“The Dawn of Grace” by Vijendra Rao

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Dawn of Grace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

North Korea Primer

Repost from the old site.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

The Ups and Downs of Cuban Sugar

James Schipper writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Extraterritorial Nature of the US Cuban Blockade

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CSC
Director Rob Miller said:

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

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

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

The Present Day Republican Party

From Daily Kos:

The current Republican Party is irrelevant to the national conservation. They want trickle down economics – well that’s a proven fail. They deny climate change – that’s a proven fail. The list goes on and on. They are irrelevant to every single national problem the country faces…

Yes they control the House thru gerrymandering. That’s made them politically relevant. But their politics is 100% obstruction; 0% productive ideas. That’s because their only goal is to serve the interests of the wealthy and big corporations. Nobody else matters.

Well, that is about right. Actually, it is 100% true.

The Republican Party is probably the last major political party on Earth that continues to push the lie of trickle down economics – that massive cuts will so stimulate the economy that deficits will vanish. They actually believe that the way to get rid of deficits is via tax cuts! Starve the state of money via taxation and that will fix the government’s budget problem. It’s insane, and it’s never been proven to work. If you lower tax rates, you starve the state of funds, as one would logically think. Tax cuts don’t do much to stimulate the economy when they are directed at the rich who don’t put much of their money into productive investment anyway.

We have had 30 years of tax cutting and where has it gotten us? To this insane hollowed out economy with the worst inequality in the Developed World, flat or declining wages for 30 years, massive floods of immigrants taking American jobs, a ruined safety net, decrepit infrastructure and a Depression brought on Finance Capital that wiped out 40% of the wealth of the average American.

Climate change is as real as the nose on your face. I am not aware of any large political party anywhere on Earth who denies that it is real. If you hear of one, let me know.

Serving the interests of the upper middle class, the rich and the corporations is not in the best interests of the vast majority of Americans.

We need a political project that lifts up as large a percentage of the American people as possible, one that benefits the American majority, not the small upper middle class and wealthy corporate elite. Neither party is offering anything like this as both parties are working only for the interests of the corporations and the moneyed classes.

We have two wings of the Republican Party now:

The conservative wing of the Republican Party = The “Republican Party.”

The liberal wing of the Republican Party = The “Democratic Party.”

Although the left wing of the Democratic Party is still a populist, pro-worker group that represents the interests of the majority of Americans, they are hated by the elites who run the party. A common maxim in modern US politics is that the Republican Party fears its base while the Democratic Party actually hates its base. Recent comments by Barack Obama and Rahm Emanuel about the liberal wing of the party (the party’s base) are instructive. See “fucking hippies,” “professional Left,: etc.

One problem is the reactionary nature of the American people, probably the most rightwing people on the planet. Although Obama’s Reaganite neoliberal party is just the liberal wing of the Republican Party, 53% of Americans are so insane that they think that this conservative named Obama is some sort of a Communist (53% of Moronicans say that Obama is a socialist in polls).

The hilarious thing about these polls is that no socialist or Communist thinks that Obama is either a socialist or a Communist. In fact, the socialist-Communist part of the US Left actively despises Obama.

Check out the rage-filled comments on Alternet these days. Alternet commenters are really just the left wing of the Democratic Party, but this is the most furious I have ever seen the US Left at Obama since he has been in office. Most commenters are attacking Obama from the Left in recent days, and they get anywhere from 50-50 to 100% up-votes. If Obama hates his base, its increasingly obvious that the feeling is mutual. Daily Kos on the contrary is made up more of Democratic Party loyalists, people who are politically active. The head of Daily Kos supports Obama, so a lot of his commenters fall in line.

It is also true that the Republicans have control of the House due to gerrymandering. The Democrats won the House election in 2012 about 51-49% if you count all of the votes cast. Therefore, logically, the Democrats ought to control the House in a fair system. However, Republicans won many governorships in 2010 and were able to redraw districts in lying, phony ways (Democrats do this too) so they end up with more Republican members than they are entitled to.

There is something sick and wrong about the way we vote for Representatives. While the voting for President and Senate is largely fair, the voting for the House is not. A state like California that votes 70% Democrat, 30% Republican for the House ought to send a House delegation to Washington that looks like 70-30 (if there are 50 California reps, 35 of them should be Democrats and 15 should be Republicans).

It is also true that the Republicans have done nothing but obstruct when they were in Congress. Congressional Republicans are on record saying that the bad economy is good for the party and that they will oppose any efforts to improve the economy since that will help Obama. That is almost treasonous, but rightwingers typically try to ruin economies when their progressive enemies are in office (see Venezuela and Chile). They have said repeatedly that they voted against things that they supported so as not to give a victory to Obama. That’s just sickening. I can’t imagine what sort of a partisan your average Republican is that they take delight in such treasonous nonsense.

Bigfoot News April 26, 2013

Hank (the Bigfoot Rick Dyer killed) has been purchased by a major Las Vegas casino! I have just learned from an excellent source that a major Las Vegas casino has purchased Hank from whoever owned it (Rick and possibly his investors). It is the casino, not Dyer, that will show Hank to the world sometime this summer, possibly in August. No doubt this will not end the speculation about the story either, as deniers will continue to say that this is a hoax along the lines of the Minnesota Iceman.

That Hank will be displayed somehow at a casino for profit will obviously not settle the question of whether or not Hank is a real Bigfoot or a clever copy, and in fact, the profiteering aspect (already well underway – note how Dyer is selling “memberships”) will make many scream “hoax”.

As you can see, this is turning into a Minnesota Iceman Redux, possibly with many of the similar problems and issues that confronted the Iceman story (which I believe did involve an actual Bigfoot shot by Hansen himself in Minnesota). Hopefully, the Hank story will be resolved better (proof of Bigfoot) than the Iceman story was.

It’s too bad it all had to unfold this way.

Surely, if the US government took custody of this Bigfoot, they would not be trying to make money off it, though the “make government a business” reactionaries would not doubt be screaming for Uncle Sam to profit in some way from its scientific possession. That the state is one of the last institutions left in the US that is not devoted solely and only to “the spirit of hucksterism” (see Marx), I have long felt, is one of the major impetuses behind that anti-government reactionary nature of the American people, who as a nation went over to mass hucksterism long ago, and exactly as Marx predicted 150 years ago. And surely, Rick Dyer exemplifies “the huckster” immaculately. As does Tom Biscardi.

Morgan Matthews silent about Shooting Bigfoot. A source is good friends with Matthews and asked Morgan about the movie. Morgan refused to comment on the movie, and the source said this is odd because normally Morgan will talk to this fellow about anything and everything. The source did however state that Morgan seemed to be very excited about the movie, which made the source excited that there may be something to the Dyer story.

The source the only thing holding him back from believing in the story is that Rick Dyer is involved; he felt that Dyer is the sleaziest person on Earth and as such he was extremely wary about anything with Dyer’s name associated with it. His assessment of Dyer is of course 100% correct, but even sleazeballs can do great things (read up on famous people on Wikipedia and see how many of them were monstrous as human beings aside from whatever they did that made them famous). And even pathological liars (yes, Dyer is a pathological liar) tell the truth sometimes, or actually most of the time. No one lies all the time. Think about it. It’s not even possible.

My opinion of Rick Dyer. To sum up and be as nice to him as possible, I would describe Dyer as a huckster, a scammer, a sleazy capitalist, and a con artist. His personality is “showboating blowhard” (like most Bigfooters). In addition, he is very rude and very unpleasant. The constant bragging is very hard to take (Who is this guy, a White Mohammad Ali?).

I suppose the most charitable way to put it is not to say that he’s a bad person (you can decide that for yourself) but instead that I simply do not like people like that. I have known plenty of them in my life, and you can’t get me away from them quickly enough. I can barely stand to listen to his radio shows because he rubs me the wrong way so much. I find myself wincing and making disgusted faces all the way through it. He is apparently hated by the vast majority of the Bigfoot community, and I would say for good reason.

He’s not going to tone anything down after he gets famous, which is going to be quite soon. Instead, a good portion of US society will soon develop strong opinions about Dyer, probably most of them quite negative. In his favor, Rick does have his fans (often female, as women crave narcissists and sociopaths like chocolate). His male admirers are less common (most men don’t cotton much to douchebags as we have had so many unpleasant interactions with male douchebags over the years that most of us have “baggage in this regard), but they definitely exist.

Dyer selling memberships to his website. The memberships are insanely overpriced, especially the gold memberships. But a lot of folks have already bought memberships, including gold memberships. I am sad to say that a couple of my friends fell for it. This proves nothing except that as Rick’s mentor’s comment that there’s one born every minute. It’s not illegal in the US to sell overpriced worthless nonsense, and you’re free to charge whatever the market will bear in most cases. Rick’s just going for a ride again, and this time he has a lot of passengers.

However, as you can see, Rick is already profiting from Hank, which of course will only increase the accusations of hoaxing. Even if he is hoaxing, nothing will ever come of it since US DA’s don’t file charges for fraud much anymore, and sadly they never have in Dyer’s case. Nor has Dyer even been sued for the various times he has defrauded his fellow humans. Rick will just get away with it once again, the same way he gets away with everything, by landing on his feet. This cat must have 99 lives.

New clues about the photos of Hank (the Bigfoot Rick Dyer killed). Four photos of Hank recently surfaced, not two as I originally reported. One was a photo of Hank being loaded into a box truck by several men. Three were of a group of men standing around Hank’s body, which is lying on an embankment. The scene appears to be early in the morning, probably the morning of September 7, 2012, after Hank was shot at 10:30 PM the previous evening. Dyer can clearly be seen in two of the photos, and the film crew also seems to be present.

In one of the photos, curiously, there are two men wearing sports coats and slacks who are obviously not the local homeless population or part of the film crew. It is uncertain who they are, but they may be some sort of government officials.

Facebook Find Bigfoot appear to have seen Hank on their Las Vegas visit to talk to Rick Dyer. This is what I have gathered from conversations with my sources. They did not come right out and say it, as that would get them into trouble, but with a lot of hints and oblique statements, they very much implied to me without saying so explicitly that FB/FB did indeed view the body on that trip, and I believe that they did also. Their having viewed the body is probably one of the main reasons why they are so certain that the Dyer shooting dead Hank the Bigfoot is true.

A “commission” represents the body of Hank. They appear to have some sort of ownership or retention rights over this corpse. The commission includes those who own the body (whoever they are) along with the US government research facility which is housing it. If you want to see the body, you have to go through this commission and sign NDA’s with them. As this branch of the government is part of the commission, the papers you have to sign are quite complicated.

The US government did not build a separate facility just to house Hank. Instead, they built a makeshift area in an already existing facility. However, most of the workers at the facility do not have access to the makeshift area where Hank is being held. This government research facility is quite complex and it is possible that the scientists/technicians who work there do not even know of the existence of Hank or that he is being stored at the facility. However, there is a US government team that has been tasked with work with, study and guard/protect Hank.

References

Marx, Karl. 1844. Zur Judenfrage (On the Jewish Question). Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher.

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.

The Camp of Saints

Repost from the old site.

A very nice, but somewhat dated (though the situation has probably only gotten worse), review of The Camp of Saints, one of the most hated books ever written. The link is on the execrable Free Republic, and the author of the review is a libertarian fool. Looks like Jean Raspail, the author of the book, was some kind of rightwing nut too.

They both blame “socialism” for causing such horrible living conditions, along with starvation and mass and early death and disease, that afflict the Third World. This is truly bizarre. Even autarkic Albania nearly doubled life expectancy from 1946 to 1980, though it was not very successful in other ways.

Almost all of the true Third World nightmare states are operating under some kind of capitalism, usually a particularly ferocious.

That socialism is good for life can been seen in the figures of Sri Lanka and India. Because India lacks Sri Lanka’s infant mortality figures, India suffers about 2.7 million dead babies every year. Those are some real numbers for you Black Book of Communism clowns to chew on. Sri Lanka’s great figures can be attributed exclusively to a mature socialist system there (Sri Lanka is a member of the Socialist International).

Everywhere we look we find the same thing, with some aberrations such as North Korea. One thing Communists in general did and do a great job of, other than a few disruptive periods, was putting enough food in everyone’s stomach. This is also something that capitalists everywhere and at all times have done poorly, ranging from deficient to just plain disastrous.

Almost every Communist country ate vastly better after Communism than before. Cuba currently has the lowest malnutrition rate in Latin America, and the UN says they have beaten it altogether. Even Costa Rica has 7% malnutrition – so much for Latin American social democracy. That Communism or socialism “causes mass starvation everywhere it has been tried” is surely one of the vicious and stupid of the anti-Communists’ lies.

Anyway, ignoring the libertarian delusional thinking, the review is a good one, and the Spaniard author notes that it is taking place as we speak, with boats patrolling the shores off the coast of Europe for flotillas pouring out of West Africa towards Europe. Boatloads of Kurds landed on the Riviera and then poured through the streets of Marseilles a while back. Those are scenes right out of the book.

The book has been dismissed as racist claptrap, but that is not entirely true. Raspail was non-racist enough to suggest that Western civilization was a cultural concept and not a racial one. I currently live in Greater Tijuana, now extending 500 miles north of Mexico into California. Only an Hispanic or the most deluded Leftist would see this transformation of a White working class town into just another Mexican city as positive.

I have nothing against US expats, but I never intended to become one. Instead the foreign country came to me, and nobody asked me to vote on it either – instead, it just got shoved down my throat and I was told to lick my lips and say thanks. The US-Mexico border in some important ways no longer really much exists.

Raspail conflates immigration with illegal immigration, the same way the Leftist illegal immigrant lovers do. Legal immigration to the US, other than refugees, is hardly a problem. We vet them very carefully, and few get into trouble. We need to limit it for environmental reasons, but other than that, the real massive damage is being done by illegal immigrants and increasingly their offspring.

Here in California, once a city goes over 60% Hispanic, it is pretty much wrecked in the eyes of any sensible non-Hispanic. We are even starting to see some guilt-riddled Hispanic Flight, with more well-to-do and self-preserving Hispanics fleeing Hispanic-destroyed towns for Whiter suburbs.

Over 60% Hispanic and a city starts getting dirty, trashy, run-down and falling apart. Crime explodes, especially petty theft, but really all types. Gangs are everywhere and so is graffiti. School failure and dropout rates go through the roof. It’s a chaotic and somewhat dangerous mess, but I guess maybe illegals like it that way, because they are just reproducing the Mexico they fled.

This unfortunately titled Usenet post sums it up quite well. What the policeman describes is reality that any honest Californian understands oh so well. He’s not hallucinating. This is basically par for the course in this state.

Particularly poignant was the destruction of the wages and lifestyle of good honest working class Americans, a devastation outrageously championed to the hilt by the entire US Left. It’s hard to imagine a position that is more hostile to working class Americans, but the Left has taken it up.

I don’t necessarily agree with the rightwing “illegals only come here for the welfare” crap in the post but the portrayal of a decent American neighborhood destroyed by Mexican illegals is gut-wrenching.

Mostly this is associated with the illegals and their nightmarish and oversized broods of children, who are growing up as an Underclass that rivals the Black one but is not nearly so pathological.

Hispanics, like Blacks, are splitting into two races. Blacks have already split and Hispanics will be next. There is an assimilated Black group that can be describes as relatively “non-Ghetto”. There is another group with a “Ghetto” mindset to this extent or that that extends tentacles to varying degrees down into the clusterfuck called the Black Underclass.

The Blacks that have left ghetto behind are increasingly disgusted with their ghetto brethren, and are for all intents and purposes just leaving them to twist in the breeze. I don’t blame them.

The same thing is starting to occur with Hispanics. In my town, there is a group of Hispanics that has grown up (usually) speaking Spanish and English and is comfortable in both languages. They tend to be lighter and to make more money, but that’s not always the case. They are just another group of Americans pretty much like the rest of us, and they are no cause for concern at all in most ways.

There is another group that, as noted above, resembles a much better behaved Black Underclass in too many ways. I figure these groups are going to split more and more in the future. Class generally trumps race any day of the week with anyone.

The illegals have just transplanted the poor and peasant societies of Mexico to America. Their kids have largely become the new Underclass described above. This group tend to be darker and to make less money, but once again, no hard rules.

When the book burners scream, rational people want to know why.

By the way, I agree with some of the commenters after the piece on the need to read the book critically, to say the least.

The reviewer also offers some interesting points on a uniquely Iberian point of view, especially in terms of defending Western civilization in Europe from various unwashed or barbarian hordes, and their disgust at the Northern Europeans for wimping out on defending the continent. They also lived under Islam for way too long, remember it well, and are not going back without a fight.

Contrast to the Continental Left that seems to think new majority-Muslim states in Europe will be glorious explosions of progressive expression.

Iberians and non-Iberians have some conflict, but a little conflict adds luscious spice to life, and those who refuse to act aggressively in defending their interests get bulldozed.

Red Revolution For Bangladesh

Repost from the old site.

Bangladesh seriously needs revolution. Thank God the Maoists have taken up arms there to overthrow the system. They have not done too well, they are completely insane, and the Islamists have united against them, but we must wish them well. After all, only the Maoists are fighting to get rid of the system, the system that kills so many.
Reasons.

Electricity is scarce and most do not have access to clean water. Roads are in terrible shape and agriculture is lagging far behind where it ought to be.

In other words, it is a total capitalist South Asian clusterfuck. Get rid of it.

Even more reasons.

⅓ of rural Bangladeshis are landless (for contrast, 50% of Central American rural people are landless). All land reforms since independence have failed.

Truth is, if you are landless in Bangladesh, I would wager that you are probably starving. The land question is clearly the heart of the matter here. If someone disagrees that giving these folks land will keep them from starving, please speak up in the comments.

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?