“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”.

North Korea Primer

Repost from the old site.

By now you surely have heard that North Korea has a nuclear bomb and has tested it, although the bomb appears very small, the test did not go well, and it has not yet been put on top of a missile. I am not at all worried about this bomb, though maybe I should be.

I have been studying North Korea for years, and this is the basis for my carefree attitude about their nuclear bomb. They simply are not going to use it in an aggressive manner as it is strictly for defensive purposes.

For those reasons, I actually support North Korea’s getting a bomb, as I figure they will never use it anyway (unless we are so stupid as to attack them) and it is only them having a bomb that keeps us from attacking them.

I think all sane, rational countries being threatened by nuclear powers should have the right to get WMD’s to defend themselves. Most countries in the world qualify as sane, and certainly North Korea does. All the nonsense about “crazy Kim Jong Il” is just US propaganda crap. For an example of an insane, irrational country that should never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon, consider the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

I actually dislike the regime intensely, but there are positive notes amidst all the terror of the gulags and the corruption of the elite.

For one, I really feel that Kim Jong Il has been trying his best to feed his people, which is more than I can say for the vast majority of capitalist regimes in the Third World, whose governments do not make the tiniest efforts to feed anyone, as this is seen as the responsibility of the individual.

The World Bank, the IMF and the US government routinely try to attack and even destroy such governments if they try to feed their people. Jean Bertrand Aristide, for example, was overthrown at gunpoint by the US, France and Canada, in part because he was spending large sums to give millions of poor Haitians one free meal (lunch) a day.

The World Bank and the IMF usually demand that these governments scale back or terminate any government feeding programs in order to continue to get loans from these institutions.

My understanding is that the northern part of Korea has never been able to feed its people, even before the Communist regime. I suppose it has always either relied on imports from Southern Korea or China, or else, if that was not forthcoming, it simply lacked enough food. The country is very cold and mountainous with rocky soil and it is hard to get crops to grow there.

Some background on the famine: North Korea had the worst floods in 100 years in 1995 and 1996, followed by the worst drought in 100 years in 1997, which also involved famine. All this happened after the economy collapsed in 1990 with the loss of Soviet economic cooperation.

To give you an example of what was involved in this 1990 collapse, note that the price of oil immediately climbed by 1000% (10 times) in the space of a year. They simply could not purchase enough oil to run their factories and farms so the whole country pretty much shut down.

For those enamored of the theory that Communist states like Cuba and North Korea can only be maintained by massive aid from outside to “keep them afloat”, we should note that from 1946-1960, South Korea received 4 times the aid to South Korea as the Soviet Union was giving to North Korea. For most of the 1950′s, the US provided 50% of the entire budget of South Korea. Which state is the welfare case, anyway?

The US has been deliberately trying to destroy their economy from Day One so we should talk about their economic problems. Right now, we are trying to cut off the regime from the entire world banking system. This means that factories that make consumer goods have been unable to import the materials necessary to make those products.

During the starvation crisis of the 90′s, my perception is that the world did not exactly step up to the plate for avert the crisis. The US continued embargoing North Korea, as they have since 1950, and as they did during the Great Leap Forward famine of 1959-1962 in which 15 million Chinese died while the US scurried to block all food aid.

The embargo has recently been strengthened in an effort to cut off the North from the world financial system. The US and other nations played politics with the food aid during the famine, a disgusting display of cynical Realpolitik in my opinion.

Regarding the number of deaths in the famine, anti-North Korean polemicists claim that 3-4 million people died. Fine, they can claim that all they want but they need to prove it. The Asian Development Bank says that 500,000 died*. Others put the figure at 600,000.

It was a terrifying, nightmarish time and the horror stories from the era seem for the most part to be true.

It is useful to note that even at the worst of the starvation in the 1990′s, the rate and degree of infant mortality, starvation and malnutrition per 1000 people only began to approach, but did not reach or surpass, the same rate as India experiences day in, day out, every single year, including this one.

So, what happened in North Korea from 1995-1997 has continued to occur on a greater scale and to the same degree every year since then in India. So how come we don’t hear how India starves its people? It should be noted that the regime has not been able to feed its people for the last 10 years and 40% of the youngest generation are stunted from malnutrition.

North Korea has liberated women to a radical degree – there are more college-educated women than men. The regime does an excellent job of taking care of orphans (especially) and children in general.

There are many orphans. – 30% of the population of North Korea was killed in the war, mostly by US carpet bombing, often with napalm, that was frankly terrorist warfare – a devastation comparable in degree to those experienced by Poles, Russians and World Jewry in World War 2.

The US, under Curtis LeMay, destroyed just about every city and town in North Korea, often with blatant napalming of entire cities. When napalm was invented in 1945, no one imagined that it would be used wholesale against entire cities.

As early as 1952, almost every civilian in North Korea was living in either a cave or a tunnel. There are still a huge number of orphans – if you meet North Koreans, you will find that almost everyone lost at least one relative in the war.

North Korea has excellent in the treatment of the handicapped – sending them to the many special schools and programs that are set up for them, finding employment for them and making special efforts to find them marriage partners.

As with the orphans, there are many handicapped, mostly due to the devastating war, and the North Korean people treat the handicapped with a kindness and deference that would surprise most residents of the capitalist dog-eat-dog West.

North Korea has truly free housing and practices preventive medicine on a comparatively high level. Prostitution is a memory and it is impossible to bribe a cop. North Koreans had a longer life expectancy and lower infant mortality than South Korea until 1980, and until the tragedies of the 1990′s, North Korea’s rates of these 2 indexes were on a par with advanced industrialized states.

North Korea had higher per capita growth rates than South Korea for decades until the 1980′s. By 1980, visitors riding trains from North Korea to China were shocked at how much better off North Korea seemed to be than China. North Korea’s rural areas were neat and well-built up, with well-maintained farm machinery in ample supply. In contrast, China, both cities and countryside, appeared squalid.

Since then, the system has foundered. It is not so much that the system itself is a completely failed model as capitalist propagandists assert but that it is a limited model. That is, you can get superb economic growth in both agriculture and industry for decades under Communism (the experience of the Soviet Union and Mao’s China are instructive).

But after decades of growth, the system seems to reach a law of diminishing returns and also bogs down into bureaucracy. North Korea has now significantly liberalized their economy to the point where it is not really a totally Communist economy (certainly not a “Stalinist” system – North Korea’s model never really resembled Stalin’s USSR anyway) at all anymore.

A lot of the enterprises are virtually being run by workers themselves and the cities are crowded with farmers markets and stands for small entrepreneurs.

Nevertheless, many of the horror stories you hear about North Korea’s gulags are probably true. Still, there is a problem with these stories. It is now acknowledged that most information from North Korean defectors is pretty much useless. Sometimes they have good information if you can get to them before South Korean intelligence does. After that, they are about useless.

Defectors’ stories are most valuable for telling us what life is like in their immediate surroundings. Few top-level defectors have left North Korea over the lifespan of the regime, so our understanding of the inner workings of the regime is limited.

The notion that North Korea would give their nuclear weapon to terrorists, or God forbid Al Qaeda, regularly heard in the US media, nearly qualifies as a paranoid delusion. The whole notion of “giving a nuke to terrorists” which Americans have been hammered with nonstop since 9-11 is sort of silly and fantastical anyway.

To look into this requires a brief primer on nuclear weapons. I am not an expert, but here goes.

For starters, let us look at the nonsense about the suitcase nukes. A modern nuclear weapon, as I understand it, is about as big as a very small car – say a Volkswagen beetle or an electric car. If you put it in your living room, it takes up a good part of the room. You can put it in a large truck, but a suitcase!? Come on.

Furthermore, most modern-day nuclear weapons are either launched from a missile of dropped from a bomber. A common misconception is that a nuke is detonated on impact. You could put a nuke in a truck and drive it into a building 100 mph, drop it from a plane, shoot it on a missile, set it on fire, or even attack it with another nuclear weapon, and none of that will detonate it.

The only way to detonate a nuclear weapon is to fire a detonator at the atomic core inside the nuke. In modern nuclear weapons, the detonator is a very large precision instrument located inside the nuke itself. It must be fired just right, with mathematical precision down to fractions of a second and many other variables lined up perfectly.

This a process that is enormously difficult, and large states with huge budgets and legions of physicists have had a very hard time doing it, with the project often taking years or decades, and many projects ending in failure. The notion that terrorists living in Afghan caves can make one of these weapons, smuggle it into the US and detonate it is hysterical.

It is testament to the ignorance or duplicity of the US media and politicians that such scenarios resonate across our land to terrify a public that is uneducated about these complex matters.

Another notion, constantly parried about on the “Terror Channels” of the US media, is that Kim Jong Il wants to attack South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, or especially the US, with his nasty nukes. I don’t believe this. The relationship between the South and the North is enormously complex, but the South (and especially its US patron) threatens the North as much as vice versa.

I do not think a North Korean goal is an unprovoked attack against South Korea, and certainly not Japan or, ludicrously, Taiwan. Any North Korean attack on an US target, forget the US mainland, would be met with such a devastating response that North Korea would be history. A Northern attack on the South would be similarly suicidal.

The North has not spent 40 years rebuilding its land from the total devastation of the war to blow it all on a suicidal war of aggression. On the contrary, I think that North Korea would eventually would like to reunify the South and the North. The South Korean population seems to agree, as 80% oppose the US’ belligerent stance towards the North.

I am not sure why the US media, which resembles a Halloween haunted house attraction meant to scare your pants off for sheer entertainment, is always trying to keep us terrified of dubious threats. Unless they just want to keep us chronically terrified for other ulterior motives.

If anyone should be afraid of anyone, the North should be afraid of the US. We are still officially at war with them, as we never signed an armistice. The US holds regular war games with the South aimed at North Korea. Plans to attack and wipe out the regime are being constantly updated, the most recent of which is frightening in its attention to trivial detail and baseless optimism about success.

37,000 US troops at 100 installations dot the South Korean landscape. The largest US bombing range in Asia is the scene of bombing practice 5 days a week, year-round. The US stationed nuclear weapons in South Korea for decades, menacing the North. Those are gone, but they have been replaced by nuclear-armed ships and planes that the US surrounds the North with.

On January 8, 2002, three weeks prior to the declaration of the Axis of Evil, George Bush presented a “Nuclear Posture Review” to Congress, ordering the Pentagon to prepare contingency plans for nuclear attack on Iran, Iraq and North Korea, in addition to the non-Axis states of Syria, Libya, Russia and China.

From their point of view, the North is mystified at why we vilify them. They see themselves as opposing the apparently illegal division of their country (engineered by the US) from the start.

They are angered at being blamed for starting a war that they see as a civil war between a minority of collaborators with the Japanese who occupied their land (those Koreans supporting South Korea) and the majority of Koreans (those Koreans supporting North Korea). They are proud that they held off the US and its UN allies during the war.

For these acts, which they see as heroic, they feel they have been unfairly tagged as “hostile nation”.

A couple of new books** have come out in the past couple of years advocating attack on North Korea. The nonsense about the North’s petty nuke that reverberates from the media machine is downright frightening. For those who wish to hear an antidote to the insane drumbeat of warmongering hostility against North Korea, consider this a beginning primer.

References

Meredith Woo-Cummings, The Political Ecology of Famine: The North Korean Catastrophe and Its Lessons, Asian Dev. Bank Inst., Tokyo, 2001

Jasper Becker, Rogue Regime: Kim Jong Il and the Looming Threat of North Korea. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 300 pp., and Bradley K. Martin, Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2004. 868 pp.

Conn Hallinan, “Hugo Chavez: Lest We Forget”

Nice piece on Chavez.

Hugo Chavez: Lest We Forget

“Charismatic and idiosyncratic, capable of building friendships. Communicating to the masses as few other leaders ever have, Mr. Chavez will be missed.”

Conn Hallinan
Dispatches From The Edge: March 11, 2013

Paying Last Respects

In early December 2001, I was searching through my files looking for a column topic. At the time I was writing on foreign policy for the San Francisco Examiner, one of the town’s two dailies. A back page clip I had filed and forgotten caught my attention: on Nov. 7 the National Security Agency, the Pentagon, and the U.S. State Department had convened a two-day meeting on U.S. policy vis-a-vis Venezuela. My first thought was, “Uh, oh.”

I knew something about those kinds of meetings. There was one in 1953 just before the CIA and British intelligence engineered the coup in Iran that put the despicable Shah into power. Same thing for the 1963 coup in South Vietnam and the 1973 coup against Salvador Allende in Chile.

Chavez had reaped the ire of the Bush administration when, during a speech condemning the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, he asked if bombing Afghanistan in retaliation was a good idea? Chavez called it “fighting terrorism with terrorism,” not a very good choice of words, but, in retrospect, spot on. The invasion of Afghanistan and the subsequent Iraqi War have been utterly disastrous for the U.S. and visited widespread terror on the populations of both countries. Upwards of a million Iraqis died as a direct and indirect effect of the war, five million were turned into refugees, and the bloodshed is far from over. Much the same-albeit on a smaller scale-is happening to the Afghans.

Would that we had paid the man some attention.

But for the Bush administration, Chavez’s statement presented an opportunity to rid itself of a troublesome voice. In came the White House’s Latin America “A Team.”

The top gun in that odious outfit was Otto Reich, assistant secretary of state for western hemispheric affairs and former Reagan Administration point man for the 1981-87 Contra War against Nicaragua. The General Accounting Office had nailed Reich during the 1986 Iran-Contra scandal for “prohibited convert propaganda,” planting false stories and opinion pieces in newspapers. A Cuban exile, Reich had helped spring Orlando Bosch in 1987 from a Venezuelan prison where Bosch was in jail for bombing a civilian Cuban airliner and killing 73 people.

Rogelio Pardo-Maurer, deputy assistant secretary of defense for western hemisphere affairs, also a Cuban exile and former chief of staff for the Contras, was the Pentagon side of the team.

While Reich met with civilian opponents of Chavez and conservative businessman Pedro Carmona, Pardo-Maurer huddled with military leaders, including Gen. Lucas Romero Rincon. Carmona and Rincon would play a key role in the April 11, 2002 coup against Chavez. The National Endowment for Democracy and United States Agency for International Development were also supporting Chavez’s opponents with money and advice, and both organizations have long histories of subversion and covert operations.

I had no special information about the possibility of a coup but it didn’t take a crystal ball to see that the armies of the night were on the move. So I wrote a column titled “Coup in the Wind” that laid out the meetings, identified the actors, and reminded readers that the U.S. has a long and sordid history of organizing and supporting coups in Latin America.

A little more than three and a half months later, the plotters struck, arrested Chavez, suspended the constitution, dissolved the legislature, dismissed the Supreme Court, the Attorney General and the National Election Commission, and fired provincial governors. We had seen this all before, and I flinched at what I thought would inevitably follow: executions, death squads, “disappeared” opponents, smashed unions, and a cowed population.

But April 11, 2002 was not 1954 in Guatemala, 1964 in Brazil, 1973 in Chile, or 1976 in Argentina. Chavez had lifted millions of people out of poverty, opened schools, increased literacy, and tackled malnutrition. In vast numbers those people rose up, and, for the first time in Latin American history, a coup was overturned.

Three days after Chavez was returned to office, Martha Honey at Foreign Policy In Focus sent me an email saying she liked the coup column and would I consider writing a follow-up for the think tank? I knew all about Martha Honey and her husband, Tony Avirgan. As reporters for the Costa Rican Tico Times, they had uncovered much of the Iran-Contra plot and were legends among those of us in the alternative press. I also knew about FPIF. It is hard to write sensible things about U.S. foreign policy without it. So I did a piece called Anatomy of a Coup, detailing U.S. support for the plotters. Since then I have written over 200 columns, so in a way it was Hugo Chavez that landed me at FPIF.

Chavez became the president of a country where 70 percent of the population was considered “poor,” in spite of $30 billion in yearly oil revenues. It was a country where two percent of the population owned 60 percent of the land, and where the gap between rich and poor was among the widest on the continent.

Today, according to the Gini Coefficient, Venezuela has the lowest rate of inequality in Latin America. Poverty has been reduced to 21 percent, and extreme poverty from 40 percent to 7.3 percent. Illiteracy has been eliminated and, proportionally, Venezuela is number two in Latin America for the number of university students. Infant mortality has dropped from 25 per 1,000 to 13 per 1,000, the same as it is for Black Americans.

Chavez’s government increased the number of health clinics by 169.6 percent and hands out free food to five million Venezuelans. Take a moment to read The Achievements of Hugo Chavez by public health experts Carles Muntaner, Joan Benach, and sociologist Maria Paez Victor in CounterPunch.

Comparing the man’s accomplishments to his U.S. obits was like taking a trip through Alice’s looking glass. Virtually none of the information about poverty and illiteracy was included, and when it was grudgingly admitted that he did have programs for the poor, it was “balanced” ; with claims of soaring debts, widespread shortages, rampant crime, economic chaos, and “authoritarian ism.”

Venezuela’ s debt as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product is lower than that of the U.S. and Europe. Inflation has fallen to a four-year low. There is crime, but neighboring Colombia is far more dangerous, particularly if you happen to be a trade unionist. And more people in Venezuela are eating better than they have ever eaten in the history of the country. Over the past decade growth has averaged 4. 3 percent, and joblessness dropped from 11.3 percent to 7.7 percent. Americans would kill for those figures.

As for being an “authoritarian ,” most the country’ s media is venomously anti-Chavez and publishes regularly, and his opponents hold weekly rallies and protests. Want to try that in U.S. ally Honduras (or Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, etc.)?

The old Venezuelan elites-aided by the U.S.-will now attempt to turn the clock back to 1997, the year before Chavez took over. But that will not be easy. Quite literally millions of people have been brought into the democratic process and they will not cede power without a fight. Once people have better housing, schools, nutrition, jobs and health care, it is very difficult to take those things away. Chavez handed a better life to the vast majority of Venezuelans, and, as they demonstrated in April 2002, they are perfectly able to defend those gains.

“Charismatic and idiosyncratic, capable of building friendships. Communicating to the masses as few other leaders ever have, Mr. Chavez will be missed,” is the way former Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva put it.

He will be missed, indeed.

Is Education Causing Flynn Effect Secular IQ Rises?

Realist writes:

I don’t think intelligence can be influenced by education. Education provides knowledge, but intelligence is what use when you lack knowledge.

It’s likely that education can artificially inflate scores on culturally biased IQ tests that depend on vocabulary and knowledge, but the most culture fair tests make every effort to minimize these variables.

Intelligence, like height, is extremely genetic within a given time and place however both of these traits can be profoundly boosted by nutrition. For example height in America has increased by several inches over the 20th century and IQ has increased by 20 points over the last 100 years, thanks to advances in nutrition. Nutrition increases the size and complexity of the brain, causing IQ levels to skyrocket.

People in the developed world are probably near their peak IQ, but people in the third world are still suffering from sub-optimum nutrition. That’s why Blacks in Africa average IQ 67, but pure Blacks born in America average around 80.

Indians average about 80 in India but would probably score 90 with first world nutrition. Actually Indians in America average ridiculously high levels (IQ 110) because only the richest and best educated Indians tend to come to America, and once here, they get a 10 IQ point nutrition boost.

So only biological variables can influence intelligence (genes, nutrition) but within a given country at a given time, it’s almost only genetic. But between generations and between countries, nutrition is HUGE.

Nothing Realist says is true.

No one knows what the IQ’s of “pure Blacks” are in the US, and there are hardly any native US Blacks who are pure anyway. One study found a group of very pure Blacks in Mississippi and Alabama. They were loggers in the pine forests there and worked in lumber mills. They had about 5% White in them on average. These are essentially the purest native Blacks in the US. The African American IQ is 87, not 85.

The South Asian IQ is ~82. South Asians in the US and UK, not a particularly selected group especially ion the UK, have IQ’s that have traditionally been 90-96. New scores of ~110 trumpeted by lying Hindutvadi dogs are suspect. Selective immigration could not have raised the scores more than 3-4 points anyway, and it was hardly selective in the UK, where scores are now ~96. The available data suggest a Flynn rise of ~8-14 points in 2nd generation South Asians merely by moving to the West. The rise is due in part to nutrition but also to schooling and growing up in a high tech modern society.

The Flynn rise is due to much more than nutrition. We know this because scores have only risen on certain IQ subtests. On others they have been completely flat. Much of the rise seems to be on tests that would be influenced by modern mathematics instruction and living in a modern, high-tech society. In addition, modern society emphasizes abstract thinking, so children growing up in the West learn to think abstractly. This makes them smarter, and the rise is shown on IQ tests.

Realist’s contention that education related rises do not show up on culture fair tests is wrong. In fact, the greatest rises have been on Raven’s Progressive Matrices, the most culture-fair and g-loaded test of them all. The increases on Raven’s have been due to modern education methods and living in a high-tech modern society. We know this due to multivariate analysis.

IQ is indeed highly influenced by education. Many of the Flynn rises we have been seeing on IQ tests in the past century seem to be due to education. As a population gets more and more educated, they start getting high Flynn rises in their IQ scores. Studies in Dominica and Kenya have born this out well. Also new ways of teaching mathematics have caused Flynn rises all over the world, possibly due to a direct effect on the developing brain.

Indian Morality Compared to American Morality

Jaipal writes:

By the way, speaking of morals and whatnot, what morals does Western society increasingly have?

Skyrocketing divorce rates, with no real family values or respect for the basic functional unit of society, namely the family.

Out-of-Wedlock births and a growing bastard population,
increasing welfare dependency parasites on the dole, a drug and gun culture where a shooting now takes place  every now and then?

Growing Christian Evangelism which emphasizes irrationality over reason like the creationism versus evolution debate.

What about gay marriage permissiveness. Should be the last to talk about morals!

Surely the low morals of America are vastly trumped by the devastatingly low morals of Indians. As humans, Indians are probably by far some of the morally lowest humans on the face of the Earth.

1. Of all humans on Earth, no humans care less about their fellow man than Indians. This is the most serious form of condemnation. Further, India has always been this way. As far back as we can go in history, Indians have never cared one whit about their fellow man.

2. One of the most viciously racist societies on Earth. India has actually instituted the most cruel and savage racism into every single crevice of its society in the form of the caste system. Is India the most racist society on Earth? In terms of the racist abuse doled out to its citizens, it may well be. In racist terms, what you have in India is nearly an entire nation of Nazi-like racists. And it is no wonder that Indians have long revered Hitler and the 3rd Reich.

3. Callous abuse of women. Of all societies on Earth, women are less safe in India than most other countries. Rapes are out of control, and possibly this has been the case for hundreds of years. For millenia, widows were set on fire on the streets of India. There are many 1000′s of cruel and horrific dowry murders of women every year in India. These murders are supported by the majority of the Indian people.

4. Child abuse. There is a long standing tradition of child abuse in India, actually sanctioned by Hindu priests. Hindu temples have been havens for the open sexual abuse of female children and even boys for hundreds of years. There are almost no arrests for these crimes, and they continue in vast numbers to this very day.

5. Slavery. Everywhere you look in India, you see frank and obvious slavery. Many millions of Indians are slaves, bonded into unpaid labor to higher castes for perpetuity. Many children are also slaves. Most of the women in Indian brothels are sex slaves, trafficked into slavery.

6. Callous abuse of traffic laws. There are few traffic laws in India, and what laws there are are violated by almost everyone. This is one of the worst countries on Earth to be a driver of a vehicle or a pedestrian on foot or bicycle. Indian drivers simply do not care and will gladly run into or over any pedestrian or bicyclist who gets in their way. There is no consideration of other drivers, and you take your life in your hands every time you step on the gas.

7. Widespread fraud, thievery and scamming. India has a business community in which ethics are nearly nonexistent. Indian businessmen constantly steal from each other, so no one trusts each other. There are no criminal prosecutions for fraud because all Indian politicians are criminals themselves. You can pursue the civil suit route, but it will take years to decades. Most Indian judges are corrupt criminals themselves, so there is no guarantee of any justice.

8. Corruption everywhere. Whether there is a single honest politician anywhere in India would be a great question. It is automatically assumed that all or nearly all politicians are criminals. This level of governmental crime is not seen much in the world outside of parts of Africa.

9. The worst starvation on Earth. India has the worst malnutrition and starvation figures on Earth. The only country that is worse is Ethiopia, and they live in the desert. Indians starve because their fellow Indians don’t care whether they starve or not or whether they live or die. India grows enough food to feed all of its people, but it is not distributed properly. Indian government programs to feed the poor are handed over to corrupt locals. Probably 95% of the food aid is then stolen by these locals and diverted to the open market.

10. A medical system based on callous abuse of the sick and dying. There are few places on Earth where you have to pay the doctor to keep you alive. India is one of those places. If you don’t pay the doctor, you get no treatment. You either live or die, or get better or worse. The only way to assure that you get any kind of treatment of all is to pay off the doctor-criminal.

11. Shit and piss everywhere. 600 million Indians lack toilets, so half a billion Indians shit and piss outdoors every day. The sidewalks and fields of India are covered with shit. It is difficult to walk in many Indian cities because there are shits everywhere you step on the ground.

Indian men piss openly, often on walls of cities. Many walls in cities smell horrifically of piss. If you look around big Indian city in the daytime, you will see city walls along sidewalks with dozens to scores of men lined up pissing on the wall. The piss rolls off the wall, down the sidewalk and into the gutters. The rich and middle class walk by carrying briefcases and care nothing whatsoever about the men pissing right next to them. No one will give these poor wretches toilets or build pubic restrooms because the Indians that have money don’t want any of it going to poor people, and the Indian state exists to serve the rich and only the rich, forever.

12. The most horrific beggars anywhere on Earth. In any Indian city, you will see beggars. You will see young boys, completely covered in shit, trying to steal food to survive. You will see men and women living on the streets, covered in in filth and degradation. You will see human skeletons everywhere, begging for food. If you give any of these wretches food, many Indians will rush up to and demand to know why you gave food to the “scumbag beggar.” According to Indians, giving food to beggars “only encourages them.” Instead of giving it to him, you should have given it to them instead.

13. If you go to the Indian holy city on the Ganges, you will see countless Indians drinking, bathing and swimming in the filthiest river the world has ever seen. Dead bodies float everywhere on the river, bloated, rotting, sickening. Crows perch on the bodies, gnawing on the dead. The rotting bodies loll up onto shore, where packs of roving dogs hound in on them and feast on the rotten corpses. This is India. This is the holiest city in all of India, the holiest city in Hinduism, the citadel of Hindu India.

14. Crabs in a barrel, dog eat dog, the law of the jungle. India has been this way as far back as anyone can remember. This is normal for India. Every man for himself, fuck everyone but me and mine. India is a nation of 1.2 million Mitt Romneys.

15. Nonexistent schools. Many villages lack schools. The state is only for the rich, so they don’t want to build villages for the poor. In many Indian villages, the schools have no toilets, so the children shit and piss outside all through the day. In many of these schools, the teachers simply never show up. They collect a paycheck for many years, but they never spend a day in class. This situation often goes on for many years.

16. The worst religion on Earth. One reason why Hinduism is the worst religion can be exemplified by Hindu temples. All Christian churches, especially Catholic churches, are mandated to give many to most donations to the poor. The churches also raise money to serve the poor. Mosques are also mandated to serve the poor.

Muslims must tithe a certain portion of income to the mosque, which is then distributed to the needy. Mohammad himself mandated this tithe and the destination of its funds. Mosques and Islamist groups often run all manner of social services agencies from schools to day care to hospitals for services for the poor and needy. Islam is essentially a socialist religion, and this impulse dates back to Mohammad himself, who was actually a bit of a 7th century socialist.

Buddhist societies have cultures that mandate a lot of distribution of income to the poor and needy. Buddhism is at core a socialist or Communist religion, which is why forms of these economic systems were easily implemented in Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, China, Korea and Japan.

In contrast, the Indian rich give their money to Hindu temples with the comforting knowledge that not one penny of those riches will ever go to the poor. For the Indian rich, if any of their money went to the poor it would be seen as wasted. So all of their money goes to the temple instead. Hindu temples accumulate vast riches, but not one dime of it goes to the poor. For the Indian Hindu, this curious dispensation is the proper one.

One gives money to the temple in the pagan tradition of trying to buy favors from the Gods. You give the Gods money, and they give you stuff and money in return. It’s analogous to the buying of indulgences in Medieval Catholicism, and it’s as corrupt, backwards and primitive as human religion gets.

*****

As you can see, America has none of these problems. Sure, American society has some serious moral transgressions, but at its core, it is a profoundly more decent, moral, cleanly and functional society than we see in India. America is a much more moral society than India, though things are on a downswing. India is much more morally degenerate.

America is a more moral country because Americans are morally superior people. India is a depraved and vicious country because Indians are immoral, savage and animal-like people.

Societies are a reflection of the people who live in and create them. Mexicans created Mexico. Mexico blows for one reason and one reason only. Mexico blows because it’s full of Mexicans. Everywhere a Mexican goes in the world, he can only recreate the disaster that is Mexico. This is because this is what his culture has programmed him to do.

80% of Mexico wants to come to America. If we let 90 million more Mexicans flood our heaving shores, America will become Mexico North by default.

400 million Indians want to come to the US. If we give in and let them in, America, the shining city on the hill, will be gone. In its place will be Calcutta from sea to shining sea.

The Invisible Hand of Starvation

Repost from the old site.

There are not many people in the US more dishonest than libertarians and Cuban exiles. Combine the two in one article, like this one here, and you get a perfect storm of prevarication and sophistry mostly in terms of selective fact-picking, lies of omission and failure to present a balanced picture.

Read an article like that, and you think that Batista’s Cuba was paradise and that Castro has destroyed a beautiful country. In fact, if you ask an average American about Cuba, this is probably what they will tell you.

The rightwing capitalist media in the US lies about few things more than Communism and socialism. There is almost nothing more threatening to them than a system that has seriously restrained the privileges of capital, so they pull out all the stops in terms of shameless lying in the Brainwash War to make sure this idea does not get too popular with Americas.

Not only do they want to kill the idea here, they want to kill it the world over. Every Communist country has had a devastating US-led blockade slammed on it, and at the same time, most either had some Contra-war waged against them or were forced to spend vast sums on their militaries due to continuous US threats of war against them.

Hence, we do not really know how well Communism works in praxis, since it has always been constrained by these devastating strangulations and threats.

As I said, the link by Humberto Fontana plus Thomas Woods appears devastating to Castro.

But let us not go down the list and pick apart and respond to each and every factoid.

Let us look at just one variable – nutrition.

The Cuban regime has recently reduced malnutrition in Cuba to 2%, about the level it is at in most 1st World industrialized states. This is the lowest level in Latin America. That is a reduction from the 40% malnutrition rate under the capitalist Cuba the exiles love so much (see below).

The US capitalist media continuously refers to Cubans, one of the most well-fed populations in Latin America (the second best-fed in the region in 1983)¹ as “starving”. The people who were starving lived in Batista’s Cuba, when 40% of the population was malnourished.²

Various studies of Cubans and nutrition were undertaken in the 1950′s. In 1956, 91% of the rural agricultural worker population was malnourished. The average ag worker was 16 pounds underweight and stunted in height. 35-40% (depending on the source) of the total Cuban population was malnourished. This manifested in weak and small bones, low resistance to disease and general weakness and fatigue.

Even in a middle class school population, 9% were undernourished. Malnutrition was rampant amongst Cuban children, along with various vitamin and mineral deficiencies. Lack of calcium had actually warped the skeletons of 11% of Cuban kids.³. In a public hospital in Havana in the 1950′s, 92% of the children had deficient diets.⁴

The state under Batista renounced its responsibility to feed the people, hence the poor, the rural areas, non-Whites, and the less educated all had deficient diets compared to the wealthier classes, the urban dwellers, the Whites and the more educated.⁵

In reports in the US rightwing press about Cuba, one constantly hears how the Cuban diet is “bland” and how the people complain because, tragicomically, they do not get to eat beef often enough. To the naive American reader, that sounds pretty bad.

Yet let us look at the situation for the families of Cuban agricultural workers under Batista, 40% of the population.

The following foods were only rarely consumed (compare to the heartrending tragedy of the modern Cubans who are denied their precious “beef”):

89% rarely drank milk
93% rarely ate corn
96%   "        meat*
96%+           bread
98%            eggs
100%           vegetables

*Any kind of meat, not just beef.

Notes

1. United States, Central Intelligence Agency. The Cuban Economy: A Statistical Review, ER 81-10052/PA, March 1981, p. 45.

2. Handelman, H., Cuban Food Policy and Popular Nutritional Levels, Cuban Studies, July 1981, p. 129.

3. Valdés, Nelson P., Health and Revolution in Cuba, Science and Society, Vol. 35, No. 3, Fall, 1971, pp. 313-314.

4. Domínguez, Jorge, Cuba Order and Revolution, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978, p. 224.

5. Aballi, Arturo J., Distrofias infantiles en nuestro medio, Revista Cubana de Pediatría, Vol. 30, No. 9, September 1958.

“The Truth and the Mirages,” by Luis Sexto

This is a great article. One of the lies of the gusanos (the Cuban exiles of Miami and elsewhere) is that in 1958, before the Revolution, Cuba had one of the most enviable economies in the region, if not in the 3rd World. They throw all sorts of statistics at us to illustrate this. However, this article shows what a lie this is.

It is especially true in the rural areas.

Pre-revolution, 88% of rural residents had no electricity. Now 95% of Cubans have electricity. 85% had no indoor plumbing or access to safe water. Over 95% never ate meat, fish or eggs. 88% never drank milk. Now all Cubans eat even in the rural areas drink milk and eat eggs, fish and meat. Many eat these items every single day. Most Cubans never saw a doctor even once in their lives. Now all have regular doctor visits.

The economy was not diversified. 80% of the economy was sugar-based. The Revolution diversified the economy for the first time ever. 30% of Cubans were illiterate. Now all are literate. 60% of the highways in the land were built after the Revolution. The Revolution simply developed the country, bottom line.

There was terrible inequality in the rural ares. 1.5% of the population owned 41% of the land. This terrible land concentration is typical of Latin America and is the cause of many or even most of the region’s problems. It’s all about land and the hunger for land.

Granted, there are serious problems with the model, but the achievements of the revolution are real.

The truth and the Mirages

By Luis Sexto

From his blog Patria y Humanidad

HAVANA Those who still insist that Cuba had one of the “most enviable” economies in Latin America before 1959 risk suffering the fate of Lot’s wife: they could turn into statues of salt.

Talking is not writing, of course. And sometimes we write what we say. Therefore, in that mechanical transfer from the spoken word to the printed page, we take it for granted that affirming something is enough to ensure that we’re saying the truth: it needs no demonstration.

Myself, I won’t say “I believe” or “it seems to me” to assure you that the Cuban economy in the 1950s and earlier was neither enviable nor envied. And I can claim that based on personal experience: my family was not middle-class, did not read LIFE magazine or the Diario de la Marina, did not go to the Varadero resorts or ate in restaurants. It didn’t even buy a ham-and-pork sandwich “with everything on it.”

If I had an education, it was thanks to a paternal aunt whose connections with the Salesian Brothers enabled her to get a scholarship from the Public Assistance Corporation for her nephew, a devoted reader.

To avoid in my confessions the mirages of subjectivity, I shall go to the fundamental documents, so you may understand why the old days were not better than today. I won’t be original. I shall simply recall what people forget with great ease, because judging the past depends on one’s social standing yesterday and one’s ideology and interests today.

I shall quote from the survey done by the University Catholic Group (ACU) titled “Why the Agrarian Reform Was Applied to the Rural Population of Cuba Between 1956 and 1957.”

I won’t burden you with figures. I’ll take long steps, go to the basics. And the first apodictic statement cited in the ACU survey comes from Dr. José Ignacio Lazaga, whom I knew as a psychologist and, in those years, an outstanding lay Catholic.

At one of the meetings about the survey, he said: “In all my travels through Europe, America and Africa, seldom did I find peasants who lived in worse conditions than the Cuban farmer.”

The preface to the survey (which was done to warn about the danger of communism if the situation of poverty continued) also says:

“The city of Havana is going through an era of extraordinary prosperity, while the countryside especially the farm workers is living under conditions of stagnation, misery and desperation that are hard to believe.”

That situation was illustrated with the following data:

The farm population, which is estimated at 350,000 workers and 2 million 100,000 people, earns only 190 million pesos a year. In other words, despite the fact that farmers constitute 34 percent of the population, they earn only 10 percent of the nation’s revenues.”

The survey’s organizers, many of whom emigrated after the triumph of the Revolution, confirmed their data with those of the 1953 national census of population and housing. For example, the ACU survey said that 89.84 percent of the respondents lit their homes with “glowing light,” i.e. kerosene. The census figure was 85.53 percent. It also said 88.52 percent drank well water, while the census reported 83.59 percent.

In terms of nourishment, the following figures should suffice: “Only 4 percent mention meat as part of the habitual rations. Fish is reported by fewer than 1 percent. Eggs are consumed by 2.12 percent of farm workers; milk, by 11.22 percent.” As to health, “presumably 14 percent suffers from (or has suffered from) tuberculosis.”

So much for the testimony of the University Catholic Group. Readers who are interested in confirming the data or learning more should access here where it appears, edited by José Álvarez, a University of Florida professor. The survey is also in my personal library and in the Library of Congress of the United States.

There is more, because the documents that belie the descriptions of “enviable” and “buoyant” attributed to the Cuban economy before 1959 are not all alike. The “Memorandum of the Agricultural Census of 1946,” and media outlets like the magazine Bohemia blame economic dependence, the concentration of property and foreign interference in our economy.

The 1946 agricultural census shows that “the proprietors of more than 500 hectares represent only 1.5 percent of the number of farms and owned 41.7 percent of the total surface.”

Add to the Cuban economy of the time the single crop that made Cuba a mono-exporting country. In 1948, as expert Raúl Cepero Bonilla wrote in the newspaper Time in Cuba, sugar accounted for 80 percent of Cuba’s exports. In sum, total reliance on one product, with everything that that implied in industrial and farm backwardness, as well as subservience to the United States market, with its sequel in political and economic dependence.

The latest-model cars, luxurious hotels and casinos managed by the U.S. mafia (confirmed by the permanent residence in Cuba of Meyer Lansky, George Raft and even Lucky Luciano for several months) and 100,000 prostitutes servicing sexual appetites throughout the country do not mean a buoyant economy.

Rather, that evaluation is made by the middle and high class, composed of 550 big landowners, according to the book Proprietors in Cuba in 1958, by Guillermo Jiménez (Social Sciences Press, 2008).

They and their employees and the employees of the sugar mills or other foreign companies and the owners of laboratories, shops, advertising companies, stores and small factories could today appraise Cuba with a nostalgia that only misses the individual and familiar space and their comfortable insertion in that distorted economy, basically controlled by foreign capital.

Now then, to talk about politics, in the words of Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff, we must start from an ethical perspective, recognizing the truth. Otherwise, the debate will make no sense.

The Cuban revolution tried to change that picture and did so in part. At least in terms of social justice, it taught reading and writing to the 30 percent of the nation that was illiterate; drew up 60 percent of the highways; raised the average life span to 76 years; eliminated endemic diseases; graduated more than half a million university students; diversified agricultural and industrial production, and electrified 95 percent of the archipelago.

Much deteriorated or was poorly built. I won’t deny that. As viewed from here, the model was wrong, a model imposed by an unavoidable circumstance: because the U.S. raised its fist in a threatening gesture, the Revolutionary Government had to accept the hand stretched out by the Soviet Union.

As I see it, the divorce between those who oppose the persistence of the ideals of the revolution and those who support them boils down to this: on that side, they exalt a past that to them deserves a comeback; to us, preventing that comeback will always be the greatest achievement.

We talk about rebuilding an economy that’s rich in social justice and independence. What do the others want?

ACN: FAO Director Praises Cuban Food Safety

This is what I mean by Cuba’s achievements. In all of Latin America, Cuba is the only country in the region to eliminate severe child malnutrition. That’s a real achievement! And why, pray tell, should any child in any country suffer malnutrition, much less severe malnutrition? Give me a reason, quick, give me a reason. Can you come up with one.

This shows the failure of the free market capitalist system in the region. For all the bullshit about “prosperity,” they can’t even feed their own damned kids. Screw “prosperity.” What good is “prosperity” if you can’t even feed your nation’s children. It’s worthless!

In the lying mainstream media, you will see a lot of articles about Cuba. They often write about the food situation there, describing it as horrible. They talk about how people run around a good part of the day trying to buy food. And they have a saying, “Pollo por pescado.” Oh poor babies! On some days, they can’t find any fish, so the poor darlings have to suffer and eat chicken instead. Good Lord, call 911! This is an emergency!

How many Americans even eat meat every day. I don’t make enough money to buy meat every day. I don’t even eat meat every day myself. I’m worse off than a Cuban! How many Americans are like me?

You will also read things that say “while many are hungry, no one is starving.” This is crap. No one in Cuba is hungry, no one, not one person. There are more hungry people per capita in the US than in Cuba. There’s plenty of food for everyone. Cubans eat 3000 calories a day. That’s more than enough food. In fact, they are even developing an obesity problem because they eat too much.

International Organization Praises Cuban Food Safety

HAVANA, Cuba, Oct 23 Raul Benitez, director for Latin America and the Caribbean of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), stated that Cuba maintains a privileged place in the struggle against lack of food safety.

Benitez highlighted the island as an example of the reduction of hunger and malnutrition due to the successful struggle it has undertaken against these scourges, explained the official in statements reproduced on Tuesday by the Italian ANSA news agency.

The only figure we accept in this moment in terms of hunger for Latin America is zero, said Benitez, a participant in Medellin, Colombia, in the 2nd Summit of Regions of the World on Food Safety, which wound up on Tuesday.

Among Cuba’s results, he stressed that it’s the only nation in the area that has eliminated severe child malnutrition, according to a report of the United Nations Children’s Fund of 2009.

This is due to the efforts of the government to improve the diet of the people, particularly that of the most vulnerable groups, points out the document.

“India a Self Deluded Nation,” By Raghu Dayal

Great article about what a shithole India is which goes into the various reasons we have discussed in the past for India’s shitholeness.

One wonders, though, why.

Apparently India’s education fails completely. Even higher education does not function at all. The graduates are crap. The Indian state spends almost nothing on education, which means that society thinks it is a low priority. But why is it that one goes to a 4 year college and comes out with a defective education? What’s that all about? Why does so little learning take place even at the tertiary level?

Cheating is apparently endemic. India appears to be basically a society of cheaters. Not to mention liars and thieves.

When Indian immigrants come to the US, they bring the culture of cheating, lying and thieving into the workplace as employees or as business owners.

The reputation of Indian businessmen among US businessmen is very low. They are regarded with the same contempt Jews used to be. No one wants to negotiate with them or do business with them. “The Indian will take you for everything you’ve got.” I hear this a lot from people who do business with Indians, but then I hear similar things about Chinese “businessmen.”

We already know why India spends so little on healthcare. In a society without any conception of the common good, almost no money will be spent on health care.

This is also why so many are starving while the middle and upper classes get obese and diabetic. The starving are “those people,” and according to Hinduism, they deserve their fate. The Indian middle and upper classes seem like a nation of Mitt Romneys. “Let them eat cake,” the Indian bourgeois cries.

That the Indian political class is utterly corrupt goes without saying. But we wonder why once again. Does it go back to no conception of the common good once again. In a society with no conception of the common good, how does this lead to an ultra-criminal political class?

The justice system apparently does not even function at all, but why is this? Society doesn’t feel like spending any money to have a functional justice system? And why is this? Because society itself has no sense of justice whatsoever?

The blatant misogyny of course is culturally embedded, but it shows no signs of change, apparently because misogyny is so embedded in Indian culture that no one wants to change it.

All of the mess below is the product of a shit culture. Society flows from culture. If your society sucks, then quite probably it’s because your culture sucks. In conversations with Indians, they rarely want to change Indian culture. This is particularly true with Indian Hindus. Everything is fine, and nothing needs to change. It’s all good. Shining India and all that.

Change flows from self-reflection. In order to change your society, you have to face the fact that it’s crap and needs changing in the first place. It’s Stage One that Indians never get to.

India a Self Deluded Nation

By Raghu Dayal

A land of myths, India takes mythology rather seriously till some myth-buster jolts it down to reality. We have often deluded ourselves that we are intellectually up there with the best in the world till the OECD-conducted PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) of 15 year school children had Indian students scoring second from the bottom, only ahead of Kyrgyzstan, among half a million students from 73 countries.

While the PISA ranking laid bare India’s poor school education, the 2012 QS (Quacquarelli Symonds) World University rankings include none of Indian universities or institutes among world’s top 200. China has seven in the top 200 list. India has over 26,000 higher education institutes with 15 million students on rolls; a survey has found 92% of their graduates are deficient in programming or algorithms and 78% of them falter in English.

Although there are more children in school, they are now learning less. As per Annual Survey of Education 2011, only 48% of class V children are able to read a class II text, and less than 30% of those in class III can do a 2-digit sum. Some 1.25 crore students come to the job market every year who have no skills. Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen is at pains to lament, “education in India is in peril”.

Mere enunciation of rights to education can be no solution. Andre Beteille termed the UPA move as “the Marie Antoinette Solution” – “they don’t have schools, so give them rights…” India’s high growth potential is largely predicated by its assumed demographic dividend.

This very demography appears likely to end up as the Achilles’ heel and worse, with country’s youth remaining inadequately educated and trained. There is serious dearth of employable technicians – plumbers, carpenters, electricians. India’s 1.4 million schools are in need of 4 million new teachers and 8 million more to be retrained.

Like education, health too has been a sad story. As many as 130 million of Indians have no access to basic health care; as Census 2011 shows, half of country’s population defecate in the open; 20% of households have to travel more than half a km for drinking water; more than two-thirds of houses (87% rural, 26% urban) use firewood, crop residue, cow dung, coal.

The number of physicians per 1,000 population for the world is 1.5, for India it is 0.6; the number of hospital beds per 1,000 population in India is 0.9, much lower than the world average of 3.3. Almost 2 million children die in India before reaching their first birth day.

The country boasts of more than 30 million tonne of grains stacked, some of which in open for want of warehouses; yet 40% of its children are underweight and 70% anemic. According to a WHO 2000 estimate, of the annual 529,000 maternal deaths globally, 136,000 or about 26% of them occur in India.

Although some pockets of the country have experienced material gains, and people now live longer, no fewer than 37.5% of countrymen are reported to remain malnourished, 41.6% of them subsisting on less than $ 1.25/day (The World Development Report, 2012).

While, on one hand, the Global Hunger Index 2007 by International Food Policy Research Institute ranked India 96th among 119 countries, well below all its neighbors except Bangladesh, on the other hand, it imported 1,100 tonne of gold last year, valued at Rs 3.5 lakh crore.

When the wide world around said India had all the basic wherewithal of an emerging global economic powerhouse, we started behaving as if we were already there. The Pew Research Centre survey of 21 major economies just conducted has revealed how Indians have had their optimism faded, how they have lost faith in the Indian economy and its future. Along with a dysfunctional Parliament, country’s polity is mired in sleaze; a bumper crop of robber barons mulct the national wealth.

Albeit a vibrant democracy it claims to be, India remains torn by language, region, caste, religion, no less than by pockets of wealth. We took pride in the steel frame of governance we had; today, it is left to be a creaking bamboo frame.

Symptomatic of a major myth, some erudite commentators have found in Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson a facile belief that India would ultimately outpace China by dint of its inclusive political institutions, China being pulled back, as they perceive, because of its extractive political institutions.

This pervasive myth of the delusion of democracy, as in effect it is practiced in India, engenders only derision. More and more of us keep striving to become more equal than others. Money and muscle rule the roost. An Election Commission analysis revealed that no less than 40 among Hon’ble MP’s and 700 MLAs among the legislators had suffered criminal indictment.

India lays great stores by the world’s largest democracy it is with constitutional freedom of expression, yet it has no qualms in slapping a young cartoonist with a incredible charge of sedition.

India’s parliamentarians, notwithstanding their hysterical avowals of its sovereignty, meddle in the minutiae of deciding which textbooks will have what text or which cartoons, exposing the hollowness of our democracy. With more than 30 million cases pending in courts, up to 26 years old, it takes an average of 17 years to get a judicial decision.

What better embodiment of our enduring myths than Delhi being touted as world’s “most beautiful city”, or Mumbai outshining Shanghai, or, better still, Kolkata soon transforming, Mamata di-style, into “better than London”!

We generally like to believe nice things about ourselves – a kind of collective mythomania. We fancy ourselves as a tolerant society and yet we have cases like Rushdie, Taslima, M F Hussain, et al. We hold the teaching profession in reverence, yet we kill a teacher who says no to cheating.

We similarly give our parents a pedestal just short of godhead but countless cases occur of old parents being dispossessed, cheated, even murdered in property disputes.

We respect womanhood as nothing short of devi or Mother (yatra naryastu pujyante, ramante tatra devata) but cases of rape and other crimes against women, shameful treatment of girl child (in embryo and after birth) and the fact that no woman considers herself safe after dark in the capital of India show that this is the biggest myth of all.

We believe in welcoming tourists and visitors to our country (atithi devo bhava) but few such guests would ever revisit after the harrowing time we give them.

Rabindranath Tagore’s Tasher Desh has a message wherein citizens, who had lost their vitality and elan, and their capacity to respond to the rhythm of life, were played a magic flute whereupon their vitality flowed back. Some similar transformation India needs, a leader to play that magic flute, to turn some myths into reality.

India – Republic of Hunger

Here.

I am getting bashed in the comments by “cultural equivalence” White liberals and Leftists for bashing India. The implication is that I hate everything about it and everyone there. It’s not so. Just to look at this video.

The physician, prominently featured, who quit to set up his own NGO’s to fight hunger in India, a fine man. So are the resolute, determined and passionate altruistic young Indian men, university educated, who went to the countryside to fight hunger. So are the filmmakers. So is the woman in the Sari who works for the Indian Development Ministry.

I have much less passion for the female economist interviewed in the Western like food court. She’s clearly a neoliberal. “What we need is economic growth! That gets first priority! Not making sure humans have enough to eat so they don’t starve and die! That will all trickle down later!”

This is her crap mindset, and it’s the mindset of all of the Indian educated “liberal” upper, upper middle and middle classes. “Sure, feed the poor! But don’t tax me or hinder my middle class lifestyle to do it!” What a shit attitude that is!

I am not sure if the poorer masses are good people or not. I think most of them are, but a lot of them have a crap attitude too. In the video, they said that if you give grain straight to the masses, a lot of the poor and starving masses will simply sell the subsidized grain for profit and use the money for things other than food. It’s downright insane for poor and starving people to do that, but maybe that’s just the crap Indian mindset:

Money, status stuff > food, health and life.

That’s obviously the mindset of your typical middle to upper classes in the 3rd World toward their own poor, but it’s a pitiful culture where the poor adopt that bourgeois mindset directed as a weapon against them and turn that weapon suicidally on themselves.

The state distributes subsidized grain to merchants at the local level. The interview with the lying criminal who ran the government grain store was instructive. He said he was open every day, all day long.

They went back the next day and he was closed. A crowd of pitiful poor gathered (How could you not feel for them?) and said the man was a liar. Instead of being open every day all day long, instead he was open only one day a month, and he often made it hard to get grain. Apparently he was selling the subsidized grain on the open market for double or triple the price (he could easily get this since his own grain was marked down so badly).

And much of the state grain sent to feed the poor simply spoils instead of being distributed. This sort of failure is typically seen in Communist regimes, where crops often spoiled before they went to market (particularly the case in the USSR).

There is a lack of motivation for the local merchant to care about his grain crops. Apparently they were given to him for free, so he doesn’t care about them. Instead he collects a salary from the state, apparently for showing up every day, all day long. He collects that salary, but then only shows up one day a month (3% of the time). He takes the free grain and sells it on the open market for double or triple its worth.

One wonders if a more free market approach might work better. Almost no one is getting the grain this way. Perhaps the local merchants could buy the grain at the low price and then sell it at say a 20% markup, instead of the 100-200% markup he could get on the free market. It’s a lousy approach, but if it fed more poor locals it could be worth it more than the present approach.

The state distributes food to local schoolchildren as a free meal. But the children often refuse to eat the meal since it has bugs and worms in it. If they complain about the bugs and worms, the teacher yells at them, so they don’t complain. Instead they simply do not eat it. This is a program that is failing in a bad way. The food being served is contaminated with insects.

Cuba also feeds its people every day, but the food they get is not full of bugs. It’s obvious that the state can feed people food that’s not contaminated with insects. The Indian state simply doesn’t care enough to get the bugs out of its food.

One particularly glaring fact was that we are told that India produces enough food to feed its own people, yet it has the worst starvation figures on Earth (India’s figures are 150% worse than even North Korea’s).

Cuba has to import 67% of its food, but they still manage to feed their whole population with an average intake of around 3,000 calories per day and a rate of malnutrition of ~2% (effectively zero). So it can be done. If a state that imports the vast majority of its food can feed its people, surely a state that grows enough to feed itself can do so.

Looking at the scenes at the Indian middle classes, one wonders just how callous they are. I have dealt with many middle class Indians, and I was stunned at their callousness. They are worse even than the middle classes and elites of Latin America, and I thought they were bad.