“The Dawn of Grace” by Vijendra Rao

Repost from the old site. Nice article about India from the old site. Touches on many familiar issues and will be of interest to everyone on this site who is interested in India.

This is an excerpt of an article by an Indian colleague of mine, Vijendra Rao. Rao is a journalist working in the city of Mysore, a large city in the Indian state of Karnataka. Mysore is a famous and very old city in the far south of India that is known as the City of Palaces. Even before India became independent, Karnataka was hailed as the most progressive state in India.

It made huge strides in various fields – women’s education, electricity, drainage, arts, literature, etc., thanks to the imaginative rulers of those years.

Rao’s prose tends to be inflected with Indian English, a distinct dialect of English. The discourse style of Indian English is often markedly different, at best, from US English. This can make Indian English seem peculiar or awkward to many US English readers. Also, Rao’s prose is deeply rooted in Indian culture, which can make it difficult for non-Indians to understand the references in the prose.

I really liked this little essay, though, and I am hard to please as far as writing goes.

A few explanations are in order. A Mysorean is one from the city of Mysore in far southern India. A Brahmin is a member of the highest caste in India – the ruling class. This ruling class has ruled India for centuries. Aryan Brahmin invaders from the steppes of Asia poured into India 3,500 years ago and pushed the indigenous Indians (now known as South Indians) south.

The darker Indians of South India were originally spread over the entire continent. Brahmins tend to be lighter-skinned than other Indians, but it is interesting to note that despite great efforts to keep their line pure, Brahmins have been getting steadily darker through the centuries.

For those who are interested in the toxic subject of IQ and race, it is interesting to note that Brahmins also score higher on IQ tests than even European Whites. An exception to the typical rule of the lighter the skin, the higher the IQ, and vice-versa, can be found in Southern India, where the Brahmins are darker-skinned, and have higher IQ’s, than the lighter-skinned commoners of Southern India.

Brahmins, like Ashkenazi Jews, probably developed their high IQ’s through some sort of selective inbreeding. Not that either group deliberately engaged in a eugenics program to produce high IQ offspring, but that is the way it worked out.

In this essay, Rao also refers to Naxalites. Naxalites are armed Indian Maoists and this blog supports them totally.

Indian democracy has completely failed; the system has killed an average of almost 2 million people every year just since independence, for a total of 100 million dead in the period (documentation of that astounding figure is here, via Chomsky).

Starvation and malnutrition rates are the same in India, year in and year out, as they were in North Korea at the height of its famine in the 1990′s. Note that the capitalist media turned somersaults to report the North Korean famine as an “evils of Communism” meme, while ignoring, for decades, the exact same situation in capitalist India.

The Indian caste system is a horrible system of cruel ingrained racism that seeps into every pore of Indian society. The proponents of caste have even injected caste into Hinduism, but Hinduism existed before the caste system brought by Aryan invaders, and it can be argued that caste is a foreign and unnecessary accretion to Hinduism. The marriage of Hinduism to caste makes it caste more difficult to uproot.

Combine the above with a royal family that, as usual, claimed to rule in the name of Gods, or be reincarnations of Gods (in this case Hindu Gods) and you have a society shot through with feudalism through and through.

Indian democracy has totally failed to eradicate caste and is probably incapable of doing so. Unfortunately, such a deeply ingrained reactionary feudal system can only be destroyed through total revolution.

Making matters worse is the systematic oppression of women. I conducted some research on women’s rights around the world. The disastrous treatment of women in Hindu Nepal and India combines with the equally disastrous treatment of women in Muslim India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan, to make South Asia the most backward place on Earth for women.

Sexism, more than being tied to religion in this part of the world, is actually a regionalism that has grafted itself onto the major religions in the area.

An unbelievable 350 million Indians are still illiterate. You would think that any decent independent India would have taught them to read by now.

The numbers of young children permanently dropped out school are in the tens of millions. Many of these kids, as young as 9 or 10, are working up to 18 hours a day on jobs, suffering under Medieval working conditions. Many of them are virtual slaves.

India has one of the worst child labor problems in the world, and Indian democracy has totally failed to deal with this Dark Ages institution. The whole Indian system, as in many developing capitalist societies, is corrupt to the core. The rule of law is a joke and the courts are sloth-like and barely function.

Armed gangs working for the higher castes run amok across society. Monetary disputes are often handled by hiring Mafioso-type thugs to go out and convince reluctant creditors. Even major Indian banks hire these freelance criminals. Construction of buildings and roads is often shoddy, leading to the inevitable injuries and deaths.

It is estimated that there are – get this – over 200 million homeless Indians who are actually living on the sidewalks of the big cities. You will step over them as you walk in the big cities. Some of the people you step over will no longer be alive – they died the previous night.

If the rich and big corporations in India want some land, they just up and take it. They drive bulldozers to a village, clear out the people, and wipe the settlement off the face of the Earth. Then they steal the land, which may have been communal land for centuries. It’s all legal with a corrupt judge’s signature, or if it not, there is no recourse anyway.

If you anger a rich or upper caste person, they will often threaten you with their private armies. All of this reminds one of various Third World capitalist terror states that US imperialism is so enamored of, where the armies of the rich keep the aristocracy in power by sheer terror, never mind voting, never mind “democracy”.

The state of Bihar is an example of the catastrophe of Indian democracy. The per capita income is an unbelievable $94 per year. Only six nations, all Fourth World failed capitalist states in Africa, have worse development indexes than Bihar. Over half of all adults are illiterate, and only 1/3 of women can read and write.

Bihar has gone from the least corrupt to the most corrupt state in India since independence. Out of control coal mining has devastated huge tracts of forest and farmland.

The tentacles of crime and caste tangle themselves into the morass of Bihari politics to the point where Bihari politics can be said to be castecized and criminalized. For hundreds of years, caste and crime went together in Bihar like bacon and eggs. The entire edifice of Bihari politics, along with most other Bihari institutions, have been taken over by the caste-crime networks, to the point where they now control the state.

Violent crime, as in so many Third World capitalist states, is out of control. Bihar is starting to look like Iraq, albeit on a much-reduced scale. The kidnapping industry has exploded. While kidnapping has been common in smaller towns in Bihar for decades, the fact is that now, on any given day, a wealthy Bihari professional can be nabbed by kidnappers.

Upper-caste gangs called Senas roam the countryside at will, looting property, extorting money and fighting wars with other Sena gangs. The Senas are best seen as analogues to the death squads run by the oligarchs in various Death Squad Democracies like El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Haiti, Philippines and Nepal.

This is basically the age-old means of staying in power that aristocrats have always used – terror. “Democracy”, electoral fraud and “demonstration elections” as a means of maintaining aristocratic power are an invention of the new field of Public Relations a century ago as maintaining aristocratic rule through terror became less tenable in parts of the world.

A criminal Mafia, largely an upper caste nexus of landlords, politicians, government administrators, contractors and sectors of the business community, holds sway over much of the countryside.

The Bihari Mafia differs from, say, the Italian Mafia in that many of the Bihari mobsters actually hold seats in the Indian Parliament. The Mafia attacks the peasants, any landlord who does not pay their protection money, and anyone else who gets in their way. An overview of the Indian Mafia is here.

A criminal oligarch named Laloo Prasad Yadav has run Bihar into the ground for the past 15 years. Yadav has done absolutely nothing while kidnappers, Sena gangs, and the Mafia wreak havoc across the state. The cynical conclusion is that Yadav was allied with the Mafioso, Senas and kidnapper gangs.

Bihar is now seen as the “Basket Case of India”. Seminars are held across India about the “Bihari problem”. Thus far, these seminars have not accomplished anything.

This is the capitalist success story called India that the MSM swoons over!

What the depressing picture above adds up to is a society that simply does not function for the vast majority of its citizens.

For all of the reasons, this blog supports the armed Indian Maoists, or Naxalites, a movement that is exploding across Eastern India, especially in Bihar, West Bengal, Chattisargh, Orissa, Andra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Jharkand, in some of India’s most backwards and feudal areas.

Some of the groups this blog supports are the Maoist Communist Center (MCC), Communist Party India – Marxist-Leninist (Janashakti) or CPI-ML, the People’s War Group (formerly made up of such groups as CPI-ML (Party Unity), the armed factions of CPI-ML (Liberation), the People’s Guerrilla Army and the CPI-Maoist. See the People’s March link on this site for more on the armed Maoists of India.

The Naxalites are a particularly large and growing problem in Bihar, and apparently they are networking extensively with the huge Nepalese Maoist guerrilla movement, which this blog also supports.

The author and I had some discussions about Brahmins and Maoists. Here are some of his interesting comments on the matter.

He touches on the relationship between Maoists and Brahmins (Not necessarily as simple as you think!) and show how one can manage to be both, to show that Brahmins have been and continue to be progressive, and to note that India is now dealing with reverse discrimination, the common lot of many societies that undertake a systematic, government-decreed, anti-racist initiative:

Basava, the great eighth century reformer from Karnataka, was a Brahmin, too. There are many others. I think only a Brahmin can turn into a Maoist. I don’t know how much you are aware that Brahmins are a much-maligned lot. Well, Brahmins cannot be condoned for what they did, but I know of more Brahmins who are reform-minded and who don’t discriminate. Unfortunately, reverse discrimination has started and is rampant now. It is there everywhere. The reason that I quit my job with one newspaper was because I had become a Jew in my office.

The Dawn of Grace

The face may well be not only the index of the mind but of the soul itself. Just as the turbulence in the mind gets manifested in the show-window of the human figure, that is face, tranquility gets similarly reflected. Man, even the best of actors, cannot for any great length of time bury his feelings and mask his emotions behind the visage. What a man looks is therefore the product of what his inner self is.

Isn’t that why Abraham Lincoln said that if a man does not attain grace by the time he is forty, well, he probably has not led a life of fulfillment.

Some faces have struck me instantly and like lightning. These faces have readily and eloquently advertised for the soul underneath. They are not bound by space, religion, nationality, ideology, profession or avocation. They constitute a motley group.

Let me name them: Bhandarakeri Swami, a religious leader whom I have seen only once as a schoolboy and only for a few fleeting moments and that too from a long range. There was radiance in his face. The halo around him was as bright as the sun. I have not forgotten how he looked a full quarter of a century ago.

It was as if the radiation emitted from his soldering-rod-like countenance etched his persona on the metal sheet of my mind. It has permanently remained there. I was to learn later that the seer was indeed pious and godly.

Not to pick out chronologically, but randomly, Gaddar, the revolutionary ballad singer, has left as deep an impression on me. At his only public performance I have attended he was a man possessed. Singing ballads and dancing to their tunes, he held the audience in a thrall.

I could not help complimenting his spellbinding performance in the only manner that I could have done: I hugged his sweat-soaked body tight. I was speechless. Sometime earlier, it was Arundhati Nag, the famous theatre artiste and the widow of Shankar Nag, the brilliant director-actor and winner of national award.

She had just recovered from the shock of losing her husband in a car crash and recuperated from the injuries she herself had suffered in the mishap.

Oh! It was amazing. She was glowing like a million suns and I could not stare straight into her eyes, just as one cannot look into the burning sun for more than a moment or two, although she was at a distance, on the dais at a function.

Then it was, of all persons, Arjunan, the younger brother of Veerappan, the most savage of all criminals of our time. There was an unmistakable spark in his eyes. He was no less a criminal than his more notorious and bloodthirsty brother, but the glint had obscured his dark deeds.

How can I not include the divinity-personified M.S. Subbulakshmi in this list?

One might be perplexed, even intrigued, at the odd bunch of names I have mentioned. They are not my choice; the very magnetism of their personalities selected them for me and attracted them to my soul. I have tried to find a convincing, if rational, explanation for this queer combination.

There is a religious leader (I myself am not slightly religious, indeed I am irreligious); there is a singer of ballads advocating violence to overturn the state (although I am not a Leftist, leave alone being an Ultra-Leftist); there is a widowed actress; and then there is a criminal who is no more, but his picture in my mind is not; there is an angelic musician.

I must tell you, I have succeeded in piecing together the essential human beings in these persons.

What is fundamental to them is the steadfast commitment to their chosen cause, be it the revolutionary Gaddar or the ferocious schemer-killer Arjunan. The two are at the two extreme ends of where a human being can be driven to by his own emotion. One was noble, the other was most ignoble.

Compassion, at least empathy, is at the root of one man’s mission, while the other committed the most heinous of crimes and died as a sacrificial animal. The grace on the beatific face of Gaddar is inescapable for one who has led a selfless life. What gave Arjunan the spark in his otherwise cold eyes was also the result of his love, his love of freedom.

He looked more like Socrates before the Greek philosopher laid down his life. He looked determined. He looked as if he knew he had done no wrong out of his own volition. Once he had paid the wages of his sin, in the form of a murder, he wanted to reform. But the system did not allow him. He was forced to get back to Veerappan.

He thought he would be safer and his life more secure with his brother, whom he had deserted long before. The expression he had was one of disdain against a society that did not allow him freedom. The freedom to lead a respectable life. His eyes emitted fire. The fire, if had spread, enough to engulf the system.

Flame was also found in the eyes of Gaddar, just as aura oozed out of that Goddess of Music called Subbulakshmi. He has striven to bring about equality. He may be an advocate of violence, but it is not violence for its own sake. It is violence for the sake of uprooting cruelty that has for centuries found expression amid us in the form of inhuman discrimination of a whole segment of society.

The love for the have-nots, who form a sizable segment of the milieu he emerges from, rivals his hatred of the discriminators who are found in a minority. However, it is not a question of majoritism versus minoritism for him. His mission is to secure a just society by overthrowing the existing unjust order.

Where does Arundhati Nag fit into the scheme of things of this article? What was (perhaps, it still is) the source of her radiance? Having lost her husband, she was exuding grief when I saw her. Her face depicted a confluence of lost love and a suffusion of sorrow.

More importantly, her dignity – quiet dignity that many women are capable of under similar circumstances (unlike the distinct absence of it in many men on being rendered widowers) – that almost made her an effervescent statue.

The face, washed with torrents of tears, had the aura of a ripened mango after the first monsoon showers. If Arjunan appeared to me to be “the statue of liberty”, Arundhati symbolized the greatest monument of love. I am trying not to glorify the criminality of the former or the widowhood of the actress.

All these people I have met or seen only once. But the effect upon encountering them all has been the same. They have held out a strong appeal. And with their eyes and eyes alone.

Except perhaps Arundhati, all the others were above forty years of age when I saw them. And all of them had qualified Lincoln’s test. What is so magical about the age forty? Why did he set that benchmark? Curiously, don’t they say, “Life begins at forty?”

Youth fades away by the time one is forty. In most cases one would have by then satiated the most basic of one’s desires and fulfilled one’s creature comforts. The kind of grace Lincoln talks of accrues the same way a hungry man exudes a sense of gratification after a wholesome meal.

Life would have assumed a definite direction, acquired a great deal of purposefulness. Desires of the basic variety would have either been taken care of or sublimated. It is time for grace to dawn on the human face or even don it.

Just when I am all set to send these essays to the printer comes the news of death of Saketh, the Naxal leader from Mysore gunned down in (what we are told) an encounter. I never met this man, but his photograph that I saw in the press on his death guarantees me that his would have been the most impressive face in my list of faces if only had I got to see him.

His face is singularly remarkable for the reason that his heart, full of goodness, has no more place for it that it gently overflows from his face. That he is shy about it if not simply unaware of it is also evident in his delicately sculpted visage. It is not easy to find faces that bear out intelligence and kindness in equal measure. Saketh’s does.

I know I am not going overboard about my adulation for a man that I never met. I am only being led by my hunch that Saketh must have attempted to reform the Naxals. (I would remain firm in this belief even if I hadn’t read all those glowing obituaries that the Kannada press honoured him with or hadn’t heard the rich encomiums a journalist-colleague posthumously spared him).

There is no way, I am inclined to believe, that he would have raised his little finger against anybody. On the contrary, if Saketh did kill in fulfillment of the Mao credo, he should have looked a killer. Like the cops, maybe.

(Incidentally, Saketh is the name of God Rama. Some coincidence that Saketh spent the prime of his youth in the wild. Yes, with his young wife. It was voluntary privation for him. Talk of Rama, Krishna can’t be far behind, though in terms of time, he was. My mind tosses up an intriguing question: Krishna advocated war, righteous war.

Since I have sung the praise of the Gita elsewhere in this book, would terror unleashed by the Naxals acceptable to me? No, just not. Violence, neither by the Naxal nor by the State, can ever be condoned. Unfortunately, State terror is vastly unfettered. Gandhi’s guiding spirit was the Gita, but he was the apostle of peace and non-violence).

This colleague, who said he shed tears for two whole days for this unlikely Naxal, tells me that Saketh was only the second Brahmin after Basava through whom compassion chose to manifest itself. That, I would say, succinctly sums up all that Saketh stood for. I must however say that, if my borrowed understanding of Saketh is right, he lived the way a Brahmin ought to live.

A life characterized by simple living, high thinking, selflessness and self-abnegation. A report says that he was Spartan in his habits and had only one pair of clothes (the Vedas ordain that the Brahmin must be found only in rags and have no flab). If only more of today’s Brahmins could emulate Saketh, Naxalism would be outdated within no time.

Saketh, in fact, gives me a complex when I glare at him. Despite being born in the same year what segregates the two of us, for instance, is grace. He has so much of it.

The quality that leaves me with the wish that I should have had an encounter with him. Especially as a Mysorean. More so as a journalist. Only after his death did I come to know that there were quite a few known to me, including his relatives, that had seen Saketh from close quarters.

Finally, why is it that babies and the aged look alike and appealing? It is all right that they both suffer from the same kind of disabilities and infirmities and they both find themselves helpless and utterly dependent. More importantly, they are free from desires.

They are either unaware of them or have fulfilled them. It is this freedom from desire (like the Buddha’s or Vivekananada’s) which imparts them grace and amiability. You know they won’t use you, and they are therefore approachable.

The same kind of tranquil look is to be found on those who have had a deep and undisturbed sleep. To be graceful is to be free from selfish desires. If you have not dreamt (what are dreams but manifestation of unfulfilled desires), you have acquired grace, however momentarily. The grace wears out as one becomes fully awake, as the state of being awake brings back desires to the fore.

Excerpted from Rao’s collection of essays, Run of the Mind. The book is available for purchase in both paper and e-book versions here. Dr. Ramash N. Rao, professor and Department Chair of the Department of Communication Studies and Theater of Longwood University in Farmville, Virginia, has called Rao “the new voice of India”.

The Ups and Downs of Cuban Sugar

James Schipper writes:

Gusanos are only those Cubans who left shortly after 1959 and who just can’t forget their defeat. Cubans who emigrated in the last 3 decades are nearly all economic immigrants and not as fanatically anti-communist as the gusanos.

Nobody in his right mind disputes that the blockade hurts Cuba, but a lot of Cuba’s economic problems are indeed home-made. For instance, the fact that sugar production dropped from nearly 10 million tons to less than 2 million tons can’t really be blamed on the blockade.

Cuba was regularly harvesting 10 million tons/year for many years in the 1970′s and 1980′s. The price of sugar collapsed recently so Cuba shot down most of its sugar mills. The lying US capitalist media insanely gloated about this and wrote endless articles on this along the lines of the “failure of Cuban system” thesis. All that happened was the price of sugar collapsed so low that the Cubans just said screw it, we are going out of the sugar business, and closed most of their mills. It was a very painful decision, but it was the right thing to do. I don’t understand why closing the mills means “failure of Communism.”

Recently the price of sugar is back up, so the Cubans are reopening some of their old mills. A lot of workers are going back to work. There is a video on BBC about this. The Cuban state put all laid off sugar workers to work in other jobs or else sent them back to school. Wasn’t that great? You lose your job, and you automatically get another job or you can go to school for free and get paid to go? Wow, that really is a great system in some ways.

I would argue that almost all children of gusanos are also gusanos. Every Cuban I have met whose parents were Cuban refugees was fanatically, almost insanely anti-Communist.

I haven’t met any of the more sensible recent arrivals. In fact, I have never met a sane Cuban-American in my life. Every one I ever met was a raving anti-Communist nutcase. And they were all reactionaries too, every single one of them.

The Extraterritorial Nature of the US Cuban Blockade

The US has imposed an embargo on Cuba since 1961. That embargo is probably never going to be lifted. 100% of the US power elite of both parties are all of the US media are against lifting the blockade. Imperialism demands not just free elections and what not but also a total dismantling of the socialist economic system on the island. The blockade has always been more about US capitalism’s international war on socialism that about anything else.

Various lies have been parroted about the blockade: That it was imposed due to the Cold War, that it was imposed because Cuba allied with the USSR, that it does not hurt Cuba at all and instead is used as an excuse by the regime, etc.

First of all, if it was imposed as a result of the Cold War, then with the fall of the USSR in 1991, it should have been lifted. The truth is that it was part of US capitalism’s war on the socialist economic system and not part of the war on the USSR. Hence with the fall of the USSR, the behavior of the US state did not change one bit.

It continued its war on socialism, attacking socialist countries, fomenting coups against progressive or socialist governments, blockading socialist countries, supporting fascist and rightwing governments around the word as they are “good for business,” funding anti-Left death squads all around the world, and continuing an ideological war against all progressive forces and states in the world.

We really must smash this lie once and for all that the US reluctantly did all sorts of bad things as a result of the War with the Soviet Union. The truth is that US imperialism simply evil, and it continued to do all of those same bad things after the USSR fell. The war was not against the USSR but against socialism itself, and that is why it continued after the USSR’s fall just as strongly as when the USSR was active.

The embargo was imposed in 1961 because Cuba began nationalizing some US properties of large US corporations. At the same time, the properties of many Cuban large capitalists was also taken. The US companies were offered 100% fair market values for their properties, but all of them told the Cubans to buzz off and those funds have not been collected to this very day. They never will be. However, if the US imposes regime change on Cuba then the first order of business will be a raid on the Cuban Treasury to pay back the US corporations and possibly the Cubans who got expropriated.

Also, Cuba began trading with the USSR. They were also trading with the US. Indeed, they were trading with the whole world. They imported oil from the USSR, but the US refineries on the island refused to refine Soviet oil, so the Cubans heroically confiscated the refineries of the imperialists.

Cuban exiles often say that the embargo doesn’t hurt Cuba at all. Instead Cuba’s economy is hurting due to Communism. One can look at photos of Eastern Europe and the USSR under Communism to see that Communism doesn’t have anything to do with buildings and infrastructure falling apart. I saw a video of Prague from ~1977 that could well have been shot in Paris or Berlin. It looked 100% like a modern Western city.

If you ask these same gusanos,* “Ok, since it doesn’t hurt them, why don’t we get rid of it then?” They will scream and yell and say no way! Obviously it hurts Cuba terribly, and that’s why the gusanos want to keep it. There is scarcely a human being on Earth who lies more than a gusano. Almost everything a gusano says about Cuba is a lie.

The embargo does indeed hurt them very badly. If a ship docks in Cuba, it can’t dock in the US for another six months. There are many penalties on foreign firms doing business with Cuba. It is not quite, “You can either do business with Cuba or you can do business with the rest of the world, but not both,” but it is close to that, similar to the blockade which has completely wrecked North Korea.

There have been massive penalties imposed on and collected from European banks for doing business with Cuba. As you can see below, a solidarity organization in the UK had $1000-2000 seized by the US because it had the world Cuba in its name. The US government says it can go ahead and confiscate that money of theirs and good luck getting it back.

Many products are made only in the US, and many, many products have parts that are made in the US. Any product with any parts made in the US cannot be sold in Cuba. Further, Cubans have many machines that need spare parts and those parts are made only in the US. They might be able to have the specially made by someone else, but that is quite expensive. The regime has to undertake expenses like this all the time.

I recall the case of a man residing in Cuba who made a trip to the UK and tried to deposit some money in Cuba to purchase something or other and he was not able to do so.

The law is crazy and its extraterritoriality is really scary. But US imperialism has always been one of the world’s worst monsters.

British NGO, the Cuba Solidarity Campaign (CSC) faces financial penalties or the risk having its funds seized by the US treasury department as a result of US blockade legislation against Cuba.

In April 2013, the British based campaign attempted to transfer funds to US publishing house Monthly Review Foundation to pay for 100 copies of The Economic War on Cuba by French academic and journalist Salim Lamrani.

CSC instructed its British bank, the Co-operative, to make the transfer to the publisher’s New York based Chase Bank. However, the payment was never made. Instead CSC received a letter from the Co-op bank stating that this payment has not been completed due to a reference which is similar to an entity related to sanctions as provided by the U.S treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). They require more info regarding Cuba.

The Campaign now faces the option of paying bank charges to try and recover the money, or providing details to the OFAC, who can decide to retain CSC funds if they
chose.

The book’s author Salim Lamrani, who is currently in Britain on a speaking tour to promote the book, said:

It is ironic that a British organisation that campaigns against the US blockade of Cuba, now faces penalties as a direct result of this legislation. Aside from the inhumane suffering the blockade causes the people of Cuba by restricting their access to US medicines and medical equipment, its extraterritorial measures break domestic laws in third countries.

CSC
Director Rob Miller said:

“It’ s farcical that extraterritorial blockade legislation is being used here to stop the sales of a book that itself exposes the breadth of the blockade against Cuba. Perhaps OFAC have specific objections to the book itself, although it is more likely that they object to allowing a payment from a British NGO with the word ‘Cuba’ in its name. Once again the ludicrousness of the US blockade is exposed in this case in trying to stop UK readers enjoying an excellent book published by a US publishing house.”

This is not the first time the British campaign has fallen victim to the extraterritorial nature of the US blockade. Dell computers has refused to sell the campaign a laptop without first being provided with the full name and addresses of directors and trustees of the organisation and bank transfers destined for projects in Cuba have regularly been refused. Salim Lamrani will be speaking in London on Tuesday 28 May, 6.30pm at Bolivar Hall, Grafton Way, London.

*Gusano means worm in Spanish. Cuban exiles are worms.

When America Bombed Its Own Workers

On August 30, President Harding placed all of West Virginia under martial law. On September 1, 2,500 federal troops arrived with more machine guns, percussion and gas bombs, and 14 airplanes commanded by World War I hero General Billy Mitchell. Bombs rained on miners’ positions, though their accuracy was problematic; in the early days of flight, bombs were literally “dropped” from flimsy aircraft.” — Robert E. Weir. Workers In America: A Historical Encyclopedia. 2013. pages 67-68.

This little snippet sums up quite well the longstanding American attitude towards working people, towards its own workers, towards its own proletariat. The American attitude is very confused because of course most Americans are workers or proletarians so much of this must be self-hatred. But the attitude that the workers are the enemy has longstanding roots in American political culture. Of course it continues to this day. Neoliberal capitalism virtually defines workers as an enemy class to be suppressed. This is now the philosophy of both parties and the vast majority of the US political spectrum.

Part of the problem is with middle class workers. Managerial types are of course workers, but they are best seen as worker traitors, workers who are traitors to their own class as they line up with the owners and the bosses. In Sweden, almost all of the managerial class is unionized as it ought to be, as managers get screwed by the bosses just as fast as the rank and file do.

And many highly paid workers do not see themselves as workers. Many attorneys and physicians are actually working class people, working for a salary. So are college professors. So are accountants, schoolteachers, journalists, editors, engineers, graphic artists, computer programmers and other IT types, police officers, firemen and many others who often vote rightwing. If you work for a wage or a salary, you are a working class person, period. You are a proletarian who exists at the whim of his boss.

As my late father once said, “Under capitalism, workers and owners are de facto enemies.”

This is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Yet the US worker sees his boss as his friend and not his enemy. He bows down to worship at the feet of the company that exploits him and would fire him to replace him with a machine or a Hindu 1-B or an illegal invader in a Manhattan minute.

But highly paid workers under capitalism often refuse to see themselves as workers. Efforts to unionize white collar workers have failed, as they see unions as blue collar working class organizations for guys with beer bellies, t-shirts and a 6-pack. They think they are better than these people, so they refuse to form unions because they don’t want to be seen as blue collar.

Neoliberal economics benefits, if anyone, the owners of capital and the rich. It is true that highly paid workers have benefited from neoliberalism. The top 20% of citizens make out under neoliberalism, while everyone else gets screwed. The record is clear on this the world over. Under the modified neoliberalism of Bill Clinton, the top 40% benefited while the bottom 60% lost money. Still this is a philosophy opposed to the economic interests of the majority.

In recent years, the benefits of neoliberalism is starting to wane even for upper middle class workers. Last year, salaries for IT professionals declined by 2%. This is part of neoliberalism’s endless war on US workers, who have been replaced by cancerous Hindu-1B parasites for many years now.

Still, hatred of the working class continues apace. The US population has waged war on the New Deal since Ronald Reagan ran against it and won in 1980. Even Barack Obama says the New Deal is dead, reiterating Bill Clinton’s epitaph. Yet Obama has done more than any other politician to put a stake in the heart of the New Deal, proving first that he is a Reaganite and second that he is a hardcore neoliberal, since neoliberalism has defined itself in opposition to the New Deal.

Attacking the New Deal continues to be great politics. Those who attack it win elections over and over while Americans snooze. All over the world, austerity has caused chaos, riots and government overthrow. The US is the only country where the crazed masses seem to the cheer on austerity, which is really their own austerity. The American worker is the most self-hating worker on the planet.

US Conservatives Are Not Evil; They Are Insane

I really don’t think most US conservatives are evil or bad. I just think they are wrong. Actually I do not think they are wrong. I know they are wrong. Almost everything they say and believe is simply wrong. For the most part, what they believe are lies, nonsense, crap, idiocy and bullshit. If we know a human being whose beliefs are all nonsensical, we usually won’t say he is evil. We might be charitable and just say he is a nutcase.

Almost all of the problems with US conservatives are because they are ludicrously partisan. To be partisan is one thing, but a conservative will never admit he is partisan.

Let us look at some examples:

Benghazi Embassy scandal: There was no scandal. Al Qaeda is waging a global war on us, and they will attack our troops and embassies any chance they can get. The Administration tried their hardest to fortify the embassy, as hard as any other administration would have tried. The diplomatic aspect of the state in the State Department is nonpartisan. Embassy personnel are staffed via the Pentagon and the CIA and contractors. Under any administration, priority will be on protecting the lives of diplomatic personnel and the integrity of US embassies.

Democratic administrations are not so stupid as to scrimp on security overseas, and there is no evidence that Republicans protect embassies any better than Democrats. One of the worst attacks ever on a US embassy occurred in 1983 when Hezbollah hit the US Embassy in Beirut. Almost all the American “civilians” killed were working for the CIA, but don’t let that bother you.

As sometimes happens, our enemies got the best of us one day in Libya. This would never have happened under Gaddafi, but we overthrew him and put Al Qaeda in charge of Libya, so that’s why our embassy got overrun.

Truth be told, wasn’t the 9-11 attack on the US far worse than the Benghazi attack in which one ambassador was killed? On 9-11, 3,000 Americans were killed, on our own soil nonetheless. But somehow to conservatives this is not a failure to protect the US homeland and citizens, but an attack that kills one ambassador is? That’s just partisan bullshit; it’s nothing more and nothing less.

If the Benghazi attack occurred under a Republican President, conservatives would not have said a word. Security failures only occur under Democratic Presidents, never under Republican Presidents. If 9-11 would have occurred under a Democratic President, conservatives would still be screaming about how “the liberals let Al Qaeda attack us.” But since it happened under a Republican, you will never hear a word of this. This makes no sense. 9-11 was either a security failure or it was not. It can’t be the case that it would have been a security failure under a Democrat, but since it occurred under a Republican, it could not possibly be one.

Lie: Obama represents something called “Chicago-style politics.” The implication here is that Obama is corrupt to the core, a representative of corrupt Chicago Democratic Party-labor union machine politics going back decades. The truth is that that corrupt machine got dismantled quite some time ago. It is true that Democratic politics in Chicago used to be very corrupt, especially under Mayor Daley. Corrupt elections were the norm, and dead people voted early and often.

Corrupt Democratic crooks in Chicago stole so many votes in Chicago in 1960 that they probably gave John F. Kennedy the election. So JFK no doubt stole his way into office. The dead have not voted in Chicago in quite some time, and federal RICO prosecutions and raids have pretty much shut down the overtly corrupt aspect of Chicago politics. To my knowledge, Chicago politics nowadays is no more corrupt than the politics of any other large US city.

Furthermore, there is no evidence that Obama is part of any Chicago corrupt Daley-style machine. That machine was made up of old style ethnic Whites, and the new Democratic politics in Chicago is much more progressive, even radical, and clean. It’s true that Penny Pritzger, Rahm Emanuel and Bill Ayers were part of the local politics scene, but neither one is corrupt. In fact Ayers and other radical types would be very against that sort of thing. Emanuel and and Pritzger come out of US finance capital and are as corrupt or non-corrupt as anyone tied at the hip to Wall Street as almost 100% of the Republican Party is.

How about Obama since he has been in office? There is no evidence that the Obama Administration is particularly corrupt as an Executive Branch. Sure, they take lots of corporate money, but the Republicans take way more, and that’s all legal anyway. There have been very few serious corruption cases under Obama.

The truth is that corruption in the US reached an all-time recent high under Ronald Reagan. It was also very high under George Bush Jr. The more capitalist the political party is, the more corrupt it is. The Democrats are not so wedded to US big business and multinational corporations as Republicans are, hence you see a lot less corruption. Any political party with profound ties to Big Capital will almost always be extremely corrupt. This fact can even be shown on a worldwide scale. Parties that are more socialist or populist and less tied to the rich and Big Capital will tend to be less corrupt since there is less Big Money to go around and they at least pay lip service to the lower 80% of the population.

Conclusion: There is no “Chicago-style politics” anymore, and even if there is, Obama is not representative of it. The old machine is dead and gone, possibly never to be revived. That Obama is some corrupt, vote-stealing, bribe-taking, brutal Daley style machine crook is simply nonsense.

Lie: Obama is killing the Keystone XL pipeline because he has ties to the Waltons, heirs to the Walmart fortune, who will lose big money if the pipeline goes through. Truth is that Obama, corporatist that he is, largely supports the Keystone XL, but he is under huge pressure from environmentalists to cave in. So Obama the corporatist is caught between his Big Money backers in Big Oil (Obama is a strong supporter of Big Oil) and the environmentalists on the Left of his party.

Obama, being a rightwing corporate capitalist whore, is inclined to support the pipeline because his corporate pimps demand it of him. However, he is pressured from the Left to kill the pipeline. So he is caught in a bind. The only wavering he is doing at all is because he is under pressure from environmentalists. If he stops Keystone XL, it will be because the environmentalists convinced him.

Conclusion: Obama has no position on Keystone XL, but is inclined to support it. But he is under pressure from his Left to kill it. The verdict is up to him.

Lie: Environmental organizations lie about the environment because they are paid many millions of dollars to lie about it. This is simply not true. Environmental groups are not corrupt, and there is no money in protecting the environment. There are no rich or business interests paying off environmental activists to do this or that. The entire environmental movement really is anti-capitalist.

Its goal is to shut down or regulate various capitalist enterprises so they can not make any money at all since they are not allowed to start up or because their operations are shut down. In other cases, it seeks to regulate capitalist enterprises in such a way as to limit the profits of Capital. The capitalists are the ones with money in capitalist societies. Since the goals of environmentalists’ projects are to limit or in some cases to disallow capitalists’ profits, no capitalist will ever support this movement.

It is certainly possible that there are rich people somewhere dishing out millions of dollars to environmental groups in order to lie about environmental problems, but there is no evidence that this is occurring. Anyway, US environmental problems are bad enough that there is no need to lie about anything; the truth is bad enough as it is. I have been following this movement for decades now and I have never uncovered a single case of environmentalists inventing nonexistent problems or even exaggerating current ones. There’s no need to do so. If projects are environment-friendly, environmentalists are content to let them go forward.

Conclusion: There are no environmental groups lying about environmental problems as the truth is bad enough. 100% of the lying is on the side of the capitalist destroyers and polluters who obviously have huge pecuniary interest in lying. No one is giving millions of $ to environmentalists to make up lies, and there is no evidence that no one ever has.

Lie: China and India are causing the majority of global warming, so we needn’t worry about global warming here in the US. Pollute away!

The truth is that China and India together cause ~8% of global warming in the world. Sure it is on the rise, but that is the current figure. Most global warming is coming out of the West.

Conclusion: The West is causing global warming, not the rest of the world.

Lie: Barack Obama, radical Islamist Kenyan born Muslim, is supporting the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. The MB are radical Al Qaeda style terrorists who hate the US and Israel. It is true that the MB are radical Islamists and they are pretty nasty. But a Republican administration would probably also support the MB regime in Egypt. Egypt gets that $2-3 billion/year as a payoff for making peace with Israel back in 1979.

So all those billions are not going for the radical Islamist MB in Egypt, instead it is going for a bunch of Jews squatting in Palestine. It’s a payoff to the Jews, nothing more, nothing less. If you’re upset about it, head on over to Hymietown, find yourself a deli, and complain to anyone who will listen to you.

Truth is that due to geopolitics, a Republican administration would probably have to support the MB to the tune of $2-3 billion a year too. If you cut off all that aid, Egypt might just tear up that peace treaty with Israel, and we can’t have that. So the aid stays, no matter which administration is in charge.

Besides, there is not a whole lot of evidence that the Egyptian MB is any more radical Islamist than the radical Sunni Islamist regimes in the Gulf. Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Oman and Yemen are all run by radical Islamist regimes. In fact, the Egyptian MB has very deep ties to the Wahhabi clergy in Saudi Arabia, and it was the emigration of many MB Islamists to Saudi Arabia due to persecution by secular regimes that helped fuel Al Qaeda in the first place.

What created Al Qaeda? Al Qaeda was created when large numbers of MB activists from Egypt and then later from Syria migrated to Saudi Arabia due to persecution by secular regimes in Egypt and Syria. The Wahhabi clerics had been rather quietist up until this point. But the MB cadres were radicalized by persecution and torture in their homelands, and they riled up the locals, turning up the heat on the quietist Wahhabi clergy. It was out of this union of Mediterranean MB activists with Saudi Wahhabi clergy that Al Qaeda itself was born.

Conclusion: Obama probably doesn’t like the Egyptian MB regime any more than any Republican would. But the rules of geopolitics are that Egypt must be supported as a consequence of US support for Israel. As with so many things in the Middle East, all roads lead back to Jerusalem.

A Capitalist World is a World of Crime, Corruption and Wars of Agression

Dota says:

I think Roger Hill is onto something here. Robert mistakes capitalism for opportunism and sociopathic behaviour in general. As I’ve pointed out before, we’ve seen exploitation in non-capitalist societies during various periods of history. Feudalism and Caste immediately come to mind.

Lee Kwan Yew once said that in order to spread the wealth around, a society must first create it. Capitalism is a good engine for wealth creation. Historically, its egalitarian societies that have been expansionist. The Arabs and Mongols come to mind. They were expansionist because they failed to create any wealth for themselves. Once they acquired wealth through conquest, they divided it amongst themselves equally (more or less).

It’s obvious that the Rockerfellers/Fords etc. represent a ‘capitalism’ that is alien to Smith’s wealth of nations. Capitalism is merely privately owned factors of production. The elites mentioned above represent plutocratic sociopathic insanity at its highest degree.

Under capitalism, all manner and degrees of opportunism, corruption, lying, cheating, stealing and sociopathic behavior becomes positively epidemic.

That is because in pursuit of money, humans will do just about anything: lie, cheat, steal, become opportunists or corrupt, and behave sociopathically in every manner and degree possible. They will also commit tons of crime and will tend to abuse women in all sorts of ways.

We saw much less of this behavior in the socialist societies of the last century. When these socieites such as Eastern Europe, the USSR and China went to capitalism, the crime rate went through the roof, entire nations became corrupt to the core, and the abuse of women increased dramatically. In fact, some socieites were almost completely taken over by organized crime. Russia to this day is significantly controlled by Organized Crime. Organized crime elements run Russia and rule it via the state.

In the past century, the most egalitarian societies committed little aggression, started few wars and committed few acts of conquest in order to obtain more land and acquire new markets and resources. On the contrary, almost all aggression in the past century was committed by unequal capitalist (and imperialist) countries trying to conquer new lands and peoples for new markets and to steal their resources for the capitalists.

In fact a world regime of capitalism virtually guarantees almost continuous wars among capitalist countries over dividing markets and resources. Capitalist countries will always fight each other over markets and resources.  This is almost guaranteed under capitalism, and there does not seem to be any way around it. A world of capitalism is a world of constant war with no way out.

Under more socialist systems, crime, corruption, abuse of women, wars of aggression, homelessness, hunger and preventive disease are dramatically reduced, as is all manner of egoistic sociopathic behavior.

As those societies transition to a capitalist model, crime, corruption, abuse of women, aggressive (imperialist) wars, homelessness, hunger and deaths due to preventive disease often skyrocket.

Bottom line is capitalism is bad for your health.

Capitalist Problem Creation, Socialist Problem Solution

Roger Hill writes:

Well Robert, I hardly see how socialism solves anything you complain about. What we have here is not a problem with the corruption of one particular group of people you label “capitalist” (a label I do not hang on myself). The real problem is with the corruption of a group of people I call the human race.

No system has better solved or ameliorated the problems of slums, starvation, lack of medical care, basic sanitation, freedom of slaves, global warming, pollution of air and rivers, poorly built sweatshops, unsafe roads and products, ruined environments, workplace illness and injury, etc, than the socialists. In fact, all of those problems above on this Earth are generally created by the capitalists, and capitalism will always cause these problems because it is not designed to solve them, and it doesn’t even care if they exist or not, as they are not important to Capital.

All of those problems above can only be ameliorated by the socialists and by state intervention in various ways. They can never be solved or in general even ameliorated by the capitalists.

I will elaborate on this in a later post.

What Good Are the “Natural Limits of Capitalist Profit?”

Roger Hill writes:

Clearly, there are those who do not wish any coercive restraints placed on the economic freedoms of individuals, but who sincerely believe there are natural restraints on all profit ventures in the very exercise of mere economic realities themselves.

These people would be called capitalists, and this is the mindset of all capitalists. That there are natural limits on profits is not particularly interesting when we see environments completely destroyed, massive slums as far as the eye can see, millions dying every year of starvation and lack of health care, countless dying from tainted products and unsafe structures and streets, countless sickened, injured and killed in their own workplaces, on and on. That all of this happens even with some sort of “natural profit limit” is not particularly interesting nor is it enlightening. Clearly, the natural limits of capitalist profits are far too high to be of benefit to any decent society.

The “natural limits of profit” produced the Irish Potato Famine, starve 14 million humans to death every year, and logically produce such catastrophes as Nairobi, Lagos, Rio de Janiero, Mexico City, Detroit, Dhaka and Calcutta.

Clear-cut rainforests, nearly extinct fish stocks, global climate catastrophe, sewage choked rivers, rivers that catch on fire, hundreds of miles of grasslands desertified by bovine locusts with hooves, flaming and collapsing sweatshops with hundreds of charred and flattened corpses, the fetid slums of Bogota, Lima and Sao Paolo: this is what the “natural limits of profit” give us. These natural limits gave us hundreds of years of slavery. Surely those slaves could find a glimmer of hope that their masters’ profits were being restrained by some natural limits, else their fate be even worse?

Roger Hill:

For example, what constitutes ‘restraints on profit’? Are these restraints enforced by coercion – in other words, by law and the power of the state?

Yes, one definition of a socialist is one who is willing to constrain the profits of capitalism via state regulation. And in a capitalist economy, the only possible decent society can be had by socialists in government running and regulating the capitalist economic engine. Allowing the capitalists to move from a mode of economic development to a form of governance via the capitalist state (where the capitalists run the state) quickly creates economic crisis and eventually results in some sort of a 3rd world system.

Is Germany a Socialist Country?

Joerg Hensiek wrote:

Robert: Germany is not the “socialist” – or rather “social democratic” – country it used to be in the 1970s. Neoliberalism has changed this nation too, even if of course not as drastically as the US. However, there are signs that this will come to end, sooner or later.

As a socialist, I consider social democratic countries to be socialist countries. In the Socialist International grouping of political parties which I support, there are many social democratic political parties there.

To me, a socialist is anyone who is willing to constrain the profits of the capitalists.

A capitalist is someone who believes that no restraints should be placed on the profits of capitalists.

Also I do not agree that Germany is a neoliberal country. The most neoliberal countries in Europe are Estonia, Latvia and the UK. Neoliberalism fails everywhere it is implemented, and Europe is no exception.

Islam Is Not Progressive

Islamic devolution, evolution in reverse.

Look at how far backwards Afghanistan has gone. This is your society on Islamism. Afghanistan was a Muslim country in 1972 also, but look how different it was. There are many ways to be a Muslim country. Afghanistan was just as much of a Muslim country in 1972 as it is this year. The only thing that has changed is the fundamentalist nature of society.

It is amazing that liberals and the Left think that Islam and Islamism is the greatest thing since sliced bread.Why? Islam and Islamism is against everything the Left is for. If the Western Left is against anything, it must be against Islam and Islamism. It’s hard to imagine a form of Islam that won’t move Western societies backwards, and it’s hard to imagine a form of Islamism that won’t throw a Muslim country into reverse.

Sure, Hinduism blows, but so does Islam. Who says that Hinduism blows worse than Islam? It’s a tough call! Which religious cancer treats women worse, Islam or Hinduism? Once again, close call! Both of these religions are obscurantist forms of primitivism instead to move society backwards, not forwards.

According to the Left, history, like clocks, is supposed to move forwards. And I believe that is the general tendency of history. Not exactly an iron law, but humans have a tendency to move from conditions of less progress to conditions of more progress. And this in a nutshell, is the Left Hegelian notion of history.

So it is in this sense that Fukushima’s theory was a conceit. Fukushima wrote that history was over, that is, we are stuck with capitalist economics, preferably of the neoliberal form, despite the fact that it is a backwards, primitive, inefficient, irrational and profoundly immoral system. The Left notion of history holds that humans have a natural tendency to move from more backwards, primitive, irrational and immoral systems towards systems that are more progressive, advanced, rational and moral.

Humans have not changed one bit. The human race has not decided to become reactionaries overnight. We continue to move towards progress on many fronts. There is no reason to think that justice and fairness minded humans will settle for the insanity and deeply unfair system of neoliberal capitalism. Nothing changed suddenly in 1990. Clocks did not stop or start working backwards. Life goes on.

We continue our walk through life, one step at a time, always forwards, never resting and not one step back.

Such is the essential human condition.