Does Multilingualism Equal Separatism?

Repost from the old site.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As this area holds 6

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Many of Iran’s

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Adygean, Tuvan and Bashkir struggles are all peaceful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hawaiians are about 2

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

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

At partition, the population was 98.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Of Dogs and Men

With apologies to John Steinbeck.

Boatswain

When some proud son of man returns to earth, Unknown to glory, but upheld by birth, The sculptor’s art exhausts the pomp of woe, And storied urns record who rests below; When all is done, upon the tomb is seen, Not what he was, but what he should have been. But the poor dog, in life the firmest friend, The first to welcome, the foremost to defend, Whose honest heart is still his master’s own, Who labors, lives, fights, breathes for him alone, Unhonored falls, unnoticed all his worth, Denied in heaven the soul he held on earth. While man, vain insect, hopes to be forgiven, And claims himself a sole, exclusive heaven. Ye! Who behold, perchance, this simple urn, Pass on; it honours none you wish to mourn. To mark a friend’s remains these stones rise, I have never known but one – and here he lies.

Lord Byron, “Boatswain”

Who says that we have souls and dogs none, anyway? The Bible? What kind of religion is that, then?

Peak Runoff in Streams and Rivers

Around these parts, in the Central Valley, low foothills and the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, peak runoff in streams and rivers is generally around the first week of spring. This year, it was the last week of March, about March 22-28. This is because most of the runoff from streams and rivers in this area is from rainfall. We have little snow in the Valley and foothills, and for some reason, snow runoff from the Sierras is generally not enough to cause flooding in the foothills and valleys below.

What is the peak runoff for rivers and streams in your region of wherever? Chime in.

Cows, Rain and Fences

During recent heavy rains here, cows were seen in many different areas stacked up against fences, in this case mere barbed wire fences. They were also huddled together often 3 or 4 cows deep. What’s going on here. I doubt coincidence. How does standing next to a barbed wire fence give you any protection from the rain? Does huddling with a group of other cows give you any protection from the rain either?

Has anyone anywhere else seen this sort of behavior? If so, what’s the rationale for it? What are the cows thinking?

What Is a Reasonable Price For Basic Cable Service?

I believe that cable prices are utterly insane. Do you agree with me?

I remember back in the old days when TV was free. Yes, free, that’s right, you got me. Then, about 30 years ago, it was something like $30/month. It stayed that way for a while. Then it went through the damned roof. Basic cable, and by that, I mean the most basic cable setup you could imagine, will cost me $50/month. That’s before any extras. What a ripoff!

I remember back in the old days when TV was free. Yes, free, you heard me right. Why was it free? Same reason that radio is free. It was advertiser-supported.

When they first put the evil cable channels on, they told us that there was not going to be any advertising. After all, they were billing us for watching TV, so why should we have to watch ads?

Ads are for free TV, not for pay TV. One of the benefits of pay TV was supposed to be no ads. Well, that didn’t last long. Cable TV is now as full of ads or moreso than the remaining free TV. So not only do you have to fork over an outrageous $50/month just to watch TV, but you have to sit through all the same stupid ads as before. Ripoff!

The reason for the ripoff prices? Monopoly! Cable companies have a monopoly. Everywhere in the US, there is one and only one cable TV company. They have a captive audience, and it’s clear that they charge the maximum that they can possibly get away with. Where you gonna go? There’s nowhere to go. It’s true that there is now some competition via the satellite companies, but that doesn’t seem to be working out very well, as they are charging just as much as the cable companies are.

I feel the cable companies should be a regulated public utility the same way that the phone companies are. I can’t think of any reason why they are not.

How much should very basic cable cost? I say $30/month maximum. I am not interested in paying any more than that just to watch TV, sorry. Now that everything has gone over to digital, I can’t even seem to get any of the free channels anymore, and that’s with a brand new wide screen TV. I don’t get it. Costs of similar “necessities” for me:

DSL internet: $30/month

Cellphone: $20/month

Landline: $10/month

Radio: Free

I figure cable TV isn’t worth one penny more than my DSL (actually a Hell of a lot less), but I’m willing to be generous to the sharks and pay them the same as I pay my phone company for the Net.

White Pride Latin America

Interesting comments from the comments section. First a fellow named Robert posts a comment, then a White Mexican named Rafa responds. I very much enjoyed their interchange, and I will comment at the end:

Robert: As a White Latin American, I think a lot of the information you put was wrong. At least the part about White Latin Americans disappearing. The CIA World Factbook puts Mexico White population at

You can talk to a lot of Latin Americans about that. They’ll tell you the same thing. My friend who goes to Mexico says the same thing. And as for Brazil, Sao Paulo is 7

Personally I AM GLAD there are a lot of white people in Latin America. But then again, I personally think that if a person looks White, then they are obviously white. Even if they are 2

I don’t mean to come off as if I am insulting you but I think at least half the information you got was wrong. At least when it came to the decline of White population. However, remember, all mestizos do not look the same. The phenotype can range from more European to more Indian. The White upper class of Mexico and Brazil may be mixed, but the non-white ancestry may not be enough to show and vice-versa.

Basically its a color continuum.

Rafa: I find it interesting that you said that if a person is 2

There are even White Americans who are known to have claimed some sort of native indigenous ancestry such as Chuck Norris, the late Patrick Swayze, and Johnny Depp (this last one actually looks like a lot Mexicans I grew up with). The term Euro-Mestizo has even entered the lexicon of American English terms used to describe people according to their race, specifically light-skinned Mexicans who are predominantly White in appearance.

I don’t know about you, but I think that ever since the world got smaller through the invention of broadcast television and the internet, Latin Americans have gotten into a tendency of competing with each other to see whose country is whiter or has a larger population of Whites. What do you think?

By the way, as far as Northeastern Mexico being majority White, I would have to say that I agree with that statement. As you might have already guessed, I am in fact Mexican and from the Northeastern border city of Nuevo Laredo,Tamaulipas.

I grew up across the border in Laredo, Texas and it is basically an explicit fact that my native region is not as White as it used to be. Many people from Southern Mexico, and even some from Central America have established themselves in Nuevo Laredo, Reynosa, Matamoros, and Monterrey in neighboring Nuevo Leon state.

Most Mexican nationals who reside in Laredo, Texas are in fact White (as are most of their Mexican-American brethren in the region), and this often shocks non-Mexican Hispanics coming from the East Coast and California.

This is a sort of Latin American White Pride that I do not have a whole lot of issues with. To me, it resembles Black Pride in the US, which is generally healthy because it avoids some extremes and pitfalls. Some of the benefits vis a vis nasty US White Pride:

No emphasis on purity: If anything, in Black Pride there is an emphasis on less purity due to Black America’s obsession with light skin. That is, the less Black you have in you, the more proud you are, paradoxically. Now, that is not necessarily a good thing, but at least it gets us away from the purity poison.

Your average Black person in the US is 1

In contrast, US White Pride is utterly toxic in terms of racial “contamination.” If you have the tiniest bit of non-White in you, you’re automatically non-White. Even a lot of White ethnics are ruled out as Whites and described as non-Whites. Examples include Jews, Armenians, Turks, Eastern Aryans, Iranians, White Berbers, White Arabs, Georgians, the Caucasus, Albanians and Southern Europeans in general.

It’s absurd. Another thing to note is that in general, among races, the more emphasis there is on purity, the more violent, fascist and even genocidal the group is. It’s no accident that the Germans and Japanese were both genocidal and strongly emphasized purity of race. The two things go together quite well. As you get away from the purity trap, you become more loving and inclusive and less likely to engage in race-based violence, much less genocide. This is because, as a “contaminated” person yourself, you can’t much demand purity from others.

Increased love for others: Most White Latin Americans don’t hate the small amount of Indian or Black in themselves. It’s not the end of the world. They have a more relaxed attitude towards race, and they often love the non-White in themselves. If you love the Other in yourself, you are more likely to love the Other in others.

No demands for segregation. Latin American Whites don’t demand segregation. There was some segregation in Latin America, especially in Cuba and Ecuador, but it’s long gone. In Cuba, it lasted as long as the Revolution.

Let’s get real here for a second. What’s behind the demands for segregation? They are about fears of racial annihilation. This is what the fears of race-mixing and miscegenation were all about. But White Latin Americans are already somewhat mixed, so in a sense, they are already an annihilated race. There’s nothing to fear from dilution if you’re already diluted yourself, so there’s no need for segregation. Let the mixing begin!

A more relaxed attitude about race. White nationalists go on and on about colorism in Latin America, but at the end of the day, it’s not as big a deal as racism is here in the US. Colorism is simply not as virulent and nasty as White racism here in the US. It’s all a continuum, a sliding scale.

Thinking in a grey or continuum type manner is healthier than thinking in a black and white Manichean manner. Grey thinking is more relaxed and adaptive and leads to more tolerance and flexibility.

What problems there are in Latin America regarding race are ll tied up with class. Many Latin American so-called Whites don’t even look all that White. Indians are disliked due to class hatred, not necessarily racial hatred. The most hardened attitudes are found in South America, especially in the Andes.

It’s not that Latin America has overcome the race issue, but more that they have more or less transmuted it into a class issue. In a region where you can trade in your Indian clothes, stop speaking Indian, move to the city and then start wearing mestizo clothing and speaking Spanish and thereby automagically transform yourself from an Indian into a mestizo is a place were biological race is not so important anymore. It has been replaced by social race.

Less fear of miscegenation. I am not aware that Latin American Whites are zealously guarding their bloodlines anymore. If they are, let me know. You can hardly demand that others marry White if you are not pure White yourself. There are some Latin American Whites who would like it to be this way, but they are going against nature. In particular, Latin American White males are increasingly marrying and breeding with relatively light-skinned mestizas. The purists lament this, but what can you do? A man will be a man.

In addition, there  is another operative trend, and that is the widespread tendency among Latin American mestizas to try to “marry White” in an effort to move up in the world themselves and to create a better future for their offspring. This is highly adaptive female thinking, and it leads to a paradoxical “Whitening” effect among mestizos that occurs concurrently with whatever “darkening” effect is going on among Latin American Whites.

It’s the wave of the future. As the world’s population gets more mixed, the sort of White Pride seen in Latin America will become more the norm for all groups. True, pure races will slowly die out and become more rare, but that’s neither good nor bad, it just is. If US Blacks, a mixed group, can be proud, then anyone can be proud of their racial elements. The progeny of a racial stew can feel proud of all of the elements that went into that stew. The result is an ethnic pride that is more tolerant, loving and unconditional.

Poverty in Cuba and the US

Tulio is profoundly upset at the notion that Cubans might be better off than Americans. In fact, the very notion makes him want to pull his hair out.

If that’s the case than that would mean Cuba has a lower poverty rate than the US, but nobody in their right mind would say we are worse off than them.

It depends on what you want. In the US, many have no medical insurance, so they cannot afford any medical care at all. If you live below the poverty line in the US, you can’t even afford to rent an apartment! You could pay for the apartment, but then you might only have $200 left over for the rest of the month. How can you possibly live on $200/month? Forget it. A lot of Americans can’t even afford utilities, even if they have an apartment. If you are a single person living below the poverty level, I don’t see how you could afford utilities and an apartment. Even if you could pay for utilities and an apartment, how could you afford food? I just don’t see it.

In Cuba, everyone can afford a place to live. Rent is set at 1

The problem with Communism is that while at best they did wipe out poverty, they were only able to be provide a low standard of living for their people.

So you are really arguing against apples and oranges here. Cuba, the USSR and the East Bloc made it top priority to wipe out poverty. Everyone agrees that they were successful at this. However, at least the USSR and the East Bloc failed at economic growth to the extent that the West surpassed them. This was an embarrassment, especially for the East Bloc when Western Europe started beating them badly in economic growth. This was the main reason that Communism collapsed in the East Bloc.

People wanted the higher economic growth that they saw in the socialist but social democratic West of Europe. This was really a competition between two different forms of socialism, and it’s clear that social democracy beat Communism. By the way, Western Europe still had significant poverty while the East Bloc wiped it out.

Moral to the story is that there is more to life than just wiping out poverty. Even if you wipe out poverty, if you can’t keep up with competing systems, people will tire of a mere poverty-less state and will wish that they had a state with higher economic growth.

Is Cuba better than the US, as tulio painfully suggest? Obviously, this notion is very painful for tulio to consider. Well, Cuba has wiped out homelessness and everyone has health care. Is anyone hungry in the US? If so, Cuba has us beat there too?

On the other hand, there is more to life than just food, shelter and health care. People want stuff. The US GDP per capita is 4.7 X the Cuban GDP. Cars are not common in Cuba and blackouts occur regularly. There are lots of problems with the system. We Americans have much more luxuries. I have a nice apartment, a computer, wide screen TV, a car and air conditioning that works. I doubt if I would have that in Cuba.

So your question does not really have an answer, whether Cuba or the US is better than the other. It depends on what you value in life. Depending on what you think is important, one or the other is better than the other one.

UK Grime Music

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

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

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

I Have White Friends Who Are On “Welfare”

I have a number of White friends who are on “welfare” programs. That’s one reason that I don’t want any safety net cuts.

Some of them are on Social Security Insurance (disability or SSI) or Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI). Let me tell you, it is almost impossible to survive on such a check. You are very nearly living in poverty, and it isn’t any fun at all. I also know elderly Whites who collect Social Security. Surely, I don’t want to see them lose their Social Security, not do I want to see it cut.

Some of them also get Section 8 Housing. Every person I know who is on disability is on Section 8. I really object to this “Section 8 is for ghetto niggers” line. My White friends are on this program. There are continuing cuts in this program, and it’s getting harder and harder to survive. If they were not on Section 8, they would not be able to rent an apartment. They don’t have enough income.

They all get either California Medical Services Program (CSMP), Medi-Cal (Medicaid) or Medicare. Without those programs, they would not have any medical care, and they have medical expenses that are not negligible. I also know many elderly folks who use Medicare, and my late father used Medicaid also. So obviously I don’t want to see these programs gutted as the Republicans are trying to to.

Some of them also get LIHEAP on their energy bills, but I don’t think this amounts to much.

At least one of them gets a low cost land line phone line too. I forget the name of that program (Lifeline?).

One of them used to get Food Stamps, but they don’t anymore. It only paid you $70/month for groceries. Try living on that sometime. It was basically a joke.

This is why I really object to this line that White workers are taxed for “welfare” programs that go to a bunch of niggers.

I would wager that most folks collecting Food Stamps or on disability are White. I believe that 7

Huge numbers of them, possibly a majority, are behind getting rid of Medicare and gutting Medicaid, since they support Republicans. Don’t they have any poor White friends or know any elderly Whites using these programs? Why are they voting Republican since the Republicans are on record for getting rid of Social Security, Medicare and slashing Medicaid?

Homicide and Rape Rates in the Caribbean

Here.

Some commenters suggested that other than Haiti, violent crime and homicide in the Caribbean is not particularly high. In other words, Haiti was giving the whole place a bad reputation.

The link is to an article in a Jamaican newspaper lamenting the high homicide rate in Jamaica and in the region as a whole. The piece notes that the UN has found that the Caribbean has the highest homicide rate on Earth, at 30/100,000, surpassing Latin America proper at 26/100,000 and South and West Africa, both at 29/100,000. So the Caribbean has an even higher homicide rate than the worst parts of Africa! In 2005, Jamaica’s rate was an incredible 68/100,000.

Much of the violence seems to be related to the drug trade. Drugs are produced in South America and then trafficked to North America. The Caribbean sits between the two, and a lot of drugs are trafficked through the Caribbean.

The rape rate is also very high in the Caribbean. 4

White Gangbangers in Argentina

Original link not working, but this photo album is similar. The text refers to the original link.

Click on the photo album to see more of these idiots acting all tough and throwing gang signs. They are from Cordoba, Argentina, which is in the center of Argentina. Known from growing wine grapes, relatively dry climate in the rain shadow of the Andes. These folks look like Whites, which seemed strange to me. An Argentine friend of mine told me that they were typical Argentine mestizos. If that is so, then your Argentine mestizo looks awfully damned White.

I knew that Hispanic-Black US gang culture was spreading to other areas, particularly mestizo and Indian populations in Latin America and I believe Black and mulatto populations in the Caribbean. I have also seen pics of Filipinos and Negritos in the Philippines who have adopted US gang culture. There are some Australian Aborigines and Polynesians who have adopted it too. The Polynesians like to imitate US Black culture, possibly because they feel closer to Blacks. In gang fights at LA schools, the Samoans would always line up with the Blacks.

If you have any information on other regions where US gang culture is spreading, please let us know in the comments. I guess this is one of the only products we are exporting anymore.

10,000 Unidentified Bodies Found in Colombia

A survey of Colombian municipalities found over 10,000 unidentified bodies reported, with only one half of Colombian municipalities reporting. I am not sure of the time period involved, whether the 10,000 unknown dead turned up in 2009 alone, or whether other years are covered.

8

In addition, over 18,000 Colombians disappeared in Colombia in 2009 alone. There are over 50,000 disappeared in Colombia according to the government.

Why doesn’t NATO and the UN step in and order the Colombian regime to quit killing its people? If they don’t obey, why don’t the UN and NATO order sanctions on Colombia, freeze their bank accounts in the West (steal their money) and then bomb the country for regime change?

Is Texas Screwed Up Because It Is Full of Mexicans?

In response to my post about the Medieval state of Texas, some have suggested that the extremely poor figures on the minimum wage, poverty and the uninsured were due to lots of Mexicans living in Texas. Texas has one of the worst poverty rates in the US, has one of the nation’s highest rates of uninsured people who lack medical insurance and has one of the nation’s highest rates of people working at the minimum wage.

There is a problem with this analysis. Look at California. White nationalists like to trash California by saying it has gone downhill ever since it has become heavily Hispanic. However, California’s economy, last time I checked, was the 8th largest economy in the world. It’s quite a stretch to say that 8th largest economy on Earth is an economic basket case. I for one don’t buy it.

We have budget problems now, mostly because the Republicans refuse to raise taxes. The budget crisis is similar all over the country, and Republicans at the federal level have made it worse by constantly slashing federal money to the states for unknown reasons. What are they trying to do? Crash state governments?

The cause of the economic crisis in California was the housing crash, caused by neoliberal economics and lack of regulation. It was particularly bad in California since our housing prices had run up so high.

The thing is that I do not believe that California has horrible rates of poverty, people working at the minimum wage and persons without medical insurance. These are problems all over America these days, but I don’t believe that California has these problems to any profound degree. At least I have not heard that it does. We have a very liberal Legislature, and if these problems got very bad, they would probably try to do something about it.

Further, Cuba is an Hispanic country. Everyone has health coverage, everyone has a job at a reasonable, non-poverty level wage, and the poverty rate is very low. I think it is

Why Jews Support Open Borders

There are some comments suggesting that Jews support Open Borders for less than ulterior motives. One suggestion was that Jews supported Open Borders in order to get Hispanics on board with pro-Israel sentiment. Another suggestion was that Jews made an agreement to support the Black Agenda if Blacks would ease up on South Africa, an Israeli ally.

First of all, Jews are going to support the Black agenda anyway, so there’s no need for an agreement. Second of all, this deal did not work very well because Blacks kept hammering away at South Africa nevertheless.

Sure, Jews are basically looking out for their own. Of course they are.

But that doesn’t explain Jewish liberalism very much. Jewish liberalism is deep and heartfelt and frankly goes against their economic self-interest as wealthy people. It’s probably a holdover from the early days when the Jews first came here and they were poor and often Leftist. Then there is the Reform notion of Tikkun Olam, making the world a better place. Jews have been heavily involved in many or most of the progressive projects in the past century. Most Jews think that’s pretty cool. Why were they doing that? Maybe Tikkun Olam.

The Right has been anti-Semitic for a long time, at least a century or more in Europe and in the US.

Before that, Napoleon was a progressive who tried to overthrow conservative monarchies in Europe in the name of a progressive project, almost a Woodrow Wilson or neoconservative before his time. He also liberated the Jews. This may have begun the love affair between progressives and the Jews. In other words, Jewish liberalism or Leftism may have begun with Napoleon.

US conservatism was anti-Semitic for most of this century. It was only with the Reagan Revolution and the New Right headquartered in Orange County, California, that the Right began to move away from that. The Birchers also turned away from anti-Semitism after a bit.

Nevertheless, the Republican Party is very racist, mostly against Blacks and to a lesser extent against Hispanics. Jews see that and worry. Most Jews figure that a White who hates Blacks or maybe Hispanics probably doesn’t like Jews very much either. It’s a form of paranoia, but it’s based on reality.

Further, the Republican Party is insanely Christian fundamentalist. Jews don’t think too much of Christianity period for historical reasons. And they really don’t like these fundie Christians one bit. These fundies are like Christians on steroids, and most liberal Jews do not like them or trust them.

We have not talked enough on here about the sociology of political expression. Jews grow up in a liberal environment, so they turn into liberals.

In my previous post, I noted a number of towns I had lived in and how it seemed that every White person in the towns was a conservative Republican. I never was, but frankly that was not an easy position for me to take, and I suffered a lot for it. The peer pressure to go along with the crowd is extreme in White communities, and I think this is one reason so many Whites go Republican. They are simply doing what everyone else is doing.

We see this with conservatism in Texas, Arizona, the mountain West, the Ozarks, the South and Appalachia. I’ve known conservative Whites from these areas, and I often felt that they got into that politics because that was what everyone else was doing. Most didn’t seem to have a logical reason for being reactionaries.

What’s going on here is that liberal Jews like the Jewish organizations think that anti-immigrant sentiment is bad for the Jews. They were all immigrants not too long ago. And they know that anti-immigrant sentiment leads to nativism, which turns to racism, which turns to racist nationalism or racist ethnonationalism, which has a tendency historically to turn on the Jews as not real Sneeds of Sneedland or whatever.

Also, most of these organizations are made up of liberal Jews, and if you are a Democratic Party liberal, I know this from experience, it is utterly mandatory that you get on board with the Open Borders thing. If you don’t, you are shunned and ultimately banned from forums or cast out of party circles in one way or another. The Democratic Party and liberalism has a number of issues on which you are not allowed to dissent, and Open Borders is one of them.

Alt Left: Do Democratic Party Intellectuals Tell Whites That They Are Evil?

A commenter, Reactionary Konkvistador, says:

Whites aren’t being told they are evil by the Republicans, Democrat intellectuals practically can’t shut up about it.

Fundamentally I do however agree that they are stupid for voting Republican.

This is so wrong. Can you give me the name of one single Democratic Party intellectual who tells Whites that they are evil? One, one, one, c’mon. I dare you.

The vast majority of people who talk like this at all are not even really associated with the Democratic Party. To the extent that they are at all, they are on the left wing of the party. Like I said, I used to hang out at Daily Kos. We had a few of those types there. Tim Wise even had a blog on the site. That type of thinking was not very popular, and those blogs were not much trafficked. The vast majority of folks pushing such a line were Blacks and Hispanics themselves.

It’s the Left that can’t shut up about race, but that’s not even the Democratic Party. Those people are more or less Commies and Leftists.

And even there, sometimes the critique is at not Whites, but rightwing Whites, often older rightwing Whites. Tim Wise’s famous Tick Tock column, which I actually agreed with and supported, was not cheering on the coming deaths of older Whites, but the coming deaths of older rightwing Whites.

You had to read the column carefully to figure that out. I agree with his conclusion. I look forward to their deaths also. They can’t come soon enough for me. The column was ridiculously peddled about the paranoid White nationalist sites as evidence that Tim Wise, or the Democratic Party, or liberals, or someone, wants Whites to die.

Alt Left: When Will US Whites Quit Drinking the Koolaid?

Commenter: It’s really not hard to understand why you hate White Americans so much. They really are some whacked out nutters.

I hear you though. I grew up in an all White suburb in Orange County. Though it was reasonable in the 1970’s, at the moment,  I would say that 10

I would add that almost all of these people were drug users, and most of them were drug dealers. Some even moved quantities of marijuana, psilocybin, and LSD. But they were Republicans at the time (Republican surfer/stoner/hippies?!), and they are Republicans now.

Later in the early 1980’s I hung out with the early Goths. Everyone smoked, drank like fish, took a lot of drugs, and hung out in nightclubs all the time acting like weirdos. Most of the chicks seemed like they were bisexual, and most all the guys seemed like they were gay or bi or at least they acted like it. There was epidemic homosexuality and bisexuality. And you know what? They were all Republicans!

It was like there was something in the water.

Later, I moved to the all White Sierra Nevada foothills, and it was the same theme all over again, this time with a huge dose of anti-abortion and fundamentalist Christianity. Same thing, all the potheads and hippies were Reaganites, Dittoheads, and Glen Beck fans. And these were working class White people!

In between, I worked all over Orange and LA Counties, and it was the same everywhere I went. I worked in San Pedro in the 1980’s, and it was the same old stuff. If you were White, Reaganism just crawled into your bloodstream. I’m now in the Central Valley, and it’s the same again, except here, most Whites are apparently mentally retarded to boot. There’s also a shocking number of Republican Hispanics around here, which strikes me as very bizarre.

I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t even want to speak to most White people anymore because I am so sick and tired of this rightwing politics. I would add that your average “Centrist” White person is pretty damned rightwing themselves!

I honestly do not know WTF is the matter with White people. We have had over 40 years of this radical rightwing BS ever since Reagan started it (Don’t even compare these new ones to Nixon, Ford, or 1970’s Republicans please – we can live with them), and it’s sent the nation right down the tubes. The longer it goes on, the more wrecked we are getting. I am afraid that most Whites are ideologically invested in this Reaganite (now MAGA) crap, and they are just not willing to give it up, nor are they willing to acknowledge how it has clusterfucked our land.

They’re going to find out the hard way, but even then, will they learn?

Until very recently, Colombia has been a very rightwing country for a good 50-60 years or more, or maybe since colonization. The place is trashed, there’s a civil war going on, political murder goes on every day, there are the worst slums on Earth, crime is rampant – the murderous oligarchic politics have turned the whole country into a Hellish sewer. But every few years until just very recently, the people go to the polls, and everyone votes radical Right again.

Bigfoot DNA Is Not Modern Human DNA

A commenter writes:

Achilli A, et al. The Molecular Dissection of mtDNA Haplogroup H Confirms That the Franco-Cantabrian Glacial Refuge Was a Major Source for the European Gene Pool. Am. J. Hum. Genet. 75:910–918, 2004.

“These findings have major implications for the origin of Europeans, since they attest that the Franco-Cantabrian refuge area was indeed the source of late-glacial expansions of hunter-gatherers that repopulated much of Central and Northern Europe from ∼15,000 years ago.”

In other words, according to what has been presented here, it is most likely that the mtDNA in Stubstad’s samples originated from humans of European ancestry. Thus while there is neither evidence of a new primate nor of a hybrid species, there is the suggestion that that those who submitted tissue were either sincerely mistaken as to the actual source or actively participated in a hoax.

First of all, the samples show no evidence of a new primate or a hybrid species. Based on the samples alone, the conclusion is, bizarrely enough, that Bigfoots are some sort of human!

It’s not true at all. The two samples matched very well for ancient European DNA from that glacial refuge. There were 9 samples from that region, and those were the best matches for the 2 samples. Modern European DNA looks quite a bit different from the ancient glacial refuge DNA. Some modern European DNA looks somewhat like the glacial refuge DNA, that is people from Spain, Portugal and Southern France.

However, even that is not nearly as good a match as the glacial refuge DNA, which almost a complete match, with both samples matching all 8 glacial refuge samples very well.

What are the chances that the DNA was a hoax or that of any two matched humans of whatever type? According to Stubstad, statistically, there is a 9

Furthermore, hoax appears to be ruled out as the two groups are from opposite ends of the US, and they don’t even like each other enough to cooperate on anything. In fact, they hate each other. Furthermore, Stubstad met one of the submitters and did not feel that the man was even capable of such an elaborate hoax.

Check out Bigfoot Forums for the best Bigfoot talk on the web.

Texas: A State Destroyed by Rick Perry

Rick Perry is the quintessential Republican looney-tune nutcase, 2011 style. He’s intensely religious, after all, he’s been put here by God Himself. He even states, comically, that he is implementing God’s will by serving as governor.

And he’s single-handedly destroyed the state of Texas. As goes Texas, so goes the nation. Look in the mirror, America. Texas is the future.

Granted, Texas was pretty near ruined when George Bush got through with it, but it seemed there was no where to go but up. Then along came Rick Perry.

Perry’s Texas has the greatest percentage of minimum wage in the US. That is the future of America under Republican rule – a nation of minimum wage workers. Republicans have been waging war on workers, wages and unions from the time they were formed as a party. There was a respite for a bit, but now they are back in style.

In fact, the best way to describe the Republican Party is “low-wage conservatism.” This philosophy is very popular in the South, which has been trashed by low wages, anti-worker and anti-union attitudes and lax regulation and environmental laws. The South is the future, splayed over the entire land. Welcome to Shithole America.

Rick Perry’s Texas has the highest percentage of uninsured Americans as any other state. Repubicans are all about making sure that you are uninsured. That’s their policy – under Republican rule, the uninsured always grow. They cut back on state funding for low income folks, and as a business friendly party, they encourage businesses to get rid of medical coverage for their workers.

The Republicans believe that you, not your employer, should pay for your own health insurance. That’s what George  Bush’s ownership society crap was all about. You get to go out and buy your own insurance, and then you get to “own” it, see? You get to buy your own insurance instead of Medicare, then you get to “own” your private old age insurance, see? Isn’t ownership fun?

Under Rick Perry, the budget deficit blew out of control due to his endless tax cuts. Texas now has one of the worst deficits of any state. Under Republican rule, deficits everywhere will explode due to irresponsible tax cutting.

Under Rick Perry, the Texan dipshits threatened to secede from the union if the government didn’t stop trying to give them health care. Yeah, you heard me right. The government tried to give the people health care, and it pissed Rick off so much that he threatened to secede. What a dumbass!

Under Rick Perry, Texas has the 3rd highest poverty rate in the nation. Under Republican rule, look for the poverty rate to explode. Rightwing rulers almost always send the poverty rate through the roof, at Republican Presidents are no exception. Poverty always rises under a Republican President. Poverty doubled under Pinochet. It’s what they do.

Texas is still an extremely rightwing state. Despite being wrecked by Republican governor after Republican governor, Texans keep coming back for more. Some folks just can’t get enough abuse.

The Lunatics’ Demands Regarding the Debt Limit

For the price of not blowing up the US economy and the world economy along with it, the psychos in the Republican Party are apparently demanding the following ransom:

1. Large cuts in Social Security. Lindsay Graham, the Republican homosexual from South Carolina, is holding out for big SS cuts.

2. A Balanced Budget amendment (holding the Constitution hostage). This is Rand Paul and David Vitter’s gambit, along with the Tea Party’s.

3. An immediate 4

TI have a hard time believing the 3rd one. It boggles my mind to even think about it.

A balanced budget amendment is a terrible idea. Sovereign states are not supposed to balance their budgets, nor are they under any obligation to. It’s not even a good idea economically. Deficits are not a problem as long as they remain relatively low relative to GDP.

The first one is amazing. The Republican hatred for Social Security must be truly extreme. They’ve tried every which way to get rid of it, but they can’t seem to do so. They’ve been thwarted at every opportunity because the American people are not yet insane enough to want to get rid of Social Security. But the Republicans are determined to cut it, and eventually to get rid of it altogether. They are going to attack Social Security any way they can, even if it means threateing to blow up the US and world economy as the hostage price.

Wow, the Republicans must really hate Social Security.

Pawlenty’s Tax Cut Proposals Would Quadruple the Bush Tax Cuts

The Republican candidates are trying to out-psycho each other on just about every issue. They are doubling down on taxes. Romney would slash the corporate tax rate from 35-2

God knows what insane people think. Do Republicans realize that all of these nutty tax cut proposals only blow gigantic holes in the deficit? Who knows? After all, they’re all  crazy that is when they are not lying. It appears that Pawlenty believes, along with almost all other Republicans, in supply side economics. Pawlenty believes that his huge tax cuts, quadrupling the size of the Bush tax cuts, will not decrease revenues. In fact, they will increase revenues. This is supply side hokum and it’s been proven to be a lie so many times it’s not even funny.

Pawlenty is pushing an incredible $7.8 trillion in tax cuts. That’s going to blow a hole in the deficit the size of the Grand Canyon.

Pawlenty's tax cuts give a 4

Slashing taxes on the rich and corporations (neoliberal economics) causes deficits at the state level, often large deficits. We have seen this in recent times when various Republican governors pushed through huge tax cuts for the rich and the corporations and the result were large deficits.

Rick Perry’s Texas is running one the nation’s largest deficits almost solely due to his tax cuts. In Wisconsin, the governor took a surplus and turned it into a large deficit by his huge tax cuts for the rich and corporations. Then he screamed and yelled about the deficit that he created himself and set about destroying collective bargaining in the state in order to reduce the deficit.

The corporate and rich-controlled mass media has given the deficit creators a pass on this issue. Has any mass media outlet ever told us that huge tax cuts devastate government revenues and lead to large budget deficits? Find me one. I can’t find one. Hence, I would wager that your average American has been kept in the dark about the real causes of deficits, most of them simply don’t realize that cutting taxes leads directly to budget deficits. They’ve been kept in the dark, lied to nonstop for years by their media lords and masters serving the US plutocracy.

The truth is that Republicans don’t give a damn about budget deficits. Hell, they created them! Deliberately? Who knows? Who knows how an insane person or a pathological liar thinks or what they really believe? Anyway, they created them knowingly or not. And every year, they double down and worsen the deficits by cutting taxes even more.

Meanwhile, in the sane world (outside of the US) almost all sane people agree that when you have deficit problems, you must do two things:

1. Raise taxes, to the extent it is possible.

2. Cut spending, to the extent it is possible.

In most sane parts of the world not part of the USA, they do both. Whereas, if, during a deficit crisis, you:

1. Cut taxes.

2. Increase spending.

Everyone knows that all you do is make the deficit worse.

The Republican game about deficits is a gigantic lie. When Republicans are in, no one says one word about deficits, though Republicans lately tend to run much worse deficits then Democrats. The reactionary controlled mass media doesn’t say one peep. Then when the Democrats come in, the Republicans start screaming and yelling about deficits. The controlled rightwing media gets right in on this too. When the Democrats come in, we start to see lots of articles about the deficit and the need to slash it.

During the latest crisis over extending the Bush tax cuts, the entire reactionary MSM media demanded the tax cuts be extended. And why not, as the media is controlled 10

If you care about deficits, you can’t support any of the Republican candidates because they are all out to blow the deficit sky high via tax cuts. But if destruction of the US government is your goal, then you should definitely vote Republican.

Interview with Richard Stubstad: Is Bigfoot Human?

I recently conducted an interview with Richard Stubstad on the subject of Bigfoot. Stubstad was an early player in Melba Ketchum’s genetic studies of Bigfoot which later branched into the Erickson Project, among others. Stubstad himself has no relationship with the Erickson Project at all.

Lately, he has been publishing his own analysis of the samples that he worked with. His job was to analyze the initial samples as a statistician to determine their MtDNA and the probability that they were finding something real and not a hoax or misidentification. Stubstad’s website is here. You need to hit the click here button to read the pdf on his analysis.

Stubstad’s paper deals with two samples. Sample 1 is apparently a bone from the southwestern US. The location is not known. Sample 2 is blood and tissue gathered from the northeastern US, possibly Vermont, but I am not sure.

The two samples lined up almost totally, a very surprising result. A hoax was ruled out because the two locations were very distant from each other, and the two groups did not cooperate with each other. Thus these two samples have a 9

The kicker is that both samples came back 10

*******

Robert Lindsay (RL): You say that these samples come from the Franco-Cantabrian glacial refuge in Europe 10-20,000 YBP. Does that mean that no modern humans have MtDNA like this? Were there any samples in GenBank of modern Europeans showing similar MtDNA to these ancient Europeans? What I am asking is if it is possible for the samples to be from modern humans existing today, or is that impossible?

Richard Stubstad (RS): Well, this is one of the caveats. There are some modern populations who have MtDNA which resembles the ancient European samples. They tend to be Spaniards, Portuguese, Catalans, Basques, southern French, etc. So a human today with predominant ancestry from these regions could have DNA that looked like that from the Franco-Cantabrian glacial refuge. However, there is a 9

RL: Do you think that the samples were of Bigfoots?

RS: I really do. I don’t think it was a hoax because the two groups who submitted these samples do not work together at all. In fact, they don’t even like each other. I can’t imagine them working together for any reason. Also, I went to the southwestern site, and I believe this fellow really does have some Bigfoot activity at his site. I’m no expert, but that’s my impression. I also felt this guy was simply incapable of such an elaborate hoax. I won’t go into the reasons for that, but let’s just leave it at that.

RL: So Bigfoot is human then? What kind of sense does that make? It makes no sense at all.

RS: Well, in my opinion, Bigfoot is probably a hybrid species, part human, part something else (a related hominid of some kind), that has the ability to have viable offspring. The MtDNA only means that there was a human female from the Franco-Cantabrian refuge in the Bigfoot line during that time frame. That’s all it means. It doesn’t speak to the females of the Bigfoot line before that, nor does it speak to the male lineage.

RL: One of the leaks from the Erickson Project said that Bigfoot was partway between a Neandertal and a human. Jeff Meldrum was said to be surprised that they were that close to us. He thought they would be more distant. Is there any evidence of Neandertal MtDNA in the sequence?

RS: There is none whatsoever. Neandertal differs by ~200 polymorphisms on the mitochondrial side, and that was not indicated in this finding at all. Even Neandertal MtDNA is quite a bit different, so this should have shown up. Dr. Ketchum is a likely supporter of the hybrid theory. This is something that she knows a lot about due to her work with animals – hybridized species.

One of her theories was that there could have been what she called “seepage” of Neandertal DNA into the Bigfoot mitochondrial genome. However, I don’t really see much evidence of this. Perhaps there is more compelling evidence on the nuclear DNA side; I just don’t know.

RL: Does GenBank even have any Neandertal sequences in it?

RS: As a matter of fact, they do, and I believe they have more than one – there are in fact several in there.

RL: In the paper, you list two dates – 10-20,000 YBP and 20-30,000 YBP, for the samples. Which one is correct?

RS: The samples themselves matched best with nine samples in GenBank. Eight of these were dated to ~15,000 YBP in the Franco-Cantabrian glacial refuge. However, I believe that this sequence can go back all the way to 20-30,000 YBP in that same area. So it could be anywhere from 10-30,000 YBP in that refuge.

RL: I have been trying to put this all together, but I just get more and more confused. This still does not make sense to me. However, a human-Neandertal or human-Erectus hybrid is at least conceivable.

One thing I find interesting is that the Franco-Cantabrian refuge is where the Neandertals made their last stand on Earth before they went extinct. The last Neandertals are known from caves at Gibraltar ~27,000 YBP. So possibly, the last remains of the Neandertals mated with one or more human females in this area, and Bigfoot was born. The Neandertals went extinct, but Bigfoot as we know it today here in North America was conceived.

RS: I don’t have a problem with that. We have a lot of stories of so-called Bigfoot males around the world taking human females to breed with them, especially here in North America.

Possibly what happened is that the remaining archaic hominids bred in with some human females in the same fashion, and the resulting offspring had enough increased fitness (ie, survival of the fittest) to keep the species from going extinct. That is, the archaic hominids may have gone extinct, but the archaic hominid-human crosses had enough increased fitness that they were able to survive.

RL: Can you describe your relationship with the Erickson Project?

RS:: Yes. Initially, I was involved at the very start of the project, not with Adrian Erickson himself, but with Dr. Ketchum along with a few other folks.

RL: Is it possible that you refused to sign an NDA and this was the reason you were not allowed to continue?

RS: No! I signed an NDA way back in January of 2010, but Dr. Ketchum threw us out anyway. We all signed NDA’s, and we all obeyed them. Even before I was thrown out though, my NDA expired, so I am not on the hook for anything. I think she wants to make this a one-woman show.

RL: You said you think she will be the sole author of the piece and that such papers often have more than one author. How do you know this? Is it possible that you and others might still be listed as co-authors?

RS: No! There is no way we are going to be listed as co-authors. You see, there were several of us, and we were all supposed to be co-authors, but Dr. Ketchum threw either most or all of us all off, so I assume Dr. Ketchum will be the sole author.

RL: What do you think Ketchum’s motivation was? Glory? Money?

RS: I think she wants to get all the credit for this discovery, and maybe there is a financial motive as well. Maybe she wants be some kind of TV star. I really don’t know.

RL: We don’t know if your samples were used in her paper or not, correct? Is it possible that your samples were not useful for Ketchum? I mean, maybe they were useful and maybe they were not, right?

RS: Well, we don’t know if she is using the samples I worked with in the project. I think maybe she is not, as we were thrown off. She still has quite a few other samples. She has about 20 good samples in total. Of those, she may have used 10 or more for her paper. Were the first two samples useful? Of course they were! These were the initial samples that yielded what she called “very interesting results;” the ones that got her interested in doing the larger project project that followed.

RL: You are not leaking private information about this project, correct? And you only know about the initial phase of the project and nothing about what came afterwards, right?

RS: This is correct. I’m not leaking anything; that was a mischaracterization. My NDA expired, and I’m not violating anything. And yes, I know nothing at all about what happened with the project after I left.

RL: How do you feel Ketchum’s project will go?

RS: I am uncertain about it. For one thing, it’s apparently a one woman show, and these papers usually have more than one author. How will a woman show go over with peer reviewers? For another, I feel that she may overreach and make too many unwarranted generalizations or speculations in this piece. We may have another Lloyd Pye case on our hands, like with his so-called Starchild Skull.

RL: I have such a hard time thinking that Bigfoot is human. It really stretches the definition of what human means.

They have hair all over their bodies, they have a nuchal or occipital crest on their skull, they have very long arms, a somewhat nonhuman hand, a nonhuman way of walking, they are much taller and weigh more than any human race, they have a midtarsal break that went out with Homo Erectus 300,000 YBP, they have hair on their breasts, they have no tools or fire, they do not seem to have a normal human language – they are language poor and do not seem able to pick up human languages very easily as another human race would – and they sometimes give off a strong odor similar to what an ape does.

On and on. They’re simply not human. That’s all there is to it.

RS: I agree with you, and this is why I think they are a hybrid between humans and some other hominid.

RL: Are you aware of the feral human theory for Bigfoot?

RS: Yes I am, and it must be considered as one of the hypotheses, but there are many problems with this hypothesis, as you note above.

RL: Regarding the other Bigfoot types around the world, do you think we are dealing with something similar? To me, looking at the Almasty, the Yeren, the Mawas, the Yeti, the Nguoi Rung, the Yowie and others, it seems that we are dealing with the same beast, maybe in different forms.

RS: I agree with you. It does seem to be the same animal, with some differences, maybe similar to the differences between a Lowland Gorilla and a Mountain Gorilla.

RL: Although I think the little Orang Pendek of Sumatra may be something different.

RS: Yes, well there, we can can possibly connect this creature to some recent bones of the so-called “Hobbit” or Flores Man in Indonesia.

RL: Is there anything else you would like to add?

RS: Yes, there is one more thing! I looked at another MtDNA sample, and it came out completely different!

RL: How do you mean? How did the DNA come back? Was it Homo sapiens sapiens again?

RS: Yes, it was as a matter of fact, but it was nothing like the two samples that came back as from the ancient Franco-Cantabrian refuge. It was completely different.

RL: Now things are really not making any sense. Can you elaborate?

RS: Well, not really. I am going to write this up in my next addition to the website you mentioned to begin this interview, hopefully within the next month or so. But it goes along with a theory of mine, that maybe Bigfoot males were taking human females into their genetic line at various points in history. Now – this doesn’t mean that I know this to be a fact; I’m merely speculating…

*******

That’s it for the interview. We may be interviewing some other biggies in the Bigfoot World as things come to a head with the Erickson Project in the near future.

For the best in Bigfoot discussions, make sure to visit Bigfoot Forums.

American Renaissance’s Third Rails: The Jews and Capitalism

At American Renaissance, the premier White nationalist site, it’s long been known that you can’t say anything about the Jews or Israel. This is probably for the best, because WN’s are fiercely anti-Semitic, and the comments would turn into a Nazi hatefest pretty quickly.

Jared Taylor, the publisher, has entered into an alliance with friendly Jews and has decided not to criticize Jews in the context of WN. This is interesting, because Jews are one thing that WN’s can’t seem to quit talking about. He has been criticized by both sides for this – from the anti-Semitic WN’s, as some kind of a Jew sellout, and by Ian Jobling, strangely enough, for being an anti-Semite himself.

Distancing himself from anti-Semitism and welcoming Jews to WN was probably a smart thing for Taylor to do. Whatever else people call him, they can’t call him a Nazi anti-Semite.

We have long heard that criticism of Jews or Israel is not allowed on Amren, and a friend recently confirmed this for me.

But he also told me that criticism of capitalism is also not allowed. This makes sense, as Taylor is a conservative Republican who promotes the Republican Party, even the craziest wings, or possibly, especially the craziest wings, and denigrates the Democratic Party. That’s part of his agenda on the site. He’s also a strong supporter of capitalism. He’s a highly paid corporate consultant.

I don’t think this is going to limit Amren’s appeal, as few WN’s seem to be very friendly to any kind of socialism these days. Most seem to be fanatical capitalists, even Libertarians. This is hard to figure, but the Libertarians are on record for getting rid of all anti-discrimination laws, as that is perhaps the one thing that all WN’s can agree on.

Housing Crash Continues, Now Worse Than the Great Depression

The housing crash is not over by any means. Housing prices fell another 1.

A friend of mine was living near Atlanta recently. When she moved there, there was one foreclosed house in the area. Now, 2 years later, half the homes on the block are in foreclosure. It looks like while the foreclosure crisis is lessening here in California, it is still going gangbusters or  peaking in other parts of the country.

The housing crash was caused 10

The corporate controlled mass media has done its job and has totally lied to Americans about what caused the housing crisis. The rich and the corporations who control the media are the ones who destroyed the economy in the first place, but they are never going to let you know that. I would be amazed if your average American knows why this happened. The finance reform bill that Obama passed is very weak, even though the maniacal Republicans are screaming that it is “socialism.” The bill does nothing to prevent what caused the crash from happening again.

Obama has done little to help Americans save their homes from rapacious banksters. A bill that passed only helps less than 1

The Republican Party has been absolutely vicious on this issue, refusing to help homeowners even the tiniest bit and blaming the victim, like they always do, for being irresponsible in losing their homes. Do 45-5

It’s not the Republicans who are bad. It’s the fiercely reactionary American people are no good. The Republicans are simply an expression of the fanatical rightwing nature of the American people themselves. The party is expressing their will. Apparently, reactionary Americans love plutocracy and corporate dictatorship, want to destroy the US economy and want to zero out the government at all levels. Go figure!

Very Nice New Piece on Race in Mexico

Here.

The site is actually named after me, which has me shaking my head in amazement.

The piece, and the site itself, was inspired by my site, in particular my pieces on race in Mexico and on the major and minor races of man.

Most Mexicans are mestizos, but there are large minorities of more or less pure Europeans and Indians. He describes most of the significant White groups in Mexico and puts Whites at ~1

Although most Whites have Spanish roots, there are also significant French, Portuguese, German, Italians and Irish minorities. I met a young woman who is Mexican-American, but she is mostly Portuguese. The village she was born in in Mexico is made up of primarily Portuguese people! There are also quite a few Jews in Mexico.

More or less pure Indians make up ~1

Mestizos make up ~6

There are what he calls 3 occult roots in Mexico: Blacks, Asians and Arabs.

The first root, the Blacks, has its basis in African slaves who were brought to the east coast of Mexico. This affair did not last long as a slave who married a free Mexican had children who were free. So, slavery quickly went out and the Blacks disappeared via mixed breeding as slaves quickly took free, non-Black Mexicans as spouses.

The result was that pure Blacks nearly disappeared and the remainder are mostly mulattos, zambos (Indian-Black) and triracials. In addition, your average Mexican mestizo now is ~4-

The next root is Asians. In the early days, quite a few Filipinos came to Mexico when it was part of Spain via the colony of the Philippines. By this time, they are heavily mixed with other races in Mexico. In the early 20th Century, many Chinese came to Mexico. Unfortunately, most were tossed out in the 1930’s in a wave of nativism, but in Mexico city and Mexicali, there are still quite a few Chinese and part-Chinese, as the Chinese also married heavily into the mix.

The last root is Arabs. Most of these Arabs are Christians from Mesopotamia, the Levant and Egypt. They came in response to anti-Christian attacks waged by the Ottoman Empire at the end of WW1. Since they came from the Ottoman Empire, many Mexicans referred to them as “Turks.” Carlos Slim, Mexico’s richest man, is Lebanese, as is Salma Hayek.

All three of these occult roots each make up ~

There have been various studies of Mexico’s admixture, but they tend to come up with quite different results. I agree with the the author that the best studies show Mexico’s genome to be 5

Most self-identified Mexican Indians have some White in them, in addition to a bit of Black. Percentages range from

The author notes that Mexican-Americans have traditionally been a lot Whiter than Mexicans, because they tend to come from the Whiter regions of Northern Mexico. Southwest Mexicans have usually tested out at 6

A photo on his site of Chicano gangbangers shows that they are mostly White, something we have always known here.

Towards the end he makes up a list of racial categories of Mexicans, following my lead in this piece, even adopting my formulae and marking scheme.

He lists five major races in Mexico – Whites, Indians, Mestizos, Blacks and Asians.

No major disagreement there.

I have been regarded as a mad splitter in my piece above. One critic said that if Lindsay doesn’t stop soon, he’s going to have as many races as there are languages. This criticism, in addition to endless bashing by race deniers, hurt my feelings, as a result, I have made few new updates to my races of man post.

However, the author is much worse of a splitter than I have ever been, splitting off all sorts of groups that I probably would not have split off. Hence, his scheme is better seen as a view towards Mexican ethnies or ethnic groups than races per se. For instance, he divides Mexican mestizos and Mexican Whites into quite a few different races, on what basis I am not sure. Are they ethnies? Quite possibly. Races? Dunno about that.

In my scheme, I actually adopted a conservative scheme in which I tried not to split off new races unless I couldn’t help it. I wanted some significant genetic distance between a group or ethny before I would split them off. Hence, I lumped most Europeans into a single race because there isn’t much genetic distance between them. I am wondering if the author has any genetic data to back up splitting many of these groups into different races, because I only split based on hard genetic data.

At the end, I think we have two different schemes here. One is dividing races based on hard genetics and the other is splitting racers and also ethnies on the basis of partly genetics but also subjective factors. On the other hand, there probably is not much genetic data on the various different Mexican mestizos and Whites.

All in all, a very commendable piece, the fruit of long research. By the way, the photos are excellent. Make sure to check them out.

Chavez’s Right Turn: State Realism versus International Solidarity,” by James Petras

This is an excellent article by James Petras.

He shows how Hugo Chavez has turned so far to the right that he is now in some ways one of the most rightwing Presidents in Latin America. For instance, only Chavez has supported the US and Colombia in backing the Honduran coup regime. And he is becoming one of Colombia’s sole allies in the region.

Why has he done this? A few reasons. For one, he’s surrounded and threatened. Colombia keeps threatening the invade Venezuela to go after Colombian rebels that hide there, and the US under “liberal” Barack Obama has just stationed 7 new military bases in Colombia for the sole purpose of attacking the Colombian guerrillas and threatening Venezuela. Colombia built up forces on the border, repeatedly crossed the Venezuelan border, and moved Colombian death squads into Venezuela to attack the people.

The Colombian guerrillas are on the defensive and can no longer provide the buffer that they formerly provided along the border to a Colombian invasion of Venezuela.

The Obama-backed coup against Honduras, which has resulted in a wave of murders against the Honduran Left, changed things. Chavez now realized that the Obama regime was willing to use military force to get what it wanted in Latin America.

At home, the opposition has made its strongest showing in a decade, winning about 5

In other words, he’s boxed in with nowhere to turn. Under these circumstances, Chavez has decided that the Colombian guerrillas, who they used to support, are a liability. He has been cooperating with Colombia in handing over guerrillas who are in Venezuela. He signed a non-aggression agreement with Colombia in return for an agreement to help catch any Colombian guerrillas in Venezuela. However, he has gotten little in return for this other than that Colombia has stopped invading and threatening his territory.Colombia still maintains a deep alliance with Chavez enemy, the US. Colombian forces are still massed along Venezuela’s borders.

Chavez hope to keep Colombia from joining in the US in any joint US-Colombian military escapades inside Venezuela. He also hopes to keep Colombia from joining in any US propaganda-destabilization efforts in Venezuela.

However, the threats have escalated, and the US appears emboldened. Chavez’ moves to the Right have not earned him the tiniest bit of praise or space from the US – they hate him more than ever. US imperialism slapped an embargo on the Venezuelan oil company due to Venezuela trading with Iran. I am not sure what this embargo entails? Incredibly, the Venezuelan opposition supported this foreign embargo on Venezuela! What a bunch of traitors.

Following his new alliance with Colombia, Chavez became the only nation other than Colombia in Latin America which has recognized the coup regime in Honduras. He did this under pressure from Colombia.

Petras points out how Allende’s Chile, Mexico in the 1980’s, Cuba and Brazil have all harbored Latin American guerrillas (in Brazil’s case, an Italian guerrilla). They refused to extradite them. But Chavez is boxed in in a way that these regimes may not have been.

Petras shows how other Left regimes also cooperated with the Right at various times. Stalin cooperated with Hitler for a while in order to buy some time to move his industry east of the Urals and build up his military-industrial complex. He even sent some German Communists who were hiding in the USSR to Germany, where they were certainly tortured and killed. But Stalin was boxed in, and he needed to buy some time, so he made a deal with the devil.

In the early 1970’s, Mao entered into a new alliance with the US under Richard Nixon’s detente. Afterward, Mao supported Pinochet and the rightist rebels in Angola. They denounced any Left regime that head the slightest ties with the USSR and supported their enemies, no matter how rightwing they were. All for the benefits of a sunshine policy with the US.

In the event of a new confrontation with the US, can Chavez expect his new Colombian ally to be neutral? Dubious. Colombia will probably ally with its imperial master in the US. And can he expect any support for the radical Left in Latin America now that he has betrayed them? This also is dubious. He may well end up with no friends at all.

Chavez’s Right Turn: State Realism versus International Solidarity

Introduction

The radical “Bolivarian Socialist” government of Hugo Chavez has arrested a number of Colombian guerrilla leaders and a radical journalist with Swedish citizenship and handed them over to the right-wing regime of President Juan Manuel Santos, earning the Colombian government’s praise and gratitude.

The close on-going collaboration between a leftist President with a regime with a notorious history of human rights violations, torture and disappearance of political prisoners has led to widespread protests among civil liberty advocates, leftists and populists throughout Latin America and Europe, while pleasing the Euro-American imperial establishment.

On April 26, 2011, Venezuelan immigration officials, relying exclusively on information from the Colombian secret police (DAS), arrested a naturalized Swedish citizen and journalist (Joaquin Perez Becerra) of Colombian descent, who had just arrived in the country. Based on Colombian secret police allegations that the Swedish citizen was a ‘FARC leader’, Perez was extradited to Colombia within 48 hours.

Despite the fact that it was in violation of international diplomatic protocols and the Venezuelan constitution, this action had the personal backing of President Chavez. A month later, the Venezuelan armed forces joined their Colombian counterparts and captured a leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Guillermo Torres (with the nom de Guerra Julian Conrado) who is awaiting extradition to Colombia in a Venezuelan prison without access to an attorney.

On March 17, Venezuelan Military Intelligence (DIM) detained two alleged guerrillas from the National Liberation Army (ELN), Carlos Tirado and Carlos Perez, and turned them over to the Colombian secret police. The new public face of Chavez as a partner of the repressive Colombian regime is not so new after all.

On December 13, 2004, Rodrigo Granda, an international spokesperson for the FARC and a naturalized Venezuelan citizen, whose family resided in Caracas, was snatched by plain-clothes Venezuelan intelligence agents in downtown Caracas where he had been participating in an international conference and secretly taken to Colombia with the ‘approval’ of the Venezuelan Ambassador in Bogota.

Following several weeks of international protest, including from many conference participants, President Chavez issued a statement describing the ‘kidnapping’ as a violation of Venezuelan sovereignty and threatened to break relations with Colombia.

In more recent times, Venezuela has stepped up the extradition of revolutionary political opponents of Colombia’s narco-regime: In the first five months of 2009, Venezuela extradited 15 alleged members of the ELN and in November 2010, a FARC militant and two suspected members of the ELN were handed over to the Colombian police. In January 2011 Nilson Teran Ferreira, a suspected ELN leader, was delivered to the Colombian military.

The collaboration between Latin America’s most notorious authoritarian rightwing regime and the supposedly most radical ‘socialist’ government raises important issues about the meaning of political identities and how they relate to domestic and international politics and more specifically what principles and interests guide state policies.

Revolutionary Solidarity and State Interests

The recent ‘turn’ in Venezuela politics, from expressing sympathy and even support for revolutionary struggles and movements in Latin America to its present collaboration with pro-imperial rightwing regimes, has numerous historical precedents. It may help to examine the contexts and circumstances of these collaborations: The Bolshevik revolutionary government in Russia initially gave whole hearted support to revolutionary uprisings in Germany, Hungary, Finland and elsewhere.

With the defeats of these revolts and the consolidation of the capitalist regimes, Russian state and economic interests took prime of place among the Bolshevik leaders. Trade and investment agreements, peace treaties and diplomatic recognition between Communist Russia and the Western capitalist states defined the new politics of “co-existence”. With the rise of fascism, the Soviet Union under Stalin further subordinated communist policy in order to secure state-to-state alliances, first with the Western Allies and, failing that, with Nazi Germany.

The Hitler-Stalin pact was conceived by the Soviets as a way to prevent a German invasion and to secure its borders from a sworn rightwing enemy. As part of Stalin’s expression of good faith, he handed over to Hitler a number of leading exiled German communist leaders, who had sought asylum in Russia. Not surprisingly they were tortured and executed. This practice stopped only after Hitler invaded Russia and Stalin encouraged the now decimated ranks of German communists to re-join the ‘anti-Nazi’ underground resistance.

In the early 1970’s, as Mao’s China reconciled with Nixon’s United States and broke with the Soviet Union, Chinese foreign policy shifted toward supporting US-backed counter-revolutionaries, including Holden Roberts in Angola and Pinochet in Chile.

China denounced any leftist government and movement, which, however faintly, had ties with the USSR, and embraced their enemies, no matter how subservient they were to Euro-American imperial interests.

In Stalin’s USSR and Mao’s China, short-term ‘state interests’ trumped revolutionary solidarity. What were these ‘state interests’?

In the case of the USSR, Stalin gambled that a ‘peace pact’ with Hitler’s Germany would protect them from an imperialist Nazi invasion and partially end the encirclement of Russia.

Stalin no longer trusted in the strength of international working class solidarity to prevent war, especially in light of a series of revolutionary defeats and the generalized retreat of the Left over the previous decades (Germany, Span, Hungary and Finland) .The advance of fascism and the extreme right, unremitting Western hostility toward the USSR and the Western European policy of appeasing Hitler, convinced Stalin to seek his own peace pact with Germany.

In order to demonstrate their ‘sincerity’ toward its new ‘peace partner’, the USSR downplayed their criticism of the Nazis, urging Communist parties around the world to focus on attacking the West rather than Hitler’s Germany, and gave into Hitler’s demand to extradite German Communist “terrorists” who had found asylum in the Soviet Union.

Stalin’s pursuit of short term ‘state interests’ via pacts with the “far right” ended in a strategic catastrophe: Nazi Germany was free to first conquer Western Europe and then turned its guns on Russia, invading an unprepared USSR and occupying half the country. In the meantime the international anti-fascist solidarity movements had been weakened and temporarily disoriented by the zigzags of Stalin’s policies.

In the mid-1970’s, the Peoples Republic of China’s ‘reconciliation’ with the US, led to a turn in international policy: ‘US imperialism’ became an ally against the greater evil ‘Soviet social imperialism’.

As a result China, under Chairman Mao Tse Tung, urged its international supporters to denounce progressive regimes receiving Soviet aid (Cuba, Vietnam, Angola, etc.) and it withdrew its support for revolutionary armed resistance against pro-US client states in Southeast Asia. China’s ‘pact’ with Washington was to secure immediate ‘state interests’: Diplomatic recognition and the end of the trade embargo.

Mao’s short-term commercial and diplomatic gains were secured by sacrificing the more fundamental strategic goals of furthering socialist values at home and revolution abroad. As a result, China lost its credibility among Third World revolutionaries and anti-imperialists, in exchange for gaining the good graces of the White House and greater access to the capitalist world market.

Short-term “pragmatism’ led to long-term transformation: The Peoples Republic of China became a dynamic emerging capitalist power, with some of the greatest social inequalities in Asia and perhaps the world.

Venezuela: State Interests versus International Solidarity

The rise of radical politics in Venezuela, which is the cause and consequence of the election of President Chavez (1999), coincided with the rise of revolutionary social movements throughout Latin America from the late 1990’s to the middle of the first decade of the 21st century (1995-2005).

Neo-liberal regimes were toppled in Ecuador, Bolivia and Argentina; mass social movements challenging neo-liberal orthodoxy took hold everywhere; the Colombian guerrilla movements were advancing toward the major cities; and center-left politicians were elected to power in Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, Ecuador and Uruguay. The US economic crises undermined the credibility of Washington’s ‘free trade’ agenda.

The increasing Asian demand for raw materials stimulated an economy boom in Latin America, which funded social programs and nationalizations. In the case of Venezuela, a failed US-backed military coup and ‘bosses’ boycott’ in 2002-2003, forced the Chavez government to rely on the masses and turn to the Left. Chavez proceeded to “re-nationalize” petroleum and related industries and articulate a “Bolivarian Socialist” ideology.

Chavez’ radicalization found a favorable climate in Latin America and the bountiful revenues from the rising price of oil financed his social programs. Chavez maintained a plural position of embracing governing center-left governments, backing radical social movements and supporting the Colombian guerrillas’ proposals for a negotiated settlement. Chavez called for the recognition of Colombia’s guerrillas as legitimate ‘belligerents” not “terrorists’.

Venezuela’s foreign policy was geared toward isolating its main threat emanating from Washington by promoting exclusively Latin American/Caribbean organizations, strengthening regional trade and investment links and securing regional allies in opposition to US intervention, military pacts, bases and US-backed military coups. In response to US financing of Venezuelan opposition groups (electoral and extra parliamentary), Chavez has provided moral and political support to anti-imperialist groups throughout Latin America.

After Israel and American Zionists began attacking Venezuela, Chavez extended his support to the Palestinians and broadened ties with Iran and other Arab anti-imperialist movements and regimes. Above all, Chavez strengthened his political and economic ties with Cuba, consulting with the Cuban leadership, to form a radical axis of opposition to imperialism. Washington’s effort to strangle the Cuban revolution by an economic embargo was effectively undermined by Chavez’ large-scale, long-term economic agreements with Havana.

Up until the later part of this decade, Venezuela’s foreign policy – its ‘state interests’ – coincided with the interests of the left regimes and social movements throughout Latin America. Chavez clashed diplomatically with Washington’s client states in the hemisphere, especially Colombia, headed by narco-death squad President Alvaro Uribe (2002-2010). However recent years have witnessed several external and internal changes and a gradual shift toward the center.

The revolutionary upsurge in Latin America began to ebb: The mass upheavals led to the rise of center-left regimes, which, in turn, demobilized the radical movements and adopted strategies relying on agro-mineral export strategies, all the while pursuing autonomous foreign policies independent of US-control. The Colombian guerrilla movements were in retreat and on the defensive – their capacity to buffer Venezuela from a hostile Colombian client regime waned.

Chavez adapted to these ‘new realities’, becoming an uncritical supporter of the ‘social liberal’ regimes of Lula in Brazil, Morales in Bolivia, Correa in Ecuador, Vazquez in Uruguay and Bachelet in Chile. Chavez increasingly chose immediate diplomatic support from the existing regimes over any long-term support, which might have resulted from a revival of the mass movements.

Trade ties with Brazil and Argentina and diplomatic support from its fellow Latin American states against an increasingly aggressive US became central to Venezuela’s foreign policy: The basis of Venezuelan policy was no longer the internal politics of the center-left and centrist regimes but their degree of support for an independent foreign policy. Repeated US interventions failed to generate a successful coup or to secure any electoral victories, against Chavez.

As a result Washington increasingly turned to using external threats against Chavez via its Colombian client state, the recipient of $5 billion in military aid. Colombia’s military build-up, its border crossings and infiltration of death squads into Venezuela, forced Chavez into a large-scale purchase of Russian arms and toward the formation of a regional alliance (ALBA). The US-backed military coup in Honduras precipitated a major rethink in Venezuela’s policy.

The coup had ousted a democratically elected centrist liberal, President Zelaya in Honduras, a member of ALBA and set up a repressive regime subservient to the White House. However, the coup had the effect of isolating the US throughout Latin America -not a single government supported the new regime in Tegucigalpa. Even the neo-liberal regimes of Colombia, Mexico, Peru and Panama voted to expel Honduras from the Organization of American States.

On the one hand, Venezuela viewed this ‘unity’ of the right and center-left as an opportunity toward mending fences with the conservative regimes; and on the other, it understood that the Obama Administration was ready to use the ‘military option’ to regain its dominance. The fear of a US military intervention was greatly heightened by the Obama-Uribe agreement establishing seven US strategic military bases near its border with Venezuela.

Chavez wavered in his response to this immediate threat: At one point he almost broke trade and diplomatic relations with Colombia, only to immediately reconcile with Uribe, although the latter had demonstrated no desire to sign on to a pact of co-existence.

Meanwhile, the 2010 Congressional elections In Venezuela led to a major increase in electoral support for the US-backed right (approximately 5

Chavez faced several options: The first was to return to the earlier policy of international solidarity with radical movements; the second was to continue working with the center-left regimes while maintaining strong criticism and firm opposition to the US backed neo-liberal regimes; and the third option was to turn toward the Right, more specifically to seek rapprochement with the newly elected President of Colombia, Santos and sign a broad political, military and economic agreement where Venezuela agreed to collaborate in eliminating Colombia’s leftist adversaries in exchange for promises of ‘non-aggression’ (Colombia limiting its cross-border narco and military incursions).

Venezuela and Chavez decided that the FARC was a liability and that support from the radical Colombian mass social movements was not as important as closer diplomatic relations with President Santos. Chavez has calculated that complying with Santos political demands would provide greater security to the Venezuelan state than relying on the support of the international solidarity movements and his own radical domestic allies among the trade unions and intellectuals.

In line with this Right turn, the Chavez regime fulfilled Santos’ requests – arresting FARC/ELN guerrillas, as well as a prominent leftist journalist, and extraditing them to a state which has had the worst human rights record in the Americas for over two decades, in terms of torture and extra-judicial assassinations. This Right turn acquires an even more ominous character when one considers that Colombia holds over 7600 political prisoners, over 7000 of whom are trade unionists, peasants, Indians, students, in other words non-combatants.

In acquiescing to Santos requests, Venezuela did not even follow the established protocols of most democratic governments: It did not demand any guaranties against torture and respect for due process. Moreover, when critics have pointed out that these summary extraditions violated Venezuela’s own constitutional procedures, Chavez launched a vicious campaign slandering his critics as agents of imperialism engaged in a plot to destabilize his regime.

Chavez’s new-found ally on the Right, President Santos has not reciprocated: Colombia still maintains close military ties with Venezuela’s prime enemy in Washington. Indeed, Santos vigorously sticks to the White House agenda: He successfully pressured Chavez to recognize the illegitimate regime of Lobos in Honduras- the product of a US-backed coup in exchange for the return of ousted ex-President Zelaya.

Chavez did what no other center-left Latin American President has dared to do: He promised to support the reinstatement of the illegitimate Honduran regime into the OAS. On the basis of the Chavez-Santos agreement, Latin American opposition to Lobos collapsed and Washington’s strategic goal was realized: a puppet regime was legitimized. Chavez agreement with Santos to recognize the murderous Lobos regime betrayed the heroic struggle of the Honduran mass movement.

Not one of the Honduran officials responsible for over a hundred murders and disappearances of peasant leaders, journalists, human rights and pro-democracy activists are subject to any judicial investigation. Chavez has given his blessings to impunity and the continuation of an entire repressive apparatus, backed by the Honduran oligarchy and the US Pentagon.

In other words, to demonstrate his willingness to uphold his ‘friendship and peace pact’ with Santos, Chavez was willing to sacrifice the struggle of one of the most promising and courageous pro-democracy movements in the Americas.

And What Does Chavez Seek in His Accommodation with the Right?

Security? Chavez has received only verbal ‘promises’, and some expressions of gratitude from Santos.

But the enormous pro-US military command and US mission remain in place. In other words, there will be no dismantling of the Colombian paramilitary-military forces massed along the Venezuelan border and the US military base agreements, which threaten Venezuelan national security, will not change. According to Venezuelan diplomats, Chavez’ tactic is to ‘win over’ Santos from US tutelage.

By befriending Santos, Chavez hopes that Bogota will not join in any joint military operation with the US or cooperate in future propaganda-destabilization campaigns. In the brief time since the Santos-Chavez pact was made, an emboldened Washington announced an embargo on the Venezuelan state oil company with the support of the Venezuelan congressional opposition. Santos, for his part, has not complied with the embargo, but then not a single country in the world has followed Washington’s lead.

Clearly, President Santos is not likely to endanger the annual $10 billion dollar trade between Colombia and Venezuela in order to humor the US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton’s diplomatic caprices. In contrast to Chavez policy of handing over leftist and guerrilla exiles to a rightist authoritarian regime, President Allende of Chile (1970-73) joined a delegation that welcomed armed fighters fleeing persecution in Bolivia and Argentina and offered them asylum.

For many years, especially in the 1980’s, Mexico, under center-right regimes, openly recognized the rights of asylum for guerrilla and leftist refugees from Central America – El Salvador and Guatemala. Revolutionary Cuba, for decades, offered asylum and medical treatment to leftist and guerrilla refugees from Latin American dictatorships and rejected demands for their extradition.

Even as late as 2006, when the Cuban government was pursuing friendly relations with Colombia and when its then Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque expressed his deep reservations regarding the FARC in conversations with the author, Cuba refused to extradite guerrillas to their home countries where they would be tortured and abused.

One day before he left office in 2011, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva denied Italy’s request to extradite Cesare Battisti, a former Italian guerrilla. As one Brazilian judge said -and Chavez should have listened: “At stake here is national sovereignty. It is as simple as that”. No one would criticize Chavez efforts to lessen border tensions by developing better diplomatic relations with Colombia and to expand trade and investment flows between the two countries.

What is unacceptable is to describe the murderous Colombian regime as a “friend” of the Venezuela people and a partner in peace and democracy, while thousands of pro-democracy political prisoners rot in TB-infested Colombian prisons for years on trumped-up charges.

Under Santos, civilian activists continue to be murdered almost every day. The most recent killing was yesterday (June 9,2011): Ana Fabricia Cordoba, a leader of community-based displaced peasants, was murdered by the Colombian armed forces.

Chavez’ embrace of the Santos narco-presidency goes beyond the requirements for maintaining proper diplomatic and trade relations. His collaboration with the Colombian intelligence, military and secret police agencies in hunting down and deporting Leftists (without due process!) smacks of complicity in dictatorial repression and serves to alienate the most consequential supporters of the Bolivarian transformation in Venezuela.

Chavez’ role in legitimizing of the Honduran coup-regime, without any consideration for the popular movements’ demands for justice, is a clear capitulation to the Santos – Obama agenda. This line of action places Venezuela’s ‘state’ interests over the rights of the popular mass movements in Honduras.

Chavez’ collaboration with Santos on policing leftists and undermining popular struggles in Honduras raises serious questions about Venezuela’s claims of revolutionary solidarity. It certainly sows deep distrust about Chavez future relations with popular movements who might be engaged in struggle with one of Chavez’s center-right diplomatic and economic partners.

What is particularly troubling is that most democratic and even center-left regimes do not sacrifice the mass social movements on the altar of “security” when they normalize relations with an adversary.

Certainly the Right, especially the US, protects its former clients, allies, exiled right-wing oligarch and even admitted terrorists from extradition requests issued by Venezuela, Cuba and Argentina. Mass murders and bombers of civilian airplanes manage to live comfortably in Florida.

Why Venezuela submits to the Right-wing demands of the Colombians, while complaining about the US protecting terrorists guilty of crimes in Venezuela, can only be explained by Chavez ideological shift to the Right, making Venezuela more vulnerable to pressure for greater concessions in the future.

Chavez is no longer interested in the support from the radical left: his definition of state policy revolves around securing the ‘stability’ of Bolivarian socialism in one country, even if it means sacrificing Colombian militants to a police state and pro-democracy movements in Honduras to an illegitimate US-imposed regime. History provides mixed lessons.

Stalin’s deals with Hitler were a strategic disaster for the Soviet people: once the Fascists got what they wanted they turned around and invaded Russia. Chavez has so far not received any ‘reciprocal’ confidence-building concession from Santos military machine. Even in terms of narrowly defined ‘state interests’, he has sacrificed loyal allies for empty promises. The US imperial state is Santos’ primary ally and military provider.

China sacrificed international solidarity for a pact with the US, a policy that led to unregulated capitalist exploitation and deep social injustices.

When and if the next confrontation between the US and Venezuela occurs, will Chavez, at least, be able to count on the “neutrality” of Colombia? If past and present relations are any indication, Colombia will side with its client-master, mega-benefactor and ideological mentor.

When a new rupture occurs, can Chavez count on the support of the militants, who have been jailed, the mass popular movements he pushed aside and the international movements and intellectuals he has slandered? As the US moves toward new confrontations with Venezuela and intensifies its economic sanctions, domestic and international solidarity will be vital for Venezuela’s defense. Who will stand up for the Bolivarian revolution, the Santos and Lobos of this “realist world”? Or the solidarity movements in the streets of Caracas and the Americas?

A Concise History of the Recent Russia-Georgia Conflict

Excellent comment from a commenter about the recent Russia-Georgia conflict.

Russia had peacekeeping troops in South Ossetia as part of the agreement with Georgia from the 1990′s after the South Ossetian had won their de facto independence. The present government of Georgia disavowed that earlier agreement.

When the Georgians and South Ossetians got into an artillery fight, the Georgians sent in their army. As part of that attack, they targeted the Russian peacekeepers, so the Russians sent in their army to defend their peacekeepers.

The Russians advanced into Georgia for two reasons, to knock out artillery that the Georgians were using to bombard South Ossetia and to separate the South Ossetians along with their allies the Abkhazian armies which had advanced into Georgia from the Georgians. Once that was accomplished after a couple of days, the Russians retreated back to their former positions.

However, the Russians then took the step of recognizing the South Ossetia and their allies, the Abkhazians, and so now Russia has upgraded the Russian forces in these places from peacekeepers to combat troops, so they now have a couple of infantry regiments along with some artillery and AA weapons stationed there.

Sums it up quite well, I think. It is true that Russia plays geopolitics as far as secession is concerned, recognizing Abkhazia and South Ossetia and not their own Chechnya nor their allies’ Kosovo. But the USSR did let all of those republics go in the first place, one of the most progressive acts of recognition of self-determination that the world has ever seen.

Georgia has staked out a place since independence as hostile to Russia, for whatever reasons. For that reason, Russia supported the secessionists in Georgia. If Georgia would not have been hostile, then Russia probably would not have done that.

As someone who supports self-determination, I am happy that South Ossetia and Abkhazia are having their rights recognized. I believe that South Ossetia wants to join North Ossetia as “Ossetia” and become a part of Russia like North Ossetia is. Abkhazia, I believe, wants to become an independent country.

A commenter noted that Russia is trying to control that part of the world in order to control Europe. But the USSR controlled that part of the world for 74 years, and they never controlled Europe. I think that Russia just wants friends in that part of the world.

It is the US and some East Europeans who are treating Russia as a hostile nation, for no apparent reason, as Russia means us no harm and is not an enemy state; if fact, it wishes to be an ally. We along with our East European friends are surrounding Russia with bases and stationing defensive missiles in Poland. Both of those are hostile acts directed at Russia.

US imperialism is paranoid. It sees enemies where they do not exist and wishes to dominate as much of the globe as possible for unknown reasons, possibly as a form of modern mercantilist warfare to increase the profit share of US corporations and the wealth of America vis a vis the rest of the world. As the rest of the world is impoverished, the wealth of US imperialism is increased. US imperialism relies on the principle of vassal states of the US along with tributaries or supply lines to control the trade of the vassals and the US.

Russia does not have a hostile, beggar thy neighbor type imperialist project going on. Why this is I am not so sure, but possibly it is a residual holdover effect from the USSR. Russia seeks allies, and you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours relationships.

They have their own self-interest only in that they do not wish to be screwed by the machinations of US imperialism, which is trying to screw them out of markets and regional influence, in addition to threatening them with surrounding them with military bases and hostile states. Russia seeks co-existence, not domination.

I assume that the US’ hostility to Russia dates back to Soviet days. Even though the USSR fell and Russia entered the capitalist sphere, we still regard them as a hostile country due to the past.

But then US imperialism is very aggressive anyway. The super-imperialists around the neoconservatives, Rumsfeld and Cheney even said that Europe not an ally but a hostile competitor (“Old Europe”). They have written papers on the need to screw Europe out of various markets and whatnot. These papers treat Old Europe as an enemy region.

I suppose that an imperialist capitalist country can have no allies. The stage of US imperialism was set in the Truman Administration when George Kennan said that the US controls of 2

If the world gets fairer and we don’t get such a huge slice of the pie anymore, the rest of the world gets richer and we get relatively poorer. It’s a fight over slices of pie. We get rich by keeping others poor. As others increase their share of the pie and get richer, we lose and get poorer. So US imperialism is dedicated to keeping the rest of the world poorer vis a vis the US in order to preserve our often ill-obtained wealth.

Why Did Russia Fight a War in Georgia Recently?

A new commenter writes:

The reason the US has military bases to surround Russia is to make sure it doesn’t grow powerful enough to pose a threat to the US. Remember the Russian-Georgian war of 2008? It was no coincidence the Russians sent in forces to overtake Georgia, which would provide Russia with a strategic position and a strategic buffer in the Caucasus.

Thanks for your comment.

Russia did not send in forces to overtake Georgia. It’s not true. I do not agree that the US is doing this to make sure that Russia does not get too powerful to pose a threat to the US. Since when is Russia going to pose a threat to the US? I don’t buy it. As soon as the USSR broke up, we started surrounding the new Russia, just like that. And they were our friends.

 

Russia does not like Georgia because it is pro-US. They have been working with the US to extend NATO and surround Russia. They’re hostile to Russia, bottom line, and pro-NATO and pro-US. So Russia sees them as a threat. Russia wants friends on its borders, not enemies. South Ossetia has broken away from Georgia. Georgia will not accept this and has been threatening them since they declared independence. Georgia finally attacked South Ossetia to bring it back into the fold. Russia went in to help the South Ossetians to preserve their right to self-determination.

US, Chinese and Russian Investment in the Developing World

US imperialism is a nasty and ugly thing. It’s paranoid, and it’s out to dominate the world. In contrast, Russia is not an imperialist power. Russia just wants friends and allies, not enemies. They are not out to dominate others; they want cooperation. There is still a lot of the spirit of the old USSR in Russia. Putin after all was a KGB man.

For instance, Russia is friends with many socialist states. They are very close to Venezuela, China, Vietnam and Cuba. They don’t care what kind of economic system you have in our country. Russia retained many of the more or less socialist allies of the old USSR in its sphere. It has not been pressuring them to get rid of socialism and adopt capitalism.

China is similar. Chinese investment in Africa does not care what kind of state or system the Africans have. They can be socialist, capitalist, or anything in between.

Russian and Chinese investment in the 3rd World is done more on a basis of mutual cooperation as opposed to imperialist exploitation which is typical of US imperialism.

When the US goes into a foreign country, they demand conditions favorable to US firms. This usually means favoring the wealthy elite of the country at the expense of the masses. The US tends to oppose any socialism in countries they invest in, and they often demand radical free market changes in the economy as a condition of investment. The US military is often as a threat used to force foreign countries to dismantle their socialism are put in radical neoliberal capitalism.

For example, the US opposes attempts to raise the minimum wage in 3rd World countries. Aristide in Haiti was overthrown by the US in part because he dared to raise the minimum wage. The US-backed coup in Honduras was sparked Zelaya’s raising of the minimum wage.

One reason is that Russia and China do not have many large non-state corporations yet. The Russian and Chinese firms that are involved in the 3rd World are often either state firms or quasi-state firms. Russia helps develop oil via their state oil corporation and makes money selling arms from state arms firms. So Russian and Chinese investment is done more on a win-win basis. Not quite solidarity, but at least not imperialist exploitation.