Why India’s Lower Castes Hate Gandhi

Here.

It turns that the great Mahatma Gandhi was bit of a monster. Or maybe more than a bit of one. I had heard before that Gandhi defended the castes system. That made him suspect in my eyes right there. Now it turns out that in 1933, the British attempted to put in place something called the Poona Act. This would have, among other things, set aside affirmative action style reservations allowing Dalits and other low castes positions, including top positions, in government at all levels. There were also some more controversial aspects to it, but let’s leave it at that for now.

Dr. Ambedkar, the great Dalit leader who wrote India’s Constitution, wrote the Poona Act. However, many high caste Indian leaders protested this Act, and Gandhi went on a hunger strike, vowing to hunger strike until death of lower castes were allowed reserved positions in the Indian government. What a monster! A wild raging debate was set off in India, and tens of thousands of Dalits and other low castes were slaughtered in communal riots all across the land. The communal massacres were so bad that Ambedkar went to Gandhi and promised to remove his proposal, and Gandhi then ended his hunger strike. And Gandhi nearly died in his strike.

And it is for this reason that Dalits and other lower castes hate Gandhi so much.

The article also notes that although reservations have been set aside for Dalits and other low castes at universities and government jobs, the large majority of them have yet gone unfilled. Further, although the Indian Constitution outlaws caste discrimination, effectively, this is not enforced, and India’s courts which are filled with high caste Indians refuse to enforce the laws.

The article states that high castes are only 10-15% of the population and implies that lower or low castes are 85-90% of the population. Are those figures true. They seem on the low side for high castes and on the high side for low castes, but I suppose it is a matter of definition.

PS Countercurrents is a superb publication with a lot of progressive focus on Indian issues.

Martyr of Nablus

The first Palestinian fighter to fall in defense of Nablus, 1967. She is beautiful, and she has an interesting phenotype. Quite dark for a Caucasoid.

I do not have her name at the moment, but it’s available on the Web if you want to sleuth around. Back then, the Palestinians had a lot of female fighters in their ranks as the PLO was a secular Leftist organization. Nowadays there are few if any female Palestinian fighters. Both secular and Islamist Palestinian armed groups are pretty sexist and fueled by Arab machisimo, and they won’t tolerate female fighters in their ranks.

“The Great Book Robbery”

Here.

This video almost makes me sick to my stomach. It shows how in the War of 1947 (the so-called Israeli War of Independence) in the course of The Nakba, or the forcible expulsion of 800, 000 Palestinians from their land, the Jews actually stole just about every single book in Palestine!

One thing that people do not realize about The Nakba is that it plays into some nasty stereotypes about Jews. The stereotype of the grasping, greedy Jew is hard one to get rid of, and Jewish folks’ behavior doesn’t exactly work to disabuse us of that notion!

Anyway, not only were 800,000 Arabs thrown out of their homes and not allowed to return. They were not allowed to take anything with them when they left. They were ordered out of their homes by Jewish militias. In the wake of these Jewish militias were various Jewish “thieving crews” for want of a better word. What did they want? The stuff. You know, the stuff. As per the old Jewish stereotype, the Jew always wants “the stuff.”

Various thieving crews were assigned to steal various types of items. One crew was called the book crew. It was more or less the “book stealing gang.” Yes, the fledgling state of Israel actually set up a little militia for the sole purpose of stealing just about every book in Palestine. Arab prisoners were press-ganged into gathering up the books from vacated homes. Jews then moved into the Arab homes, and they every single thing that was in  the home for themselves. All of the furniture, the clothing, the silverware, the paintings, everything, everything, everything, the Jews stole it all. They literally stole everything in Palestine that was not locked down.

And you wonder why the Arabs are pissed.

These stolen books still exist to this day. They are in special Jewish institutions in Israel, and all of them are outrageously labeled “abandoned property.” The nerve!

Of course what followed were pogroms against Jews in Arab lands. Jews were thrown out of these lands, and they were also forced to leave all of their belongings in the country. They could hardly take anything they owned with them. The difference is that the Arab Jews only want to be compensated for their “stuff.” None of them want to go back and live in their Arab countries. They are now quite happy in Israel.

However, the Palestinians not only want their stuff back, but they also want to go back to their homes, and they can’t. This desire to go home and the Jews’ refusal to let the Arabs go back is what makes the Palestinian refugee question different from just about every other refugee and ethnic cleansing question on Earth. Persians who left Iraq? Croats, Bosnians and Serbs in former Yugoslavia? Russians who left Chechnya? Pandits who left Kashmir? None of those people want to go home and none of them are prevented from going home anyway. Palestine  and Israel is the only place on Earth where the refugees want to go home but are prevented from going home. And this makes it a very special case.

I still can’t believe those Jews stole all those books! Those bastards.

Civil War in Balochistan

Fascinating documentary on the Baloch civil war in Pakistan. The Balochis never agreed to be part of Pakistan. One year after Pakistan was formed, a referendum was held, and Balochistan voted to be a separate country. Pakistan’s army then invaded Balochistan, conquered it and made it a part of Pakistan.

A similar thing happened in India. On the eve of India’s independence, India was actually about 3,000 princely states. These states voted on whether to become part of India or not. Almost all of them voted to be part of India, but a few did not. Every state that voted to not join India was immediately attacked by Indian army. Many people were killed in these battles to force these states at gunpoint to join India. All of the Northeast did not want to be part of India.The Northeast was attacked and forced to join India at gunpoint.

Kashmir did not want to be part of India. The Indian army invaded Kashmir and forced Kashmir to join India. The UN ruled that India had to allow Kashmir to vote on whether they want to join India, join Pakistan or be independent, but India never allowed the vote. Almost 100% of Indians you meet, if you ask them about this UN vote and they know about it, will get very agitated and angry, start pounding the table, raise their voice and get threatening and arrogantly bellow that India will never allow this vote to occur.

As you can see, your average Indian is a fanatical nationalist (an Indian fascist if you will), as malign and horrific as the fanatical nationalists in Palestine (the Zionists or Jewish fascists) or any other fascist like nationalists everywhere on Earth. So not only do Indians follow an amoral, cruel, backwards pagan religion that belongs back in 1,500 BC, apparently most of them are fascist-like ultranationalists.

These two reactionary poisons come together in Indian nationalism or the Hindutvadi movement, which are two separate things but in practice merge together. I note that they are separate because one of the worst Indian nationalists on this board was an Indian Muslim! And in my town, we have many Sikhs. One thing I have noticed about them is that support for Punjabi independence is about nil in this group, and most of them are now very strong Indian nationalists, sort of like Hindutvadis minus the Hindu element.

The fact that India thumbs its nose at the UN means that India is an outlaw state, a scofflaw state, a pariah among the world’s nations.

Really, Pakistani nationalists are not much better than Indian nationalists, and Pakistan as a nation is not much better than India.

The Pakistanis do not have the best interests of Kashmir at stake either. They invaded Kashmir back in 1947 because they wanted to annex the place! Just like Indian wanted to annex it to her state.

The truth is that whatever Kashmiris wanted back in the late 1940′s, right now, if they want anything, they want to be independent. Only 6% of Kashmiris want to join Pakistan. Most Kashmiris simply want an independent state. A fair number of them want to stay with India now, but one wonders where those figures came from, since 15 years ago, about 90% of Kashmiris wanted to leave India. Now the number wanting to stay in India is much higher. I would guess that many years of war and 70,000 dead has convinced many Kashmiris that India is never giving up the place, so they may as will quit fighting and agitating for an independence that will never happen.

Back to the Balochis. The Balochis have been fighting for their independence off and on ever since the late 1940′s. The war continues to this very day. Balochi independence has huge support inside Balochistan, surely it has majority support. Only a few Balochis support the Pakistani state, but those are the Balochis who run the Balochi regional government, who most Balochis consider to be a bunch of traitors.

The Balochis point out that the Pakistani state hardly spends one nickel on Balochistan. Almost no money for schools, hospitals, water, sewage systems, roads, infrastructure projects, jobs, nothing, nothing, nothing. In that sense the Pakistani state is like the Indian state in that it cares nothing about its people and only serves a tiny elite. In the case of Pakistan, this elite is made up of a feudal landowning group and addition to a military officer corps group.

Balochistan has a deep water part at Gwadar. This is Pakistan’s only deep water port and it is doubtful that they will give it up. Almost zero jobs at this port have gone to local Balochis. The locals have a very high unemployment rate. Most of the jobs were given to outsiders imported from other parts of Pakistan. So though the Pakistani state has sunk a lot of money into this port, almost none of it has gone to the locals.

Pakistan feels that both China, India and the US are its enemies and are out to screw it over in a geopolitical sense. One of the prizes is this port. To give up Gwadar, the Pakistani state feels it would be handing a victory to its Chinese, Indian and American enemies. Ain’t going to happen.

At the end of the day, the Pakistani state is as backwards, evil and monstrous as the scofflaw state of India. Its criminality approaches the Jewish fascist state in Palestine. One wonders if it is the nature of a state to be essentially criminal in nature.

Non-Story of the Day: Abbas Not Wanted in His “Hometown”

Repost from the old site. This is another old piece from 2005. It got some nasty comments from Israeli Zionists, including one woman who lived in Safad. Zionism is sick, and Israel, that shitty little country, is Jews’ hate state. The whole enterprise, the whole idea, is sick, and a pox on everyone who subscribes to the worldview of the KKK-Jews.

This piece has got to be the non-story of the day, New Palestinian Leader Still Persona Non-Grata in Home Town – Inhabitants Remain Suspicious of Former Resistance Leader.

At first glance, it appears interesting. But it is also an insult and a veiled attack on Abbas himself – I mean, if even the folks in his own hometown hate his guts – is he a jerk or what? But closer examination reveals the idiocy of this very piece.

Abbas was born in 1935 in Safed, a town in the Galilee in what is now Israel. Photo of Safed in 1934, one year before Abbas was born. Here are photos from 1948, just before the Nakba (the ethnic cleansing of 800,000 Arabs from their lands and the subsequent theft of their property by Zionism).

With the Nakba of 1948, most of the Arab population were apparently ethnically cleansed out of Safed and not allowed to return. And another photo of Safad two years later in 1950, when most of the Arabs were gone.

This is how Safed looked in 1992, after almost all of the Arabs were gone. In 1948, there were 13,300 people living in the town, only 20% of whom were Jews. There was fighting in Safad during the 1929 Arab-Jew riots and disturbances, and 29 Jews in Safad were killed by Arabs in that year. The Jewish presence is Safad is a long and deep one.

Safed was one of the few cities in Palestine traditionally considered holy by Jews. In the 16th Century, Safad was a center of Kabbalism, the Jewish mysticism movement. But the Palestinians also have an ancient presence there. Palestinians and their ancestors have been living in Safad since the time of the Canaanites, the ancient ancestors of the Palestinians.

In fact, Safad was the capital of Canaan, the Canaanite Kingdom. In 1400 BC, Egyptian hieroglyphics mention the Palestinian town. The Crusaders conquered Safad in 1140, and Saladin reconquered it for the Arabs in 1188.

The Jewish Palmach militia attacked the town before Israel even declared its independence on May 15, 1948, giving the lie to the Zionist insanity that “the war started when Arab armies invaded Israel after Israel gained independence“. Safed was conquered by the Palmach on April 11, 1948, before the “Arab invasion” had even started! So much for “the Arabs started the war” nonsense!

Today, the town’s population is 16,600, and it is a noted arts center. But it turns out, according to the Daily Star piece linked in the first paragraph, that the people of Abbas’ very own hometown want nothing whatsoever to do with him!

Why is that, you may ask? Because almost all of them are Jews, and almost all of the Arabs of Safed are gone, living as refugees (the refugee population was estimated at 67,698, as of 1998).

So, this shocking story reveals, the Jewish invaders and robbers of the Israeli town of Safed, Abu Abbas’ hometown that he was thrown out of as a 13-year-old boy in 1948, hate Abbas’ guts and don’t want him to come back to the town! Surprise surprise. This is a news story?

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.

“Coal Miners and Company Scrip,” by Alpha Unit

St. Peter, don’t you call me, ’cause I can’t go;
I owe my soul to the company store.

Nobody’s sure who wrote “Sixteen Tons.” People usually attribute the song to Merle Travis, who recorded it in 1946. A singer-songwriter named George S. Davis claimed he wrote it during the Depression. I don’t know if there’s any way to settle that question. But the couplet above sums up what it felt like sometimes to be a coal miner in nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century America.

Before labor reforms were enacted and enforced, the life of a coal miner, like that of sharecroppers and other laborers, was often just one step above slavery.

Coal mining was vital for the widespread industrialization that got underway in the nineteenth century. Before then, there were two types of coal mines: drift mines and bell pits. They were small-scale operations that yielded coal for homes and local industry. But the growing demand for coal due to industrialization made coal mines deeper and mining more dangerous. And there was a lot of money in consideration.

Mining operations were in remote, rugged areas, naturally, so mine owners had to provide housing for their workers. In fact they provided just about everything for their workers, typically. This was because paying the miners posed a problem.

You have to remember that this was before there was a national currency in the United States. Neither was there a sufficient supply of coins. Mining operations were far from banks and stores. Mining companies saw great advantage in the closed economy that resulted from creating the company store and paying in scrip.

Whatever a miner needed he could buy – and often had to buy – at the company store. The tools of his trade he bought there, along with whatever other goods he and his family needed. If the company store didn’t have it in stock, he had to do without it. The company store could charge whatever the mine owner wanted. If wages were increased, the company store could increase prices to make up for it.

Some companies paid exclusively in scrip. Others used scrip as a form of credit that miners could use between paydays. In this case, the scrip amount would be charged against the miner’s payroll account and deducted from his next pay. Some companies let their workers trade scrip for cash, but not always at full value. Some paid as little as 50 cents on the dollar; others paid as much as 85 cents per dollar.

Not only were the supplies for the miner and his family deducted from his pay, but so were his rent for company housing, utilities, fuel coal, and doctor’s fees.

Mining companies were creative in withholding as much money as they could from workers. One practice they engaged in was cribbing. A coal miner was paid per ton of coal that he brought up. Each car brought from the mines was supposed to hold a specific amount of coal – 2,000 pounds, for instance. But companies would alter cars to hold more coal than the specified amount, so a miner could be paid for 2,000 pounds when he might have actually brought up 2,500. Workers were also docked pay for slate and rock mixed in with coal. How much to dock was left at the discretion of the checkweighman – a company man, of course.

On payday, a miner was given a pay envelope with all the check-off deductions listed and any balance due him inside. Often the envelope contained a few pennies, or nothing at all.

The United Mine Workers, a merger of two older labor groups, was founded in 1890. This organization – whose first convention barred discrimination based on race, religion, or national origin – set about to make mining safer, to gain miners’ independence from the company store, and to secure collective bargaining rights. Among its specific goals:

• a salary commensurate with dangerous work conditions
• an 8-hour workday
• payment in legal tender, not company scrip
• properly working scales: improper or outright dishonest weighing was a big concern for miners
• enforcement of safety laws and better ventilation and drainage in mines
• an end to child labor: “breaker boys” as young as 8 would remove impurities from coal by hand – hazardous work that led to accidental amputations and sometimes death
• an unbiased police force: mine operators owned all the houses in a company town and controlled the police force, which would evict miners or arrest them without proper cause
• the right to strike

The UMW was able to secure an 8-hour workday for coal miners in 1898. During its first ten years the UMW successfully organized coal miners in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. It finally achieved some recognition in West Virginia in 1902. It spent the next several decades organizing strikes – some of which ended up being deadly – and getting involved, controversially, in politics to further its goals.

Labor contracts and legislation eventually outlawed the use of company scrip. World War II marked a turning point for scrip, and by the end of the 1950′s almost all coal mining operations were paying their workers in legal tender.

What a long haul.

US Republicans and the South Africa Question

Repost from the old site.

It’s pretty common nowadays to call US Republicans racist. That is often true. After all, the South didn’t turn from Democrat to Republican after the Civil Rights Act was signed for no reason. Nixon’s Southern Strategy was explicitly racist, as were his Wars on Crime and Drugs.

So was Bill Clinton’s ending of “welfare as we know it” (done under extreme Republican pressure), and so is, in my opinion, the entire Republican war on federal government spending. Federal government social spending is so unpopular precisely because it is assumed that White families do not benefit from it and Blacks and Browns do.

To put it explicitly, the federal government taxes “hard-working Whites”, takes their hard-earned money, and gives it to Blacks and Browns who are “lazy, criminal, parasitical, hostile to Whites and a scourge upon our nation”. Or so it is constructed, in my opinion, in minds of tens of millions of White voters.

It is important to note that the rightwing trend for US White voters began in the 1960′s, with the new immigration bill that expanded the ranks of preferred immigrants from White Europeans to include non-Whites the world over (especially Asians and Hispanics). At the same time, the federal government passed many civil rights laws, primarily effecting US Blacks, but to a lesser extent also Hispanics.

Simultaneously, government social spending was dramatically increased with the advent of Medicaid, AFDC, food stamps, general relief, WIC, federal housing and Social Security for the disabled non-elderly. Around the same time, Black riots rocked our land and the US crime rate skyrocketed for largely unknown reasons. The increase in the crime rate was heavily driven by the skyrocketing crime rate of young Black men.

In the 40 years since, Black and Hispanic street gangs have become a blight on our big cities and have become so entrenched as to prove almost ineradicable.

Appallingly, the advanced country of the US was actually exporting vile and wicked street crime gangs to the backward, feudal, fascist nations of Hispanic Central America, notably Honduras, and especially El Salvador. These two nations, especially El Salvador, are now in the midst of a street crime wave that boggles the mind.

Here in the US, we are now in the midst of a wild, rollicking debate about illegal immigrants that pits the outraged average American against distant elites of both the US Democratic and Republican Parties. The Democrats love the illegal alien criminals because to oppose them, in PC lingo, is de facto racism. Also, the Democrats need the Hispanic vote.

The Republicans love illegal alien job thieves because they are a source of hyper-exploitable labor that has devastated the wage structure of many working class occupations in the West, especially California, in the last 15 years.

I bring all this up to point out to you to the salience of race in US politics. Most US Whites won’t admit to being racist, but the fact is that White racism has been the principal factor driving Whites towards conservative politics for 40 years now. Not that we are allowed to talk about it.

Now, there are a lot of conservatives that are not racist. I know this because I know these people. I would like to toss something out to these non-racist Republicans (including Black and Jewish Republicans). What exactly, I want to ask them, do you think about South Africa?

Do you realize that under the Reagan Administration, the US government supported South Africa to the hilt, against the will of virtually the entire international community?

Do you realize that those Republicans who were in the forefront of support for South Africa are still in power in the US Republican Party and include George Bush’s father, Dick Cheney and almost all Republican Congressmen who date back to the 1980′s?

We should allow people and political parties to make mistakes in life and we should accept their apologies.

I want to ask non-racist Republicans if they are aware that the Republican Party has never apologized for supporting South Africa, and that not one Republican politician, including Cheney and Bush Sr., has ever apologized for supporting that nation?

How do you feel about the fact that your political party supported apartheid 100%, has never apologized for it, and never will? Do you realize what apartheid was all about?

Keep in mind that our media gave us only whitewashed version of apartheid. How about, from this excellent comment on Daily Kos, the lowdown on what apartheid was really all about?

It was the white terrorist government of apartheid South Africa that declared Mandela a terrorist. There is no conundrum about Mandela vis-a-vis freedom fighter/terrorist. Repeat – no conundrum, no conundrum. Mandela fought the oppression and exploitation and land expropriation of South Africa’s 87% majority African population.

There is ABSOLUTELY NO JUSTIFICATION FOR APARTHEID, NONE, NONE, NONE. South Africa’s whites never bought a drop of land on any fair terms (they stole 99.99% of it), they never provided a sustainable land base for the majority black population.

Apartheid separated men into horrific labor camps in E Goli, Tshwane, E Tekweni, Cape Town and all of South Africa’s cities. Women were not allowed to stay with their husbands. Apartheid encouraged the spread of AIDS in its dying years. It planted false propaganda that AIDS was a western creation to keep Africans from reproducing. They took no action to educate about AIDS.

Apartheid South Africa created a dual economy trapping poor people in horrendous conditions in Bantustans; they built walls around their white homes and kept Africans in “their place”. They stirred up ethnic conflict by dividing Venda from Tshangan from BaPedi, from Zulu from “coloured” from !Xhosa.

There is no way under God that there is any construction of anything Nelson Mandela ever did that was terrorism. Each and every white voter of apartheid South Africa declared war and terror on the African majority EACH AND EVERY TIME they voted for the National Party.

Forced Removals was terrorism. The Bantustans project was terrorism, the labor system was terrorism, funneling weapons to the IFP was terrorism. Mandela was NEVER, NEVER, NEVER a terrorist, He reacted to a terrorist state. And a terrorist state that DICK Cheney supported. This is why I so hate Dick Cheney and am confident that his space in hell is reserved.

Wow, reading what apartheid was really about, an inescapable conclusion becomes clear. I read major US newspapers (Los Angeles Times) read major US newsmagazines (Time and Newsweek) and watched US TV News (CBS, NBC and ABC) during the apartheid tumult of the 1970′s and 1980′s.

Never once was the real story, portrayed above, spelled out for me. Instead, as I recall, the issue was obfuscated with moral relativism to the point where you could not tell the good guys from the bad guys. Barring other theories for now, is there no other conclusion other than that the US media (as described above) is profoundly White Supremacist, or at least was 15-30 years ago?

Anyway, back to my Republican friends. Do you support apartheid? Do you realize that if apartheid existed today, the US Republican Party and almost all Republicans would probably support it, based on past conduct? Does this bother you? If so, why do you vote Republican?

Is Israel a Racist State?

Repost from the old site.

Let’s look at this question from a strictly deterministic point of view, absent the avalanche of Zionist bullshit such a question usually provokes. Does Israel, or does Israel not, discriminate, as part of official Israeli state policies and not informal societal policies, against non-Jews?

Yes, yes, yes, a thousand times yes!

We can argue like Jewish lawyers about the nature and degree of the discrimination, we can compare the shitty little country of Israel to all the shitty countries of various sizes she delights in comparing herself too, but none of that changes the bottom line.

In Israel, discrimination is written into the very existence of the state. If you support Israel, this is the Jim Crow garbage that you are supporting, de facto.

Let’s suppose the US was run like Israel.

Actually, it was for much of its existence. Indians only became citizens in 1920, the year women finally got the vote. Indians were put in boarding schools until recently. Discrimination against Hispanics, to a Jim Crow degree, was rife in the West.

So was open discrimination against Jews in all of the US. And the war against Jim Crow led to open warfare, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the loss of the US South by the Democratic Party as the racists left and went Republican.

Nevertheless, in 2012, we can still make an interesting comparison. Let’s pretend for a moment that the US is Israel. Thanks to Charley Reese for the theme:
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Let’s say that the US is a White Christian state, and that this fact is written right into its Constitution. In fact, the US is defined not as the state of its citizens, but as the state of all White Christians everywhere on Earth. It’s Whitey Homeland.

Any White Christian anywhere on Earth can come to Whitey Homeland, the US, and automatically become a citizen. White Christian criminals wanted anywhere on Earth for any crime can flee here and we will protect them. Why? Because they are White Christians.

The White Christian homeland of the US was formed some time ago, when 80% of the non-White Christians were thrown out of the country in a war and their land was seized. Now, 93% of the US is reserved for Whites only, although 20% of America is non-White Christian. This 93% was purchased by an organization called the White Christian National Fund.

Its donors are Whites throughout the world who support the White homeland. Once the WCNF bought the land, they forbade the sale of it to anyone who was not a White Christian.

The non-White Christians who were evicted decades ago linger in refugee camps in Canada and Mexico, where they destabilize those countries and clamor for right to return, which the US refuses to grant. Almost all White Americans are living on land stolen from the non-White Christians, and many are living in homes that were previously lived in by non-White Christians.

In big US cities, a similar development reigned. White Christians were routinely approved for any development they wanted, while non-White Christians were usually denied all building permits, including merely refurbishing or adding on to a home.

Many US neighborhoods were designated, officially or not, as White neighborhoods. By official decree of the state, non-White Christians were forbidden by renting or buying land in these neighborhoods.

Many non-White Christians have refused to live the lands they and their ancestors have lived on for many years. US military jets fly over these lands and spray poison the non-White Christian crops. Non-White Christian towns on White lands are denied all government services.

When they still won’t leave, the US Army shows up in the non-White Christian village and gives the residents 10 minutes to pack up and leave. Then the Army bulldozers begin to destroy every structure in the town.

The US government, at federal and state levels, issues Whiteification Plans, meant to “Whiten” non-White Christian areas. This involves surrounding non-White towns with White towns in order to “Whiten” the area.

Just for a moment, imagine the reaction of every Jewish organization in the US, not to mention the Israeli government, if the US pursued such a course. Recall that the US government on all levels would brutally discriminate against Jews, who, though White, would be non-Christians, and subject to the full brunt of US government racism.

Does anyone doubt that Jews were be screaming about this racism til the cows came home? But then, why do these same Jews support the same racist nonsense in Israel?

Juan Peron on the Death of Che Guevara

Here.

Fantastic speech from Juan Peron in Madrid. Peron is often accused of being a fascist, but if this is what fascism looks like, sign me up tomorrow. Better than this mushy center-right Obama crap of the Libertarian neoliberal ultracapitalism of the Republicans. A pox on both their houses. Up with Juan Peron!