Why The ETA Political Wing Was Banned

Repost from the old site.

I received an interesting email from one Gonzalo Polo (website here), a Spanish nationalist. I am publishing the parts of it that can be published here. I normally don’t post the names of emailers as it is a violation of Netiquette, but he issued a veiled threat to me, so he gets named. If you don’t want me to reveal contents of your mails, don’t threaten me.

I always supported the Basque and even Catalan separatist causes. In the Basque movement, I supported the armed wing called the ETA. This mail points out some less than flattering things about the ETA, so I am running it, and it also tells us some interesting stories about the history of the Iberian Peninsula.

I am posting it to provide another perspective to the National Question in Spain.

I still think that Spain should allow a referendum on independence, and that is really what this whole fight is all about. I understand that Spain will never hold this referendum, which makes me wonder when they crow that only a minority of Basques support separatism. So hold the referendum already. Truth is, I do not think that Spaniards are civilized enough to split up their nation.

Few nations are.

Only the former USSR and Czechoslovakia have broken up peacefully, with Quebec and and the UK showing a willingness at least. Spaniards have always been terribly intolerant as a people, a tradition like the peculiar one of church-burning that is proving hard to break.

At least the intolerance part is traced by Carroll Quigley back to the Arab occupation, said influence of which makes the area from Latin America across the Mediterranean to Pakistan the Peru-Pakistan Axis, as he calls it.

That much of Spain’s industry is in the Basque Region makes separatism supposedly lethal for Spain, but I doubt it. Spain is a mature and wealthy country and I think they could handle separatism just fine, but Spaniards are just too backwards to do it. I include the famously liberty-lovers the French in this backwardsness, and all of Asia, including those supposedly more highly evolved humans in Northeast Asia.

China is utterly insane when it comes to Tibet (as we saw in the past few days) and Taiwan, and in this way they are firmly in a backwards Asian tradition. Burma, Indonesia and India won’t tolerate separatism either, and the result has been horrible massacres and even genocides.

I suggest that a willingness to break up one’s country is the ultimate act of a civilized people, and it is a litmus test for seeing how civilized you are. By that test, most of the world fails except for some Europeans, but that makes sense. Europeans are the only people who will even try to play by the rules of war either.

The Catalans seem to be debating separatism in their media, and there are some interesting debates going on. One of them is revolving around the nature of the ethnic nationalism that Catalan nationalism is. There are good progressive arguments saying that all ethnic nationalism leads to some variety of fascism, since, like the anti-Semitism I discussed previously, the impulse has nowhere to go but to the Right.

Put another way, internationalism is language of the Left (yet note armed separatists are often Leftists) and nationalism is the language of the Right. It was only the stew of 70 years of internationalism that so wore down the nationalist sentiments of the USSR and enabled them to cleave off 15 republics with very little bloodshed.

There were bloody and fascist-like nation-building episodes in many of these new countries, but that’s just the normal nation-building experience, and if we had to deny the legitimacy of every nation that had ever done this, we would have few countries left on the globe.

It’s probable that that same evil Commie internationalism allowed the Czechoslovaks to separate so amicably. You can’t say that 43 years of Goulash Communism didn’t do any good at all.

Nationalism created the Axis in World War 2 and probably led to World War 1 too. All these fetishists of the state that demand states have their precious “monopoly on violence” and that all armed non-state actors surrender all arms immediately or be destroyed as “terrorists” might want to think that one over sometime. Note that the worst enemies of the Axis ultranationalists were the armed partisans, often Communists.

If you lurk around Internet fascist, Nazi or nationalist forums long enough (and I like to do this for a lark) you will notice that these types hate no one worse than Communists. As nationalists are often not members of the towering heights of capital, one wonders what all the fuss is about.

Fascists, and the nationalists who dress up like them once in a while, Halloween-like, hate Commies over the nationalism question. Commies are dubious, at best, about nationalism. The blood drenched soil of ethnic and Lazarus-like nationalism is the essence of fascism. That’s what the whole bloody Commie-fascist fight is all about in a nutshell.

There’s also the fact that fascism is a last-ditch effort of capital to preserve its privileges in the environment of a serious threat by the Left. The seriousness of the Left Threat provokes a deadly anti-Communist reaction in the fascist. Commies are no longer some ludicrous phantasm – they are marching in the streets – and we need to kill as many of them as possible and put the rest in jail.

It’s curious why more don’t support ethnic separatism. Ask an American, if you can get lucky and find one who even understands the concept, and 90% chances are they support the state and oppose the armed separatists everywhere on Earth. Most folks you meet on the Net are the same way.

But go to a separatist region and you will find large numbers who support separatism. It seems we are not empathizing well enough with the national aspirations of our brother humans.

That ethnic nationalism brings out the caveman in anyone is shown how the separatist Catalans are total nationalist pigs when it comes to granting the Occitan speakers their legitimate human rights.

The ETA political wing was banned (although their men were elected in the last elections to the Basque Parliament under another name, and therefore they act as deputies in the Basque Parliament and mayors in some villages) because they used the public money they earned to send it to the ETA, and also because they gathered information about politicians and submitted it to ETA.

They have decided to boycott Spanish elections so they do not present candidates.

The current President of the Basque Parliament (the moderate Basque PNV) and all political parties of Euskadi (including leftist radical but non-violent Basque parties) define the ETA as a terrorist group (the EU and the US also).

In the last general elections of Spain the political wing of ETA asked Basques not to vote. Even considering that in the villages where ETA supporters have more influence, that this means that if you vote you become a target, people who decided not to vote grew 10 per cent since last elections.

ETA murdered a retired socialist politician who walked in the streets along with his wife and daughter a day before the elections. He was a poor man who worked in a highway booth and handed tickets to the drivers. ETA political wing’s major of the village of Arrasate-Mondragon refused to condemn the assassination.

For this reason all the rest of the parties who governed the town in coalition with this party (including radical left parties) determined not to back her position. This means that there will be soon be another mayor in this town formed by a coalition of the rest of the parties.

For your information I would like to highlight that the PNV (the moderate Basque party) is so scared about the ETA that in the last Basque elections, they could not find candidates for some towns. The Spanish socialist and conservative parties found candidates and, for instance, Mrs. Regina Otaola (Otaola is a Basque name and she is 100% Basque) is the current mayor of Lizarra.

All socialist and moderate candidates in the Basque Country have bodyguards. The man who was murdered two days ago had no right to have a bodyguard because he retired from politics so he was an easy target.

I also would like to inform you that the population of the Basque country is diminishing, the reason being that about 1/3 to 1/4 of 100% Basques have determined to run away from their homeland – the reason being that they want their children to live in a non-violent atmosphere so they have moved to other regions of Spain, for instance my brother-in-law Mr. Aguirre Ormaetxea (100% Basque).

For your information, the language spoken in Galicia is not a dialect of Portuguese, although both languages have a common origin. In the 8th century the Arabs invaded the entire Iberian Peninsula except the mountains of the north. Only the mountains of the North of Spain from Galicia to Catalonia were not invaded.

The original Spaniards (a blend of races and peoples united under the Roman Empire and highly sophisticated at that time, as opposed to people from Northern Europe) started to recover territory from North to South.

Little kingdoms such as Portugal, Castilla, Navarra, Leon and Aragon started to fight Arabs. Galicians joined the kingdom of Leon and Portuguese created the kingdom of Portugal.

Catalonia at that time was invaded by the Emperor of the Sacred Roman Empire, a German emperor of the tribe of the Francs who controlled France and Germany under the blessing of the Pope. The Catholic Church maintained the fiction that the Roman Empire was still alive.

Catalans expelled the Francs from the Hispanic Mark (the name of Catalonia at that time that included a province that nowadays belongs to France) and joined the kingdom of Aragon (a big kingdom that nowadays covers the regions of Aragon, Catalonia, Majorca and Valencia). The French Catalans do not have a Catalan department; Catalans have no rights as a minority in France.

The valley of Aran is part of the province of Lerida (Catalonia), although it is located in the Northern part of the Pyrenees Mountains. People from Aran speak an Occitan (Langue d’Oc) dialect similar to the one was spoken in all Provence before the Germanic tribes imposed French (the former Langue d’Oil that was spoken in Norther France).

Occitan is not spoken nowadays in France. The nationalist Catalan parties do not allow the Aranese language to be taught at school, and they force children to learn Catalan instead of their native language.

The Catalan and Spanish languages are spoken in all the Mediterranean coast from the Border of France to the region of Murcia (including the Balearic Islands). Catalan was never spoken in the current region of Aragon except in the border with Catalonia where children are able to learn the Catalan language thanks to the Aragon Government.

In the Regions of Majorca and Valencia, Catalan is freely spoken as well as Castilian. The people of these regions vote PP or PSOE – Spanish conservative or socialist parties. In the last general elections, the winning party was the Socialist Party, and nationalist CIU party obtained only 11 seats. Furthermore, the president of the Catalonian Parliament is also a socialist.

Catalan radical nationalists pretend to create a new country that would include the regions of Catalonia, Valencia and Majorca together with French Catalonia. French Catalans, Valencians and people from Majorca want to remain in Spain and dislike Catalan imperialism.

I would also like to point out that Guernica is a painting the Republican Legitimate Spanish Government asked Picasso (Picasso was born in Andalusia, namely in Malaga) to paint in order to show the world the horrors of the Spanish Civil War. Once the painting was finished, it was shown for the first time in the Universal Expo of New York, namely in the Spanish pavilion.

The US government refused to return the painting to Spain once the war was over, and it remained in the Metropolitan until Franco died. I would like to point you out that around one million people died in the Spanish Civil War. Guernica was bombed by the Germans, but many other Spanish towns were also bombed and destroyed by the Russians.

I would like to highlight that neither the US nor the European democracies helped the Republican Government of Spain because they were scared about Hitler so they preferred not to see what it was happening except for Germany (who backed Franco) and Russia (who backed Republicans.)

Once the Civil War was over, many republicans ran away from Spain and stayed for years in concentration camps in France (my grandfather among others).

Many democrats felt that the US and the European democracies were acting in bad faith, so many people (like Hemingway) came to Spain to fight as volunteers with the Republic.

P.S. In a recent poll published by The Economist, you can read that only between 1/4 and 1/3 of Spanish Basques back independence. In the last elections to Spanish parliament Basque PNV party obtained only 300,000 votes in the Basque Country.

When White Nationalists Complain About Jews

Repost from the old site.

Problem is, there is almost no way to do this without sounding like this guy.

German nationalism probably only dates to the 1880′s, and Italian, Russian and Pan-Slavic nationalism barely to the turn of the century.

Otherwise, nationalism in the modern sense really only arose in Europe with the French Revolution (though it was present first in England in the 1600′s with the defeat of the Spanish Armada), but it took the other nations mostly until the end of the century to adopt nationalism. Modern European nationalism is a relatively new phenomenon.

These modern nationalists pretty quickly took an interest in race, along with the usual volkisch blood and soil bullshit. And most European nationalists agreed on one thing: the Jew was no good.

More recently, in the very early 20th Century, Nordicism began to evolve in Germany and in the US and the UK. I once had a copy of a proto-Nazi book by a German race scientist delineating all of the races in Europe and the surrounding area detailed down to the last detail. It was published in 1918.

This newer nationalism transcended the older nationalism of the one nation in an attempt to unite all Northwestern Europeans under some sort of a superior Nordic or White Race. At the same time, pan-Slavism and even Islamism developed (Yes, modern Islamism only dates to around 1900 or so).

Southern Europeans were quickly defined out of the equation by Nordicists, especially in the US where they were widely despised, but Hitler actually put Meds second only to Nordics. He hated Slavs, but this was mostly because he said they were a “slave race”.

They were a slave race apparently because they had allowed themselves to be enslaved by Jews in the form of Jewish Bolshevism or Communism. The fascists’ main beef with Communists was that the Communists tended to be anti-nationalist.

And it’s simple to see why Jews have been in the forefront of seeing that White ethnic consciousness or nationalism is dead and buried forever.

This is why the anti-racists (who, granted, do bash away at Whites) are so often Jewish. This is why Noel Ignatiev has founded an organization to make Whites go away forever. This is why Tim Wise exists. This is why Jews so often decline to identify as White. This is why there are so many Jews on the board of the NAACP. This is why Jews pushed the 1965 Immigration Act and could well be why they pushed civil rights so hard.

Let’s face it: it’s hard to believe that US Jews really care about civil rights while they supported their KKK-Jewish brethren in Israel. Forget it. There must be another motive.

All of this Jewish behavior made the White Pride crowd dislike Jews more and more with every punch in the ring.

Anti-Semitism is not monolithic; some of it is pretty harmless stuff. But when you start talking about your blond hair and blue eyes and your White race and White blood and then start slamming away at Jews, people, especially Jewish people, do tend to see historical parallels that are not necessarily present in other anti-Semitic brands.

And who could blame them?

The Basque Independence Movement

Repost from the old site.

Although it is not a popular cause in the US, this blog strongly supports the armed struggle of ETA, the armed Basque nationalist Red front. The Basque cause is very poorly known in the US and probably in most of the rest of the world, hence, here is a bit of a primer.

The Basque people are probably the last remaining group of the original populations that inhabited Europe before the Indo-European (IE) invasion and conquest about 8000 years ago. The best theory indicates that the IE people probably came out of the southern Ukraine near the Black Sea.

Their first stop was Anatolia, and this is why the Hittite languages (ancient languages of Anatolia, or Turkey) are by far the most divergent languages in the IE language family.

In fact, I subscribe to a controversial theory that renames Indo-European as Indo-Hittite due to this deep split. For those who don’t know about the IE language family, IE, or proto-IE (PIE), was the mother tongue of most of the languages of Europe.

European languages in the IE family include English, German, French, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Irish, Welsh, Scots Gaelic, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian, Czech, Slovak, Bulgarian, Romanian, Moldavian, Albanian, Slovenian, Greek, Serbo-Croatian, Lithuanian and Latvian and some lesser-known ones.

A few tongues in Europe are non-IE, such as Finnish, Hungarian, Turkish, Estonian and Basque. Outside of Europe, we have some other IE languages in some pretty distant places, including Kurdish, Persian, Hindi, Urdu, Pashto, Sanskrit and a variety of languages related to them that are not well known by Westerners.

Apparently a divergent group of PIE left the PIE homeland and moved into the area of India, Iran and Afghanistan thousands of years ago.

Before the IE people spread out over Europe 8000 years ago, Europe was home to a variety of peoples who are very poorly known. Almost nothing is known about their civilizations (such as they existed), who they were, what they did, how they lived, what they ate, much less what languages they spoke.

The original inhabitants of Europe at this time weren’t Cro-Magnons, but they weren’t exactly Manhattan metrosexuals with cell phones either. After the IE people spread out across Europe, they apparently displaced, intermarried with, or wiped out almost all of the indigenous people of Europe.

One group that held out for a while were the Etruscans, residents of Italy. We actually have some retained some scraps of the Etruscan language somehow, but it doesn’t seem obviously related to anything else. The only other group that held out was apparently the Basques.

The theory that the Basques are the last remaining original inhabitants of Europe has long been a popular theory based on the fact that the Basque language is unlike any other language in Europe, or, really, in the world. Formally, Basque is considered to be a language isolate – not related to any other language.

However, I believe, based on very controversial theories, that Basque is related to some languages of the Caucasus (such as Chechen), an obscure group of Siberian tongues known as the Ket Family, an obscure language in far northern Pakistan called Burushaski, and also to the vast Sino-Tibetan family, of which Chinese is the most famous member.

Basque seems to me to be closest to various Caucasian languages. The latest genetic research has shown that the Basques have a blood type frequency that is divergent from all other populations in Europe. Interestingly, the closest people with this blood frequency are in the Caucasus Mountains.

In their mountain hideaways, the rugged Basques fought off many intruders and managed to keep a lot of other conquerors out of their hair with a hands-off attitude. Although the Romans conquered the area, they basically left the Basques pretty much alone as too much hassle, a common attitude of many conquerors that came through the region.

The Basques converted to Christianity along with the rest of Europe, and are known for their passionate, conservative Catholicism. With the consolidation of the Spanish nation, the question of how to deal with the Basques came up. For centuries, most governments in Spain and France preferred to pretty much leave the Basques alone.

During the Spanish Civil War in 1936-39, the Basque Region was a hotbed of Communism, Socialism, Anarchism and all varieties of Leftism. It was a major Republican stronghold. The Spanish Anarchists even “ruled” parts of the Basque country for part of this time, probably the only time in history that any humans have ever lived under anarchist “rule”.

The Basques fought very hard against fascism. Picasso’s famous “Guernica” painting is a painting of the Franco-Nazi air raid on the city of Guernica in the Basque Country, a raid that killed 6,000 people and outraged the world. A Basque Communist female fighter named “La Passionara” became quite famous.

The flood of Nazi guns was too much for the Republicans. The Republicans lost the war and fascism, in the persona of Generalissimo Franco, came to Spain. During World War 2, many Basques fought for the resistance against the Nazis, especially in France. The Basque region was known as a major redoubt and rear base for the French resistance.

When Franco came to power, a new chapter of history opened for the Basque struggle. Franco tried to consolidate Spain as no ruler ever had before. He demanded that all regional minorities adopt a “Spanish” mindset, language and loyalty. He ferociously tried to wipe out all vestiges of the Basque, Catalan and Galician languages and cultures.

Catalans speak a Romance language in between Spanish and French and live along the southern coast of Spain by the French border in and around Barcelona. The Romance family is a subfamily of IE that is derived from Latin. Romance includes Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, Catalan, Sardinian, Corsican, Romansh (an obscure language in Switzerland) and some lesser-known tongues.

Galicians speak a dialect of Portuguese, believe it or not, and live along the rocky northern coast of Spain by the border with Portugal. Many Galicians are fishermen.

The Basque people resisted Franco for a while, but he put many of them in prison and really hurt the Basque movement. In 1959, a faction broke away from the Basque Nationalist Movement, formed the ETA, and took up arms.

They planted several bombs in Spanish cities that year. In 1968 , the ETA officially adopted armed struggle. The insurgency has been going on for 46 years now, though it is not as strong as it used to be.

Hardly any Americans realize the significant level of support for even the armed insurgency in the Basque country of Spain. As of a few years ago, there were regular street protests and even riots, as young nationalists run amok through the streets, smashing stuff and writing graffiti.

I have seen video footage in the past decade of very militant pro-ETA rallies in the Basqueland with large crowds of supporters milling around.

Many folks you would consider to be regular folks – middle-class people who dress well, drive nice cars and have good jobs – are strong supporters of even the armed Basque movement. It’s quite a shock to see dowdy-looking housewife types and middle-aged office workers with potbellies angrily waving banners supporting the ETA bombers.

Yet this is the reality of popular support for Basque nationalism, even the armed wing, in the Basque Country. Although Batasuna, the political wing of the ETA, was banned recently, another party took its place and garnered around 15-20% of the vote. Total support for complete independence in the Basque Country or Euskara, as they call it, is around 35-40%, or possibly higher, in my opinion.

Note: I just spoke to a German Communist friend of mine about the support level for the independence movement in Basqueland. Here is what he said: “Oh, I think almost all Basques support full independence. And even many Spanish migrants in Basqueland don’t really oppose the ETA or the independence movement.”

Note the presence of Spanish migrants who have moved into the Basque Country, mostly to take jobs. They are really the wild card in any poll about levels of independence support in Basqueland.

What is the struggle about, anyway? Well, a significant number of the Basque people (maybe almost 100% – see above) want independence from Spain.

Possibly a lesser number desire independence from France, but the struggle in French Basqueland is another matter and beyond the scope of this post. The Spanish government has always refused to hold a referendum on independence for Euskara, a key Basque demand.

The Czech Republic split from Slovakia, referendums have been held on independence in Scotland and Quebec, and yet Spain bucks the tide in the civilized world. The economy is surely a stickler. The Basque country holds much of Spain’s heavy industry, and how well Spain would fare economically after Basque succession is largely unknown. But it should at least be a subject of discussion, and Spain has put it out of limits.

As long as Spain refuses to provide a Basque referendum on independence, the Basque struggle, including probably the armed front, will go on. That’s all there is to it. Spain can end the insurgency tomorrow by opening peace talks with the ETA (Spain has never done this) and ultimately agreeing to hold a referendum on Basque independence.

An interesting sidelight to the Basque struggle is the role of women and feminism in the conflict. Some of the toughest ETA cadre have been women, often tougher than the men. And ETA male fighters, though nominally Marxist, have long been known to hold surprisingly conservative, Old World type views on the role of women in Basque society, opinions heavily tinged by conservative Catholicism.

From Rosa Luxembourg to the Holocaust

Our choice is socialism or barbarism.

- Rosa Luxembourg

Those words are as true today as when she said them in 1918.

By the way, Luxembourg was one of the Jewish leaders of the German Communist and socialist movement which coalesced in the short lived Bavarian Socialist Republic in 1920. The movement was quickly defeated, hundreds were killed, and there was much chaos.

The German people, especially the middle classes, did not think much of the German Left. It’s true that many of the leaders of the movement were Jewish. It’s never pretty for defeated movements and it’s never easy being a minority.

Those two truths coalesced as German Nazism grew out of the German middle classes’ and ruling classes rage at the rebellion of the German Left and their fear of the nascent Bolshevik movement in the USSR, which originally was also pretty heavily Jewish in its higher echelons.

The association of Jews and Communism was all the rage among the Right. Even Winston Churchill (who was basically a bad guy other than WW2) said, “Communism is Jewish.” The resulting theory of Judeo-Bolshevism led directly to WW2 and especially the Holocaust.

Good Brief Analysis of Adolf Hitler

Via Daryl Basarab’s interesting Gangster Bolshevism page.

I agree with the analysis that Hitler’s style was to target the easy targets while the people with real power simply left the country or were declared “Aryans.” Harmless assimilated Jews were murdered, the Zionist movement encouraged, Poles butchered. Capitalists were left in place while socialists were purged during the night of the long knives. But Hitler underestimated the strength of the Soviet Union.

That’s about it. How anyone but a German nationalist could possibly support such a project is beyond me. How can even White nationalists, not to mention ordinary White people, get behind such a monstrosity? How many White nationalists, forget ordinary Whites, think that Slavs are an inferior race to be massacred on nearly the same level as Hitler slaughtered Jews?

How many people really think that the mentally and physically ill should be killed (their murder was rationalized via semantics as euthanasia but it was nothing of the sort). Even the retarded? Surely their lot is unfortunate, but do they deserve murder? Come on now.

Keep in mind that this was not even the same thing as the euthanasia we discuss nowadays. Now we ask if the suicidal, with terminal or even terrible illnesses, should be allowed the assistance of physicians or helpers in their quest for suicide. Nazism went way beyond that. There was no pretense at assisted suicide. The unfit were simply murdered, exterminated, slaughtered such as mercilessly as the Jews were cut down.

What sane White nationalist supported German colonization and resulting imperial exploitation of the conquered nations of Europe? The plan for the Slavic nations was much more evil. 25% were to killed, 50% were to be removed and the 25% who looked “German enough” were to be Germanized.

Their lands were to be stolen, the people conquered and ethnically cleansed off the land, similar to the Zionist project in Palestine. But it was even crueler than Zionism. The Zionists never even theorized murdering 25% of the Palestinian Arabs and in practice a very low number of Arabs were killed in any of the wars, and the overall number is surely quite low.

The rightwing likes to talk about the socialist nature of Nazism, but that isn’t really correct.

Nazism started out as socialist, but Hitler never cared one whit about economics. All he cared about was nationalism, race, militarism, colonialism, imperialism, etc. Hitler cared no more about capitalism than about socialism, and he cared nothing about either.

Hitler shrugged and went along with the early socialist nature of the project, but when his big money backers (the junkers – the large landowners, the big capitalist industrialists and the military) rebelled with alarm against socialism, Hitler quickly had the socialists dispatched in the Night of the Long Knives. Workers were often worked to death or nearly to death in this “socialist” country.

Unions were #3 to be targeted in the early stages. They were considered more of an enemy than Jews at number. Communists and socialists were numbers 1 and 2 to the concentration camps. What sort of socialist or even Left project goes after Communists, socialists and trade unionists as enemies numbers 1, 2 and 3? It makes no sense.

Once big German money was on board and the Jewish capitalist competitors were out the way, great profits were to be made making various products for the Reich. The rich and business were served very well by Nazism.

Of course Hitler underestimated the USSR. He thought that the Communists were decrepit and weak due to the essential degenerate nature of Communism itself.  Communism was always his true enemy deep down in his heart. He hated Communists more than he hated Jews, and he hated Jews something serious. In fact, much of the anti-Semitism stemmed from the peculiar prejudice of the time that “Communism was Jewish,” writ via the Nazis as “Judeo-Bolshevism.”

At the end of the day, this can only be seen as a mad ultranationalist project.

Extreme nationalism, colonialism and imperialism were the orders of the day, with racism shot through it all. But that’s not unusual, and colonial and imperial projects are typically racist, often brutally so.

There was also extreme militarism on a near Athenian level, but many nationalist projects are militaristic.

It was also deeply conservative socially, but this is also a hallmark of primordialist nationalist projects. After all, modernity and its cosmopolitanism are precisely the problem for which ultranationalism is the brutally molded solution, no?

The History of the West German Guerrilla

A history of the Red Army Faction (RAF), the Revolutionary Cells (RZ) and Rote Zora. Also deals somewhat with more peripheral groups like Action Directe (AD) in France and the Combating Communist Cells (CCC) in Belgium.

I always liked all of these groups, especially the RAF. They were quite successful for a long time, especially in the 1970′s and and 1980′s. They’ve since broken up. It was often hard to catch their leaders and armed combatants. They had a core of thousands of supporters who protected them via safehouses and whatnot and it was always hard to penetrate the organization.

Raids were often made in which the cops would find that the cadre had just abandoned the place. This shows a guerrilla with excellent intelligence. I remember once when the Feds raided a Weathermen or some split group’s safe house. They arrived just after the cadre had left. They left their clothes behind and there was even still-hot coffee still sitting on the counter. That’s how fast they left.

Cadre can only split that fast if they have advance warning of a raid. How do they get that advanced warning? They must have excellent intelligence inside the state apparatus and hopefully even supporters or agents deep inside the state counter-guerrilla force itself.

Raids often ended in huge shootouts, as the RAF often did not want to be taken alive. There were quite a few coordinated actions with the Palestinians, especially with the PFLP.

The RAF made some errors.

They kidnapped a US soldier to get his ID to use to bomb an officer’s climb. Then they killed the soldier to eliminate witnesses. I never liked that action.

An RAF-Palestinian combined group hijacked a jet in Mallorca and shot the pilot. That’s lousy, shooting pilots. Come on.

A combined RAF-Palestinian group was behind the hijacking of the jet that ended up in Entebbe, Uganda. An Israeli team including former Prime Minister Ehud Barak raided the plane and all of the guerrilla were killed.

All of these hijackings and other hostage takings, including a mass hostage taking at the German Embassy in Sweden which left the embassy in flames, were done in an effort to negotiate a prisoner release with the authorities. All such prisoner release attempts failed, so one could argue that the hostage taking raids were worthless. The cops never gave up any prisoners.

During a period in the 1970′s called The German Autumn a number of RAF cadre were apparently murdered in their prison cells in a short period of time either by shooting or by fake hanging made to look like suicides. That was pretty brutal of the state to do that. I don’t see the point. They were either common prisoners or POW’s. In either case, they cannot be murdered in their cells by the state. Screw that.

In the early 1990′s, the RAF officially dissolved their organization and declared a permanent ceasefire. There have been no new urban guerrillas in West Germany, France or the Netherlands since. Nevertheless, the remains of the Red Brigades have resurfaced in Italy and some deadly and quite violent anarchist organizations have turned up in Greece. The war isn’t over.

Eric Hobsbawm Interview

Very nice interview with Michael Ignatieff (who I don’t like too much) interviewing the late, great Eric Hobsbawm. Hobsbawm joined the Communist Party at age 14 in Germany in 1933 and remained a party member for the rest of his life. He always supported the Communist cause.

He now admits that the Stalinist paranoia of the USSR was a disaster (beginning with the “Trotsky was a British agent” line soon after the Revolution). Stalin killed so many people for little or no good reason. As Hobsbawm points out, many of those killed by Stalin were Communists themselves, often the finest revolutionaries.

Hobsbawm’s statistics on the deaths in the USSR are exaggerated. There were at least 2.6 million excess deaths in the USSR from state violence, not including the population transfers during the WW2, various wartime deaths of the enemy, and the famine of 1932. That’s a lot, but it’s not 10-110 million as we often hear.

Hobsbawm took a lot of heat for this 1994 interview in which he implied that the deaths during the USSR might have been worth it if a better world had unfolded as a result. He meant this as an analogy to the 50 million deaths in WW2. Most say that those deaths were worth it in order to defeat fascism and rightwing militarism. So it is as an analogy to the WW2 statement that he wonders if the Soviet deaths might have been worth it if things had turned out differently.

Hobsbawm makes no apologies for the crimes of Stalin. He also says that the invasion of Hungary was a turning point among Western Communists. This is when they started to abandon the USSR. Hobsbawm says the Hungarian invasion was a catastrophe.

Hobsbawm is correct though, along Rosa Luxembourg’s lines, that the question is still one of a better world versus barbarism (Luxembourg said the choice is “socialism or barbarism). With the triumph of neoliberal capitalism the world over, what we are seeing is barbarism writ large spanning the planet. Hobsbawn says this is also a catastrophe, and I agree with him.

Hobsbawm was a famous Marxist historian who authored a number of famous books, including “The Age of…” series.

“Europe’s Crisis Spawns Calls for a Breakup—of Spain,” by Matt Moffett

Very interesting article! I support this secessionist movement 100%! It’s clear that Catalans really are a nation in need of national liberation. I think that Spain could still do quite well if they let Catalonia go. The Catalans have never been happy living in Spain, and nationalist sentiment is very high. It’s a typical subject of animated dinner table conversations at the family table – that’s how normal and heated politics is in this part of the world.

Catalan is a separate language from Spanish, and Spanish speakers can’t exactly understand Catalan speakers. I know I have a hard time reading Catalan myself. Catalan looks and sounds sort of like a mixture between Spanish and French. It is close to the Occitan language of which Provencal is a part.

Language politics is a big deal here. Valencians, who only speak a dialect of Catalan and not a separate language, have formed a ridiculous movement that says Valencian is a separate language from Catalan. It’s as if the British decided that British English and American English are two separate languages. However, the use of Valencian as a tongue is declining.

Catalan is most spoken in the north around Barcelona. It’s in pretty bad shape in France. It’s also spoken in the Balearic Islands, where it’s not in particularly good shape either. There is a tiny community of Catalan speakers on Sardinia.

There are also many Spanish speakers in Catalonia who do not speak Catalan. Lately, Catalan nationalists have taken the reigns demanding the Catalan be the language of instruction in schools. They advocate having no schools where Spanish is the language of instruction. In addition, all building signs must be in Catalan also, not only in Spanish. But Catalan signs need not carry a Spanish translation.

So Spanish speakers feel that they are being discriminated against, and they are angry.

If Catalonia got its independence, the new government would probably make Catalan the official language.

As you can see, Catalans feel that they don’t get their money’s worth out of the taxes they pay. They pay more than their fair share of taxes and don’t get back much in return. To them it’s a ripoff. With the horrific crash of the Spanish capitalist economy (30% unemployment), a lot if Catalans simply want out.

However, the Spanish state is horrified by this since Catalonia is a powerful industrial engine for the state of Spain. In addition, Spanish Francoist fascists never really went away, and to some extent, this mindset continues on at the upper levels of Spanish politics. The Francoist elements are so insane and awful that they would probably try to prevent Catalan separatism by force.

To the north, independentists have won election the Basque Country too. I have long supported their movement, and I even support the armed ETA guerrillas. It would also be difficult to split off the Basque Country as it is also an economic engine.

There is a similar movement in Galicia in the far northwest near Portugal, but it’s far less popular.

There is another movement in Belgium which is discussed in the article whereby Dutch speaking Flanders wants to secede from French speaking Wallonia.

This article also shows how asinine HBD theory is. Catalans have a reputation for being hard working and more productive than most of the rest of Spain, who the Catalans see as a bunch of layabouts. Yet the people of Catalonia and those of the rest of Spain are identical genetically. The differences are merely cultural. A similar dynamic is at play in Belgium, where the industrious Flemish are the same genetically as the purported layabout Walloons.

According to HBD idiots, every time you have harder working people and layabouts in the same country, it’s always a racial thing. Usually the busy folks are the Whites or the often more Northern type (who tend to be more White) while the lackadaisical parasites are the (often more southern), “niggerized” or “Indianized” folks.

We see this most typically in Italy (White Padanian “Celts” versus Sicilian-niggers), but you see it in other places too. Even the fight in the EU now over the north (read Whiter folks) supporting the unproductive welfare cases in the South (read: niggerized Whites, mongrels, off-Whites or non-Whites) boils down to this kind of a sick racist dynamic.

There may even be something similar going on in India with the Indian bread basket of Punjabi “white folks” complaining about having to support the more Australoid “Indian niggers” in the south.

There are some progressive people on here who are enamored of some aspects of this HBD crap, and I really urge you to be careful with these ugly racist arguments.

Europe’s Crisis Spawns Calls for a Breakup—of Spain

By Matt Moffett

Many people in Catalonia, a province known as “the factory of Spain,” feel that the rest of the country has become an economic millstone. They’re pushing for an independent Catalonia. WSJ’s Matt Moffett reports from Barcelona.

BARCELONA, Spain—This vibrant northern region of Catalonia has long been known as the “factory of Spain” for generating wealth that helped sustain the entire nation. Now Catalonia, beaten down by years of recession, has become the battleground in what threatens to become an economic civil war.

Protesters in Catalonia last month marched for independence in Barcelona.

In protests large and small, hundreds of thousands of Catalans are embracing a stark proposition: Only by breaking ties with Spain and becoming an independent country can Catalonia free itself from economic malaise.

Catalans go to the polls Nov. 25 for a regional parliamentary election, and polls show pro-independence parties in front.

“Madrid has been draining us dry for too long,” says Josep Casadella, a corporate human-resources administrator. He became an Internet sensation not long ago after posting a video of himself refusing to pay the fare at a toll booth and complaining that Spain should build free roads for all the taxes it collects.

The region’s president, Artur Mas, has called the marriage between Catalonia and Spain’s capital one of “mutual fatigue.” He has pledged to place an independence referendum before voters.

Appalled at the separatist sentiment, a military veterans’ association said that politicians pushing for Catalonian independence should be tried for “high treason.” In recent days, pro-Spanish- unity protesters held a smaller demonstration of their own. Marchers held a sign reading: “Help, Europe. Nacionalists are crazy.”

Spain’s internal struggle echoes a larger debate convulsing the euro zone itself, as wealthier northern nations complain about supporting poorer southern ones. But now, as Europe enters its fifth year of crisis, the economic strains are deepening the fractures within some nations.

In Spain and Belgium, and to a degree Italy, local and national governments are battling over how to allocate scarce resources. Even within Germany, which is economically stronger and politically stable, richer areas are grumbling about the cost of subsidizing the poorer areas.

Catalonia’s president, Artur Mas, called the marriage between his region and the Spanish capital one of “mutual fatigue” in a speech, likening it to the way “northern and southern Europe have grown weary of one another.”

Cultural and linguistic variances within many EU countries only make matters worse. Catalonia itself is a prime example: Its own language is widely spoken and instilled in younger generations as the main language in most elementary schools.

Throughout the continent “there are some very long-standing strains and tensions of unequal regional economic development that are now being brought to the surface,” says Adrian Smith, editor of the journal European Urban and Regional Studies.

Catalonia’s turmoil represents a major threat to European leaders’ hope of containing Europe’s crisis by stabilizing Spain, which is home to the euro zone’s fourth-largest economy but is also vying with Greece for the highest unemployment rate in the euro zone, around 25%. Policy makers had hoped that EU aid would keep Spain afloat while investors digest losses in Greece, which is even more troubled.

Spain’s financial markets are quivering at the mere talk of secession of Catalonia, which produces almost 19% of Spain’s economic output and 21% of its taxes. Investors fear the revolt will undermine Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s plan to get a grip on spending, particularly in the 17 regional governments that have been a big source of Spain’s deficit.

If pro-independence parties triumph at the ballot box in next month’s regional election, Catalonia’s leader, Mr. Mas, will face pressure to make good on a vow to place an independence referendum before voters. National authorities say that would be illegal.

Mr. Mas studiously avoids the word “independence” to define his goal. Some analysts believe he would satisfied simply with a more favorable revenue-sharing deal. Meanwhile, impelled by swelling support for secession, he has become bolder, asserting publicly several times that “Catalans demand the instruments of State.”

“We are convinced that an independent Catalonia is perfectly viable economically, ” says Albert Carreras, Catalonia’s finance secretary. “Rather, we question whether Spain is viable if Catalonia were independent. “

Further muddying the Spanish political picture, pro-independence groups in Basque Country—another region where separatist sentiment is strong—won control of parliament there in elections Oct. 21.

Outside of Spain, Belgium faces the biggest separatist strain. There, a vibrant separatist movement in the wealthier, Dutch-speaking Flanders wants to cut ties with poorer, French-speaking Wallonia. For the moment, a political impasse has been avoided by formation of a coalition government that excludes the separatist N-VA party, even though it won the most votes.

Still, local elections this month only heightened tensions. The N-VA’s leader, Bart de Wever, won the mayoral race in Antwerp, the country’s second-largest city, and used his acceptance speech to call for more independence. “Your government does not have the support of Flanders,” he told Prime Minister Elio Di Rupo, who hails from Wallonia.

In Italy, as in Spain, the regional spats are partly rooted in pre-crisis deals that gave regional governments more spending authority, but without more responsibility to raise revenue, says Alberto Alesina, a Harvard University economist. “All that people are talking about are enormous scandals and wasting of money at the regional level,” says Mr. Alesina. In Italy, he says, the south is the bigger culprit but says the north is hardly blameless.

When the southern island of Sicily recently needed a €400 million transfer, or about $520 million, from the central government to continue paying its bills, Northern Italians grumbled about claims of payroll-padding there. They cited as an example the island’s 27,000-strong corps of forest rangers hired during the fire season. Sicily is roughly the size of Massachusetts.

In Spain, financial woes are putting the union on the rocks. In August, Catalonia said it would seek a €5 billion bailout from the national government to make debt payments. Catalan officials say they would have no need for budget-cutting or bailouts if the central government were distributing tax revenue fairly. Some 43 cents of every euro Catalonia pays in taxes doesn’t come home, according to data compiled by the Catalonia government.

Underlying the grievances is Catalans’ image of themselves as a hardworking, thrifty people, “the Germans or Lutherans of Spain,” says sociologist Enrique Gil Calvo, who was born in a neighboring northern region. Residents of Catalonia, about three-quarters of whom speak Catalan, are openly scornful of what they consider to be the indolence of southern Spaniards.

People from Madrid, for their part, poke fun at what they perceive to be Catalans’ workaholic, stingy nature. The discovery of copper wire, one joke goes, came about as a result of two Catalans engaging in a tug of war over a penny.

The debate is no laughing matter to Catalan independentistas, as the secession supporters are known. They view themselves as patriots “just like George Washington,” says Jaume Vallcorba, a businessman who heads a pro-independence group, Fundacio Catalunya Estat.

As an independent nation, Catalonia would have GDP per capita of €30,500, which would rank it seventh in the European Union, just behind Denmark and ahead of Germany, Mr. Vallcorba’s group says in its presentation. He adds that Catalonia’s exports to the rest of the world recently surpassed its sales to the rest of Spain.

Spain’s prime minister, Mr. Rajoy, termed the Catalan independence push “madness of colossal proportions” in a speech this month.

In a briefing, a senior official in Madrid said that Catalans conveniently overlook help they get from the national government, such as the billions of euros being used to bail out a locally run savings bank.

Even some Catalans think the independentistas “are painting a picture that is prettier than the reality would be,” says José María Gay de Liébana, an economist at the University of Barcelona who can trace his Catalan lineage to the Middle Ages. How, he asks, would Catalonia’s already indebted and deficit-ridden government shoulder the added economic burden of opening embassies all over the world, creating its own police and customs agencies, and possibly an army?

Mr. Gay de Liébana adds that Catalonia would have to assume a reasonable share of Spain’s national debt, perhaps as much as €200 billion. And he wonders whether the breakaway nation would ever be accepted into the EU, particularly in the face of certain opposition from Spain. “People would say we abandoned the ship when things got tough, instead of rowing together,” he says.

As Spain’s economy sinks further into recession, however, more people seem willing to take the plunge to independence. “There are many people who didn’t favor independence a couple of years ago, who now view it as our only hope,” says Laia Serrano, an economist who last year formed a nonprofit group, BarcelonActua, to help the growing number of recession victims.

On a recent Thursday night, she had set up a soup kitchen on a downtown Barcelona street where about 60 people lined up for meal boxes. One 78-year-old retiree said the situation reminded him of waiting for ration tickets in the hard years after the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s.

“Everyone says that independence will mean more jobs, so we have to support it,” said another man, who said he was 35 years old and unemployed for four years.

Clashes with central authority are a recurring theme in Catalan history. In the 18th-century War of Spanish Succession, Spain’s Bourbon king, Philip V, crushed Catalan forces who had cast their lot with his Austrian rival. Later, during the Civil War, Catalonia was a stronghold of resistance to another strongman, Gen. Francisco Franco, who would harshly suppress Catalan culture during his four-decade dictatorship.

Perhaps because Catalonia couldn’t count on much support from central authorities, an aggressive spirit of entrepreneurship flourished. “Catalonia was globalized before anyone knew what that meant,” says Salvador Cardús i Ros, a political writer. Even in the 19th century, he notes, a distinctively Catalan product, the tangy sausage butifarra, was marketed abroad and manufactured with machinery from Germany, meat from Northern Europe and spices from Asia.

Today Barcelona is home to international heavyweights such as Mango MNG Holding SL, the women’s fashion retailer, and Grupo Planeta, the dominant publisher in Spain and Latin America.

Catalonia is a big tax contributor to the central government. But officials in Barcelona complain the money isn’t redistributed fairly. The annual deficit between what Catalonia pays in taxes and what it gets back from Madrid represents about 8% of Catalonia’s total output, roughly €16 billion, Catalonian officials calculate.

Catalans complain that, as a consequence of underinvestment, their local roads and infrastructure is inferior to that in poorer parts of Spain. “We have to choose between using public roads that are dangerous, or toll roads that are expensive,” says Manel Xifra, president of Comexi, a packaging-machinery company with €100 million in revenue.

In Catalonia, toll roads make up almost three times the proportion of the regional highway system as they do in the region of Madrid—a smaller geographical area, but one that is roughly similar in GDP and population.

He also complains that national officials have dallied for years in making a logistically important investment to connect Barcelona’s port to its train line. And that Barcelona’s airport provides too few international flights, forcing transfers when he travels for business.

Some Catalan executives, though, are worried about the impact of the independentistas on business. Jose Manuel Lara, the chief of Grupo Planeta, recently told a radio interviewer that much of the company’s operations would need to be transferred out of Catalonia if it seceded, because it wouldn’t make sense for a Spanish language publisher to be based in a region where Catalan was the official language.

To cover its expenses, Catalonia’s government has ratcheted up the top marginal income-tax rate to 56%. That is the highest in Spain, and only a hair below Sweden, at 56.6%.

“You can’t tolerate a Swedish level of taxes and African level highways,” says Xavier Sala-i-Martín, a Catalan economist who teaches at Columbia University and who says he is “pro choice,” supporting the Catalans’ effort to determine their future democratically.

Catalonia’s frustrations surged to the forefront during a Sept. 11 independence rally that drew more than one million demonstrators. Rosa Maria Sastre, an 81-year-old retiree, was too infirm to join the independentistas, so her granddaughter marched carrying a poster-size photograph of Mrs. Sastre. “We’d been waiting a long time to send a message,” Mrs. Sastre says.

On both sides, ardor is rising. The mayor of the Catalan city of Vic recently draped the red-and-yellow striped Catalan banner on the balcony of the historic municipal hall there. A few nights later, vandals climbed up and burned the flag to cinders.

—Frances Robinson and David Román contributed to this article.

Write to Matt Moffett at matthew.moffett@ wsj.com

Arabs Brought Farming to Europe

In the year 7,500, farming began in Germany. Recent DNA studies show that the farming began because migrants from the Golden Crescent (basically Iraqis) moved west through Turkey and SE Europe and the Carpathians to Germany, bringing farming with them. The superior advanced Arabs taught the inferior backwards Nordics how to grow food. They also left traces of their genes in Germany and along the route back to Turkey.

This was the beginning of the West, and the stimulation came from the Middle East.

In addition, I know that going back to around 12,000 YBP, Europeans resembled modern day Arabs both phentoypically and genetically. So if you go back far enough, Euros were just a bunch of Arabs. Or alternately, Arabs were the first Europeans. I told some Arabs that, and they said, “Of course we were. We all know that.”

Tell that to a White nationalist and watch him go ballistic!

“Why We Are Afraid, A 1400 Year Secret,” by Dr Bill Warner

This is a video by an Islamophobic (he calls himself a counter-jihadist) far rightwing activist in the US. As such, it rubs me the wrong way. I don’t like US reactionary Islamophobia. It’s retarded.

On the other hand, most of what this reactionary scholar says about Islam is true. The Muslims are in a similar situation with US Blacks. Just as the behavior of Blacks gives ammunition to their haters, the same is true with Muslims. If so many Blacks and Muslims didn’t act so bad in the first place, there would be little hatred and discrimination against them.

Hence it’s a sad fact about Islam that much of what Islamophobes accuse it of is actually true. This is especially true if we look at Islam historically as opposed in its moderated essence. The era of the Caliphates when all of Islam lived under Islamic Law shows us the true essence of Islam. The modern secular era and the reactionary Islamist backlash against it is but a distortion.

The scholar points out the obvious: The Golden Age of Islam in Spain and Baghdad was anything but. It was only tolerant and open-minded in comparison to the backwardness and reactionary stupidity that preceded and followed these eras.

To be fair, most religions have been pretty backwards in a historical sense. The Catholic Church committed many outrages against heretics and even the advancement of science.

Traditional Talmudic Judaism in Europe was a miasma of backwardness, superstition and stupidity under a “dictatorship of the rabbis” as Israel Shahak painfully points out. It is this prison of idiocy that the formation of Orthodox Judaism in the late 1800′s sought to return the Jews to, and it is this nightmare of totalitarian nonsense that the Reform and Conservative Jews want to swim away from.

Jews only began to climb out of this hole when Napoleon tore down the walls of the ghettos and welcomed the Jews into secular society. Through the 19th Century, most progressive thinkers regarded the Jews that emerged from centuries in the ghetto as damaged creatures in need of assimilation to society to heal them.

But back to the video.

Warner points out that Islam has always been an expansionist religion.

Those of my mother’s generation, wise and correct about so many things, often said, “Islam was spread by the sword. It was convert or die.” This is not completely true, but there is much fact behind this. Muslims did not always offer that stark choice to the conquered or the dhimmis, but they offered it often enough. In jihadi-stricken areas today, Muslims continue to occasionally make this demand of infidels. We have some recent reports out of Iraq of such demands.

Even after conquest, repression and dhimmitude slowly withered away non-Muslim majorities down to the tiniest of minorities. This constant repression was combined with occasional massacres and even horrific and sometimes genocidal wars.

Once again, let us look to our elders.

Those in my mother’s generation noted about the Armenian genocide and the genocide in East Timor: “Yes, but the Turks were killing the Armenians because they were Christians. And the Indonesians were killing the East Timorese because they were Christians.” I, being PC, protested this forbidden account, but my elders just shook their heads. “No, they killed them because they were Christians. That’s how Islam works.”

We who went through the revolutions of the 1960′s ridicule our elders as old fashioned and bigoted fogeys. We have carved out a new way, a way of liberation, Political Correctness. But it turns out in so many ways that our elders were right, and we revolutionaries were wrong. Among other things, my elders understood the nature of Islam.

Warner points out correctly that not only was Islam spread by sword, it made continuous raids on neighboring non-Muslim regions including Europe. The attempts were to conquer them for the Muslims. He also suggests that the Dark Ages were caused by Islam’s war on Christian Europe. That is certainly a provocative topic in our PC times, but he may be correct. He also points out that the wars of conquest never really ended until the fall of the Caliphate in 1918.

Where I feel he is wrong is in assigning all modern Islamist attacks to jihadi attempts to conquer the infidels. Instead, most such wars are occurring in Muslim lands or in majority Muslim lands in non-Muslim states. Examples are the jihads in Southern Thailand, Southern Philippines and northern Nigeria. In all of these wars, sickening slaughters of non-Muslim civilians have taken place for no other reason than “kill the infidels.”

The horrific bombings in India appear to be some sort of a “war on the infidels.” Most other jihadi attacks are attacks on non-Muslim minorities in Muslim lands (typical Muslim persecution of minorities that tends to go on as background under Muslim rule.)

I disagree with Warner that the attacks in Europe are jihadi attacks aimed at conquering Europe for the infidels. Instead, the attacks seem to be Muslim retaliatory attacks against Western wars in Muslim lands (say Iraq) and against non-Muslims who harshly criticize Islam (Theo Van Gogh killing.)

The 9-11 attacks were not attempt to violently convert us as so many misguided folks think (including my Mother’s generation). Instead, Al Qaeda attacked the US as an enemy state that was killing the Muslims in various parts of the world, propping up the Israeli enemy and occupying the Holy Land of Saudi Arabia.

It’s a sad state of affairs when the only people who are complaining about this backwards, violent and barbaric religion are backwards, violent, barbaric, and often-Christian reactionaries in the West. This ideological war is really a war of reactionaries against reactionaries, one fundamentalist group against another.

Amidst all of this, the secular Left, ostensibly opposed to obscurantist barbarism, has lined up with one set of reactionaries (the Islamists) against the other set (fundamentalist Christians). It makes no sense. A reactionary fundamentalist is a reactionary fundamentalist. The flavors matter little as it all digests the same in the end.