National Bolsheviks of Russia

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These are the National Bolsheviks. People keep telling me that I am one myself. Others keep trying to recruit me to them. I don’t know why they are doing this. Maybe because I reject the Western Left on race.

The Natbols are extremely confusing and hard to understand, as are most Third Positionist movements. Third Positionism is said to be “neither Right nor Left.” It’s also called Left Fascism. Goes by a lot of names. They are pretty socialist economically, but not on other things. Mostly they are just very hard to describe and make sense of. The group in this video is a radical split from the original National Bolsheviks under Eduard Limonov, who has since softened his stance. But I still don’t like Limonov, nor do I think much of his group or the split.

This stuff smells like fascism to me. I know there is Stalin worship in them, but Stalin has some fascist tendencies, so that’s not surprising.

Color me dubious.

Feel free to discuss in the comments section.

Trailer for Oliver Stone’s South of the Border

Here.

Looks pretty good. Interviews with Raul Castro in Cuba, Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Rafael Correa in Ecuador, Kristina Kirchner and her husband Nestor Kirchner in Argentina, Fernando do Lugo in Paraguay and Lula da Silva in Brazil.

Those South American accents the Presidents are speaking are really wild. I could barely understand a word any of them were saying.

Comes with another silly article in the Guardian by an interviewer who conducted a 1-hour interview with Chavez for the Guardian. Stephen Sackur’s interview is a bunch of distorted crap, as usual.

Yes, there is inflation in Venezuela, mostly due to an overheated economy but also due to the fact that the poor have so much more money now that they are buying so much more stuff. Also the producers are withholding products from the market to create artificial shortages in order to drive prices even higher. The US allies in Venezuela think that prices are not high enough!

Yes, there is an economic downturn, similar to one occurring all over the world, like in the US and Europe. I suppose the downturn there is due to the fact that capitalism is a failed system too?

Yes, there is unemployment in Venezuela, but the rate has been cut in half from 1

Chavez is not “manufacturing poor people” as the opposition media owner claims. The poverty rate has collapsed under Chavez. He cut poverty in half.

He has not turned the oil, agriculture and power industries into vast state bureaucracies . The oil sector has always been state-run, but it was run by the elite for their own benefit. Chavez made it into a company that works for the people. He got rid of the elitist bureaucrats. The vast majority of the ag sector is in private hands, mostly in large estates. The state has only conducted some land reforms and turned idle land over to landless peasants. The power industry has been nationalized, true, as it has been in many European countries. So what?

Yes, the bolivar was devalued, a good idea. This was an economically necessary move and there was nothing wrong with it.

7

RCTV was shut down for many reasons. Keep in mind that they supported the coup in 2002. If a TV station was a co-conspirator in a military coup to overthrow the US government, would it still be on the air. Anyway, they were kept on the air for years after the coup. They failed to abide by many reasonable regulations that they were asked to abide by, including keeping decent records.

They refused to abide by these rules in order to force a showdown with Chavez. Yes, they got suspended, but all they did was go to cable, where most of the Venezuelan media is anyway, like the US broadcast media. So they are still on the air and as wildly anti-Chavez as ever.

The owner of Globovision was arrested for economic crimes that he committed. The arrest warrant was issued not by Chavez but by a court. The charges are crimes related to his auto business. Chavez is cracking down on crooked businessmen all over the country. Too bad.

Yes, there is state corruption in Venezuela. It effects both Chavistas and economic pols in the states and cities that they rule. Corruption is a long-standing problem in Venezuela dating back to the early days of the Republic. It’s not going away anytime soon.

Blast from the Past – 1973

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I get a lot of questions about what kind of music I am into. Basically, I came out of the rock and roll scene in the 1970’s. Heavy metal, folk-rock, space rock, electronic music, glam, the works. In particular, glam, which was very much hated back in those days. I heard the second New York Dolls album in 1974 and saw God. This stuff was very underground back than. From there, to punk rock, on to Gothic and whatnot.

The New York Dolls doing Personality Crisis, Looking for a Kiss and Trash from 1973.

With David Johanson on vocals (still alive and looking fantastic at age 60), Sylvain Sylvain guitar, bass, piano (still alive at not looking nearly so good – or like a normal 59 yr old at 59), Johnny Thunders, guitar, vocals, (Dead! Heroin overdose at age 39), Jerry Nolan, drums (Dead! Bacterial pneumonia and bacterial meningitis at age 46), Arthur Kane, bass (Dead! Leukemia at age 55).

By the time of their first album, their first drummer, Billy Murcia, was already dead at age 21, barely a man yet, overdosed on booze and drugs at a party, forcefed coffee to revive him, suffocated on the coffee, dead in a bathtub. David Bowie’s song Time on Aladdin Sane is about Billy Murcia.

The second album was aptly titled Too Much, Too Soon. As might be expected, soon after its release, the band was already broken up. Too much high and fast living had caused their implosion.

They were punks before there was punk rock.

Glam!

Some of the greatest rock music ever made!

Blast from the Past: Great Movie from 1969

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Midnight Cowboy.

With Jon Voigt as Joe Buck and Dustin Hoffman as Ratso Rizzo in one of the greatest US movies of the past 50 years. Only X-rated movie to ever win Best Picture at the Academy Awards. Directed by John Schlesinger. Unfortunately, the movie is now largely forgotten, but those of us who lived in the era will never forget it.

If you’ve never seen it, do.

A Painful Philosophical Dilemma

This is a difficult question, a moral dilemma, that speaks of a philosophical quandary you might find yourself in and how you would react to it. How you answer says a lot about your moral character, values and personality.

Suppose, assuming you are male and straight:

You are off on a camping trip in the mountains far away from civilization. You are alone in your tent. You wake up in the middle of the night and you feel very groggy. It seems as if you have been drugged. You can’t make sense of anything and you have no recent memory of anything untoward. You are very confused. You notice that your hands are tied behind your back. You also notice that for some reason, your pants are down around your ankles. And with horrified despair, you notice that your ass is really sore.

You somehow manage to work yourself free and you’re going to be ok. You make it back to civilization without any further strange incidents.

Here is the question:

Would you tell anyone what happened to you, or would you keep it secret?

Hint: You’re supposed to say you wouldn’t tell anyone.

Discuss in the comments.

"Older Really Is Better," by Alpha Unit

When I was a kid, my idea of what it might feel like to be old had been captured in this Beatles song:

When I get older, losing my hair Many years from now Will you still be sending me a valentine, Birthday greetings, bottle of wine? If I’d been out till quarter to three Would you lock the door? Will you still need me, will you still feed me When I’m sixty-four?

Sixty-four was ages away in my mind. It was something my grandparents might have been. Whatever it was, it was old. You’d practically had it by then. Sixty-four isn’t old. If you’re between 40 and 68, you’re doing better than you were twenty years ago. The Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain lays it all out. Barbara Strauch, the author, explains that middle age is practically brand new in our species, a product of our increasing lifespan in the West. Scientists have only recently begun studying it. Surely by the time you’re pushing fifty, it’s pretty much downhill from there, people might have once thought. It’s only a matter of time before parts of you are all used up, broken down, and ready to be replaced or given up on. Maybe not today or tomorrow – but the decline has set in, and there’s no turning back the clock. Completely baseless, according to research cited in the book. In middle age, your brain is actually still developing. In no way is it static or inevitably turning to mush. Myelin is the fatty material that insulates nerve fibers. It increases the speed at which signals move around your neural network. Myelin levels actually increase the older you get. Its growth takes off in middle age. Your brain is improving in other ways as well. First, though, the big difference between your brain at 20 and your brain at, say, forty-five is processing speed. It’s slower, so you’re more easily distracted when your start to focus on something. According to Strauch, processing speed mainly affects the beginning of your concentration on something. That’s why researchers recommend that you consciously focus at the very beginning when you set out to complete a task. This slower processing speed, allowing for distraction, is how you end up in a room with no idea why you walked in. Strauch says scientists used to think processing speed underpinned every aspect of brain functioning. But they now know it doesn’t. So the decline in processing speed doesn’t really matter that much in middle age. There’s also no disputing the struggle with memory as you get older, particularly episodic memory and names. What the author points out is that in spite of the fact that you’ve drawn a blank, those memories haven’t vanished. It’s just that your brain struggles now with requests for names and facts that it can’t associate with anything else. It’s like trying to find the right book in a well-stocked library, says Strauch. It’s not a storage problem; it’s a retrieval problem. Sound and meaning are stored in different parts of the brain, and over time, the link can decline. But these memories can pop up if someone gives you a hint. To help yourself remember names as you get older, she says try to attach the name to something else. For example, when meeting Joe, who happens to have bushy eyebrows, giving him the name “Joe Bushy-Eyebrows” (in your mind, of course!) will help you remember his name. The simple word “Joe” might be too arbitrary for your brain to retrieve easily. And to help yourself remember a task you need to do, she suggests imagining yourself doing it. This will create a neural footprint that will actually help trigger your memory. Distraction and memory loss are common concerns the older you get, but what’s good is that they in no way signal any major loss of brain cells. Strauch says brains shrink about What researchers will tell you is that since you keep these cells, there are ways to keep your brain running well. The fact is that in middle age, entire areas of cognitive functioning are improving.

  1. Inductive reasoning is better than it was in your twenties.
  2. You are better at recognizing categories.
  3. You are better at sizing up situations.
  4. You are better at getting the gist of a matter.
  5. Your social expertise has never been better.

A sense of well-being peaks in middle age, across occupations and ethnic groups. Your brain is actually becoming less responsive to negative stimuli. In all these areas, your brain is functioning at its best. Over the years various “brain boosters” have been touted, but a couple of things have proven to be effective. One thing that’s good for your brain is being open to new ideas. Don’t shy away from confronting ideas that are different from your own. Talk with people you disagree with. These kinds of challenges sharpen brain functioning. But the best thing you can do for your brain, by far, is exercise. According to researchers, anything that impacts your body impacts your brain. Your brain is like your heart; everything you do for your heart is just as beneficial to your brain. Vigorous exercise increases brain volume and actually produces new brain cells. Cognitive functioning goes up. All of this brings to mind more words from the Beatles:

I’ve got to admit it’s getting better, A little better all the time…

References

Lennon, J. and McCartney, P. 1967. Getting Better [Recorded by the Beatles]. On Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band [Record]. London: Parlophone. Lennon, J. and McCartney, P. 1967.  When I’m Sixty-Four [Recorded by the Beatles]. On Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band [Record]. London: Parlophone. Strauch, Barbara. 2010. The Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain. New York: Viking Press.

“Older Really Is Better,” by Alpha Unit

When I was a kid, my idea of what it might feel like to be old had been captured in this Beatles song:

When I get older, losing my hair Many years from now Will you still be sending me a valentine, Birthday greetings, bottle of wine?

If I’d been out till quarter to three Would you lock the door? Will you still need me, will you still feed me When I’m sixty-four?

Sixty-four was ages away in my mind. It was something my grandparents might have been. Whatever it was, it was old. You’d practically had it by then.

Sixty-four isn’t old. If you’re between 40 and 68, you’re doing better than you were twenty years ago.

The Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain lays it all out.

Barbara Strauch, the author, explains that middle age is practically brand new in our species, a product of our increasing lifespan in the West. Scientists have only recently begun studying it.

Surely by the time you’re pushing fifty, it’s pretty much downhill from there, people might have once thought. It’s only a matter of time before parts of you are all used up, broken down, and ready to be replaced or given up on. Maybe not today or tomorrow – but the decline has set in, and there’s no turning back the clock.

Completely baseless, according to research cited in the book.

In middle age, your brain is actually still developing. In no way is it static or inevitably turning to mush.

Myelin is the fatty material that insulates nerve fibers. It increases the speed at which signals move around your neural network. Myelin levels actually increase the older you get. Its growth takes off in middle age.

Your brain is improving in other ways as well.

First, though, the big difference between your brain at 20 and your brain at, say, forty-five is processing speed. It’s slower, so you’re more easily distracted when your start to focus on something.

According to Strauch, processing speed mainly affects the beginning of your concentration on something. That’s why researchers recommend that you consciously focus at the very beginning when you set out to complete a task.

This slower processing speed, allowing for distraction, is how you end up in a room with no idea why you walked in.

Strauch says scientists used to think processing speed underpinned every aspect of brain functioning. But they now know it doesn’t. So the decline in processing speed doesn’t really matter that much in middle age.

There’s also no disputing the struggle with memory as you get older, particularly episodic memory and names.

What the author points out is that in spite of the fact that you’ve drawn a blank, those memories haven’t vanished. It’s just that your brain struggles now with requests for names and facts that it can’t associate with anything else.

It’s like trying to find the right book in a well-stocked library, says Strauch. It’s not a storage problem; it’s a retrieval problem.

Sound and meaning are stored in different parts of the brain, and over time, the link can decline. But these memories can pop up if someone gives you a hint.

To help yourself remember names as you get older, she says try to attach the name to something else. For example, when meeting Joe, who happens to have bushy eyebrows, giving him the name “Joe Bushy-Eyebrows” (in your mind, of course!) will help you remember his name. The simple word “Joe” might be too arbitrary for your brain to retrieve easily.

And to help yourself remember a task you need to do, she suggests imagining yourself doing it. This will create a neural footprint that will actually help trigger your memory.

Distraction and memory loss are common concerns the older you get, but what’s good is that they in no way signal any major loss of brain cells. Strauch says brains shrink about

What researchers will tell you is that since you keep these cells, there are ways to keep your brain running well.

The fact is that in middle age, entire areas of cognitive functioning are improving.

  1. Inductive reasoning is better than it was in your twenties.
  2. You are better at recognizing categories.
  3. You are better at sizing up situations.
  4. You are better at getting the gist of a matter.
  5. Your social expertise has never been better.

A sense of well-being peaks in middle age, across occupations and ethnic groups. Your brain is actually becoming less responsive to negative stimuli.

In all these areas, your brain is functioning at its best.

Over the years various “brain boosters” have been touted, but a couple of things have proven to be effective. One thing that’s good for your brain is being open to new ideas. Don’t shy away from confronting ideas that are different from your own. Talk with people you disagree with. These kinds of challenges sharpen brain functioning.

But the best thing you can do for your brain, by far, is exercise. According to researchers, anything that impacts your body impacts your brain. Your brain is like your heart; everything you do for your heart is just as beneficial to your brain.

Vigorous exercise increases brain volume and actually produces new brain cells. Cognitive functioning goes up.

All of this brings to mind more words from the Beatles:

I’ve got to admit it’s getting better, A little better all the time…

References

Lennon, J. and McCartney, P. 1967. Getting Better [Recorded by the Beatles]. On Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band [Record]. London: Parlophone.

Lennon, J. and McCartney, P. 1967.  When I’m Sixty-Four [Recorded by the Beatles]. On Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band [Record]. London: Parlophone.

Strauch, Barbara. 2010. The Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain. New York: Viking Press.

Good Audio Session on OCD

Voices of those who have OCD.

Pretty good program. Six audio segments of six neurotics afflicted with an anxiety disorder called OCD. All are high-functioning people, and none appear to be insane in the slightest. It always bothers me that people think we are nuts. I know people with this illness who are always getting accused of being crazy, of being psychotic, of being schizophrenic. How stupid can you get? How could anyone possible confuse the people in this audio with true crazies, psychotics or schizophrenics? I just don’t get it at all.

It’s also amazing how many people think we are dangerous. You don’t have to think about this disorder or the people who get it very hard to realize that these are some of the least dangerous people on the planet. All it takes is a basic understanding of human nature of the sort that any smart person in a primitive or tribal society might have.

Among all of the scales of the human personality, two of the scales are the guilt scale and the aggression scale. The scales actually run in opposite directions. The greater the guilt, the less the aggression. The greater the aggression, the less the guilt. It’s not a pure relationship, but it’s as good as any. Once again, any smart shaman could tell you this in a New York instant. Why can’t modern people figure this out.

Highly aggressive people are so in part because they feel little to no guilt. Guilt is a brake on the gas pedal of aggression and antisocial behavior.

Highly guilty people are so in part because they commit so little aggression or do so little wrong. They commit so little aggression and do so little wrong in part because they are driving with the breaks on all the time.

As a prominent psychiatrist said, “Antisocials commit tremendous aggression and feel little to no guilt, and obsessionals feel tremendous guilt and and commit little to no aggression.”

Well, of course. It’s as clear as air. We can’t people see the obvious?

A Strange Bioethics Case

A Bioethics site highlights a strange protocol engaged in by a pediatric urologist team. This team is involved in clitoroplasty of young girls. The girls have CAH (congenital adrenal hyperplasia), a condition that can produce an enlarged clitoris, among other masculinizing effects.

There is no evidence that an enlarged clitoris is harmful in any way, psychologically, socially or medically. Hence, there really is no need for the research. The surgery aims to reduce the enlarged clitoris to a normal sized clit. No one really knows what the effects of the surgery are, but the authors of the study aim to prove that nerve function is spared and the girls can have normal sex lives later on.

How they are proving this is rather strange. One of the doctors has the girls come in with their parents and strip naked in the office. Then she lies down on a table and he takes a vibrator-like object and places it on her clitoris. The girl is asked to report the intensity of feeling she experiences with the stimulation by the vibrator.

The gist of the article is that this study is bioethically dubious and should have at least gone before a committee for approval.

Some of the comments are saying that the doctor should be arrested for child abuse, but I think that goes too far. It would be best for the research to go before a committee to determine if it is appropriate. No one knows what long-term effects these girls will experience from this research.

Diddling lolis with vibrators in the name of research. LOL.

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

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

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

The spokesman answers a lot of good questions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Alpa Shah

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

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

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

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

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

What stage are you at in the Indian revolution?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why are you boycotting elections in your strongholds?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What does democracy mean for you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even today, more than 6

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So are you against the development of mines altogether?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What conditions do you want for negotiation?

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

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

Like Rice? Eat Brown, Not White

These healthy Asians love to eat this White rice, but increasing evidence indicates it’s not even good for them, much less for the rest of us. Just forget White rice altogether as much as possible, and eat the brown instead. I almost live off rice, so this is good advice for me.

The brown lowers the risk of diabetes 2. Know anyone with diabetes 2? I have known many. As a disease, it sucks. Really, really, really, really sucks. You do not want to get this disease! Bottom line: don’t get it. Life is fucked up enough as it is. No reason to add to the misery to the extreme.

Deepening Fascism in Israel: The Evidence

Like I said earlier.

From the always great Jonathon Cook (a bit long at 30 pages, but if I can read it, so can you), an American living in and writing from Nazareth, you know, the birthplace of, you know, that religion called, you know, Christianity? Except now Nazareth is part of something called a Jewish state, of the Jews, by the Jews and for the Jews.

The Christians are relegated to the background, to a footnote, and that’s at best. At worst, they are an oppressed minority like the Blacks under apartheid South Africa. But this is all necessary, you know, to give the Jews their safe haven from Holocaust 2 you know, because as Herzl and Hitler remind us from beyond the grave, everyone hates the Jews, with good reason.

Cook has the advantage of being neither Arab nor Muslim nor Jewish traitor, so no one quite knows what to do with these folks.

Yet I wonder for how much longer Mr. Cook can keep penning his prose from inside the heart of the beast amidst the deepening gloom. It’s no longer daytime in Israel, ever, anymore. Nor is it the darkest night. There’s still light, just enough to see by, but that’s it.

It’s dusk. The dusk of a settling fascist dark.

The Internet: A US-owned and Controlled Asset

A stunning claim, yet that is what is proposed in an incredible new Senate bill announced by Jew Lieberman, I mean Joe Lieberman, formerly a Democrat, then Independent Senator from Connecticut, now a National Socialist Senator from Tel Aviv.

The bill breathtakingly declares the entire Internet all over the world to be a US asset, and would give the President the right to seize it and shut it down in a national emergency. The purpose of the bill is supposedly to prevent a Cyber 9-11, but it looks like the cure is the same as as the disease it claims to prevent.

How Black and Hispanic “Values” Clash with White Middle Class Upbringing

Referring to the video here, a commenter disagrees that the people on the show were out of line to ask the White woman why she won’t date Blacks. He also denies that they said she was racist:

One again, did he actually use the word racist? I listened to that dialogue again and I did not hear it. At 8:48 he says something like “well that…” and then it becomes intelligible. Then all I could hear is “why?”

I also heard him say, “not everybody is going to be attracted to the opposite race…” We’ll forget for the moment that there’s no such thing as “an opposite race”, but he did seem to acknowledge that some will just prefer their own. All he asked is why.

1. They didn’t need to say she was racist. It was implied.

2. They should not have asked her why in the first place. I mean, in White culture, you ask a question like that, and people will look at you like, “What the Hell kind of question is that!?” And everyone can read that body language.

You know, I was not brought up that way. Would I ask some Black woman to go out with me (assuming I wanted to take her out), then badger her if she didn’t want to, then ask her why, then say she was racist for not dating me? I mean, in the White bread world I was brought up in, that is like the nadir of outrageous, audacious rudeness. You’re not “acting White.” You’re “acting like a nigger.”

But Black guys do this all the time. Ask White women out, badger them when they say no, then say they are racist for saying no.

Do you realize what White middle class socialization is like? We are brought up, and there’s like a million rules about every little stinking thing. It drives you mad just to keep track of them all the time and not be constantly violating them. Chronic violation of the rules leads to ostracization, rejection, not getting hired, firings, all kinds of bad shit. So you learn or you’re an outcast.

Violation of a lot of these rules, it is implied, is called, “Acting like a Black or a Mexican.” IOW, it’s low class. White people don’t act that way. Or, good White people don’t act that way. Trailer trash? Sure, but they’re hardly White. They are barely above the Blacks and the Mexicans. In some cases, worse.

In fact, even in White liberal environments, you will hear people say, often laughing, “Don’t do that! That’s not the White thing to do.” “That’s not White. That’s not a White way of acting.” That’s what, “Hey, that’s mighty White of you!” means. It means you are acting like an upstanding White person.

Now. Is there an implied supremacism behind that? Sure. But if supremacism is what it takes to get your group to act good, I say go for it. I would love it if Blacks would shame their kids who act bad, saying, “Don’t do that! You’re acting like a White person! How disgusting! Act like a proud Black person instead.” Indeed, this is part of the Afrocentrist mindset.

Now, maybe Blacks think we are a bunch of uptight nerds who keep dropping turds in the punch bowl and spoiling all the fun. Perhaps we are, I have no idea.

But I’m pointing this out to show you how profoundly offensive a lot of Black and even Hispanic behavior is to White bread, middle class suburban Whites. I mean, you were brought up that you don’t do these 100,000 and one things on near penalty of death. Then you see non-Whites not only doing this stuff, but doing it unapologetically, refusing to apologize when called on it, and even seeming to glory in it.

It’s so offensive to us it’s beyond words. It’s appalling.

Male Birth Control Pills

Damn, I would so kill for a supply of those. Ever since I was, like, 17 years old, when I started needing them.

The research has been ongoing forever, but people are pessimistic. A lot of guys are saying it will never be made. I never knew this funny hydraulics system was so damned complex.

The failure has given rise to male conspiracy theories that the Evil Matriarchy doesn’t want to allow one to be made (you know, like the evil docs who have been preventing the cure for cancer for decades now). Reason? It would take away the biatches’ last sure means of control over us.

Have you ever heard of “happy accidents”? New phrase, especially with 30-something women with clocks winding down. They weren’t really trying to get pregnant or anything, oh no! It was just one of those happy accidents! He he. Uh-huh.

Latinas are notorious for this shit. “I got pregnant to hook the guy.” Hispanic guys take it with a grain. Babies are belt notches to them anyway.

Me? I’d be contemplating homicide.

Have you ever asked either member of a couple if their young kid was planned? I have. Typical answer? A shy head shaking no. Good God. How could anyone be so stupid? You know what that means? It means, while they were not trying to get pregnant, they were having sex without birth control. Forget that, “I wasn’t trying to get pregnant, I was just having sex with no protection,” is, like, an oxymoron. It’s like playing Russian Roulette without “trying” to kill yourself.

In high school and later, some of my friends were having tons of sex. I used to ask them if they ever used birth control. All my working class friends always said no. Amazing no pregnancies ever resulted.

But really now. What are you, retarded? In the White, tract home, middle class neighborhood I was brought up in, babies were always planned. All my friends, if they had siblings, were exactly X years apart from them. The friend would have 1, 2 or 3 siblings, all exactly 2, 3 or 4 years apart. That was, as they say, no accident.

No babies? That was planned too.

The only exception would be true accidents, which are quite rare with modern methods. In which case, the typical remedy was a casual abortion.

Birth control? Just leave it up to the woman. Yeah right. Bad idea. Real bad idea. Women in general are too thoughtless, incompetent or outright devious to leave such matters up to them.

Very Interesting Black Blog

Jamila.

Been checking it out lately. It’s quite amazing.

I figured the author was Black, but the writing was so bright and the person so well-read that I started to wonder, a function of my liberal racism. “Are you sure this person is really Black? I mean, they’re so smart!” So I went looking for evidence that the author was really Black.

I finally found it, but then they said they were wearing a dress in that photo. Huh? Because along with the Black hypothesis, I also assumed the author was male. Because the writing was so good and especially the thinking was so bright and erudite in that, you know, male way. That’s my liberal sexism. “This writing is so smart and good. No way it’s a chick!”

So I followed the link to their Facebook page and lo and behold, a Black woman, and not an academic looking one either, a young, pretty fun-looking one!

What’s really strange is the link list. There’s me (that’s how I found it), some Black woman blogs (including the awesome What About Our Daughters?), some super-feminist blogs, then the other extreme – some Men’s Rights Activist, masculinist and PUA blogs, then some race realist blogs, then some libertarian sites. Huh? Huh? Huh?

Reading around, she’s also sympathetic to race realism, which is really strange coming from her type, or really any Black blogger. Sensibly sympathetic to it, and taking some of the usual Blacks who are trying to tear it to pieces. She has an excellent review of Michael Levin’s Why Race Matters book. Levin is actually not a bad person, and his heart is in the heart place. I wonder if he’s a Liberal Race Realist at heart.

What’s weird is that to some extent, with all of her strange contradictions, she’s a bit of a Black female mirror image of me!

Very strange site. Very strange. But good stuff!

Good God, Are You Kidding?

In Germany, the “Freedom Democratic Party,” who call themselves “liberals” filed “anti-Semitism” and “support for a terrorist organization” charges against three members of Die Link, or The Left Party for sailing on the Turkish flotilla to Gaza.

Israel Shamir has written about this before.

Go to Israeli fora, and they shudder when discussing modern Germany, land of the Hitlers to the End of Time. German anti-Semitism is everywhere, they say. Even German rats scurrying down Berlin alleyways in the dead of night have it in for the Jews.

But Shamir points out that instead of being some horrorshow of unreconstructed Nazism, modern Germany is practically Tel Aviv on the Rhine. Endless Jewish browbeating of Germans, nonstop demands for money and especially gold (How does that play into the grasping Jew stereotype?) that resemble an eternal shakedown, continuous, nearly tic-like German genuflecting and apologies to Jews. Face it: modern Germany is just another Israeli Occupied Territory.

Institutes for the Study of Jewish Culture and Holocaust Studies have sprung up like mushrooms all over Germany. There are probably more professors engaging in this pro-Judaic scholarly masturbation than there are Jews in Germany.

Jews have come back to Germany, 100,000 of them. You would think they would keep their heads down, assimilate and try to make nice, but they’ve been stirring up trouble as usual.

The Anti-German Movement is a curious and problematic Leftist movement. A product of splits on the German Left, the Anti-Germans are part of the pro-Israel Zionist Left.

The Anti-Germans are mostly Gentiles, but there is also heavy involvement of German Jews. The theme of the movement is the terminal evil of Germanness. Since the founding of the state in the 1870’s, and really, long, long before, Germanness has been a font of evil. It started with the Kaisers and World War 1, where somehow the Germans were more at fault than the other crazy parties.

A seamless carpet rolls back centuries to early German culture, tainted back hundreds of years into the past with the roots of Hitlerism. To the Kaisers, to the First War, to Nazism and the Holocaust, it’s all one roll of Jew-hating, imperialistic, malevolent, tainted dough.

Even the Second War did not exterminate the German evil, since it is set in the German soul like a diamond in a ring. Germanness must be destroyed, excised, cut from the hearts of Germans like a bloody Aztec ceremony. Only after this exorcism can the world rest in peace. You can imagine how this goes over with your average German, still more or less a nationalist, despite it all. After what happened to them 65 years ago, it’s hard to believe that the German Jews returned to pull this shit. How do they expect Germans to react?

The charges filed against Die Link are part of this masochistic flagellation of the German soul, part and parcel to the game, along with the drooling suckup to the Jews.

At some point, the groveling apologies, the self-abdication, the blackmail of billions, it’s all got to end. At some point, you need to let bygones be bygones and move on.

But does the Jew ever bury a grudge?

Never forgive, never forget.

That’s a pretty hardass stance.

It’s also a recipe for interminable conflict.

Anti-White Hate Propaganda on a British Talk Show

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kkXogn8Oeo]

That video is really pissing me off. It’s a British talk show about White women who are with Black guys. They interview a bunch of White women who prefer Black guys to White men. The Black guys, as a rule, are the well-behaved types that my friends and I call “White Blacks” – i.e., they act like White people.

We learn so many fascinating facts from these silly dames.

Black men are better in bed than White men. White men are lousy in bed. WTH?

Black men treat women better than White men. I can tell you right off that in my experience, that is not true.

Also notice at the end of the video, the one White woman who says she would not date a Black man, in fact – if he was the last man on Earth even – notice the propaganda here. They interviewed five White women who prefer Black men to White men, and one White woman who felt the opposite way; if you’re a moron, which most people are, the logical conclusion is that 8

Also notice how the “White Black” guy argues with the White woman who refuses to date Blacks and implies that she is a racist for having this opinion. Utterly sickening.

But this is what Black men and boys always do. In schools where there are many Blacks and Whites, this is the line the hyper-sexually aggressive Black boys use with the White girls. If the girl says she won’t go out with them, they badger and badger her about it, endlessly accusing her of being racist. After all, the only reason she could resist his irresistible Black Big Cock Godliness is racism, right?

Sadly, many White women are weak and stupid, and Cultural Marxism worsens these problems, so this lame line – “You won’t date me because I’m racist!” – actually works, incredibly enough.

I’m shocked that Black males would stoop so low as to use this line. If a Black woman would not go out with me, I would hardly accuse her of being racist! How rude can you get? I was brought in a civilized, mannered, White middle class environment, and a lot of stuff is just beyond the pale rude. Especially calling someone racist because they won’t date your sorry ass. How pitiful can you get?

I have known many White women who had relationships with Black men. Some even preferred Black guys. In the case of every single woman where they had a kid, the Black man had taken off, nowhere to be seen.

This is the typical scene. Single White or Hispanic Mom, or she has a new guy. The Black guy made one or more kids with her, then he took off. If you ask the child, he’s either mad at or indifferent to his absent Black father. Ask the woman, and the father is nowhere to be seen. He’s vanished from the Earth, takes no interest in his offspring.

In addition, the Black men were far more likely than White men to abuse, verbally and physically, imprison, browbeat, keep at home, rape, rob, steal from, and of course cheat on the White woman. I can’t think of one single case where the guy did not do at least one of these things. What I have seen, Black men treat White women appallingly worse than White men do.

Are there cases that are not like this? I assume so, just never met any. If I knew a White woman who was involved with a Black guy and thinking of marrying or having kids with him, I would recommend that she not do that. As evidence, I would cite the experience of the women I know who had relationships with Black men.

Was the sex great? Who knows, maybe it was. Did they treat these women better than White guys? Are you kidding? For White women, Black men may well be a fun ride for a bit. As far as marrying them or having kids with them, the odds are not on your side.

A Hereditarian Points Out the Main Problem with Hereditarianism

A commenter points out the problem that I have long had with the hereditarian view of human genetics, in particular IQ, where these characters are the most vocal. On the face of it, the hereditarian view is a valid hypothesis, it’s just that the people proposing it are such a bunch of malign and loathsome shit, almost to a man. And yes, they are almost all men, by the way. Women are understandably repelled by this misanthropic view, as they ought to be, since women are natural humanists.

For instance, quite a few people say I’m a good writer. Some even say I’m a great writer. Maybe they’re right, who knows?

But the point is that though I had talent even as a child, it didn’t end there.

I wrote a poem in the second grade, and the teacher thought it was so great that she called the principal in and read it to the class in front of him while everyone clapped. Actually, the poem sucked, but it was pretty good for a 7 year old.

At age nine, I was working on a novel. At age 16, I won an award for the best high school newspaper column in the state. At age 22, my creative writing professor said he’d never seen anything like it in his life and compared my stuff to Thomas Pynchon. At age 31, my friends were reading my stuff and shaking their heads, comparing it to James Joyce or William Shakespeare.

Anyway, the point is…guess what? I’ve been practicing writing my whole life! In the last few years, when I publish nearly every day, I’m practicing almost all the time. It wasn’t just some God-given gift. I’ve been working on it for 45 years! I have friends who are awesome musicians. Guess what? They all practice or if they are in a band, rehearse, constantly. They only get better and better. My artist friends draw all the time. The more they draw, the better they get.

Your risk of Alzheimer’s is related not so much to IQ but to the degree to which you exercise your brain in life.

Suppose two guys are born with a gift for running. At age 50, one guy hasn’t run in 25 years, and he sits on his ass all day, drinks beer and watches TV. His friend at age 50 still runs marathons. Guess which one is the better runner? Your brain isn’t all that different from your legs. Your brain is like a muscle; it gets better the more you use it.

The hereditarian approach to IQ has serious weaknesses. How can we explain 20 point IQ gains in only 70 years in the West in the 20th Century (the Flynn Effect) with consummate massive increases in head size? Guess what? It didn’t happen by genes, and genes didn’t make those heads bigger either.

How can we explain the 20 point gap between US Black and African IQ? Probably not by genes.

How can we explain 5-14 point Flynn rises in IQ in the second generation of many ethnic groups who move from the 3rd World to the West? Not by genes.

Ground Zero for the atavistic misanthropes of the hereditarian game was always the almost physically repulsive Gene Expression blog. The character named godless capitalist was always a loathsome man. The repellent Jason Malloy was a close second. Even Razib was creepy as fuck.

I remember once the news hit that IQ’s in Scandinavia, previously rising due to a Flynn Effect, had actually started to decline in recent years. The assholes on Gene Expression were practically throwing a party on their fucking site! IQ’s are going down, yeehaw! Malloy was pouring the drinks. What kind of human being rejoices when humans are getting stupider? Good God.

The commenter sums this view up nicely:

I agree that hereditarian racialists shoot down every bit of evidence for environmental effects on IQ. They tend not to merely disagree that the evidence is persuasive; they tend to angrily reject it and ridicule as it the stupidest idea ever. I think they’re somewhat justified in doing so because hereditarian positions are perfectly valid a priori assumptions, and, though not without problematic implications, would seem a wiser basis from which to proceed.

Nevertheless, one of those problematic implications hinted at tends to manifest itself as diehard genetic determinism, which in the hands of the average punter often produces a sort of supreme disgust with the world, seeing in it only human(oid) rubbish fit only for extinction natural or assisted.

Well, at least it does so in its most extreme forms.

The more moderate form is also dehumanizing, however. It says to a person all that you are now, or all that you’ve managed to achieve by now, that’s it; there is not the slightest chance you’ll ever amount to any more than that (so just give up and die already, or something useful like that, you get the feeling they’d like to add).

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

Repost from the old site.

Updated February 6, 2008:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

April 7, 2006

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

April 8, 2006

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

April 9, 2006

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

May 4, 2006

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May 13, 2006

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

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

May 15, 2006

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

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

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

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

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

Making Sense of Kosovo

Repost from the old site.

Updated March 25, 2008:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The SWP opposed all of these.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two essential rights are at stake here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The following paragraphs are propagandistic:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Establishing a colonial administration

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Divide and rule

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

The Saudhouse

Repost from the old site.

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

After all, 8

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They used to say that 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Saudi terror. The Saudi Sunni terror.

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

Weirdboy Spider on My Indoor Hall Doorway

A Zebra Spider (Salticus scenicus ). This is a common jumping spider found across the US. Often found indoors in warm weather.

I found this little weirdboy on my indoor hallway door frame. They are very curious and inquisitive and often do not run away when confronted. Instead, they will turn to face you and check you out with their gigantic eyes. They are mostly harmless, but apparently they can bite sometimes if you handle them. The bite is about as painful as a bee sting. This is part of a group of spiders called jumping spiders.

I looked him up on the Net and was surprised to find whole Internet communities full of bug lovers . Some of them even keep little guys like this for pets. There are even some girls and women who keep them as pets. Girl power! Down with arachnophobia!

He sure is a cutie, though, huh?

I got a measuring cup and put it underneath him and poked him a bit. He jumped down into the cup and then I took him outside and released him, since I usually don’t kill bugs except for pests. I often rescue them with my hand so I can release them outside if I am sure they are harmless.

I’ve never seen this weird spider before!

Excellent News Out of Palestine

Update: AAB has now denied responsibility for the attack.

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

Good Shit from 1968

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNGe7iK1O-4]

Ennio Morricone doing The Ecstasy of Gold, the soundtrack to Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. The ultimate spaghetti Western music to the ultimate spaghetti Western flick. These flicks and especially the music to go along with them were also very popular with us punks during the early punk era for some weird reason. You would often hear these tracks on the punk radio stations of the era and at wild hardcore punk shows. I don’t have a reason for that.

Edda Dell’Orso, Italian diva, does the killer Italian operatic solo wordless singing on the score.

Ennio Morricone, typical crazy artist, with a typical crazy artist look in his eyes. He looks pretty punk. I can see why the punks like him. I so want to be this dude.

Sergio Leone is next.

Sergio Leone. He looks like a punk too. Also shades of Francis Ford Coppola and how could we miss the Hemingway?

One more thing. Why don’t all your Nordicists just FOAD already? Who says Southern Europeans are inferior? They make more and better art in a century than you could in a millenia? Even your ultimate Nordicist heroes of all time, the Nazis, said so.

Evidence for Environmental Effects on IQ

The hereditarians are flat out wrong on IQ. They always say that there is an environmental effect on IQ, but then whenever you show them any evidence of it, they immediately shoot it down. There are few hereditarian researchers on IQ who actually acknowledge evidence for an environmental effect on IQ.

Arthur Jensen, Philippe Rushton and the snide, upper class, snooty, antisocial atavists over at Gene Expression lead the pack. Since nearly the entire HBD/race realist sphere follows the line of Jensen and Rushton, nearly this entire sphere has rejected all evidence for a direct effect of the environment on IQ. Every time we show them they evidence, they shoot it down.

Nearly all White racists and especially White nationalists reject all evidence for an environmental effect on IQ and shoot down any evidence they throw up.

White nationalists have a lot at stake in this debate.

White nationalism is founded on the idea that European Whites are a genetically superior race, and most of the other races, including Blacks, Bushmen, Pygmies, Eskimos, Amerindians, mestizos, mulattos, Polynesians, Melanesians, Micronesians, Southeast Asians, Papuans, Aborigines and Negritos are all quite genetically inferior in intelligence.

They also throw in all non-European Whites as genetically inferior in brains, including Arabs, North Africans, Iranians, Afghans, East Indians and the people of the Stans. Since most White nationalists are Nordicists, Southern Europeans and the people of the Caucasus are also thrown in as intellectually genetically inferior.

There isn’t much evidence for this, as Southern Europeans and the people of the Caucasus in general have IQ’s that are quite high. Furthermore, Eskimo and Maori IQ is high. The IQ’s of many groups in the US, including Mexicans, East Indians and Africans, are also quite high.

When we suggest that there are environmental effects on IQ, we shoot down their whole theory of genetic intellectual superiority and upset their whole theoretical worldview.

But there is quite a bit of evidence for environmental effects on IQ.

Wild IQ rises in the 20th century, mostly in the developed world, are impossible to explain by genetics.

The much higher IQ of US Blacks as opposed to other Blacks is hard to explain by genetics, though WN’s and the Gene Expression authors never tire of retarded explanations. The WN explanation for the 20 pt difference between US and African Black IQ is that it is explained by White blood in US Blacks. This explanation is retarded as it can only explain 4.5 points of the gap, leaving the other 15.5 points unexplained.

The Gene Expression folks say that African IQ is artificially lowered by malnutrition (they invoke environment only when it suits their hereditarian bias and reject it the rest of the time). Therefore, normative Black IQ is 80, and US Black IQ of 87 is also explained by White blood. But there is no evidence for their theory.

The White nationalists and their HBD buddies also pour cold water on the Flynn Effect showing massive IQ rises in the 20th Century. According to them, while IQ has actually increased, real intelligence has not gone up one single iota. The FE IQ’s are not on some BS called “g intelligence,” therefore they are nothing, meaningless ephemera. People are not getting smarter at all, not even

For instance there have been 22 different studies of IQ and breastfeeding, all the way up to age 50. All of these studies found cognitive benefits from breastfeeding. On the contrary, hereditarians recently championed one study that found no de novo effect for breastfeeding on IQ. Instead, the differences were tied up with mother’s IQ’s. That is, smarter mothers breastfed more and stupider ones did not. I will take 22 studies over one any day. (Sternberg and Grigorenko 1971, p. 128)

The effects of nutritional supplementation in pregnancy on IQ of offspring have been studied.

Nutritional supplementation in pregnancy and later supplementation of children has been shown to have effects at age 24 in Guatemala (1980) and age 18 in Mexico (1982). Mexican boys improved on IQ, and Guatemalans improved on a range of cognitive and achievement outcomes. (Sternberg and Grigorenko 1971, p. 124)

Lead levels in blood have a strong effect on IQ, leading to declines of up to 10-15 points. There is a clear cause effect relationship between blood levels and IQ. Blood lead levels are higher in Blacks than in Whites, because Blacks tend to liver in older dilapidated housing that has lead paint. Black children apparently ingest the paint chips somehow.

Iron level in the blood also effects IQ. consistently shown that malnutrition leads to low IQ and antisocial behavior in childhood. Iron deficiency is quite high in US Blacks and Hispanics.

One controlled study found that children who were severely malnourished in childhood ended up with IQ’s of 84 when returned to the home, 82 when institutionalized and 97 when adopted away (Sternberg and Grigorenko 1971, p. 123).

A study in South Africa showed that intensive courses in college teaching Black college students the types of intelligence that are tested for on IQ tests quickly raised IQ’s from 83 to 97. Students were generally aged 18-22, above the age where environment is said to effect IQ. Even Philippe Rushton agreed that scores went up in this study, but he had some retarded reason why this had no effect on his hereditarian theories (Rushton and Jensen 2005).

It is a common canard among White nationalist and hereditarian circles that all early intervention programs designed to raise IQ have not been able to do so. It’s true that they often do not raise IQ, but they have other benefits. What matters is whether these programs are cost-effective or not.

Yet some very intensive programs have been successful. The Abecedarian and Perry Preschool projects (Sternberg and Grigorenko 1971, p. 108) showed long-term rises in achievement scores lasting all the way into adolescence. Abecedarian found rises of 4.5 IQ points all the way into adulthood. The problem is that Abecedarian was quite expensive. Whether 4 point IQ gains could occur in large populations given this treatment and whether this would be cost-effective is not known.

References

Rushton, J. Philippe and Arthur R., Jensen. 2005. Wanted: More Race Realism, Less Moralistic Fallacy. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law. Vol. 11, No. 2, 328–336.

Sternberg, Robert J. and Grigorenko, Elena. 1971. Environmental Effects on Cognitive Abilities. New York: Routledge Psychology Press.