country over, they have so far failed to adapt to the new nature of work in the 21st century.

Talk of workers’ rights to the 4.6 million self-employed[ii] means precisely nothing. When Jeremy Corbyn gives speeches about Keir Hardy, he might as well be reading from Istanbul’s phonebook for all the relevance it has to the voters he’s attempting to reach.

This sort of rhetoric would suggest that Labour now stands on a platform of reviving heavy industry when in fact no such plans exist. It’s evident that such populist polices are not incompatible with electoral success in modern times.

We can look to Donald Trump’s rise to power as evidence of this. A campaign punctuated with the cry – “We’re gonna put the miners back to work!” – roars which carried the rust belt states and Trump himself to an electoral college victory.

While such an agenda should never constitute the headline of a Labour campaign, there is room for it to form a fractional element of a wider economic plan. With the benefits of automation and clean coal, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t create new jobs in coal, steel and manufacturing: industries whose revival would be predicated on a new regime of tariffs and public infrastructure spending.

Though Labour are often happy to ingratiate themselves with the attendees of events like the Tolpuddle Martyrs’ Festival and the Durham Miners’ Gala, they have nothing substantial to offer on the issue of heavy industry yet are content to bask in the romanticism of it.

While the decline of the British steel industry predates recent governments, it now faces a crisis that threatens to end its very existence. The proximate cause of this crisis is China dumping its own steel at below cost price on the world market. This is comparable to a supermarket opening next to a corner shop and offering loaves of bread for 10p.

Inevitably, the former will put the latter out of business, and then, when it’s free of competition, it is able to raise its prices with impunity. Similarly, if we surrender ourselves to a reliance on Chinese steel, we’ll face higher prices in the long run. Failing to protect them would deliver a coup de grâce to the last bastions of our national manufacturing industries, prompting the decline of communities and our capacity for self-sufficiency.

It’s for these reasons Labour would do well to adopt policies to the effect of the following:

  • Introduce tariffs on Chinese steel to such a point that it becomes unaffordable in the UK.
  • Lobby other European nations to form a steel block, not dissimilar from the Common Agricultural Policy, which will allow for free trade in steel amongst nations with comparable wage levels and health and safety standards.
  • Legislate that all public works must use British steel with appropriate caveats (e.g. certain types of steel are not produced in the UK).
  • Cut the disproportionately large foreign aid budget from 0.

As the supply of steel drops, the free market will necessitate investment leading to the construction of new steel plants, not only in the UK but across Europe. It’s an excellent example of triangulating socialism with capitalism and reaping the rewards of the free market in the 21st century.

Now, I don’t suggest that such policies should be the focal point of a Labour manifesto by any means, on the contrary, they should be towards the bottom of the list, but they most certainly should be on that list.

Such a policy, though necessary, is not an election winner, and speaks only to a specific group of people. It should be brought about in tandem with policies that resonate with the 4.6 million self-employed individuals who are in dire need of strong representation.

These people are more inclined to identify as entrepreneurs than as part of the working class. Mechanics and carpenters are now business people not proles. They don’t care about the history of struggle, or talk of how the EU is essential because it ‘protects workers’ rights’ which is nonsense in its own right, but they do want to have constant work with good pay and little else.

Indeed, until pressure from the Tory-supporting press prompted a u-turn, the Chancellor meant to levy upon self-employed people an even higher tax rate. In the wake of such a clear display of contempt towards the self-employed by the Conservatives, no better opportunity exists for Labour to launch an appeal to white van men the country over.

So, what problems do self-employed people face, and what policy platforms can appeal to them?

By definition they don’t have an employer from whom they can claim sick, maternity, or paternity pay, their work can be inconsistent, and they must continually reinvest their earnings to facilitate the survival of their trade or business.

Such policies should include:

  • Cutting taxes for the self-employed, allowing them to free up income they can use to cover the cost of sick pay and other work-related benefits (alternatively, introduce self-employment working tax credits where feasible).
  • Lowering VAT so that consumer spending increases, thus pushing up demand for new wardrobes, landscaped gardens, vehicle modifications, and so on.
  • Forcing the banks that we taxpayers bailed out to provide loans where feasible to self-employed individuals at a special low interest rate for the purpose of buying tools, refurbishing workshops, or taking on trainees.
  • Sending apprentices to work with the self-employed rather than with huge multinational chains, where they exist as little more than wage slaves.

Again, such policies won’t provoke a landslide electoral victory, but they are essential to attract to the Labour cause the sort of voters who are not only needed to win an election but whose interests lie in the Labour camp; the clue is in the name, after all.

But policy isn’t enough. We can’t expect people who work two jobs and maintain other responsibilities besides to read complex manifestos and pay attention to policy documents – to do so would be an unreasonable burden. Instead we need to talk in a language that ordinary people understand. That is to say: we should speak like normal people.

In 1917 the Bolsheviks condensed a complex economic program into three simple words: ‘PEACE, LAND, BREAD’. It was a message that was understood by every echelon of Russian society without exception. This is no means to advocate Bolshevism, but it serves to demonstrate that exactly 100 years ago, without the benefit of social media, YouTube, spin doctors, and hashtags, it was possible to create easily digestible slogans that summarize a policy platform.

Yet somehow the modern Labour party is entirely incapable of developing a slogan, sentence, paragraph, or message of any length or format that appeals even remotely to its core vote or to those it needs to incorporate into it.

In 2015 Labour produced “A Better Plan for a Better Future” as its campaign slogan. This inspired precisely nobody and means exactly nothing. Given that unemployment in 2015 was 1.9 million[iii], how about this: “Labour Will Give You a High-paying Job”. Or with a little more finesse “Higher Pay, More Jobs”.

At the end of the day, despite the Twitterati’s various obsessions, jobs are the primary concern of most voters, and they have been and should continue to be at the forefront of any Labour campaign. Moreover, nobody speaks the language of the 60’s union bosses or the Marxist Politburo; talk of ‘comrades’ and ‘struggle’ should be consigned to the dustbin of history unless in the context of a historical discussion.

This chapter has thus far dealt with the need for and the avenue by which the traditional northern post-industrial vote can be shored up, and how best the 4.6 million self-employed can begin to be brought across to Labour in greater numbers, as well as a brief mention of language and communication which will be dealt with in greater depth in a subsequent chapter.

With all that said, there remains one ever-growing and crucial voting block who cannot bring themselves to vote Labour for reasons easily condensed into one word.: Immigration.

Blue-collar blokes are sick of being called racists for daring to criticize immigration. There is nothing left wing or liberal about the free movement of people; to the contrary it’s a right–wing, neoliberal idea that disproportionately favors employers.

The Labour party has no need to become radically nationalist, but by God it should be patriotic. It should fly the Union Flag and St. George’s Cross at every speech and every office, and the same for the Welsh and Scottish flags. But above all, Labour should call for a points-based immigration system that guarantees people the world over get a fair shake at entering the country on the basis of having the skills we need in the economy.

Let’s take India’s best scientists and China’s best students and do so on the understanding that they will commit themselves to the country for a specific amount of time. Let’s not feel obliged to take unskilled workers, of which we already have a surplus, in order to further drive down the wages of construction site laborers, baristas, and private hire drivers.

So, here’s a ‘radical’ suggestion for a slogan “British Jobs for British Workers” the words of one Gordon Brown as recently as 2007. This is the sort of slogan that should be plastered so thickly on the walls that they begin to be structurally integral to the building they occupy. Like communication, immigration will be dealt with in detail in a subsequent chapter, but in relation to appealing to the forgotten working class, it must be a cornerstone.

Over 900,000 people are apprentices[iv], mostly young women – an  ideal demographic for Labour voters. Since an apprentice in their first year is entitled to a below-subsistence wage of £3.40 an hour, and those most likely to enroll in an apprenticeship are poorer to begin with, it’s a total no-brainer: Labour should be promising every apprentice in the country a pay rise.

To those who suggest this would be irresponsible spending, we’ll be enjoying the benefit within two years of not having to send the EU hundreds of millions of pounds a year, of which a fraction could be spent on improving apprentices’ pay.

Here’s another groundbreaking slogan “A Pay Rise for Apprentices”. It’s time the unions with their multi-million bound budgets and 6-figure wage packets stopped resting on their laurels and actively began unionizing young apprentices the nation over. An offer of free membership for a year would be hard to refuse.

Others talk of an ‘anti-boss’ brand of populism, but as well as being counterproductive, since we absolutely want bosses to vote for Labour, time has rendered it irrelevant. We now live in an age where peoples’ bosses are oftentimes a relative or a friend, where this isn’t the case, it’s rare that employees don’t know their manager or supervisor outside of the workplace on a casual basis, at the very least as acquaintances.

Any anti-business or anti-boss talk cannot be part of a modern Labour party’s rhetoric or policy. Where there is room for populism, it’s anti-corporate populism.

Let’s make sure Google, Starbucks, and Facebook pay the taxes they’re duty bound to, given that without a taxpayer-funded education system they would have no employees, without the NHS they would have to provide insurance, without public roads they would have no means of haulage, and without internet and phone-line infrastructure they would have no means to even exist.

From the gains made by appropriating the correct levels of tax owed by such corporations, let’s move these profits into delivering tax cuts for small business owners, incentivize them to take on new employees, and expand their trades. It’s by means such as these that Labour can successfully convert traditional Conservative voters simply by offering them a better deal.

We can also reach the middle classes. For the first time in their history, junior doctors went out on strike, and did so on several occasions in the wake of Jeremy Hunt’s punishing reform proposals. Legal professionals are in the process of a mass exodus from the legal aid program, with Scottish wages having dropped over 2

While an opportunity clearly presents itself to launch an appeal to traditional middle class Conservative voters, the Labour party is too embroiled with internal affairs to mount any effective effort.

On this point of traditional Conservative voters, it’s time to speak to farmers once again. We will soon have control over farming subsidies, let’s outbid the Tories on this issue and in addition offer an innovative rural apprenticeship program in order to train future generations in the ways of agriculture, while also aiding overworked and beleaguered farmers.

Furthermore, let’s force supermarkets to pay a fair price for dairy, meat, and vegetables, while subsidizing the cost to the consumer, paid for by an equivalent tax on sugary foods in order to ensure farms thrive while still protecting consumers and simultaneously improving the health of the nation.

Once free from the Common Fisheries Policy, let’s put our fisherman back to work and become the fishing capital of Europe. It makes no sense to subsidize corporations through working tax credits. Labour should promise an increase in the minimum wage and use the welfare savings to fund new infrastructure in our now-decrepit seaside towns.

Through this dual approach, we can not only increase the quality of life of those left behind by globalism while once again making British seaside towns worthy tourist attractions, but also bring back into the fold voters who have long since deserted Labour for UKIP.

Through these methods, we can expand our ever-shrinking coalition to include people from all walks of life, while still staying true to Labour values in a modern and relevant way. Let’s go forward in lockstep with farmers, fishermen, carpenters, shopkeepers, laborers, dockers, lorry drivers, and lawyers.

Some may ponder, then, might this not alienate the metropolitan middle classes, who as of this moment form the last bastion of the Labour bloc vote? Well, the biggest genuine issue for such people is the absurdly high house prices which keep people off the property ladder to middle age, and some of the highest rents in the world.

All the while we spend £25 billion every single year on housing benefit[vi], money which goes straight into landlords’ pockets, (not that we don’t want landlords to prosper).

It’s time to announce a national house building program that takes the money straight out of the housing benefit budget and puts it into building 250,000 homes a year until the housing shortage becomes a surplus, at which point the free market will dictate rents, house prices will return to affordable levels, and the UK will once again become a home-owning democracy.

This is how we can offer concrete solutions to clear issues that will resonate with the 8 million people who live in London. Such a program would also lead to the employment of hundreds of thousands of people, prompting a higher tax revenue and increased spending in local economies throughout the country.

In summary, in order for Labour to properly construct policy that appeals to the working class, it must first understand how the working class has evolved over the past century. It should adopt a dual approach that halts the decline of traditional manufacturing and shores up our export market, while simultaneously engendering job growth in emerging markets, with an eye to appealing to those whose new nature of work leaves them without a natural party to vote for.

This program should incorporate the good work done by Ed Miliband in formulating policies to re-introduce security into the workplace, particularly in dealing with ‘zero-hour’ contracts, while also acknowledging that such policies do not have a broad enough appeal amongst swing voters. Labour must push for full, proud, and secure employment. By these means, Labour will rally all elements of the modern working class to their cause. 

Chapter II Foreign Policy and the Military

Foreign policy is not an election winner. Even when Blair’s hated decision to invade Iraq prompted the largest marches ever seen in the UK, the Labour government comfortably held on to power in the 2005 elections.

However, it’s important to remain principled and strive always to do what is right and best, both for the people of our nation and for those abroad but never at the expense of either. Moreover, Labour faces challenges from the left, notably the Liberal Democrats and the Greens, whenever it assumes an overtly pro-war posture.

There is scarcely a sentient being on earth who still believes Iraq, Libya, or Afghanistan were successful interventions, and for all the times it’s been said, it’s clear we haven’t learnt the lessons of the past. The Labour party should make it clear that they will not involve themselves in foreign military entanglements that do not directly concern the security of the United Kingdom and its allies.

British blood should not be expended to remove a foreign dictator only for that nation’s people to find liberation give way to an unimaginably worse kind of tyranny as has happened when ISIS filled the vacuum that Western bombs created.

Having said that, it is crucial that Labour demonstrate that it does not take security lightly, and its commitment to having first-class armed forces should be clear to everyone.

We have a Conservative government that has sacked soldiers before they could claim their full pensions, moved hundreds of thousands of positions into the reserve army, has aircraft carriers that we can’t land aircraft on, and now, most bizarrely, is offering troops the option of not serving in combat zones in return for a pay cut.

In uncertain global times, Labour should put itself forward as a patriotic party committed to the primary duty of the state: the protection of its own people. It’s essential that a commitment to at least

The latter is contentious, particularly within Labour circles, but there are some universal truths on this matter. Firstly, Trident has been commissioned, and should Labour win power, they will inherit the system no matter what their policy is. Secondly, the majority of the population are in favor of nuclear weapons, and confusion on the issue only allows the Tories to portray Labour as a threat to national security, philosophical arguments about MAD aside.

It’s also right that we reverse the horrible mistreatment suffered by our veterans. No individual who has laid their life on the line for the nation should be allowed to sleep on the streets, and as part of the aforementioned house building program, there should be guaranteed homes for veterans with subsidized mortgages, a cost to be taken from the

There should also be jobs in the public sector reserved for them, particularly in the police and border forces. It’s my view that the treatment of veterans is a legitimate use of the term ‘military spending’.

Our foreign aid spending is disproportionate, badly allocated, and unsustainable. We are running a budget deficit of £40 billion, and continue to borrow more money to spend abroad, often sponsoring foreign militaries in proxy wars, or putting money into the pocket of despots to secure exploitative trade deals.

After the United States of America, we are the second biggest foreign aid donor on the planet in real terms. We spend $18 billion compared to the U.S. spending of $31 billion[vii]. That is over half of their expenditure despite being significantly less than half the size of their economy.

There are many cases in which it is not only right but morally incumbent upon us as a nation to send funds and resources abroad, to combat Ebola as a recent example.

But setting an annual target of 0.

Foreign aid does a lot of good, and where it does so it should continue to do so, but where reasonable savings can be made, this is exactly the course of action that should be pursued. The liberal, Guardian–reading, mocha-sipping elites will tweet furiously in response to such a suggestion, as if there’s something essential about the budget being set at 0.

It’s important to ignore these people, whose numbers appear  more significant online, as they represent a minority as has been shown time and time again, with only 1 in 4 supporting the current foreign aid policy[viii].

For those who suggest that giving money to space-program-pushing India will somehow engender good relations with developing countries, I’d suggest we could better build relations by ceasing to hinder their economic growth through climate regulation (with caveats) and ending the practice of Western and Chinese companies exploiting the developing countries’ natural resources.

We currently face the worst refugee crisis the world has yet known, and as a party, people, and species, we have a duty to help those in need. In the immediate future, we should accept lone child refugees and house them with willing volunteers in the UK.

Subsequent to this, we should quiz every local council in the country and see what facilities they can spare to house other refugees, prioritizing families. However, there are 60 million displaced people globally and counting. The UK cannot effectively double its population by accepting every single individual – even

Thus, longer-term solutions must be found, and they begin with rich Middle Eastern countries which have so far allowed the burden to be shouldered by their neighbors like Lebanon as well as Western nations, namely Germany.

It is time we lobbied Saudi Arabia, to whom we sell jets and whose pilots we train in order to better fly them, we gave a free ride when they invaded Bahrain, and continue to do so as they fight in Yemen killing civilians with British bombs, and whose disgusting head-chopping record gives ISIS a run for their money.

This is not a suggestion to cut ties with the Saudis or the UAE, but given the support both militarily and diplomatically that we provide for them, it’s reasonable to assume we can make demands of them: and if ever there was a need to, it is now. These countries should be taking in great numbers of refugees. They have the infrastructure; they just lack the will.

Further to this, the foreign aid budget should be used to contribute to a wider transnational program to build U.N.-protected safe zones across the Middle East, to prevent refugees making the treacherous journey across the Mediterranean, which in itself will save thousands of lives but also to keep them safe from terrorism and keep them fed, watered, and sheltered until such time that they can return to their country or region of origin.

The geopolitical landscape has suffered a seismic shift in the past year alone, and upcoming European elections look to continue that trend. The long and short of the matter is that we have distanced ourselves from our European neighbors so long as their current rulers last anyway, and thus we must move closer to our historic allies in the U.S.

However, Jeremy Corbyn (perhaps out of some need for the adoration of the echo chamber of his cult of no personality) is making a frequent habit of attacking President Trump vocally, viciously and publicly. He’s joined in such attacks by other high-profile liberals, notably the speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow.

When the Cameron government shamelessly courted the Chinese into buying out our public infrastructure, John Bercow was front and center in welcoming Xi Jinping to address both houses of Parliament.

Yet in a stunningly hypocritical fashion which must require Olympic levels of mental gymnastics to justify, Bercow has come out against Trump addressing Parliament and intends to block him from doing so, all the while being supported in these efforts by the leader of the Labour party. Part of the problem is the disingenuous hysteria around Trump that you’ll find in the Guardian, Mirror or indy100.

But putting that aside, even a blind man can see that it’s absolutely within British interests to foster closer cooperation and trade with the U.S.A., the biggest economy in the world, which also has in common with us in language, culture, and history.  In fact, for anybody who considers themselves on the left, a closer relationship with Trump can only be a good thing for world peace, given his thus-far successful moves towards détente with Russia.

On this point, there’s no need to paint Putin as the eternal bogeyman. There are elements of his governance which we can all criticize from one angle or another, but to invoke the words of a separate J. C. for a moment, “Those without sin should cast the first stone”.

The domestic policies of Russia are entirely an issue for the Russian people, and continuing to burden Russia with ever worsening sanctions not only destroys diplomatic relations but is mutually harmful for both our economies. Let’s work with Trump and Putin to defeat ISIS, and in doing so we will position ourselves closer to their ears to best influence them on any human rights issues we find significant.

We claim ownership of an island over 7,000 miles away from our shores on the basis that its citizens voted in a referendum to remain British. This is no bad thing and we should continue to respect the right to self-determination.

However, when those in Crimea, who are 6

This is made even more bizarre by the fact Crimea was part of Russia as recently as 1954, when Khrushchev gave it to Ukraine, and now over 60 years on, it’s reasonable that its inhabitants would rather unite themselves to a superpower rather than a failed state.

Some will surely cry ‘appeasement’ to the idea that we should improve relations with Russia. To those people, I say: compromise is essential in international relations, we can’t preach to the world how they should live and operate, and it’s arrogant and pseudo-supremacist to try and push our liberal democratic model on every culture and people of the earth.

That’s not to mention that Putin did little when we invaded Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, supported French action in Mali, and imposed sanctions against their Iranian allies, yet liberals appear indignant at any suggestion that the Russians be allowed the same freedom in their international actions.

That’s not to say we shouldn’t assume a strong posture – we absolutely should – which is one of the reasons this text has hitherto advocated the maintenance of Trident and spending of

Working closely with our American allies, we should aim to maintain peace through strength, but this is by no means mutually exclusive with closer cooperation with Russia, with whom we should be seeking to strike trade deals, closer ties, and better relations. In short, we should make allies, not enemies, wherever possible.

Most people aren’t concerned with international relations. They want food on their table, a roof over their heads, and enough disposable income to live a good life. However, it will never be the case that Jeremy Corbyn could be elected Prime Minister on an anti-American ticket.

It’s a simple truism that the U.S. is a crucial ally, and to worsen our relations in the context of Brexit would leave the UK essentially isolated. Trump’s lewd comments about women are not a hill Labour should be dying on, nor a hill they should have even assumed a position atop in the first instance.

Instead Labour should have a foreign policy that doesn’t indulge in 3-dimensional chess and virtue signalling but instead sends a very clear message. Labour will be second to none in defense of the nation, second to none in rebuilding relations, and unwilling to expend British blood or treasure in foreign wars that do not concern us.

In Europe, let’s form bilateral trade agreements and maintain the same standard of intelligence sharing as exists today, both of which are perfectly possible without power sharing in a technocratic bureaucracy.

The upshot of this in messaging terms is that Labour should state loud and clear that Labour will keep you safe, prioritize our own citizens, and maintain a humanitarian outlook on global affairs. Little else is necessary, and Corbyn’s famous hand-holding with the IRA and Hamas are enough to set him up for a decisive defeat in any British election.

Chapter III – Immigration

Immigration became a taboo subject in the realm of political discourse with the dawn of the Blair Age. Conversation on the matter was shut down, and dissidents were branded racists, outcasts, and forced into silence. A mixture of concern and outrage boiled up amongst those left behind by New Labour, leading to the return of two British National Party candidates in the European Elections of 2009.

Fortunately, both of those vile individuals have since lost their seats and faded into obscurity, with those voters now opting to side with the far more moderate UKIP. Nigel Farage single-handedly put immigration at the center of British politics, and his influence led to a vote to leave the European Union, within which the primary concern amongst Out voters was immigration.

This had been a sleeping giant for some time, and Farage was able to awaken it. However, even now in a post-Brexit world, the issue of immigration is still taboo for many, particularly in the mainstream media. It’s rare that anyone advocating a merit-based immigration system as opposed to no controls at all isn’t branded a racist by a ‘Question Time’ panelist or political opponent.

It’s an issue that’s particularly pernicious on university campuses and in inner cities. In the former, anyone to the right of Chairman Mao on the issue is considered Hitler’s earthly avatar, and in the latter, it’s a common occurrence to find your trip through Central London punctuated with stalls of the Socialist Workers Party distributing leaflets that read along of the lines of ‘Let all refugees in now! Stop racism!’.

Speaking of the SWP, whilst Labour seems curious about its own credibility gap, meanwhile its own shadow chancellor is giving interviews to the SWP[x], so whoever is running the Labour PR machine should enjoy the ‘benefit’ of instant dismissal.

The fact that the views of a tiny vocal minority are over-represented on television and online media makes people scared to air their true opinions, only taking action within the security and anonymity of the ballot box. Over 7

Overwhelmingly, the country is dissatisfied with current levels of immigration. This includes Black and minority ethnic voters of all stripes who believe the number of immigrants should be reduced, and they do so by sizeable majorities[xii].

It’s pertinent to mention that immigration is disproportionately a concern for the working classes, and many of them have fled Labour, leading UKIP to be the main challenger to Labour in a great many constituencies in the 2015 election. Although it’s proven difficult for UKIP to directly take seats from Labour, there are two problems that this bleeding of voters poses.

The first is that it will lead the Labour vote in northern communities to be split with UKIP, thus allowing a Tory candidate to take a seat with as little as 3

We are in the process of leaving the European Union, and thus we will no longer be shackled to the free movement of labor which has given every citizen of the EU the right to live and work in the UK. However, neither the Conservatives nor Labour have made clear the path ahead.

What better opportunity then for Labour to appeal to its forgotten voters, take back the defectors, and win over Conservatives by proposing a strict points–based,Australian-style immigration system. Let’s legislate in order to ensure that only immigrants who possess the skills and resources we need have the ability to settle and work in this country.

Let’s mandate that immigrants should have an excellent grasp of the English language, not just because such a skill is essential (particularly in the medical profession) but also because it will ensure universally beneficial integration.

At the same time, we should make it clear that this country already has enough unskilled workers, unemployed, and disabled people who are struggling to cope as it is, and it should not be incumbent on the country to take more such people in.

It’s here the points-based system comes into its own: for example, if there is a shortage of unskilled labor, we can adjust the requisite points for entry and mandate that people who enter under such circumstances have jobs waiting for them.

Some suggest a migration system based on merit is xenophobic, and to those people it’s worth mentioning that we’ve applied a points-based system to non-EU citizens for years, and as members of the EU, we were giving preference to European migrants who were predominantly White over Indian and African migrants.

A points-based system is totally equitable and accepts people based on ability, irrespective of skin color, creed, or nationality. This is entirely in keeping with the sort of values that led to Labour’s foundation and should remain at the forefront of any respectable leftwing movement.

There is a myth that there is something ‘left wing’ or ‘progressive’ about uncontrolled migration, or that it would be desirable to have an unlimited number of unknown individuals entering the country every year.

Let’s be clear: the free movement of labor is a rightwing, neoliberal, capitalist policy, not dissimilar to the free movement of capital. It’s a symptom of an anarchic free market system that serves the elites extremely well; it drives down the price of labor for corporations, affords the middle classes cheap gardeners and nannies, and perpetually rigs the job market in the employers’ favor.

It’s a fundamental leftist belief that the free market is not infallible, requires regulation, and this regulation should pertain not just to levels of taxation and regulation but also to the distribution of workers.

This is not advocacy of immigration control on the basis of electoral populism, or economic philosophy, though it would indeed be popular, and it does follow philosophically; instead it’s an advocacy on the grounds of basic math.

Plainly, the UK cannot sustain the number of immigrants coming into the country every year. 300,000 is the rough annual net migration figure to the UK per annum. Many point out rightly that a large number of these people are students, and they’re right to do so.

However, whether student or worker, they still take the same toll on transport, health, and social infrastructure.  As a nation, we are building around half the number of houses we need every single year, at around 135,000[xiii], creating a clear deficit in housing availability. That’s not to mention that our own domestic birth rate is over 800,000 per year[xiv].

We already have a dangerous housing bubble which threatens to collapse at any moment, pulling our entire economy down with it, and it’s only exacerbated by such migrant numbers. Of course, part of this problem is that we don’t build enough houses, and issues pertaining to that were detailed in the first chapter.

However, the costs of building such enormous numbers of houses and providing the associated infrastructure would be to say the least prohibitive, and even if it were feasible, it would not be desirable.

Aside from housing there are huge costs associated with the NHS, when people who have never contributed arrive able to take full advantage of it without question. This is one of the factors that has led to a record NHS deficit of £1.85 billion[xv]; although of course underfunding remains the direct cause of this crisis, immigration serves to aggravate it.

You’ll hear from Labour politicians and often to the thunderous applause of their echo chambers, the following platitude: “You’re more likely to see an immigrant working in the NHS than using it”.

Aside from being disingenuous, since it’s entirely determined by happenstance and geography, the point they are trying to make is that because immigrants work in the NHS, we should allow an unlimited number of immigrants to enter the country, as if the former warrants the latter, which is a total non-sequitur.

Yes, we have a large number of migrants working in the NHS, and that’s a good thing to. Let’s keep them there and continue to allow medical professionals into the country in line with demand. Having controlled immigration and having Indian doctors are not mutually exclusive; in actuality an equitable points-based system will incentivize and drive up the number of highly qualified migrant workers relative to unskilled workers.

The people are crying out for a credible party to come out strongly on immigration, and if Labour did so, they would take the country by storm.

Chapter IV – And the Rest

Regarding inertia

As of this writing the most commonly seen Labour slogan is “Working together for real change”. The problem is the party is not working together, and presents no change. The conflict within and between the constituency and parliamentary Labour parties is wreaking havoc on Labour’s public image, and as the well-known adage tells us, voters don’t vote for divided parties.

However, this text will not attempt to dissect the intricacies that have led to this point; instead suffice it to mention a couple of key issues.

Jeremy Corbyn will never receive the support of the current MPs and therefore must go. The only alternative would be to begin a process of deselection across the country –  a sort of Trotskyist Night of the Long Knives, which would only leave the party’s reputation in tatters and replace experienced MPs with amateurs.

There is a divide within the parliamentary party between those representing constituents who are socially conservative working class and middle class social liberals. While Labour has always been a broad church that has incorporated numerous factions, the divisions now seem to be intensifying like never before.

Party loyalty is at record low rates, and people are now more likely than ever to throw out of office the candidate of their forefather’s choice and often on the basis of a single issue. This is more contentious than ever post-Brexit, given that some Labour MPs represent constituencies that voted overwhelmingly to Remain and others the reverse. Inevitably MPs jostle with one another to represent their diverse constituents.

The remedies are imperfect for both issues. For the first, Corbyn must go, which is easier said than done; and secondly the Labour party must support the will of the people and push for a real Brexit that rejects freedom of movement. Neither solution is ideal, but both are necessary, not least because the majority of the country hate Corbyn, and the majority of the country voted for Brexit.

On to the second, and more important, element of the slogan: “Real Change.” The most obvious change that has taken place in the last couple of years is the transformation of the Labour party from a party of government to one that wallows in political oblivion. Change is an important message to transmit, but the kind of change needs to be clear, and Corbyn’s Labour has thus far advocated very few changes indeed.

In fact, in my research for this work, I wanted to see exactly what policies Jeremy Corbyn had promoted in order to deal with them individually. However, when I tried to access Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘priorities’ on his website, it returned an error page reading “Unfortunately the page you were looking for was not found”, which is so patently ironic that no explanation is needed.

Further hunting will lead you to an article in the Mirror listing several flagship policies, which range from unpopular and bizarre like abolishing the monarchy to leftist clichés like ‘tax the rich’, and standard Labour talking points like re-nationalizing rail.

An eager hunter will find a more exhaustive list in a Telegraph article, which is pretty damming for the Labour party PR machine when the right-wing pro-Tory paper gives more policy detail than Labour themselves do. Eventually, one will stumble upon the ‘Jeremy for Labour’ page detailing ten broad policy positions. A brief glance is enough to know it’s a slight rewording of Ed Miliband’s 2015 manifesto combined with some broad meaningless jargon.

“We will build a progressive tax system so that wealth and the highest earners are fairly taxed, act against executive pay excess, and shrink the gap between the highest and lowest paid – FTSE 100 CEOs are now paid 183 times the wage of the average UK worker, and Britain’s wages are the most unequal in Europe. We will act to create a more equal society, boost the incomes of the poorest, and close the gender pay gap.”[xvi]

Do we not already have a progressive tax system? What rate should the highest earners pay? Will you cap executive bonuses? How will you boost the incomes of the poorest? How will you close the gender pay gap?

Such questions could be the only reasonable response to reading such general non-offensive meaningless milk-and-honey talking points. Anyone who feels the media hasn’t given Corbyn’s Labour a fair shake and has undertaken to do their own research will only be doubly disappointed when they discover that in the two years of his leadership, there’s scarcely a new policy to speak of.

For those who seek out concrete information, they should be rewarded with definitive and detailed policy proposals signed off by renowned economists, think tanks, and financial organizations.

Such policies should include pledges to build huge tidal power stations taking advantage of the fact that our nation is surrounded by water, to build offshore wind farms (including specifications on how many of them, at what cost and where the money is coming from), and to build new motorways, detailing how many people such a project would employ and projecting the economic benefits it would bring to this city or that. Alas, nothing of the sort exists.

Not to harp on about political antiquity, but Harold Wilson talked of the ‘white heat of the technological revolution.’ It’s not something that was ever truly delivered on, but it’s a phrase that stuck. What better time than now is there to renew the scientific and technological revolution? In the age of drones, self-driving cars, nanotechnology, and interstellar rovers, the modern Labour party has very little or nothing to say about it.

As a people we have the potential and as a country we have the need to host research and development facilities for the world’s leading technology firms and to have factories producing technology for the modern age. Labour Shadow Ministers should be meeting with Tesla and Microsoft, putting out press releases and winning support amongst the firms of the future, letting them know Britain is open for business.

In tandem with this we need new and forward-looking training schemes. The youth vote is overwhelmingly Labour but also the least likely to turn out.

Labour councilors, MPs and its half million members (Where are they?) should be knocking on every door of every council estate, meeting the unemployed, disenfranchised youth, and giving them a clear, concise piece of paper offering them a world-class training program that Labour guarantees to introduce if it wins the election.

Give these people something to aspire to and something to vote for outside of the Blue and Red tribal dichotomy which means very little to most people.

AddendumI have returned to this section to note that shortly after the time of writing, the Conservative government has unveiled so called ‘T-levels’, which promise to train youngsters in the practical and technical fields of the future. Once again, Labour has been too slow on the draw and attempts to do so now would appear to be a derivative imitation.

Put before people a plan that they can understand and offer them a future: through training programs, scientific advancement, industrialization, automation, pay rises, and tax breaks. Talking points must give way to the tangible.

What matters to most people when all is said and done is the food on their table, the money in their pockets and the roof over their head. Naturally, a sense of community drives many voters, but elections cannot be won through street marches in aid of the NHS. It’s an established truism that Labour will best serve the NHS, and people understand that all too well, but it cannot rely on this one-trick pony to carry it through to government.

Tough on Crime, Tough on the Causes of Crime

Possibly the best thing to come out of the Blair era was the acknowledgment that the great mass of Labour voters were not ultra-liberal, as the Westminster establishment would have you believe but are in fact deeply socially conservative. As such, it’s crucial not only for the execution of justice, but for the electability of the party that Labour are seen to come down hard on criminals and serve justice to victims.

This should come in tandem with core Labour values about alleviating poverty, which we know to be the leading cause of crime since the devil will find work for idle hands to do. Any attempt to crack down on crime must do so heavily and stringently on perpetrators, while simultaneously delivering a revolutionary jobs program to put those idle hands to work.

As a consequence, such people will be able to sustain a family and home, thus giving people a stake in society they would be unwilling to discard with wanton criminality. The Tories have shamelessly cut back the numbers of police to levels last seen in 2003[xvii]. Prisons are being sold to private companies and the conditions that occur within them as a result is nothing short of disgraceful.

Prison guards are striking, and criminals are forcibly taking control of their own prisons, if such a thing could be believed to be true in 21st century Britain. Not only is this a national crisis that warrants an urgent response, but it’s a political opportunity Labour has thus far made no move to exploit.

It should call for and develop credible plans to introduce an increase in police numbers, prison reform, and higher wages for those on the frontline keeping our streets safe. Labour should be tough on crime because it’s the working class who suffer disproportionately at the hands of criminals without the benefits of gated drives and suburbia to protect them.

The Labour party has thus far failed to make political capital from any of these issues. It should go forth hand in hand with the police unions and declare that Labour will be second to none in its commitment and strength of purpose to cut down crime and clean up our prisons. Labour will serve the interests of victims and not criminals once again.

Corbyn’s irreparably damaging comments that he was ‘unhappy’ with the shoot-to-kill policy have done nothing to reduce the idea that Labour are soft on crime. The party needs to push the message night and day until it’s accepted as a truism that under Labour the streets will be safe again. 

Speaking to the People

Many in the Labour party have become totally removed from the voters they serve. Famously, Emily Thornberry poured scorn on a white van man for daring to hang the English flag on his own home. She was roundly attacked by people living outside the ultra-liberal Westminster bubble and was forced to resign from her then position as Shadow Attorney General, though since then Corbyn has secured her promotion to even greater heights.

It’s no surprise that working-class people continue to turn to UKIP in such numbers, when Labour’s North London elite mocks anyone patriotic or traditional in outlook. The voters of Rochester and Strood where the comments were made had nothing in common with Emily Thornberry and the beliefs she manifests, yet she felt perfectly entitled to go there and belittle the very people whose support she should have been trying to secure.

Unsurprisingly, Labour came 3rd in the constituency, losing over 1

Such events are symptomatic of a wider problem, which at the moment is embodied within the Labour leadership. The public watched in outrage as Jeremy Corbyn failed to sing the national anthem during a Battle of Britain commemoration. The papers made hay when Corbyn made a half-hearted bow at the Cenotaph, and did so, by the way, in a tatty suit. When the Red Flag is sung, it brings a smile to activists’ faces but confusion to the country at large.

Corbyn is known to be a republican. There is no problem with that. But he must understand that the vast majority of the country are in favor of the British monarchy because it speaks to their patriotism, is synonymous with their British identity, and is associated with the wars from times gone by and those lost in them.

Any leader of any party should sing the national anthem with gusto, and do so in the finest black suit with the boldest red tie. A refusal or failure to engage in the traditions that venerate the nation and honor our war dead sends a clear signal to the working class of this country that Labour is not the party for them. Indeed, many in the country view Corbyn as directly ‘anti-British’ given his close ties to IRA figures and his now infamous comments calling Hezbollah his ‘friends’.

Some will suggest that the aforementioned are merely superficial issues. In many ways, they are an issue of presentation, but the image the Labour party and its present leadership is not a secondary or tertiary concern, it should be the primary concern for any party seeking to win power.

It’s all well and good having an excellent manifesto, but if no one reads it or gives it credence because they believe its authors are intrinsically unpatriotic, then the manifesto is entirely useless.

Jeremy Corbyn’s tenure as leader is essentially a job interview with the British people at large. He must win their approval in order for them to grant him power. Yet he can’t be bothered to wear a decent suit, which in the opening days of his leadership campaign was endearing and charming, but at this point marks him as an unprepared amateur.

The Labour party has a war coffer of funds at its disposal, including membership subscriptions of over 500,000 individuals, a long list of big private donors, and a great deal more cash donated by trade unions. Yet for all these resources, there isn’t a single advisor who can tell Corbyn not to wear black suit trousers with a blue suit jacket during Prime Minister’s question time. When members of the public go for a job interview, they dress to impress, and they expect their leaders to do the same.

We need a leader of the Labour party flanked by the Union Flag, bellowing the national anthem, and embracing patriotism the same way the people do. Sadly, it appears the liberal elite feels shame and embarrassment at any suggestion of national pride.

There are people who understand this. Andy Burnham makes a particularly good example. A working-class lad who graduated from Cambridge, he returned to his home town to represent Leigh as a member of parliament, where he notably worked to secure justice for the victims of the Hillsborough disaster cover-up.

From a cold reception in a speech at the Anfield Football Grounds in 2009, he returned after five tireless years of fighting for justice to a well-earned hero’s reception. He wasn’t afraid to speak about that which for so long Labour had considered taboo, namely immigration, and during his bid for the leadership in 2015, he did just that.

Burnham rightly acknowledged all the good that immigration brings, from economic growth to cultural enrichment, while at the same time talking about those left behind by uncontrolled immigration. He talked of a factory worker in his constituency who sat alone during lunch times as he was the only English-speaking worker.

He rightly identified that immigration had disproportionately taken a toll on Labour’s industrial and post-industrial heartlands, and since his failed campaign, he has become even more vocal on this issue.

Alas, for some reason he lacked a certain spark during the campaign, though that aside, he spoke directly to the country, but yet it was the niche Labour party membership who had for the first time the total say on the new leader. Consequently Corbyn won. Burnham has moved out of the front line of national politics towards a campaign to be the mayor of Manchester. Let’s hope that he and his fellows plan a return in the near future.

Chapter V – Conclusions

There absolutely is a place for social liberals within the modern Labour party. The Labour party has a history of pushing through excellent liberal reforms from Barbra Castle legislating equal pay for equal work between the genders to the introduction of civil partnerships under Blair.

Throughout its history, Labour has been at the forefront of liberal reforms that have liberated people of all stripes, and it’s a good thing too. It’s also right that the Labour party platform deals with discrimination against transgender, gay, and black and minority ethnic individuals, but it should not do so at the expense of all else.

Too often, Labour party circles have discussion dominated by issues that (while important) effect .0

How can it be that lifelong gay activist Peter Tatchell, feminist icon Germaine Greer, and the left-of-Labour George Galloway have all been no-platformed or attacked on our university campuses. The attitudes that lead to such absurd action are rife among Labour party members and less often to be seen amongst the general populace, for whom these individuals would be considered far left, not something-or-other-ophobic.

There’s a false equivalence between parties like UKIP, a liberal isolationist organization, on the one hand, and fascism or racism on the other, and the comparison between them is consistently pushed by groups like Momentum, the Alliance for Workers Liberty and the Socialist Workers Party, all of which are groups operating with or within the Labour party.

Here’s an excerpt from the SWP publication the Socialist Worker, which I have seen distributed by Labour party members outside meetings and talks:

“And in Stoke Central the racist UKIP party, which came second there at the last general election, wants to whip up racism to take the seat from Labour. Socialist Worker is calling for a vote for Labour in both elections. They will be seen as referendums on Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour—and Corbyn could be forced to resign as leader if Labour does badly.

The racist right will feel ecstatic if UKIP leader Paul Nuttall wins in Stoke. Labour has rightly attacked Nuttall for his previous statements supporting privatization of the NHS. But Labour’s official campaign has not challenged UKIP over its racism. Labour will be most effective if it both attacks the cuts and also confronts UKIP divisive racism.”[xviii]

It’s simply not enough to shout ‘racist’ and expect to win an argument. In fact, at this point it’s no longer even a case of diminishing returns, but it’s actually backfiring, making people more inclined to vote for UKIP when their concerns about migration are met with insult by leftists. We on the left should be trying to win debates, not shut them down.

This isn’t an appeal to the SWP to change their tactics. They are free agents and can do as they please. But the fact that the Labour party leadership meets with them, gives them interviews and is commonly seen marching alongside them is indicative of the sort of attitudes that fester in Labour and also appears to be a soft endorsement of such views.

It’s part of a wider problem where certain social liberals are going so far in their anti-racism campaigns that they shut down free speech within the media, on university campuses, and on the streets, more often than not targeting people who were never racist in the first place.

In short, these liberals have become the very illiberal people they believe they’re fighting against. Such people are fooled into believing the rest of the country is on their wavelength, buoyed up by thousands of retweets and Facebook likes, yet they do not appear to understand that their online presence is an echo chamber. The more their preaching is welcomed by the converted, the more steadfast they become in their initial beliefs.

Most people in the country are not anything close to this level of ultra-liberal, and such attitudes do not resonate with them. The great mass of people are patriotic and socially conservative, and their concern with politics extends to ensuring the system provides them with a safety net and the opportunity for employment.

That doesn’t mean the country at large doesn’t have a sense of and desire for social justice. Of course it does. But the best way to ensure it is to first establish economic justice. When Labour party figures engage in extended diatribes about intersectional feminism, which to most people of both genders means nothing, it turns the public off.

Liberalism is a welcome element of the Labour coalition, but it cannot continue in such an extreme form, nor can it override concern for the economy and for jobs. Labour need to talk less about rules surrounding transgender usage of bathrooms in North Carolina, and more, much more, about jobs.

Corbyn’s position is untenable. He has had second chance upon second chance and failed to rehabilitate his image or reform his party. His name is toxic and his leadership destructive, and for these reasons, he must go.

In his place, we need a strong man or woman who understands the patriotism that stirs within Labour’s core vote, who understands the nation’s deep social conservatism, and who is prepared to meet the electorate’s demands for homes and jobs. Perhaps an Andy Burnham, a Gisela Stewart, a Dan Jarvis, a Richard Burgeon, or someone else entirely.

Labour must overcome its misconceptions about the people’s wants by breaking free of both Westminster and its online echo chambers.

The public are not shocked or angered about cuts to the benefits bill, in fact it’s a popular position[xix]. On this, let’s deliver the biggest benefits cut yet seen, and let them fall on the corporate welfare that now costs over £50 billion a year between working tax credits and housing benefit alone.

Let’s force corporations to pay a living wage, and put the working tax credit savings into a jobs program that will mop up any collateral unemployment. Let’s build houses until prices fall and housing benefit drops to record lows. Let’s cut old-age benefits for the very richest pensioners who have no need of them, and distribute that money to the needy elderly according to their ability and means.

Over a million food parcels were distributed by food banks to hungry citizens throughout the country in 2015[xx], evidence if any more were needed that our infrastructure, welfare, and employment programs are totally failing the British people.

Unfortunately, the people accessing these food banks are the least likely to turn out in a general election. Let’s take Labour’s mass membership and send it to deprived communities to knock on doors and win support from those who have never voted before. Such an effort should be supported by its hundreds of MPs, thousands of councilors, and hundreds of thousands of trade union affiliated members.

Labour’s war coffers are full enough to help out its members when they sacrifice their time for the party. Travel and other associated costs should be subsidized in such campaigns.

Let’s take a strong message into the heart of the country, into Scotland, Wales, the Midlands and the North, that Labour will deliver British jobs for British workers.  It will carry through to the agricultural areas which the Tories presume to sit upon since time immemorial and deliver a program to get British farms working again.

Let’s go into London and make clear that Labour is the party for social justice, and that begins with housing. Guarantee the construction of at least 250,000 homes every year and provide credible plans on how it will be done because whether you’re Black, White, trans, gay, straight, male or female, your primary concern is shelter, of which there is currently a dire shortage.

Let’s spark off a renaissance in 21st century manufacturing, now with the benefits of automation and renewable energy. Take to the public a message that cuts in the foreign aid budget will deliver a program of nuclear, tidal, wind, and solar energy expansion that will not just create innumerable high-paying jobs but will have the added advantage of saving the climate.

Let’s wade into the realm of the intelligentsia and say loud and clear that Labour is the party for true liberals, those who believe in rationalism, freedom of speech, and tolerance. Let’s talk to those who face the prospect of a life behind bars and deliver to them a place behind a college desk, a workbench or the wheel of a JCB.

Let us go to the people and promise them; Jobs, Homes and Health.

[i] Khan, O. (2015 May 15) Race and the 2015 General Election Part 1: Black and Minority Ethnic Voters. Retrieved from http://www.runnymedetrust.org/blog/race-and-the-2015-general-election-black-and-minority-ethnic-voters

[ii] Monegan, A. (2014 August 20) Self-employment in UK at Highest Level Since Records Began. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/aug/20/self-employment-uk-highest-level

[iii] BBC Business. (2015 March 18) Economy Tracker: Unemployment. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10604117

[iv] Mirza-Davies J. (2016 November 21) Apprenticeship Statistics: England. Retrieved from http://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN06113/SN06113.pdf

[v] Blacking, D. (2014 July) So You Want to Be a Legal Aid Lawyer? Retrieved from http://lacuna.org.uk/justice/so-you-want-to-be-a-legal-aid-lawyer/

[vi] BBC Business (2015 September 21) Why Is the UK’s Housing Benefit Bill so High? Retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-34290727

[vii] OECD. (2016 April 13) Development Aid in 2015 Continues to Grow despite Costs for In-donor Refugees. Retrieved from http://www.oecd.org/dac/stats/ODA-2015-detailed-summary.pdf

[viii] Leach, B. (2012 December 19) One in Four Support Britain’s Foreign Aid Policies. Retrieved from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/david-cameron/9770644/One-in-four-support-Britains-foreign-aid-policies.html

[ix] Lubin, G. (2014 March 16) How Russians Became Crimea’s Largest Ethnic Group, in One Haunting Chart. Retrieved from http://www.businessinsider.com/crimea-demographics-chart-2014-3?IR=T

[x] Socialist Worker (2017 February 28) Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell Spoke to Socialist Worker on the Recent By-election Results. Retrieved from https://socialistworker.co.uk/art/44161/Shadow+chancellor+John+McDonnell+spoke+to+Socialist+Worker+on+the+recent+by+election+results

[xi] Migration Watch UK (2014 November 18) Opinion Poll Results on Immigration. Retrieved from https://www.migrationwatchuk.org/briefingPaper/document/249

[xii] Migration Watch UK (2015 March 25) Immigration Policy and Black and Minority Ethnic Voters. Retrieved from https://www.migrationwatchuk.org/briefing-paper/11.37

[xiii] Castella, T. (2015 January 13) Why Can’t the UK Build 240,000 Houses a Year? Retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-30776306

[xiv] BBC News (2013 August 8) More UK births Than any Year Since 1972, Says ONS. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23618487

[xv] Dunne, P. Mckenna, H. and Murray, R. (2016 July) Deficits in the NHS 2016. Retrieved from https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/sites/files/kf/field/field_publication_file/Deficits_in_the_NHS_Kings_Fund_July_2016_1.pdf

[xvi] Our Ten Pledges to Rebuild and Transform Britain. Retrieved from http://www.jeremyforlabour.com/pledges

[xvii] Newburn, T. (2015 November 24) What’s Happening to Police Numbers? Retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-34899060

[xviii] Clark, N. (2017 February 14) Clive Lewis Backs off, but the Labour Right is out for Corbyn’s Blood. Retrieved from [xix] Wells, A. (2011 May 16) Strong Public Support for Benefit Cuts. Retrieved from https://yougov.co.uk/news/2011/05/16/strong-public-support-benefit-cuts/

[xx] BBC News. (2015 April 22) Record Numbers Use Food Banks – Trussell Trust. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-32406120

Alt Left: Some of My Positions on Conservative and Liberal US Foreign Policy

Is it ok for me to believe in Leftist economics yet still agree on many points with the neocons when it comes (rhyme, hah) to foreign policy? Conservative opinions I like:

  • Occupation of Palestine.
  • bombing of Yemen.
  • Invasion of Iraq.
  • Invasion of Lybia.
  • Anti Hamas and Hezbollah sentiment.
  • Pre-coup Erdogan (he has one of the rails now).
  • France´s colonization of Algeria.

Now these things aren’t perfect, but optimal compared to the other alternatives.

  • Aggression against Russia regarding Ukraine, I’d prefer to have an referendum in Ukraine about EU membership, to give NATO aggression legitimacy. The issue with this is that the European Commission isn’t clear on whether it wants Ukraine in the EU. I want to replace all of the non-White subsidies/investing (welfare for children, loans for adults) with EU subsidies and troops in Eastern Europe, LEBENSRAUM!!!. https://themoscowtimes.com/articles/more-than-half-of-ukrainians-want-to-join-eu-poll-shows-32735

The liberal foreign policies I agree with are: -Legalization of drugs (affecting Latin america). -Diplomacy with Iran (I’m a big fan of Obama s negotiations about the nuke thing.). -Ok with leaving Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine to Russia (Ukraine would already be losing an shit ton of people to Russia anyway through emigration) as long as it leads to EU membership of Ukraine,

Sure, the fact you like my economics is amazing enough to keep you around. My positions: Conservative opinions I like: – Occupation of Palestine. NOPE – Bombing of Yemen. NOPE – Invasion of Iraq. NOPE – Invasion of Libya. NOPE – Anti-Hamas and Hezbollah sentiment. NO on Hezbollah because I love Hezbollah. I don’t like Hamas too much, but the Hamas-haters are worse, and anyway they are pragmatic for Islamists. – Pre-coup Erdogan (he has one of the rails now). NOPE. Rails? – France´s colonization of Algeria. NOPE. Aggression against Russia regarding Ukraine, id prefer to have an referendum in Ukraine about EU membership, to give NATO aggression legitimacy. The issue with this is that the European commission isn’t clear on whether it wants Ukraine in the EU. I want to replace all of the non-white subsidies/investing (welfare for children, loans for adults) with EU subsidies and troops in Eastern Europe, LEBENSRAUM!!! NOPE. Not sure if I want Ukraine in the EU. Anyway, I hate the EU. Mostly I don’t want them in NATO, Hell no. Also I do not want more North American Terrorist Organization troops in Eastern Europe. Not sure about cutting the safety net either, especially racially like that. See? Look above. Conservatives are always wrong on foreign policy. Period. The liberal foreign policies I agree with are: – Legalization of drugs (affecting Latin America). OF COURSE. – Diplomacy with Iran (I’m a big fan of Obama’s negotiations about the nuke thing.). SURE. – Ok with leaving Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine to Russia (Ukraine would already be losing an shit ton of people to Russia anyway through emigration) as long as it leads to membership of Ukraine. ABSOLUTELY, I support the annexation of Crimea and I support the Donbass fighters. I wish Russia would just annex the Donbass. It would solve so many problems. Not sure about Ukraine and EU membershit. Anyway, I hate the EU too. EU is the economic arm of the North American Terrorist Organization. See? Liberal foreign policy is always right.

Why Trump Is a Disaster: (((Middle Eastern Foreign Policy)))

Zamfir: I’m surprised you have a strong preference for Democrats over Republicans. To me it seems like a hopeless choice. If you vote Republican you’re voting for one set of evil elite interests, but not explicitly against your biology and cultural heritage; if you vote Republican you’re voting for another set of evil elite interests, and explicitly against your biology and cultural heritage.

Hard to pick between those two! What is the real advantage in voting Democrat in your opinion? (I guess I’d vote for Bernie, but then again I’d vote for Trump for similar reasons… Not that I expect either one would ever do much on anything I care about.)

His foreign policy is literally insane. He’s an ultra-rightwinger. Venezuela. Syria. Iraq. Nicaragua. Trump resigned from the UN Human Rights Committee. Trump jacked up the military budget to the extreme.

((Trump))) hates all the enemies of Israel. (((Trump))) ought to just move to Tel Aviv already. (((Trump)))’s the most pro-Jewish and pro-Israel President we ever had. (((Trump))) has caused serious harm to the Palestinians, and he has uprooted decades of somewhat sane policies in the Holy Land in order to back Israel to the hilt.

The reason Israel has been acting so bad lately, cracking down on domestic dissidents, and massacring Palestinians demonstrating at the border, is because Trump gave them the green light to do so.

Trump loosened the the ROE (Rules of Engagement) in Syria and Iraq, and civilian casualties increased by 10 times. Trump’s deliberately murdering civilians by the tens of thousands. Just the other day, Trump bombed Iraqi forces on the border of Syria, killing 30 of them. Trump loosened the ROE in Mosul, and we and the Iraqis killed 40,000 civilians as a result.

Trump openly states that he wants to steal other countries’ oil.

Trump supports ISIS. The Pentagon is protecting ISIS right now. We train ISIS fighters at a base in Abu Kamal. Every time Syrian troops try to attack ISIS, we bomb them! Trump claims he’s fighting ISIS? Trump is supporting ISIS. We are allowing ISIS to have a large swath of territory in Syria that covers some oil fields. We have bases over there and we refuse to attack ISIS. Sometimes ISIS patrols even drive right by our forces.

Obviously US forces have been embedded with these groups, including ISIS, for some time now. We coordinate attacks against the Syrian military with ISIS. When Syria attacks ISIS, Trump’s military (the air force of ISIS) rushes in and bombs the Syrian army in support of ISIS!

Trump tricked a group of Russian, tribal and Christian militias into thinking an oil field was going to be handed over to them. When these forces went to occupy the oil field, Trump lied and said they were attacking our allies.

Our allies, the SDF, were nowhere in sight. We had told them to leave the oil field. As soon as this group reached the oil field, we started bombing them. At the same time and apparently coordinated, ISIS attacked these forces.

This is where this madman Pompeo chortles about killing hundreds of Russians. Yeah. They murdered those Russians in cold blood along with a lot of anti-ISIS militiamen, including many Christians.

At other times in this war, ISIS killed a few Russian officers, including generals, with very precise targeting. They also targeted the Russian embassy with very precisely. They could not have done these things on their own. The only reason they were able to kill those Russian officers and attack the embassy is because we must have had Special Forces helping ISIS carry out those attacks.

We are using the Kurdish YPG and SDF to occupy a large portion of Syria, including most of its oil. So we are helping the Kurds steal Syria’s oil. We are trying to ruin the Syrian economy by starving it of oil funds.

But when the Turkish military attacked Afrin as part of an invasion of Syria to conquer Syrian land and annex it to Turkey, the US supported them to the hilt. Many brave Kurdish fighters were killed by these invaders.

The Turkish military was accompanied by militias they called the Free Syrian Army, but all they were were radical Islamists. Many were ISIS and Al Qaeda who just changed their uniforms to fight alongside the Turks.

The Turks have been supporting ISIS to the hilt for a long time now, and we have not lifted one finger to stop them. At the same time we are helping Kurds steal Syrian land, we are helping Turkey slaughter Kurds in Afrin in Syria and supporting their genocidal war against the Kurdish people in Turkey.

Most of the funding for ISIS and Al Qaeda comes from Qatar, UAE, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. Qatar quite openly supports Al Qaeda. ISIS was a project of Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia from Day One.

When the Saudis and UAE invaded Yemen, they airlifted thousands of ISIS and Al Qaeda fighters from Syria to go fight alongside the Gulf invaders. The Houthis fired a missile at a ship full of ISIS and Al Qaeda militiamen and blew up the ship. Trump lied and said it was a civilian ship and accused the Houthis of endangering shipping in the area. Our ships then fired on the Houthi area that shot at the ship.

When Trump attacked Al Qaeda in a botched mission in Yemen, our military came under very heavy fire. Trump responded by leveling the small village we were attacking and killing almost everyone in it, including women and children. Our forces also deliberately blew up houses that had nothing but women and kids in them. But America was freaking out about one dead Special Forces fighter, who probably deserved it if you ask me.

We are occupying land in Syria which we stole and will never leave. We support Turkey conquering part of Syria and annexing it!

Trump has been involved in one fake false flag after another in Syria. Trump has been told that these are false flags, and he bombs Syria anyway. His administration is directly involved in the planning and carrying out of these false flags with the British and the French.

Trump has an alliance with the Saudis, which has resulted in supporting their awful invasion of Yemen. Trump’s also been assisting the Saudis in funneling guns and weapons to the Al Qaeda-type Islamists in Syria as part of an alliance with Saudi Arabia.

Qatar, UAE, Jordan, Turkey, the US, Israel, the UK, and France have all been supporting the radical Islamists in Syria, including Al Qaeda and even ISIS. All of those countries had intelligence and military advisors directly embedded in those groups, in particular in Al Qaeda. An Al Qaeda commander told us this in an interview with a German journalist.

Trump has helped the Saudis and UAE literally invade Yemen, where they have been conducting a genocidal campaign against the Yemeni people. Trump sold a huge amount of weapons to the Saudis.

Trump verbally attacked Qatar and helped the Saudis to isolate them. Trump accused Qatar of supporting terrorism, which is true, but so are our allies Saudi Arabia, UAE, and more broadly Jordan, Turkey, France, the UK and even our own government.

Trump did this because Qatar had opened up friendly relations with Iran, which caused Saudi Arabia to almost declare war on Qatar. We verbally attacked Qatar because Trump hates Iran. All of this is to screw Iran. He dismantled the Iran deal and put sanctions back on Iran.

Should the Rich and the Reactionaries Be Given Rights?

Sisera: So what does that mean then? You believe rich people are inherently oppressors who don’t deserve rights but then White men are okay?

Most of them are oppressors, of course. Don’t you even understand class politics or the nature of capitalism at all. Those rich people who are pursuing their economic self interests in the class war, well of course they are our oppressors. The oppressors of me and mine anyway. I suppose they see us as oppressors. Marxist theory doesn’t say that anyway. It just says that when the rich pursue their self interests in the class war, everyone who’s not rich gets fucked. You want to call that oppression? You are welcome to. If you side with the rich, you are an idiot. Why would you side with your class enemies. Most of them are oppressors, of course. Don’t you even understand class politics or the nature of capitalism at all. Those rich people who are pursuing their economic self interests in the class war, well of course they are our oppressors. The oppressors of me and mine anyway. I suppose they see us as oppressors. Marxist theory doesn’t say that anyway. It just says that when the rich pursue their self interests in the class war, everyone who’s not rich gets fucked. You want to call that oppression? You are welcome to. If you side with the rich, you are an idiot. Why would you side with your class enemies? The rich are our class enemies. Does that mean they oppress us? I dunno. When they’re in power, they screw us over. All of the rich hate democracy, lie like rugs, and support violence, murder, terror, genocide, coups, and dictatorships anywhere the people take power. Personally, I think all conservatives and reactionaries are pure filth. I wish they would all drop dead tomorrow. That way they would be where they belong: in graves. They’re nothing but pure garbage. Show me a reactionary or conservative anywhere on Earth that’s actually a human and not a lying, sadistic, murderous piece of scum. There aren’t any! In a democratic society, of course the rich get their rights, but they abuse the fuck out of them, and anytime they people take power, the rich start using violence, coups, death squads, rioting, judicial and legislative coups, etc. to get their way. We let the rich take power all the time. They won’t let us take power at all. I’m glad the Chinese Communists took away the rights of the reactionaries. Look what would happen if they had rights? See Venezuela, Syria, Iraq, Ukraine, Honduras, Haiti, Brazil, Paraguay, Colombia, Nicaragua, Indonesia, Philippines? That’s what happens when you give the rich and the reactionaries any rights at all. Right now they would be burning China to the ground like they are doing to Venezuela and Nicaragua because they are furious that a people’s government got put in. If that’s the way they are always, always, always going to act, why give them rights? So they can destroy your country and take down any democratically elected government they don’t believe in? They try to destroy by antidemocratic means any people’s or popular government any time it gets in. And when they take power themselves, they usually put in a dictatorship. This is what happens if they don’t get their way and the people elect a democratically elected people’s government: Attempted coups by street violence: Nicaragua, Ukraine, Syria, and Thailand. Attempted coups by economic warfare: Venezuela, North Korea, Iran, Syria, and Nicaragua. Coups by legislative means: Paraguay and Brazil. Attempted legislative coup: Venezuela. Coups by judicial means: Brazil. Coups by direct overthrow of the state: Honduras, Haiti, Venezuela, and Egypt. Attempted coups by direct overthrow of the state: Ecuador and Bolivia. Coup by insurgency: Haiti. Attempted coup by insurgency: Syria. Coups by direct invasion: Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Panama, Libya, and Grenada. This is what happens every time they get into power, especially if they take over a people’s government:  Right-wing death squad authoritarian regime installed: Honduras*, El Salvador, Argentina, Brazil*, Guatemala*, Chile, Philippines*, Uruguay, Bolivia, Indonesia*, and Ukraine*. No I don’t have a problem taking away rights from reactionary fucks! Why should we give them rights? Give me one reason! One! One reason!

Zionism, Anti-Zionism and the Monster of Dual Loyalty

Forced to choose between loyalty to the homeland and loyalty to the tribe, Jews have traditionally chosen treason. This is the poison pill of anti-Zionism, for it throws the Jews back into the Diaspora where they may revert back to their normal treacherous role. On the other hand, Zionism has not solved the problem of Jewish disloyalty and dual loyalty. In fact, it has worsened it by orders of magnitude. Whereas before Zionism Jews may have been mildly treasonous, afterwards Jewish treason went through the roof as Jews captured nation after nation throughout the West and turned one White country after another into a colony of Israel. All things considered, I think Jews would be much less treasonous without a Jewish state. So yes, the dismantling of Zionism would throw the Jews back into the Diaspora and bring back the boogeyman of Jewish dual loyalty. But Zionism has morphed the dual loyalty monster into a titan. All in all, I feel that Jewish dual loyalty would radically diminish if the Jews no longer had a state that they could use to drag generations of White Gentiles into fighting and dying for them in the endless Wars for the Jews we see playing out across the land, in Iraq, then in Libya, next in Yemen and now in Syria and soon to be Iran. Lebanon? Been there, done that. 323 Marines died in that War for the Jews.

The "Iranian Expansionism" Lie: How the US and UK Have Joined the Gulf Arab War against the Shia: The Cases of Iraq and Yemen

Iraq

Iraq is the latest flash point. This is not a case of Iranian expansionism either. Saddam somewhat repressed the Shia, although millions of Shia were Baath Party members, and most of the army were Shia. When the US military rolled through the Shia cities of the South during the Gulf War, they expected a warm welcome. It was the other way around. A convoy would be driving down a street in Nasariyah with nary a problem in sight. They got halfway down the street when the whole street opened up on them with automatic weapons and RPG’s. Most of them were hiding on rooftops. These were Shia Baath Party people, Shia Iraqi military veterans and also a lot of Shia who were simply Iraqi nationalists who would rather live with Saddam than be conquered by foreign invaders. Of course, our criminal, Nazi-like war of aggression against the Iraqi people resulted in the overthrow of Sunni rule. With democracy, obviously a Shia government was elected, as 6 Of course the new Shia government has friendly ties with Iran. The Shia Alawi government of Syria also has close ties with Iran. The Shia Hezbollah in Lebanon has close ties with Iran. None of this is “Iranian expansionism” or “Iran conquering the Arab world.” Instead these are Shia populations in the Arab World who have formed a natural and normal confessional alliance with Shia Iran. Shia are going to ally with Shia. What do you expect them to do?

Yemen

In Yemen, the Shia are 4 A tribal group in the north called Houthis who are mostly Zaidi launched a very popular civil war from the north all the way to the south of the country, eventually overthrowing the government. The US- and Saudi-installed president, a man named Hadi, was airlifted out to Saudi Arabia where he continued to insist that he ran the country. Hadi was very unpopular, and frankly most Yemenis hated him. The Houthi revolt had the support of the majority of Yemenis. The Yemeni Army was loyal to a former president named Saleh, who was also a Houthi Shia. Most of the Yemeni Army, 70-8 The US went along with this folly and insisted that Hadi was still the real president of the country. Well, no he wasn’t. Ever heard of a revolution? When an armed revolution happens and overthrows the government, the new armed group is the new government. I would say they are even under international law. Revolutions have been a legitimate way to overthrow states forever now. Or do we now say that all revolutions are illegitimate? Would that apply to our own revolution then? That would have to be illegitimate too, right, because the US says that armed revolutions cannot install legitimate governments? The remaining 2 Since that time, the Saudis have been bombing all over the country. The Saudi and UAE militaries also invaded, but they did not get far. They set up a few garrisons, but they came under constant attack and suffered heavy casualties. The Saudi military is terrible and is not capable of fighting any war. The UAE military is about as bad. The US has been supplying intelligence and command and control facilities to the invaders from the beginning. At least 10,000 Yemenis are dead at the hands of the US and the UK in this sickening war. Whenever the Saudis start running low on bombs, we rush-deliver more bombs to them. Al Qaeda has a large presence in Yemen, and they quickly waged war against the Houthis and Saleh’s army. The Gulf states have been funneling supplies to Yemeni Al Qaeda ever since the invasion, using them to help overthrow the Shia Houthis. When the war started, Saudi Arabia and the UAE flew 300-400 ISIS and Al Qaeda jihadis from Syria down to Yemen to fight against the Houthi. The UAE and the Saudis continue to run jihadis into Yemen, typically by ship. The Saudis have never launched one attack against the Al Qaeda and ISIS in Yemen, and the US has had a quite but not completely hands-off policy too, as the US and UK are using ISIS and Al Qaeda in Yemen to overthrow the Houthi. The Houthi takeover had nothing to do with “Iranian expansionism.” That’s a paranoid lie of a fever dream. The Shia are 4

The Hell with the Pentagon

As the agency which enforces US foreign policy at gunpoint, the Pentagon has always blown. First of all, there is no such thing as the Defense Department. When has the Pentagon ever defended the country? Pearl Harbor? They did a fine job there, huh? Obviously the task of the Pentagon is not to defend the US mainland, which is all it ever ought to do anyway. Its task is to running around the world starting wars and killing people in other countries. Leaving aside whether that is sometimes a good idea (and I think it is,) what’s so defensive about that? The real name of the Pentagon is the War Department.That’s what it was always called until World War 2, which the War Department won. After that in a spate of Orwellian frenzy, we named an army of aggression an army of self-defense and comically renamed its branch the Defense Department. It’s like calling cops peace officers. You see anything peaceful about what a cop does in a typical day? Neither do I? There was a brief glimmer of hope there in WW2 when we finally starting killing fascists and rightwingers instead of sleeping with them, but the ink was barely dry on the agreements before we were setting up the Gladio fascists, overthrowing Greek elections and slaughtering Greek peasants like ants. Meanwhile it was scarcely a year after 1945 when the US once again started a torrid love affair with fascism and rightwing dictators like we have always done. We were smooching it up right quick with Europe’s fascists, in this case the former Nazis of Germany (who became the West German elite), Greek killer colonels, Mussolini’s heirs, actual Nazis in Ukraine, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania, Jew-Nazis in Palestine, Franco (who we never stopped sleeping with anyway), Salazar, the malign Mr. Churchill, the true repulsive Dutch royalty and disgusting European colonists the world over, who we showered with guns and bombs to massacre the colonized. In 1945, a war against fascism, reaction, Nazism and malign colonialism had ended, and for some reason America had fought against these things instead of supporting them as usual. 1946, and we were back in old style again, hiring Nazis by the busload for the CIA, overthrowing democratic governments and putting in genocidal dictatorships, becoming butt buddies with fascist swine everywhere. So you see we have always pretty much sucked. World War 1 was fought amidst one of the most dishonest propaganda campaigns the world had ever seen, the Korean War was a Godawful mess where we turned North Korea to flaming rubble with the population cowering in caves while slaughtering 3 million North Koreans. The horrific catastrophe called the Indochinese Wars, such as the Vietnam War, the Secret War in Laos and the Cambodian Massacre, where we genocided 500,000 Cambodians with bombs, driving the whole place crazy and creating the Khmer Rogue. Panama and Grenada were pitiful jokes, malign, raw, naked imperialism at its worst. The Gulf War was a brief return to sanity but turkey shoots are sickening. Of course that followed on with the most evil war in US history, the Nazi-like war on aggression called The War on the Iraqi People (usually called the Iraq War), the Afghan rabbit hole which started out sensibly enough but turned into another Vietnam style Great Big Mess. I suppose it is ok that we are killing Al Qaeda guys and I give a shout out to our boys over there fighting ISIS or the Taliban and Al Qaeda in South-Central Asia, Somalia and Yemen. Some people need killing. But I sure don’t feel that way about their superiors, the US officers who fund and direct ISIS, Al Qaeda, etc. out of an Operations Center in Jordan with Jordanian, Israeli (!), Saudi, UAE, and Qatari officers. And it was very thoughtful of the Pentagon to cover up the Ukrainian Air Force shootdown of the jetliner which we saw on the radar of our ships in Black Sea. And it was nice of the US to relay the flight path of the Russian jet to the Turks 24 hours in advance so they could shoot down that Russian jet and kill that pilot. One hand giveth and the other taketh away. For every good thing we do in Syria and Iraq, we do 10 or 20 bad things. Pretty much the story of the Pentagon. Sure if you fought in WW2 or one of the few other decent wars, you have something to be proud of, and I can even say, “Thank you for your service,” but the main thing is that you signed up for the rightwing army of the rich that is dead set against the people and popular rule everywhere on Earth. Sure, it’s a great army, professional, super-competent and deadly, but it’s generally tasked with doing lousy things. Why anyone would sign up for that reactionary nightmare of an institution is beyond me. America needs to level the Pentagon and put in a true People’s Army instead. Like that would ever happen.

Gedalia Braun's Piece on Africans

Sam: A possible explanation for Black behavior. “…common understanding among blacks of what morality is: not something internalized but something others enforce from the outside…” https://whitelocust.wordpress.com/morality-and-abstract-thinking-how-africans-may-differ-from-westerners/ Tulio: Interesting article. But I’d like to examine multiple perspectives on this topic before I draw any conclusions. I’ve never been to Africa to observe her findings first hand, and given that the author writes for Amren, this individual has an obvious predisposition. For example she speaks of cruelty and torture in Africa, but that has existed among whites as well. I’ve seen some of the torture devices used during Europe’s middle period. Even looking at them was unbearable. Even in this country witches were burned at the stake. Blacks were hung from trees on false accusations while whites stood around and cheered. I don’t like her conclusion that blacks have some inherent flaw that makes them incapable of being moral or having any abstract thoughts. Google a list of African proverbs and they contradict everything she just said.

First of all, Gedalia Braun is a man, not a woman. No idea what that first name is all about. I actually think he is onto something, especially as he lived in various African countries for many years. That was always one of my favorite articles on Amren. The odd thing about that article is that while is not real flattering towards Africans, the author doesn’t seem to hate Africans at all. In fact, it seems that he is rather fond of them despite it all. I don’t think just writing for Amren should disqualify you as biased. One of the truly disturbing things about Amren that I learned from hanging out there a very long time is that so much of what those articles say is flat out true. That is hard to swallow. However, the site is dishonest and biased as it only reports the downside to Blacks and never says anything good about them, while I know some of you will be amazed, but there are actually quite a few good things you can say about US Blacks if you are looking to write good things about them. The Black love of cruelty and sadism does seem to be a part of the race. Yes any culture can become extremely cruel and sadistic, even the “highest” races of all which can become downright genocidal under the right conditions of Organized Violence.  Not long ago, two of the “highest” races of all, the Germans and Japanese, engaged in some spectacular cruelty, sadism, out and out evil and even horrific genocide. And yes, European White did use to be quite sadistic and cruel as the torture devices indicate. However, under normal peacetime conditions, most European Whites in Europe and the West demonstrate remarkably little sadism and cruelty, while with Blacks, even US Blacks, it just seems to go on unabated. I should note that cruelty and sadism are not Black traits. They are human traits! Humans are naturally cruel, sadistic and downright evil, at least at times. Most human societies and most humans have it in them to be sadistic and cruel. I was a pretty vicious little boy, but all my friends were too, so I just figure that boys are just naturally rather evil. But you grow out of it. I still have cruelty and sadism in me of course, but I try to keep it locked up in a cage inside of me and hope it never comes out. My argument is going to be that Blacks are more susceptible to the normal human tendencies than say Whites or Northeast Asians are, not that Blacks are evil and sadistic and White people are real nice. Screw that. Some of those things may not be race-dependent. For instance, even if Blacks are bad at abstract thinking as a race, if you push their IQ up, their capacity for abstract thinking ought to grow quite a bit. African Americans appear to be dramatically more intelligent that Africans for whatever reason. One standard deviation is nothing to shake your finger at. Hence, even if US Blacks are have some inherent issue with abstract thinking, pushing that IQ up to one SD is going to make US Blacks a Hell of a lot more abstract than Africans. I should also note that a number of the other downsides to Africans that he writes about – childlikeness, love of cruelty and sadism, needing morality imposed from the outside rather than from within A lot of that has been said before. Albert Schweitzer wrote much the same things after working for years as a do-gooder in Africa. The fact that he was such a do-gooder makes his remarks particularly potent, as I do not see how a man with that much of a kind heart would deliberately make up a bunch of evil things about Blacks. In fact, if you study so called racist literature down through the years, you will find many of these things that Braun talks about repeated many times. Much early anthropological writings on Blacks are now called racist because they were pretty blunt about the race, whereas now the field is very PC. For instance, the thing about Blacks being “childlike.” Childlike is not the same thing as childish. Childlike is not a bad thing really. I would love to be childlike in some ways and I hope I am, actually. Early American writings including I think Thomas Jefferson noted the same thing: they also said that Blacks were childlike. The morality thing sort of makes sense. In situations where brute force enforces morality, Blacks do pretty well. I heard they do pretty well under Communism. Supposedly you could walk from one end to the other of Maputo in the middle of the night and no one would bother you. Maputo is the capital of Mozambique. That was under the Communist like government of Samora Machel, who is actually one of my heroes. Havana is the safest large city in the Americas and it is very Black. Blacks also do well under Islam. Reporters have gone to the parts of West Africa that are under Islam and they say that things are a lot smoother, less chaotic and far less crime ridden than in the non-Muslim countries like Sierra Leone and Liberia to the south. I hear there are also many Blacks in Yemen, maybe up to 4 Under both Islam and Communism, morality is for sure imposed from the outside in a pretty heavy handed way. It was similar in the typical African village or villages that was ruled by a king. I have heard that pre-1960, Nigeria was mostly a country of small rural villages. There was almost no crime in these villages. Not only was law enforcement pretty brutal, there was also a heavy shame factor involved similar to what we see with the Northeast Asians, who do not want to commit crimes or even do bad things in general because it will bring shame unto their families. Amazingly rural Africa was able to operate under the same shame-based morality as the Northeast Asians, yet the NE Asians are usually thought to be a “higher” race than Africans. So it looks like some of those things that make these “higher” races higher can actually be imported and be used by the “lower” races, which seems counterintuitive but is also hopeful. The notion that Black genes make societies inherently unstable is belied by the fact that North Africa (1 Also Ancient Egypt was 1

Some Little-Known Truths about Arabs

Lin writes:

To Pranav: …To me, (Sunni) Islam is basically an Arab/pan-Arab civilizational push, or it’s just a veneer over Arabized power. Let me recollect what I posted here before: 1) Arabic is said to be language of Paradise. 2) Arabs are said to be a superior race. Superiority of the race of Arabs over non-Arabs 3) Though faggotry is condemned, large 4) The strictest sect of Islam, the Wahhabi Saudis, allied with the British and French kufirs during WW1 to topple the Ottoman Turk Caliphate, treason of the worst kind I must say, yet they consider themselves guardians of Islam. What a farce and shame. I personally don’t think the Sunni Arabs have much of an economic future (Persians could be an exception that their Shiite Islam is more flexible, like they allowed sex change). I also foresee an Euro/Mediterranean Jihad One, after which the Middle East will be further fragmented…

Most of this is correct. Sunni Islam is indeed an Arab or Pan-Arab civilizational project, and it is also a thin veneer over Arabized power. In addition, it is a vehicle for Arab supremacy. 1 is correct. They do speak Arabic in Paradise, and the only true Qurans are those written in Arabic, for God transmitted the Quran to Mohammad in Arabic. There are many translations of the Quran into all sorts of languages, but many Muslims consider them to be nearly illegitimate, as the only proper Quran is the one written in Arabic. 2 is also correct. If you go to Islamic sites on the web, you will see articles along the lines that Arabs are a superior to non-Arabs. No doubt all of these sites were written by Arabs, but nevertheless, Islam is a sort of an Arab Supremacist religion. 3 is true, but some Islamic countries tolerate it more than others. 4 is sadly true, and it is quite a blight on the Saudis’ claim to be the ultimate in hardline Islamists. Instead they seem traitors to the umma.

I personally don’t think the Sunni Arabs have much of an economic future (Persians could be an exception that their Shiite Islam is more flexible, like they allowed sex change).

I do not know what to say about this. The Sunni Arabs are definitely sitting on a lake of oil and gas that isn’t going away soon. Some of the Gulf countries have started to branch out away from an oil rentier economy. Dubai is now an international port city, one of the largest on Earth. About the rest of the Sunni Arab states, I do not know what to say. Iraq, Syria, and Libya appear to be failed states right now, and Yemen is turning into one awful fast. There is some violence in Egypt, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan and Lebanon, but state structures appear to be largely intact. Palestine is a war zone and increasingly so is the Sinai. Indeed the Shia do not appear to be going on jihad now or anytime soon. They do not believe in offensive jihad like the Sunnis do, and Shiism is quite a bit more progressive than Sunnism. Like Catholicism with its Pope, Shiism has its clergy. As the Pope and Vatican continue to update Catholicism to keep up with a changing world, the Ayatollahs and clergy in Lebanon and Iran do the same with Islam. The clergy in the latter two lands are surprisingly progressive, but those in Iraq, not so much. I know little about the Houthi Shia in Yemen. The only people involved in the global jihad right now are radical Sunnis. The Shia, instead of being involved in this project, are victims of it, as global jihadists see the Shia as heretics to be killed on sight if not exterminated altogether. So the Shia, like the Arab Christians, are literally fighting for their lives against global jihad and are much more victimized by it than the Christian West is. Almost all terrorism in the world today is committed by Sunnis. In fact, the Shia are responsible for little terrorism outside of attacks on Israelis outside of Israel. There is some state terrorism being practiced by the Shia Iraqi state against Iraqi Sunnis.

I also foresee an Euro/Mediterranean Jihad One, after which the Middle East will be further fragmented…

I have no idea if this is going to occur, but it seems like it already is at a low to high variable level, right? Surely the Tunisian, Libyan, Egyptian, Palestinian, Lebanese and Syrian parts of the Mediterranean are heating up, and a few are out and out jihad war zones right now. Turkey is increasingly starting to resemble the beginnings of a war zone. Terrorism in Europe is at a fairly low level, but the few attacks have been spectacular and there is a steady drumbeat of low level attacks happening in the background. Comments along with your own predictions are welcomed.

US Muslims Are Not Bad in and of Themselves

I do not believe that US Muslims are a problem in and of themselves. Sure, some are a problem, but the overwhelming majority seem to be ok. Muslims are like Blacks. Sure some Blacks are criminals and give the group a bad name, but Blacks are not a problem in and of themselves because so many Blacks are living perfectly decently like you, me or anyone else. Saying all US Muslims are evil is like saying all US Blacks are evil – it’s as bunch of stupid racist bull.

We have Yemeni, Pakistani and Palestinian Muslims in this town. These Muslims in my town are causing exactly zero problems. They are not even very radical. I would say that I am far more of an America-hater than any Muslim in my town.

I know each of these Muslims pretty well, but I know the Yemenis better than the others. In fact, a number of them are friends of mine. These Yemenis are not causing any problems at all.

A few of them are out and out patriotards. One graduated from Georgetown University and is in with US government types. At first he wanted to work for the FBI as an Arabic interpreter. He flies back to DC for political conferences sponsored by the State Department.

He is a very strong supporter of US foreign policy. In fact, when he opens his mouth, he sounds like a mixture of Hillary Clinton, Ashton Carter and John Kerry. He buys into all the Deep State propaganda of the corporate media 10

I don’t think they hate non-Muslims one bit. I have never heard them say anything against non-Muslims, not one word. They don’t even like to talk bad about Jews. In fact, they worry about me because they think I am an antisemite, and they think antisemitism is uncool. The older man told me that Yemeni Muslims and Yemeni Jews get along in the US quite well, as they put aside whatever differences they might have had in the homeland. He said many Yemeni Muslims work together with Yemeni Jews in New York running stores.

If they hate anyone, it’s Shiites and Iranians, but the old man doesn’t mind the Shia, and he doesn’t care about Iran either. He hates the Saudis worse than anyone else in the region. This opinion is apparently common, as many Yemeni nationalists despite the Saudis since Saudi Arabia has intervened in Yemen over and over and treats Yemen like a colony. The older guy in fact is supporting the Shia Houthis in their war against the Saudi, UAE, Egyptian, Sudanese, Jordanian, US and UK aggressors and invaders.

He told me that the Zaidi Shia of Yemen are just about Sunnis theologically. They only differ in one or two minor ways. In fact the “Shia” Zaidis are themselves diverse as not all of them even identify as Shia! Some “Shia” Zaidis say that they are actually Sunnis, and others say that they are both Sunni and Shia at the same time. They characterize themselves in these odd ways because Zaidism is so close to Sunnism doctrinally.

I have a very hard time understanding why these Muslims in my town are some sort of enemy within. Sure there are radicalized US Muslims, but I’ve never met one myself.

“Problems” and “Solutions”

Discuss Severaid’s quote and my examples given below, agreeing, disagreeing or expanding on the notion.

The chief cause of problems is solutions

– Eric Sevareid

I think this guy is onto something.

Examples:

War on Terror – Solution was all out war on “terrorism” – really just disobedient Muslim states and some international guerrilla/terrorist groups.

The “solution” did not solve the problem at all, and in fact it made it much worse and introduced quite a few new problems.

The “solution” to the “Muslim terrorism problem” did nothing to alleviate the problem, and the problem only expanded massively, in the process destroying much of the secular Muslim world and replacing it with ultra-radical, armed and ultraviolent fundamentalists. Several new failed states were created out of functioning but authoritarian secular regimes.

A wild Sunni-Shia war took off with no end in sight. A new Saudi-Iran conflict expanded to include all of the Sunni world against Iran and some Shia groups.

The policy was incoherent – in places (Palestine, Iraq, Syria, and Libya) secular nationalists were overthrown and replaced with radical fundamentalist regimes (Iraq, Palestine) or failed states teeming with armed fundamentalist actors (Yemen, Somalia, Palestine, Libya, Iraq, Syria, and Mali). In other places, fundamentalist regimes were overthrown and secular nationalists were put in (Egypt).

We alternately attacked and supported radical groups such as Al Qaeda and ISIS. An awful Russia-Turkey conflict took off on the Middle east with the US and NATO siding with Al Qaeda and ISIS supporting Turks. The US attacked and armed fundamentalists to attack Shia Iranian, Hezbollah and Houthi armies waging all out war on Al Qaeda and ISIS. In Yemen we actively attacked the Shia who were fighting Al Qaeda while supporting Al Qaeda and fundamentalist Sunnis with intel and weaponry.

Some Kurds were called terrorists and support was given to those attacking them. Other Kurds were supported in their fight against ISIS. In actuality, all of these Kurd represented the same entity. There really is no difference between the PKK, the YPG and the rulers of the Kurdish region. Meanwhile, Kurds fighting for independence were supported in Iran and Syria and attacked in Turkey though they were all the same entity.

Billions of US dollars and thousands of US lives were wasted for essentially no reason with no results or actually a worsened situation. Russia, one of the most effective actors in the war against Al Qaeda and ISIS, was declared an enemy and attacks on them by our allies were cheered on.

A horrible refugee crisis was created in Europe.

Muslim populations in the West were substantially radicalized.

Instead of ending Islamic terrorism, Islamic terrorist, conventional and guerrilla attacks absolutely exploded in the Middle East and to a lesser extent in Europe, Canada, Australia and the US. It also exploded in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Lebanon, Thailand, the Philippines and of course Syria and Iraq. There was considerable fighting and terrorism in Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Morocco and Jordan. The Palestinians ended up much better armed than before and the conflict exploded into all out war on a few occasions.

Terrorism and guerrilla war exploded in Mali, Nigeria, Cameroon, Somalia and Kenya with some new attacks in Niger, Mauritania, Chad and Uganda. Somalia took a turn for the worse as a huge Al Qaeda force set up shop there and the country turned into the worst failed state ever with nothing even resembling a state left and the nation furthermore split off into three separate de facto nations.

The “solution” failed completely and simply ended up creating a whole new set of problems that were vastly worse than the original problem for the which the solution was directed.

Technology: Technology itself could be regarded as a lousy fix to many problems.

Friday the Thirteenth in Paris

Here.

Superb article by Chris Floyd,  one of my favorite writers. He pins the blame for all of these jihadist monsters on the US.

I do not think that is 10

All you have to do to get US support is be a rightwing government and this holds true under both Republican and Democratic Administrations. The radical fundamentalist and often sectarian Islamists absolutely hated secularism, socialism and Communism, so they were and are great tools for us to use when we attacked secular, nationalist, socialist or Communist governments anywhere on Earth.

We started this crap with the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, where we used Islamists to help in the coup. In 1965, we used Islamists among others to help Indonesia kill 1 million Communists in a very short period of time. We really picked up the pace with Brezhinski’s brilliant idea under Carter to use radical Al Qaeda types to overthrow the Communist government in Afghanistan. The Afghan jihad virtually created the international jihad, and Al Qaeda and the rest of the global jihad types. There are allegations, not quite proven, that the US helped to arm, fund and train the Chechen radical Islamists against Russia. We used Islamists against Libya and now Syria. We are currently arming Islamists against Iran.

Bottom line is we helped to create this whole mess. Not through pure design, sure, but these global jihad monsters were the logical outcome of US policies which continue to this very day in Syria and Yemen where we are supporting radical Sunni Wahhabi Islamists sectarians including Al Qaeda against the populist Houthi rebellion and the majority of the Yemeni Army who has gone over to them. We recently backed radical Sunni Islamists in Lebanon to attack Hezbollah.

Global jihad is our baby. It’s our Frankenstein. We made it, and now we have to deal with the consequences.

America Has a Special Mission to Bring Freedom and Democracy to the World

It is indeed true. America, that shining city on a hill, has a special mission to bring freedom and democracy to the whole world, at gunpoint if need be. America’s mission is to be the Humanitarian Bomber to the world in need, freeing people groaning under the weight of oppressive dictatorships so they can breathe the free air of freedom and democracy.

Before and after American intervention.
Before and after American intervention.

Before shows the horrible, evil, nightmarish world of oppressive dictatorship. This is before America got involved to bring light unto the world. Doesn’t that look horrible? Awful! Terrible! Those poor people need some liberation! On the right shows the the results after the great US (and NATO) intervention to remove the vicious dictators who slaughter their people and replace them with peace, freedom, democracy, human rights, gay rights parades, affirmative action quotas and radical feminism.

Look at how much better those countries look after US intervention! Isn’t America cool? God bless America! Land of the free! If you are suffering under a cruel dictator, just give America a call and we will send some humanitarian bombers to liberate you so you can enjoy peace, freedom, democracy, prosperity and human rights for all. Right now your country looks like those on the left. But don’t despair. You can look like the countries on the right in no time. Just give America a call today for a free Democratization Estimate.

Eric Margolis on Russia and Syria

Here.

Fantastic radio show, unfortunately from a Libertarian-aligned station, Scott Horton, but oh well, beggars can’t be choosers.

So I will just ignore this guy’s retarded Libertarianism and focus on the positive.

Margolis says many an interesting thing in this broadcast. I can vouch for most of it except:

Israeli support for ISIS: unverified.

Qatari support for ISIS: unverified.

Saudi support for ISIS: formerly true, at the moment uncertain.

NATO instigators that exploded the early Syrian protests, probably with sniper rifles: unverified, but I’ve heard the rumors.

US, French and UK special forces on the ground in Syria carrying out attacks on Assad’s army: unverified, but shocking if true.

All the rest is pretty much straight up true. Why is Russia enemy #1? They would not roll over and obey the US. Instead they declared their independence from America. So Russia’s got to be taken out for that uppity behavior.

Why are we so nuts about getting rid of Assad?

Because from the US’ POV,  the whole anti-Assad, Syrian Civil War project is about taking out Iran. Get rid of Syria and screw Iran by getting rid of one of her main allies.

Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Kuwait, and Jordan apparently all want to either sock a blow to Iran or just take out Assad because he’s Shia.

Turkey probably wants him out because he’s Shia; I am not sure if they care about Iran.

France and the UK are probably on the blow to Iran side.

Israel surely wants to take out one of its worst enemies and also smash Iran by taking out Syria. Keep in mind that the Axis of Resistance is: Hezbollah, Lebanon, Syria, the Palestinians and Iran. All of the rest of the Arabs surrendered to Israel a long time ago. Since 9-11, Israel’s been whispering in our Presidents’ ears, telling us to take out their enemies. And so we have, in Iraq and Libya and now working on Syria.

The lunatic multinational invasion of Yemen is all about crush Iran. Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Sudan and Egypt are all in on the smash Iran Yemeni project.

Anyway if you want to figure out what’s going on in the world, this great interview is a good place to start.

Vile and Repulsive: America Supports Sickening Illegal Invasion of Yemen

Here.

Absolutely sickening.

Yes many Arab countries have joined in on this invasion of a sovereign country. This invasion is not about anything so much as “Kill the Shia.” That’s all it is. All of the invaders are Sunnis. They are invading because a nominally Shia group called the Houthis overthrew the extremely unpopular Hadi government in Yemen.

70-8

Actually the Houthi have been the main group running Yemen since the Middle Ages. A middle aged Sunni man who runs the local market supports them, saying, “They are the only people who know how to run the country.” Sadly his sons are infected with lunatic sectarianism and hate the Houthi as “Iranian proxies.”

Really the Houthi have little to do with Iran. Yes, they support Iran and vice versa, but there is no good evidence that Iran has given them much more than moral support.

What is going on here is that Saudi Arabia, the most evil country in the region other than its close ally Israel, is angry because the Houthi Shia Hadi who supported Saudi Arabia was overthrown by the Houthi rebels who are not real keen on Saudi Arabia.

Bottom line is Yemen has been a Saudi colony forever. Yemen has never been allowed to pursue any policy at all that was not pre-approved by the Saudis. For all intents and purposes, it’s not even an independent country and is instead a colony of Saudi Arabia.

The Saudis and other Sunni states have repeatedly intervened in Yemen. The last time Egypt intervened, they got their asses handed to them in a very bad way, losing 50,000 men. I do not think these invaders will have things so easily. They have already destroyed most of the country with bombs. Bombs repeatedly fall on markets and civilian vehicles driving along highways.

The Houthis will not go down easily.

This war is also about Saudi, Qatari, UAE, and Bahraini support for their buddies called Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (Yemeni Al Qaeda). This is the remains of the original Al Qaeda from Saudi Arabia that relocated to Yemen after the crackdown in Saudi Arabia.

Yemeni Al Qaeda has been a Saudi and larger Gulf project from Day One. To the north in Syria, UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia are throwing their weight behind another Al Qaeda faction called Al Nusra. 9

So, in Syria: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, and Qatar are supporting Al Qaeda massively with weapons and cash.

In Yemen: Saudi Arabia is certainly supporting Al Qaeda as a major project. And by attacking Al Qaeda’s worst enemy, the Houthis, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, UAE, Egypt, Sudan, and Qatar are supporting Al Qaeda to the maximum by attacking their worst enemy.

Indeed, Hadi, who is supported by the Sunni coalition, generally refused to attack Yemeni Al Qaeda and instead forged some sort of a truce with them. Yemeni Al Qaeda made serious gains under the Hadi government. And since the invasion, Yemeni Al Qaeda has continued to make major gains.

Note that the Sunni coalition has not dropped one single bomb on Yemeni Al Qaeda, and instead has waged all; out war on Al Qaeda’s worst enemy!

All of this sheer lunacy is wrapped up in ridiculous Iran-paranoia and Shia-paranoia. The Sunnis have always ruled the Arab world with an iron fist, and the Shia have been downtrodden from Day One. Sunnis have staged repeated mass slaughters bordering on genocides of the Shia since the very earliest days of the Sunni-Shia split. In the Arab World, the Sunnis are the crackers, and the Shia are the niggers. Sunnis saying “the Shia are out to get us” are like Hitler saying “the Jews are trying to genoide us!” or the crackers saying, “The niggers are trying to kill us all!”

It’s insane nonsense. The typical case of the bully screaming that the victim is trying to massacre him as he beats the victim to a pulp. If you understand human psychology, this is precisely how bullies operate. The bully is always “defending himself” against the “aggression” of the victim. In geopolitical terms, the victim is usually just getting ready to genocide the bully : “They’re going to kill us all!” Most genocides actually start out just like this. Go research some genocides and get back to me. It always goes like this.

So it goes with the madness of the Sunni Arab Idiocracy and their Shia and Iran paranoia. Talk to most any Sunni Arab, and you will hear the most ridiculous idiocy: how Iran is getting ready to conquer the Arab world, how Iran has to be stopped before they conquer us all, about how Iran is going to conquer the Arab world and force all the Sunnis to convert to Shiism, on and on. As insane as this psychotic babble is, a large majority of Sunni Arabs actually believe this nonsense.

Bottom line is that Iran hasn’t invaded another country in hundreds of years, and I can assure you that Iran does not want to conquer one inch of Sunni Arab soil. The last thing Iran needs is a bunch of rabidly enraged Sunni Arabs living under its rule. I am sure that Iran would prefer to rule over as few Sunni Arabs as possible.

In other words, Iran paranoia is a bunch of insane bullshit. And that’s what’s driving this whole ridiculous invasion.

In a fight where there’s good guys and bad guys, generally speaking the US can be counted on to support the bad guys, and of course that is what we are doing here. We are providing a lot of support to the Sunni invading states, apparently because the US is going to support whatever insane thing Saudi Arabia decides to do. We have also bought into idiotic line of the Israelis and Sunni Arabs that “Iran is the real enemy.”

So the US is helping the Sunnis pound Al Qaeda’s worst enemy in Yemen. The US is helping the massive expansion of Yemeni Al Qaeda by refusing to lay one finger on them and by pounding their enemies.

None of this makes any real sense from a geopolitical point of view except that US Mideast foreign policy is Israeli foreign policy. In the Middle East, we simply do whatever our Israeli masters tell us to do. And the Israelis’ worst enemy is Iran. If that means helping ISIS and Al Qaeda fight “Iran” in Syria, then Israel will do just that, and indeed, Israel is giving serious support to Syrian Al Qaeda, including providing air support for their battles by bombing the Syrian Army and taking wounded Al Qaeda fighters to Israel for treatment.

Yeah.

Israel is supporting Al Qaeda. Is that nuts or what?

So, the US attacks Al Qaeda in a few places like Somalia, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

On the other hand, the US gives all out support to Al Qaeda in Syria and Yemen.

The lunatic hand of the US neocons is behind all of this idiocy, and the American people could care less.

“Hey did you hear? America supports Al Qaeda!

Yawn. “What’s on TV?”

Are Arabs Usually in a State of War?

RL: Most people in the region have been living in peacetime most of the time since independence.

Swank: Seems to detail a different picture here…

There has not been a war fought on Moroccan territory. Morocco has been at peace 10

Algeria fought a civil war from 1991-2000.  That is 10 years out of 53.

There has not been a war fought on Tunisian territory. Tunisia has been at peace 10

Libya fought a 4 day border war with Egypt in 1977. There was an on and off war in Chad for 8 years between 1978-1987. There has been civil war since the overthrow of Ghaddafi. That is 12 years of war out of 63 years. Libya has been at peace 9

Egypt was involved in several wars with Israel, but they didn’t last long. The total adds up to maybe 2 years at most. That’s 2 years of war out of 93 years.

Indeed, Palestine has been embroiled war almost all the time since 1947.

Jordan has only fought some wars with Israel. Maybe 2 years of war out of the last 66 years.

Syria fought several wars with Israel, but the combined total only lasted two years. They fought a war with the Muslim Brotherhood that went on perhaps 1 year. There has been a civil war since 2012. That is 6 years of war out of 64 years.

Saudi Arabia has not been in any wars since 1920 that I am aware of. However, there was an internal civil war that lasted a few years recently, but it was a very low level war. Saudi Arabia was briefly targeted in the Gulf War but that was only for a year. That’s 3 years out of 95.

Oman has not been in any wars since 1920 that I am aware of. Oman has been at peace 10

Bahrain has not been in any wars since 1920 that I am aware of. Bahrain has been at peace 10

UAE has not been in any wars since 1920 that I am aware of. UAE has been at peace 10

Qatar has not been in any wars since 1920 that I am aware of. Qatar has been at peace 10

Kuwait has been at war only with Iraq and that was only for a few weeks. That is 1 month out of 95 years.

Yemen did fight a civil war that lasted maybe 8 years. This resulted in a split in the country. There has been an internal war against Al Qaeda for maybe 4 years now. That’s 12 years out of 54.

Iraq fought a brief war with the British in 1941, but it only lasted one month. There was civil war in Mosul in 1959, but it lasted no more than a week. Iraq fought a number of wars with Israel, but those amounted to no more than 2 years. The Iran-Iraq War lasted 8 years. The Gulf War was over in less than a year and was by an internal civil war on 6 months. Iraq has been at war since the Iraq War in 2003, 11 years. Since 1932, Iraq has been at war for 22 years. That is 22 out of 83.

Lebanon fought a few wars against Israel, adding up to no more than 2 years. There was a brief civil war in 1958 lasting no more than one month. There was a major civil war in Lebanon for 15 years, from 1975-1990. Hezbollah fought a 1 month war with Israel in 2006. There was a brief civil war in 2007 with the Lebanese army fought a 4 month civil war against Fatah-al-Islam. In 2008, Hezbollah fought a 1 week war with the government. The Syrian Civil War has spilled over into Lebanon for the last year. Lebanon has been at war for 19 out of 70 years.

Conclusion: Most countries in the Arab World have been at peace most of the time since Independence.

The Future According to ISIS

ISIS 5-year expansion plan. Parts of Europe are not included on this one.
ISIS 5-year expansion plan. Parts of Europe are not included on this one.
The map below includes parts of Europe.
Isisplan
This map labels the various vilayets of provinces of the future ISIS Caliphate. Yaman is Greater Yemen, Hijaz includes much of Saudi Arabia. Sham is Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Sinai and parts of Arabia. Iraq includes Iraq and parts of Arabia and Kuwait. Kordistan is Greater Kurdistan, in this case extending far down into eastern Iran. Anathol is the western half of Anatolia. The Maghreb is a well known term for northwestern Africa, usually applied to North African states such as Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria but in this case, also includes all of the Sahel and West Africa.

Andalus includes all of Spain. Khurasan is an old term for Iran and Afghanistan. On this map it also includes Tajikistan,Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kirghistan, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal at the very least. I am not familiar with the terms Alkinana (northeast Africa), Qoqzaz (apparently means the Greater Caucasus as you can see in the spelling), Orobpa (southeastern Europe) and Habasha (much of Central Africa above the Equator. There is an unnamed province in Southern Iran.

I honestly do not see how they conquer India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Armenia, Georgia, all of Eastern Europe, all of West Africa, Spain, Iran, Azerbaijan, or even Lebanon and Israel for that matter. I am just not seeing this, sorry. If I were an Indian though, I would be frightened of these maps.  

US Foreign Policy: Nation State Destruction

Under folks like “Democrat” Anne-Marie “Humanitarian Bomber” Slaughter and “Republican” George “Mission Accomplished” Bush, US foreign policy really boils down to the removal of nation-states either by invasion, mercenary insurgency or armed coup. What’s left over is a failed state with little authority in most of its territory which is then ruled by various US proxy forces such as Nazis, fascists, warlords, tribal chiefs and Islamist fundamentalist idiots. In Libya, we destroyed a brutal yet stable nation-state and replaced it with anarchy, a failed state apparatus and rule by tribes, warlords and radical Al Qaeda types with a continuous low level of violence. In Syria, we destroyed a brutal yet stable nation-state and replaced with utter chaos, a mad civil war that left 180,000 dead and 9 million refugees and most of the nation in utter ruins outside of the state’s rule. Radical Islamists control vast swathes of land and atrocities occur continuously. The truth is that Syria has been destroyed. In Iraq, the US removed a very brutal yet stable nation-state and replaced it with utter chaos, and a continuous insurgency followed by a savage civil war that has left 1.4 million Iraqis dead. Al Qaeda types control vast swathes of land, and Ayatollah types hold sway in the south. Iraq lies in ruins. In Afghanistan, the US removed an evil yet fairly stable state under the Taliban and replaced it with military occupation and a failed state which barely has jurisdiction or control outside of Kabul city limits. Most of the land lies in ruins and a vast number of died for no particularly good reason. Afghanistan basically lies in ruins. In Ukraine, the US replaced a stable but corrupt leader who refused to bow to IMF debt slavery and be a nation-seller. A man who got cold feet when it came down to the nitty-gritty of selling out his people bailed on the devastating deal being shoved down his throat. The US then funded some of its pet Nazis to riot in the streets, kill cops and put snipers on buildings shooting dozens in false flag operations. An insane Nazi regime soon took over and immediately declared war on every minority in the country, especially the Russians. They also for all intents and purposes declared war on Russia. The Russians in the East, naturally alarmed at the rise of this new Nazi power in Europe, logically decided they wanted no part of this mess and voted to secede. A huge military operation was then launched on the people of the East resulting in hundreds dead and entire cities in ruins while America cheered on the slaughter and called for more killing and destruction. Much of Eastern Ukraine now lies in ruins. In Yemen, a weak government has lost control of much of the countryside where tribal militias and Al Qaeda type Islamists control giant swathes of territory. I am not sure what it was like before 9-11, but I do not think it was this bad. Tunisia, previously a very stable state, is now destabilized by invading Al Qaeda types from Libya flooded with weapons from the overthrown Libyan government. Mubarak was removed in Egypt, and in the resulting protests, many died. Elections were held, and Muslim Brotherhood Islamists won. Quite a bit of protest and some violence then ensued. The MB started enacting a lot of anti-democratic laws, and al-Sisi, a Nasserite style general in the Egyptian Army, seized power along with other officers. The MB protested, and many MB protesters were massacred in cold blood. Death sentences were levied against 600 protestors for a protest in which one cop was killed. Attacks against Egyptian Coptic Christians increased dramatically. The result is a chaotic Egypt that was much more stable under Mubarak.

The Arab World: The Ilusion and the Truth

Oneofmany writes:

I wouldn’t compare the Arab states and Iran to the Western and Asian ones in terms of socialism or economics.The Arab peninsula has socialized food distribution and medicine paid for by high oil revenues to feed almost everyone but everything else is a joke. There is no real middle class, little economic activity derived from intellectual and artistic skills or interests, very little business and hobby types forging creative industry and small businesses, no political will to make upper and lower class interests work together. Your either a wealthy connected type who lives in segregated properties and developments with lavish imported architecture, food, cars, and toys or you live in the depressing spans of identical government housing blocks and work in an underpaid servicing job. Of course that’s not even counting the virtual slave labor they bring in from south east Asia and India. The West and Japan (as well as China to lesser degree) have far more fleshed out economies and social capital, a real middle class driven economy and far more opportunity to economically and socially advance. Also, if happiness and fulfillment mean anything than their certainly a bust in that area. Based on self reporting the Islamic world is the most miserable place on Earth outside of the poorest parts of Africa and Haiti.

These sort of comments are typically tossed about by those who hate Arabs such as Hindus and Jews. I am amazed you are parroting this stuff. This is not really true. Most Arab countries are pretty socialist. If the state doesn’t take care of it, the Islamic charities do. There is what you call socialized food distribution all over the region, including Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Palestine. All of North Africa has been pretty socialist for a long time now. All of Gulf is socialist for its citizens. North Africa and the Gulf have huge middle classes, as did Syria and Iraq. Lebanon has a vast middle class. Palestine is a mess, but the people are pretty middle class in behavior and outlook and further, horrific 3rd World slums do not exist. What passes for so-called poverty in the Arab World is really not so bad compared to the true poverty of Latin America, India, the Philippines, Indonesia, Africa. Everyone has a place to live and enough food to eat and generally education and medical care is available as is transportation. There are no homeless. Yemen is the only Arab state with a lot of real poverty and malnutrition but I do not understand that situation well. I believe that the state is broke too. Oligarchic neoliberal Libertarian laissez faire economies simply do not exist in the Arab World. They simply do not believe their fellow Arabs should go without food or medicine. You are wrong about businesses in the Arab World. In the Levant, Mesopotamia, and North Africa there are a vast number of small businesses and quite a few Arab-run large businesses too. Economies boom right along. I do not know much about the Gulf, but looking at Dubai, I would hardly say there is little business activity going on there. The slave labor in the Gulf is really the only real true poverty in the Arab World. I have known a number of folks from that area, male and female, from Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, and Kuwait, and all of them were living pretty nice, rather middle class and happy lives. Arabs do not seem to be miserable type people. They like to enjoy life. I do not agree that Arabs are the most depressed people on Earth. Look over at Scandinavia or Russia for that. If you think this website is valuable to you, please consider a contribution to support the continuation of the site.

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.

Genocide in Australia

Repost from the old site. Looks like it was way worse than the genocide of the Amerindians in the US. The wiping out of the Amerindians was done mostly by disease. The much-repeated story of blankets poisoned with smallpox apparently occurred in once, back East. There was a large poisoning of maybe 200-300 Amerindians in the Shasta area of California in the 1800’s, and there was a massacre of 200-300 Amerindians near Eureka at the same time. California was actually one of the worst places of all. There was an all-out war against the Amerindians here. I spent months going over old newspaper archives in a library as part of work I did for an Indian tribe here in the Sierras (now doing great with a casino). In the 1850’s and 1860’s, the California Indians were fighting back. The governor himself was making wild proclamations about how this war a war of one race against another, a war that had to lead to the extinction of one or the other. For 15-20 years or so, it was more or less legal to kill any Indian you wanted in the Sierras and Northern California and for any reason. You could rape an Indian woman too if you want to, and take an Indian child captive. All of this was more or less legal. Of course this was taking place against the backdrop of the utterly insane mass criminality and homicide of the California Gold Rush, a crime wave the likes of which the state has never even come close to seeing since. Too many young unmarried men, hardly any women, few to no families, lots of money in the form of gold, little law enforcement, all the ingredients were there. The law that existed was a brutal one, and men were hanged right and left in the Gold Rush for all sorts of things, but preying on Indians was not one of them. On Sundays, the men would all go to church, then they would head back to the camps to drink, take drugs, steal, fight, kill and just in general act like animals. There were regular hangings at the camps, and these were well-attended. Folks would go watch the hangings, then head back to camp to commit more crimes later that evening. Sometimes, even capital punishment just doesn’t cut it. Recall the stories of the pickpockets that roamed through the crowds in England at the hangings. This was when pickpocketing was a capital offense. Until 1870 or so, an Indian in this part of the state kept his head down and his mouth shut and hoped to stay alive. Epidemics and disease took their toll. By 1890, 9 That’s interesting to folks who insist that genetic change in humans takes a long time. Not necessarily, when something happens that kills 9 Those who tally such things say that ultimately, Whites killed 7,000 Indians and Indians killed about 11,000 Whites. It’s true, the Indians were could be brutal and women and children were at times killed, but they also often kidnapped them and made them members of the tribe. There are a couple of stories in my family about encounters with Indians. These all stem from one line of my family, who actually came over with the first invaders on the Second Ship of the Mayflower. Sometime in the 1640’s in Massachusetts, Indians attacked the village where all the men were off hunting. They rounded up the women and children and prepared to set fire to them. Some of the women started singing a pretty song, and the Indians stopped to listen. Well, this was long enough for the menfolk to return, chase off the Indians and save the day. Two of my ancestors were in that group, a woman and her young child. Later, in late 1700’s Virginia, one of my relatives was taken captive by Indians with his friend. They made them run the gauntlet, a popular thing that Indians liked to do with captured Whites. As you ran the gauntlet, the Indians beat on you. Well, the friend was apparently killed in this process. My ancestor, though, when prodded to run the gauntlet, started jumping around and squawking like a chicken. The Indians all started laughing and decided he did not have to run the gauntlet. I’m not sure if it’s the same story, but one of my ancestors at one point was either captured by Indians or joined them. This in late 1700’s Virginia again. His family just gave him up for dead. Well, 10 years later, the son returns home, about 30 years old, and he’s walking up to his father’s house all dressed like an Indian. His father got out his gun and was ready to shoot his own son until he recognized him. Back in those days, if an Indian was coming onto your property, you shot him. My family goes back to 1600’s Virginia and it’s said that if you can trace your line back that far, you have a 5 The first two stories are probably apocryphal. If you notice the themes: clever Whites use their ingenuity (and common human nature) to fool the Indians by disarming them and appealing to their sensibilities for comedy and appreciation of music. As the Indian is a barbarian savage in both tales, at the same time, he is a fellow human, revealed by his ability to appreciate a clever joke or a beautiful song. At the end of the day, there is really no way to figure out if such stories are true or not. But they got passed down through the family for years for a reason that is at once egotistical and at the same time a warning: our line is a clever line, able to cheat death by our wits. Remember this, and use this lesson in the close calls you may experience in your own dangerous times. The treatment of the Aborigines looks like a real genocide. There were sterilization attempts, deliberate attempts at “breeding them out”, mass imprisonments for minor infractions, infantilization throughout life by being confined to child-care like institutions where even their shit had to pass muster. In these homes, both sexes experienced mass sex abuse, and this went on for decades. Single women were not allowed to have sex, and males were punished for being a “menace to White women”. Half-breeds were taken away to be raised by Whites, and many Aboriginal children were stolen from their families. There was a conscious attempt to make this race fade into history. There are not many full-blooded Aboriginals left. There are not that many in cities, and most are in remote areas. They still have very serious problems, but they are hardly any kind of threat to the rest of Australians in any way. At the moment, alcohol and drugs are the worst problems, and fetal alcohol syndrome is epidemic among them. The damaged children are petty criminals and find it hard to function on their own. When the Whites first showed up, Aboriginals were waging their own war of extinction on the Negritos of Australia, who may have been there even before the Aborigines showed. The Negritos are the first people out of Africa 70,000 years ago, who moved along the Indian Ocean to SE Asia, leaving trace populations (or relatives) behind (possibly) in Yemen, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, the Andaman Islands, Malaysia, the Philippines and New Guinea.

The journey taken by early man out of Africa 70,000 years ago. As you can see, one line goes to Australia. Negritos, not Aborigines, were probably the first people in Australia.

The first Whites witnessed Aborigines hunting Negritos the way man would hunt wild animals. They were killed just for the pleasure of it, and because they were small. Early investigations A photo of Australian Negritos from the Cairns rainforest, taken in 1890, found by Tindale in 1937. He went looking for some Negritos in the area and found a few of them. I haven’t seen any genetic studies on these people, since there are few if any of them left, but studies did seem to show that like most Negritos, they are most closely related genetically to the people around them, in this case, the Aborigines.

Native Tasmanians are now apparently extinct. They were also hunted like animals for decades. The people that we commonly know as Aborigines (or at least one group called Carpentarians named for the Gulf of Carpentaria in Northern Australia) seem to have come much later from Southern India (and seem related to the Veddoids) and largely replaced the Negritos, a genocide that was in its final phases when the Whites showed up.

Indo-Melanid Yanadi boys in Southern India. Note the resemblance with Aborigines. Unfortunately, cranial studies do not show a relationship with Veddoid types and Aborigines. However, genes did seem to show a link a while back. Nevertheless, cranially and surely genetically, these Yanadis are Caucasians. They may be some of the most ancient Caucasians of them all. It’s fascinating to think that the Aborigines as we know them are the original people, but were actually later arrivals from India and the Pacific Rim respectively.

The Carpentarians showed up about 15,000 years ago, were darker and had little body hair. A classic Aborigine, probably a cross between an Ainu type and an early South Indian type. These types were generalized across India and SE Asia about 24,000 years ago. Another group, called Murrayians, are apparently related to the Ainu, and arrived 20,000 years ago. The Ainu are thought to be the remnants of the original people of Northern Asia. They were stocky, wavy-haired, hairy, and fairly light-skinned.

A photo of Ainu Yasli Adam in traditional garb. I love this photo. Note that he could be mistaken for an Aborigine or a Caucasian. Anthropological studies suggest that Ainu types showed up in Australia about 20,000 years ago. There seems to be evidence of them in Thailand around 16,000 years ago, and about this time they went to Japan to form a very early Japanese culture called the Jomonese. There is a suggestion that proto-Jomonese people were also in Thailand around this time. At the same time, the Americas were being populated by types that best resemble the Ainu. These are the Paleoindians, and the Amerindians today are no relation, no matter how much they scream. The famous Kennewick Man is also a Paleoindian most closely related to an Ainu or a Maori. He only appears Caucasian because the Ainu types do look Caucasian. However, in facial structure, they are Australoid, and genetically, they are Asians. Complete moron White nationalists claim that Kennewick Man is a White Man, and this proves that Whites were here before Amerindians, and therefore the whole continent is ours. Stupid or what? I’m going to do a whole post taking these clowns to task over this. In traditional early anthropology of the Philippines, a group called the proto-Malay is postulated. They arrived after the Negritos and after an Australoid group called Sakais, who seem to resemble Veddoids or the Senoi of Malaysia. The proto-Malay are described as short and very hairy. A hairy Asian sounds like an Ainu, and indeed, there were Jomon types in Thailand, and Ainu types may have settled Australia 20,000 years ago, and the Americas 12,000 years ago. In short, Ainu types were on the move around the Pacific Rim from 12-20,000 years ago, and may even have settled in the Philippines. This is real cutting-edge stuff here and I am totally going out on a limb. Feel free to dive in.

An Australian fossil called Kow Swamp from 20,000 YBP curiously looks more like Homo Erectus than Homo Sapiens. The Negritos were least advanced, then the Murrayians, then the Carpentarians. Tindale and Birdsell did the best work on the peopling of Australia long ago and much of it stands to this day. In between the 1960’s saw such idiocies as pan-Aboriginalism, which mandated that all Aborigines had to come from a single source. Ridiculous theories postulated Negritos not as ancient remnants of the first modern humans in their regions, but as the result of microevolution (in particular, to living in a rain forest) and evolutionary drift. This same scenario plays out in Africa, where Bantus kill Pygmies just for the fun of it, and take special pleasure in eating them. This old habit has come back with the horrible civil war in Zaire that has killed 5 million people. In the Philippines, Negritos have been murdered by settlers for their land for decades now, with few legal consequences. The remainder are a defeated people, their lands stolen by Filipinos, working for Filipinos on their former lands as agricultural labor, living in squatter villages, families falling apart, riven by alcohol, dope and even pornography.

A full-grown Ati woman. The Ati, a Philippines Negrito group, live on Panay Island, where they number about 1,500. The Filipinos have been stealing their land and killing them when they resist for decades now, and the government could care less. The Negritos of the Philippines are starting to look like a defeated race.

On the Andaman Islands, most of the Negritos have gone extinct due to disease. The few remainders, for some odd reason, are afflicted with very low fertility, that is, the women seem to be unable to bear children. Is this nature’s way of marking the extinction of a race?

Andaman Islands Negritos. Contact with advanced civilization is fatal to them. They have some immunity to malaria, but none to Hepatitis, venereal diseases or even the common cold or the flu. They quickly succumb to venereal disease, violent crime, beggary, and sloth upon contact with modern civilization. There is a group on the Sentinel Islands that attacks all researchers who come near. Indian nationalist fuckheads keep sending expeditions to “bring them into civilization” but every Andamans group that has come to the modern world has been destroyed. Long may the Sentinelese prosper in the Paleolithic glory. I actually think these Stone Age chicks are kinda cute. Hell with modern woman anyway. Every one I meet wants to know my net worth. Think these babes care? Hell with Late Capitalism, how do I get me one of these Negrito chicks anyway?

Alt Left: George Habash, a Revolutionary Life

Repost from the old site.

The following tribute to George Habash, leader of the Palestinian Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) was delivered to a meeting organized by the CPGB-ML in Central London on Saturday 10 February 2008. The Communist Party Great Britain Marxist-Leninist, basically a hardline pro-Stalin group, last time I checked. This document is interesting for various reasons.

For one, it shows that hardline Communist rhetoric in the style of the former USSR is still popular. The PFLP are lauded for being a hardline Marxist-Leninist organization. It’s hard to say whether they still are or not, as they seem to be downplaying this in recent years, and no one really knows what Communism even means anymore. It is true that there was a Communist state in South Yemen, but I am not sure if they accomplished much down there. One of the biggest heroes of the Arab Left is Gamel Nasser, leader of Egypt. One great thing that he did do was to initiate a land reform. Most Arab states probably do not have feudal or semi-feudal land relations in the countryside anymore, but Egypt did in the 1950’s. 1 The vast majority of the rural population was reduced to the status of landless laborers or sharecroppers in debt peonage on the land of the landlords. Nasser was able to break up the large estates by buying them up via the government and giving the land to the sharecroppers. It was one of the great progressive events in modern Arab history. Back in the day in Yemen, you would go into the houses of the poor in South Yemen and see Nasser’s picture on the wall – they knew he was a hero to the Arab poor, and mostly for the land reform. Unfortunately, land reform was not enough. Population was exploding and Egypt desperately needed to put more farmland into production. Hence the Aswan Dam, a necessary evil. But even this did not solve the problems, as the rural poor continued to pour into the cities to look for nonexistent work. The landowners were bought off by assuring them a place in industry, which was and is heavily corrupt and tied in with the state. But the Egyptian economy was so shaky that the rich didn’t really feel like investing in it. Socialism was and is a pretty easy sell across the Arab World, in part due to Islam. Islam is a pretty socialist religion, although fundamentalists will argue the point with you and point out that the Koran says that there are those who have more and those who have less and this is ok. Nevertheless, the Koran is hardly a raging individualist tract. Nor are the deserts of the Arab World suited for individualism. In such an environment, the every man for himself libertarian is lost and probably dead quite quickly. One must form alliances or one will be destroyed. One must work cooperatively or the elements will take your life. In a world of perennial scarcity, mass hoarding by a few means death for many more. Hence, in the past century, most independent Arab states have opted for some kind of socialism. Where the states could not do it, the religious or militant groups did. There is no hatred of welfare or government as we have it in the individualist US. Socialism is simply normal and free market libertarianism is seen as a bizarre and cruel aberration. Nevertheless, in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and probably other places, the clergy did resist land reforms on the grounds that they were un-Islamic. Iraq, newly emerging from semi-feudal relations in the 1960’s, saw the Iraqi Communist Party become one of the largest parties in the country. It was particularly popular with poor Shia who flooded in from the countryside and poured into what later became Sadr City. At that time, the Shia clergy were widely regarded as corrupt. They were tied in with large landowners, often involved in money-making scams, and were noted for enticing women into sexual relationships with them. One of the few great things that the Shah of Iran did was to institute a land reform to realign the semi-feudal relations in the Iranian countryside. It went off pretty well, but some ethnic groups opposed it and hence were persecuted. The tone of the Communist Party Great Britain Marxist-Leninist in the statement below is what might be called Stalinist or anti-revisionist. Anti-revisionists hold that the problems with Communist states came from them leaving the path of true Communism and diluting their economies with capitalist relations. I do not know how much there is to that, so I can’t comment on revisionism. But even staunch Marxist sites nowadays post long pieces stating flat out that the Soviet model failed. The North Star Compass is a pretty interesting site. It’s run by former Communists from the East Bloc and the USSR, and it is dedicated to the reestablishing of the Soviet Union as a socialist state. For these folks, Gorbachev was enemy #1. There are quite a few interesting essays there, and for those who think that Putin is a Communist, these guys really hate Putin. For those who think that Russian Communists are all racists and anti-Semites, note that the North Star Compass despises the newly emerging fascist threat in the USSR. There are many Trotskyite sites on the Net. The Trotskyites used to be totally nuts on the question of “Stalinists”. Can you believe that they supported the German attack on the USSR and opposed the Soviet army’s war in Afghanistan? Trotskyites seem to have calmed down a lot lately. Many of them are supporting the Nepalese Maoists and the Colombian FARC. They even support Cuba. Usually this is measured with a tone that these states and movements would be better off if they adopted Trotskyism. Truth is that it is possible that Trotskyism has hardly even be tried anywhere, except possibly in the USSR from 1917-1922. Trotskyites have a reputation as the ultimate splitters, and in the Philippines they have, incredibly, taken up arms alongside the feudal and fascist state against the Maoist NPA. In Defense of Marxism is a good example of a Trotskyite site. It seems that many Communists nowadays in the West are Trotskyites of some sort. No one really knows what to make of them, and many Stalinists just laugh about them and regard them as irrelevant. Western Trotskyites seem to have a lot of money for some reason, and often put up nice websites. Non-Trotskyite Communist sites often have mild critiques of Trotskyism as some sort of irrelevant hairsplitting movement. Western Trotskyites were heavily Jewish in the West until 1967 or possibly earlier. World Trotskyism opposed Israel in the Six Day War and Jewish Trotskyites consequently defected en masse. Many seem to have made their way into the neoconservative movement. There are a variety of reasons for the heavy Jewish presence in Trotskyism, and that Trotsky himself was Jewish cannot be ignored. Trots have tended to oppose both Stalinism and Maoism as horribly brutal ideologies that committed atrocious human rights violations. Trotskyism has been a serious movement only in the West and it has tended to flounder in the rest of the world. One of the Trots’ main points is that a rapid buildup of urban industry is essential for the development of a modern socialist state. Trots are almost the opposite of the Maoists and their emphasis on the peasantry. There are sites that basically uphold the former USSR and even Stalin, but they are often angry at Maoists, whom they accuse of adventurism. In India, Maoists are killing traditional Communists in the state of Bengal, a state that has been run by pro-Soviet Communists for about 30 years now. Marxism-Leninism Today is an example of a pro-USSR, pro-Cuba, anti-Maoist site. They support the CPI-M (Communist Party India-Marxist) in Bengal and are not too happy with the Indian Maoists for killing their comrades. Here is a cool site by a Georgian artist who is the grandson of Joseph Stalin, showing the Stalin family tree among other things. Stalinism.ru is a site run by Russian Stalinists, but if you can’t read Russian, it’s not for you. The National Bolshevik Party is some sort of a bizarre marriage of Stalinism and racial nationalism (I don’t want to say Nazism, but I fear that is what it is). It’s Russian too, but check out the scary party image, complete with Nordic lettering, and the background on the homepage. Lots of related links at the bottom – looks like they have chapters all over the place. Another great site, coming from a somewhat different point of view, a Maoist one, is the Single Spark. Although Maoists are often described as ultra-Stalinists, Maoists and Stalinists are not necessarily the same thing. The Maoists have always been the real bomb-throwers on the Far Left. Despite Cold War rhetoric, pro-Soviet Communists often did not take up armed struggle until all peaceful avenues for change were blocked, and the Left was up against a death squad state. Otherwise, the idea was to try to gain power through parliamentary means, despite Lenin’s denouncements of “parliamentary cretinism”. If the state was reasonably democratic and not killing the Left, the pro-Soviets often argued that “an objectively revolutionary situation did not exist”. On the other hand, Maoists tend to reject all bourgeois democracy as invalid, particularly in very backward societies with mass extreme poverty and accompanying disease, hunger and premature death. Hence, Maoists have launched insurgencies against formally democratic states as Peru, Sri Lanka, Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, Philippines, Nepal and India in recent years. In most of these cases, the pro-Soviet Left decided to sit out armed struggle, and the Maoists were denounced as adventurists irresponsibly taking up arms in spite of a lack of an objectively revolutionary situation. In Peru, the war launched by the Shining Path led to a state that was less and less democratic and soon became just another Death Squad State. Thus in 1984, the pro-Cuban Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) took a vote and decided that “an objectively revolutionary situation existed” and opted to take up arms. Another difference is that despite Cold War rhetoric, Maoists are often a lot more vicious than the Castroites and pro-Soviet rebels. Maoists have no qualms about killing “class enemies” – anyone prominent advocating rightwing politics or abusive landowners – whereas the Castroites often try to take the high ground in guerrilla war. Examples in Latin America are the Castroite ELN in Colombia, URNG in Guatemala, FSLN in Nicaragua, FMLN in El Salvador, the aforementioned MRTA, and the FARC in Colombia. Despite crap from anti-Communists and the US government, all these groups have tried pretty hard to abide by the rules of war. At any rate, the overwhelming majority of grotesque human rights violations in each of these conflicts were committed by the state. On the other hand, the Maoist Sendero Luminoso was a profoundly savage and cruel guerrilla group, though they almost seized power. Communism doesn’t mean that much anymore. Cuba allows religious believers to join the party, and there are millions of liberation theology Leftist Catholics in Latin America and the Philippines. The Chinese and Vietnamese Communists have introduced major elements of capitalism into their economies, while retaining a great deal of socialism at the same time. Over the course of a few years, from 2003 to 2005 and 2006, the Nepalese Maoists underwent a sea change in politics. They went from hardline Maoists railing against revisionists and opposing anything but the dictatorship of the proletariat, to an embrace of multiparty democracy and a mixed economy and measured critiques of Mao, Lenin and Stalin as outdated for the needs and realities of today. I think this is fantastic. I care nothing about dogma. I just want results, and I don’t really care how you get there – capitalism, socialism, communism or whatever. If Marxism is indeed an ever-evolving science (which, if it is a science, it must be) then there must be no treating its elementary texts as some sort of religious books. The works of Marx, Lenin, Mao and others must be regarded as the works of men, not Gods, positing theories. These theories must be tested in praxis to see how well they test out, as in any empirical investigation. The theories of these mortals will either test out or they will not, and if not, we need to adjust them accordingly. We know what our goals are; all that is at stake is how to get there. Let us listen to top leader Prachanda and other Nepalese Maoist leaders, from the Single Spark site:

Since MLM is a progressive science, the people’s war calls for ideology and leadership that is capable to complete a new People’s War in the 21st century. Our Party’s CC Extended Meeting last September held that the ideologies of Lenin and Mao have become old and inadequate to lead the present international revolution. The political and organizational report passed by the meeting says, ‘The proletariat revolutionaries of the 21st century need to pay their serious attention towards that fact that in today’s ground reality, Lenin and Mao’s analysis of imperialism and various notions relation to proletariat strategies based on it have lagged behind.’ As Marxism was born in an age of competitive capitalism, the strategies and working policy formulated during the times of Marx had become old when they arrived at Lenin’s times of imperialism and proletariat revolution. Similarly, the ideologies developed by Lenin and Mao at the initial phase of international imperialism and proletariat revolution have become inadequate and lagged behind at the present imperialistic phase. Therefore, ‘the main issue is to develop MLM in the 21st century and to determine a new proletariat strategy.1 The second [wrong trend] …is not to concentrate on how revolutionary struggle can be developed in one’s country by developing correct strategy and tactics, but to talk more of world revolution, enjoy classical debate, eulogize strategy and tactic of the past successful revolutions, teach other fraternal parties as if they know everything about the concrete situation in that country and stick to what Lenin and Mao had said before. This trend represents dogmatism.2 What we think is that situation has undergone a considerable change, so the communist revolutionaries must not stick to what Lenin had said about insurrection and what Mao had said on Protracted People’s War.3 Q. You have envisioned a people’s republic, no? Prachanda: Mao Zedong’s People’s Republic cannot fulfill the needs of today’s world. It cannot address today’s political awareness appropriately. Mao said cooperative party theory; we called it competitive party theory. We have said let’s move ahead from the conventional People’s Republic and develop it as per the specialties of the 21st century. Q. You do not follow the old concept of communism? Prachanda: Definitely not. What happened without competition? In the USSR, Stalin gave no place to competition and went ahead in a monolithic way. What was the result?4 Does Communism make sense today? P: It’s a big question, starting with Marx, Lenin and Mao Zedong, who wanted to apply the Marxist teachings in semi colonial countries. Now, we still need Marxism, but in accordance to the needs of the 21st century. We have to apply Marxist science in a very new context, understanding social, economic and also technological changes, without dogmatism and without sectarianism. We are trying to develop a completely new concept, different from what happened in the past century. When we are in the government, our experiment will surprise everybody. This will happen only if foreign investors trust a communist government… P: Yes, I know. We cannot ignore the whole process of liberalization in the world. So, we will apply mixed economics to this country. Right now, we are not saying that we plan a total socialist economy, though we will not blindly follow western liberalism. We have some national priorities and we will welcome foreign investors, using capital from abroad for the well being of Nepal.5 Though Mao made some bold experiments to revive and develop socialist democracy, his efforts did not result in any qualitative advance. Why did socialist democracy ultimately fail? Why did it have to bear the stigma of ‘totalitarianism’ from its adversaries? If the revolutionary communists of the 21st century have ‘to win the battle for democracy’, as Marx and Engels had declared in the famous Communist Manifesto, we must dare to question the past practice in socialist democracy and take some bold initiatives.6. All selections from this document7.

CPGB-ML Tribute to Habash

In his 1944 speech, “Serve the People”, Comrade Mao Zedong said these famous words:

All men must die, but death can vary in its significance. The ancient Chinese writer Szuma Chien said: ‘Though death befalls all men alike, it may be weightier than Mount Tai or lighter than a feather.’ To die for the people is weightier than Mount Tai, but to work for the fascists and die for the exploiters and oppressors is lighter than a feather.

Today, the heroic Palestinian people are continuing to resist, whether in the breaking of the barrier with Egypt to alleviate the genocidal siege of Gaza, or in the martyrdom operation at Dimona, the nuclear site where imperialism and its stooges do not demand inspections, to express a sense of grief at the loss of Al-Hakim, Dr George Habash, one of the greatest leaders of the Palestinian people, and, more importantly, to celebrate his glorious life and give real political vitality and clarity to the essential work of building solidarity with the Palestinian people in the British working class and in the anti-war and other progressive movements.

Nice memorial poster of PFLP leader George Habash. In all of the obits in the US news, few detailed the reason for the radicalization of Habash. At university in Lebanon, he was apolitical and preferred to play guitar. He raced home during the “Israeli War of Independence” to his home in Lydda. Jewish militias attacked the town and forced 9 Most were Palestinian Christians. His sister died of typhoid fever during the siege of the town and Habash buried her in the backyard. He blamed the Jews for blocking access to the hospital that could have saved her. There were some notorious massacres of Palestinians during the attack on Lydda, including the execution of many young men in a mosque. The Jews forced Habash and others to line up and leave their homes and all of their possessions. One man asked if he could return to get the keys to his house and for making this request, he was shot dead in front of Habash’s eyes. From that point on, the apolitical future doctor was transformed into a revolutionary.

Comrade George Habash, who has passed away at the age of 82, gave more than six decades of his life to the revolution. He was born into a prosperous Greek Orthodox family in the Palestinian city of Lydda. At that time, the Palestinian people were under the rule of the British colonial mandate, which was systematically preparing the way for the creation of a Zionist settler colonial state, which, in the words of Sir Roland Storrs, the first British governor of Jerusalem in the 1920s, would form “for England a ‘little loyal Jewish Ulster’ in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism”. In the summer of 1948, whilst studying medicine in Beirut, George went back home to help organise resistance to the Zionist catastrophe that was sweeping over the Palestinian people, driving them from their ancestral homes and lands into exile and dispossession. At this time, he and his whole family, along with 95 percent of the inhabitants of his native city, were forced out at gunpoint by the Zionist terrorists and ethnic cleansers commanded by Yitzhak Rabin. Years later, Habash was to observe:

It is a sight I shall never forget. Thousands of human beings expelled from their homes, running, crying, shouting in terror. After seeing such a thing, you cannot but become a revolutionary.

During al-Nakba, the catastrophe, more than 700,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes and lands, made stateless and refugees. Graduating as the first in his class, Dr Habash eschewed the chance to pursue a lucrative career, opting instead to open a people’s clinic offering free treatment and a school for refugees in the Jordanian capital, Amman. Around this same time, he and his comrades founded the Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM), the first pan-Arab movement to take up armed struggle against colonialism and to win back the lost lands. The significance of the ANM should not be underestimated. Not only was it to be the root of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP); from its ranks also came revolutionary forces in many parts of the Arab homeland, including the National Liberation Front in Aden and South Yemen, which not only defeated British imperialism in a revolutionary armed struggle to win national liberation, but, later as the Yemen Socialist Party, leading the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, stood in the vanguard of to date the only real attempt to build an Arab socialist state on the basis of the scientific principles of Marxism-Leninism and the dictatorship of the proletariat. In the 1960s, Comrade Habash, like many other anti-imperialist fighters then, before and since, came to accept that the liberation struggle of the oppressed people, if it was to be crowned with success and carried through to the end, needed to be based on Marxism-Leninism. Lamis Andoni, an analyst for al-Jazeera, who knew Comrade Habash well, expressed matters this way in his tribute to his friend:

He belonged to a generation influenced by Franz Fanon, Mao Zedong, General Vo Nguyen Giap and later by Che Guevara. In their views, colonialism epitomised systematic, institutional violence and subjugation of people under its control … In the early 1960s, George Habash, already a paediatrician in Amman known for treating the poor for free, endorsed Marxism as he grew convinced that the national struggle should not be separate from the struggle for social justice.

After the founding of the PFLP in December 1967, following the Arabs’ bitter defeat in the June 1967 war, Habash declared that the struggle was “not merely to free Palestine from the Zionists but also to free the Arab world from remnants” of Western colonial rule. All Arab revolutionaries, he said, “must be Marxist, because Marxism is the expression of the aspirations of the working class”. In a 1969 interview, he declared:

By 1967, we had understood the undeniable truth, that to liberate Palestine we have to follow the Chinese and Vietnamese examples.

Indeed, Comrade Habash paid close attention not only to the Chinese and Vietnamese revolutions, but to the experience of all the socialist countries and the revolutionary movement in all parts of the world. Cuba and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea were also two countries close to his heart and with which he and the PFLP forged tight bonds of active solidarity. In the memorial hall for Comrade Kim Il Sung in Pyongyang, the Korean comrades proudly display the several awards and medals presented to their great leader by the PFLP over the years. Under Habash’s leadership, the PFLP forged close and active ties of combat solidarity with national liberation movements in all parts of the world – the ANC in South Africa, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and the Irish Republican Movement, to name but a few, embracing training, material assistance, joint operations and moral encouragement. In the September 1970 hijackings that gave the PFLP worldwide fame, Leila Khaled was joined by Patrick Arguello Ryan, a militant of the Sandinista National Liberation Front and the only martyr of those operations. In 1983, after the Nicaraguan revolution, the Sandinistas commemorated Arguello by renaming the Geothermal Plant at Momotombo in his honour. A poster still available on the PFLP website describes Arguello as the “symbol of common Nicaraguan/Palestinian struggle”. Comrade Habash sought to translate into reality, and himself embodied, these inspiring words of Che Guevara, which go to the very essence of proletarian internationalism:

Let the flag under which we fight be the sacred cause of the liberation of humanity so that to die under the colours of Vietnam, Venezuela, Guatemala, Bolivia, Brazil will be equally glorious and desirable for a Latin American, an Asian, an African and even a European.

Comrades, The Palestinian revolution is a complex and difficult one, throwing up many challenges and inevitably differences of view. Equally inevitably, Comrade Habash often found himself embroiled in internal controversy, particularly in terms of the sometimes painful compromises, concessions and retreats that have been forced on the Palestinian people at various times. But what shines out is the fact that he never lost sight of the importance of unity in the national liberation movement. In their own tribute to their leader, the PFLP put matters this way:

In 1987, with the outbreak of the great Intifada, Dr. Habash called for upholding Palestinian national unity, and convening the Palestinian National Congress in Algeria in 1988. Comrade Al-Hakim always understood national unity as a necessary condition for the continuation of the struggle and the national liberation movement, whether in Beirut during internal fighting among Palestinians and after as well, recognising that the internal contradictions among Palestinians could not be solved through military mechanisms, but rather through the democratic processes of the liberation movement.

Lamis Andoni, to whom we have already referred, wrote:

‘His message to the Palestinians was to restore our unity,’ Issam Al Taher, a senior aide, who saw him a day before his death said.‘Unity, unity, unity — that was his only message,’ said Al Taher.

Andoni notes of the relationship between George Habash and Yasser Arafat:

The two men never severed ties and continued a complex relationship of camaraderie and rivalry until the end.

Andoni continued:

Tall and handsome, Habash exuded a certain charisma that disarmed his distracters who admired his persistence but criticised what they saw as rigidity. A stroke that partially paralysed half of his body changed his appearance later but did not affect his ardour for the cause.It was that Habash that I saw and met for the first time in Tunis in 1983. The PLO was expelled from Beirut too and most its leaders moved to this northern Mediterranean capital of Tunisia. Habash moved to Damascus, Syria instead. On that day the PLO was holding a meeting. Most of the leaders had arrived and then there was a stir and silence. Habash entered slowly on crutches, hampered and subdued by his physical disability. The hall, filled with hardened fighters, stood on their feet while Arafat hugged Habash and escorted him to his seat.

Of the final period of Habash’s life, Andoni notes:

He would get so distressed during conversations discussing the events in Palestine and most recently in Iraq, that his wife, and closest friend Hilda, would interfere to stop it.When Israel besieged Arafat in 2002 in his compound in Ramallah, Habash stood by his rival. When Arafat died, amid Palestinian suspicion that Israel may have been involved, Habash deeply mourned him. The few times I was able to see him over the last three years, he never stopped monitoring and learning every detail about Palestinian life. His physical ailment deepened the sense of soulful pain he internalised. Those who were with him during his last days recall how disturbed he was by the rift between Fatah and Hamas. He opposed the strategy of Mahmoud Abbas, the current Palestinian president, of accommodating US and Israeli demands but did not endorse Hamas’ military take over of Gaza. His main concern was the damage brought upon the Palestinians by the most serious internal rift in their history.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the mourning for Comrade Habash has transcended the differences in the Palestinian ranks. President Mahmoud Abbas declared three days of national mourning, noting that Habash had dedicated his life to struggling for his people. Hamas leader Ismail Haneya said, “Dr. George Habash spent all his life struggling for the cause of the Palestinian people.” Islamic Jihad described him as a “real leader” and other Palestinian organisations paying their tributes included the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Palestine Popular Struggle Front, who said that his path was and is one of liberation for the Palestinian and Arab people. In its December 1967 Founding Statement, the PFLP declared:

The masses are the authority, the guide, and the resistance leadership from which victory will be achieved in the end. It is necessary to recruit the popular masses and mobilise them as active participants and leaders … The only language that the enemy understands is the language of revolutionary violence … The slogan of our masses must be resistance until victory, rooted in the heart with our feet planted on the ground in deep commitment to our land. Today, the Popular Front is hailing our masses with this call. This is the appeal. We must repeat it every day, through every breakthrough bullet and the fall of each martyr, that the land of Palestine today belongs to all the masses. Every area of our land belongs to our masses who have defended it against the presence of the usurper, every piece of land, every rock and stone, our masses will not abandon one inch of them because they belong to the legions of the poor and hungry and displaced persons … The struggle of the Palestinian people is linked with the struggle of the forces of revolution and progress in the world, the format of the coalition that we face requires a corresponding … coalition including all the forces of anti-imperialism in every part of the world.

Much more can be said on the life, work and legacy of Comrade Habash, but in summary these are some of the things he advocated and taught: • That the fundamental way to liberation lies through armed struggle and people’s war based on the masses. • That for the struggle to be successful and carried through to the end it needs to be based on Marxism-Leninism, the scientific world outlook of the working class. • That the oppressed peoples must uphold proletarian internationalism in their struggle for liberation, based on militant unity within and between the three major currents of the world revolutionary process, the socialist countries, the national liberation movements, and the working-class movement in the imperialist heartlands. • That the liberation of the nation necessitated the principled and democratic unity of all the forces of the nation, even though major differences will also exist and must be struggled over. Clearly, all these are not just lessons for the Palestinian people alone. In June 2000, age and ill health led Comrade Habash to step back from the day-to-day leadership of the PFLP. Giving an inspiring speech on that occasion, in many respects he wrote his own epitaph. He told his comrades:

What I have lived through over the course of these militant decades, and the rich experience I have acquired, is not a matter to be taken for granted. It is your right, and the right of coming generations to review the content and lessons of this experience with all of its many successes and failures.

As befits a man who gave all of his own life and strength to the revolution, Comrade Habash said of the martyrs, the prisoners and his comrades, and it is with Comrade Habash’s own words, from his farewell address, Palestine Between Dreams and Reality, that we conclude this tribute:

I remember each of the martyrs, one by one, and without exception – those martyrs to whom we are indebted, for whom we must continue the struggle, holding fast to the dream and holding fast to hope, and protecting the rights of the people for whom they shed their blood. Their children and their families have a right to be honoured and cared for. This is the least we can do for those blazing stars in the skies of our homeland.I also remember now the heroic prisoners in the jails of the occupation and the prisons of the Palestinian Authority – those militants who remind us morning and night of our patriotic duty by the fact that they are still there behind bars and by the fact that the occupation still squats on our chests. Each prisoner deserves the noblest signs of respect … Now permit me to express my gratitude to all the comrades who have worked with me and helped me, whether in the Arab Nationalist Movement or in the Popular Front. They stood beside me during the hardest conditions and the darkest of times, and they were a great help and support for me. Without them I would not have been able to carry out my responsibilities. They have been true comrades, in all that the word implies. Those comrades helped to create a congenial atmosphere, an environment of political, theoretical, and intellectual interaction that enabled me to do all that was required. Those comrades have a big place in my heart and mind. I offer all my thanks and appreciation to each one of them by name. In addition, to the comrades who vigilantly guarded me, looking out for my safety, all these long years, I offer my gratitude … As a last word, I feel it necessary to say that I know well that the goals for which I worked and struggled have not yet been attained. And I cannot say how or when they will be attained. But on the other hand, I know in light of my study of the march of history in general, and of Arab and Palestinian history in particular, that they will be attained. In spite of this bitter truth, I leave my task as General Secretary of the Front with a contented mind and conscience. My conscience is content because I did my duty and worked with the greatest possible effort and with complete and deep sincerity. My mind is content because throughout my working years, I continually based myself on the practice of self-criticism. It is important to say also that I will pay close attention to all your observations and assessments of the course taken by the Popular Front while I was its General Secretary. I must emphasise that with the same close attention, if not with greater attention, I will follow and take to heart the observations and assessments of the Palestinian and Arab people on this course and my role in it. My aim in this closing speech has been to say to you – and not only to you, but to all the detainees, or those who experienced detention, to the families of the martyrs, to the children of the martyrs, to those who were wounded, to all who sacrificed and gave for the cause – that your sacrifice has not been in vain. The just goals and legitimate rights which they have struggled and given their lives for will be attained, sooner or later. I say again that I don’t know when, but they will be attained. And my aim, again and again, is to emphasise the need for you to persist in the struggle to serve our people, for the good of all Palestinians and Arabs – the good that lies in a just and legitimate cause, as it does in the realisation of the good for all those who are oppressed and wronged. You must always be of calm mind, and of contented conscience, with a strong resolve and a steel will, for you have been and still are in the camp of justice and progress, the camp whose just goals will be attained and which will inevitably attain its legitimate rights. For these are the lessons of history and reality, and no right is lost as long as there is someone fighting for it.

Notes

1. Ashok. (May 2006). Our Experiences of Ten Tumultuous Years of People’s War, The Worker#10, pp. 68-73. On Lenin and Mao, p. 71. 2. Basanta. (May 2006). International Dimension of Prachanda Path. The Worker #10, pp. 82-90. 3. Ibid. On Models: Page 87. 4. Kishor Nepal. (June 2006). Prachanda Interview. Maoist Revolution Digest. 5. Alessandro Gilioli. (Early November 2006). Prachanda: Our Revolution Won . L’espresso, Italy. Excerpts. 6. Prachanda. (November 18, 2006). Democracy: The Forbidden Fruit or Nectar for Progress? Speech at the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit in New Delhi. 7. MLM Revolutionary Study Group in the U.S. (Dec. 21, 2006). Assessing Recent Developments in Nepal: A Bibliography on the State, a Peaceful Transition to Socialism, Democracy and Dictatorship, Negotiations and Their Relevance to the International Communist Movement in the 21st Century.

New Issue of Al Qaeda's Inspire Magazine Released

I was able to obtain the new issue of Al Qaeda’s Inspire Magazine. It’s difficult to obtain if you don’t know what you are doing. As far as I can tell, it’s only available on jihadi forums. First of all, you have to find those forums. They are very secretive, their locations are not well-known, and the sites are constantly going up and down and changing locations and url’s. However, I have access to sites with lists of the latest lists of jihadi forums. Then you start to visit the forums. The forums are all in Arabic, so you have to figure out the Arabic. Even then, it’s not easy because a lot of the links are just pictures. You click the picture links, then try to figure out where the download links. After a while, you find them. There are many hazy-type download links at fly by night servers. You find one that works, and you go and get the file. I’ll be making the file available for download on my server here. That link should work; anyway, I was just able to download the file. The last copy (available on my server here) got downloaded 141 times, so apparently there is some interest out there. The latter link definitely works. I emailed WordPress asking them if it was ok to offer Al Qaeda stuff for download, and I got no response, so I assume it’s ok. If anyone is wondering, I hate Al Qaeda and I don’t support their project. I’m just making this stuff available so people can see what these very dangerous people are all about. This latest issue is getting quite a bit of press. It highlights “Operation Hemorrhage,” the operation to down two cargo planes, a Federal Express and a UPS, in October by using PETN explosives packed into a toner cartridge of a printer. The report goes into minute detail about how they did it. Why they are showing their hand like this, I have no idea. AQ says that the intention was not a terror attack, as they realize that these planes only have two people aboard. They said that instead the purpose is to disrupt the US economy. It’s true that for 10 years since 9-11, we were not checking cargo flights at all. Now we are supposedly checking 10 Al Qaeda claims to have found a way around a variety of security measures. First of all, the devices are made with no metals, and this is how they elude metal detectors.They now have five different bomb detonators that use no metal whatsoever. They elude bomb-sniffing dogs by packing the material so tight in the toner cartridge that the cartridge is completely sealed. Then they use a variety of solvents to wipe clean all of the surrounding objects in case any PETN molecules escaped. They explain how they manage to elude X-ray scanners, but that description was rather complex and I will let you tackle it yourselves. For one thing, they used an explosive that was similar in molecular composition to the printer toner itself. It is true that the printers were inspected twice in the UK, but both times passed inspection. The bomb was only intercepted when the US had the exact tracking number of the package. Al Qaeda denies US claims that they have only one bombmaker. The US named this fellow, and claims that he is AQ’s bombmaker. Whoever the bombmakers are, they are extremely intelligent. AQ continues to claim that they downed a UPS cargo plane that crashed in Dubai on September 29, but the US insists that that crash was due to a battery fire. AQ ridicules that claim, and asks why the US can’t figure out that they did it. There is quite a bit of baiting and ridiculing of the US and its allies in this issue. They are basically taunting us. AQ claims that the whole operation cost only $4,200. That is probably correct. There are repeated exhortations about Palestine in this issue (“Palestine remains the main issue,” etc.) US analysts note that AQ’s ability to pump out the propaganda shows that AQ is operating with relative freedom. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is currently operating mostly out of what even this issue of Inspire calls “the failed state of Yemen.” I would agree that Yemen is close to being a failed state.

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