Northern and Southern Mongoloids

It is best to split the Mongoloid race into two branches – Northern and Southern Mongoloids.

Northern Mongoloids include the North Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, Xibe, Oroquens, Mongolians and various Siberians.

North Mongoloid – South Korean girl.

Southern Mongoloids include a large grouping including many of the peoples of South China – Tibetans, Dai, Burmese, Thai, Hmong, Khmer, Lao, Vietnamese, Malay, Filipinos, and most Indonesians.

Southern Chinese – Northern and Southern Mongoloid mix.

Below is a pure Southern Mongoloid.

Southern Mongoloid – Kinaray-a Filipina.

For comparison purposes, see a Japanese (N. Mongoloid) and Filipino (S. Mongoloid) mix below.

Japanese – Filipina mix. A mixture of N. Mongoloid and S. Mongoloid in this case results in a phenotype that is mostly N. Mongoloid.

There is a lot of controversy on the boards about this issue. Some say that Southeast Asians are not pure Mongoloids – that instead they are Mongoloid-Australoids. Most of this critique comes from Chinese racists. Many of these Chinese are overseas Chinese who live in the Philippines and Indonesia. Chinese people are unbelievably racist as it is, but the overseas Chinese are some of the most insanely racist of all the Chinese, far more racist than the mainland Chinese.

This is all based on something called Han Supremacism. Han Supremacism is the underlying racist ideology behind almost all Chinese racism. Han Supremacism generally says that Northern Chinese are superior to Southern Chinese. The Southern Chinese were originally the Yue people, but they got conquered by the Han and become Hanized.

According to Han racism, only the Han are Chinese people. All of the other ethnic groups in China – and there are over 80 of them – are all “non-Chinese.” Hence the Taiwan aborigines, the Dai, the Tibetans, the Uighurs, the Mongolians, the Hmong, and some would say even the Cantonese, are all “non-Chinese.”

This is the most vicious Nazi-like ethnic nationalism, whereby only the majority ethnic group is defined as part of the nation and the rest of the residents of the land are said to be “foreigners.” This was precisely the fascist ethnic nationalism that overtook Europe in the 1930′s and 1940′s and it is essential to all fascist movements all over the globe. It was also a part of the ideology of the fascist Young Turks of Turkey when they murdered 2.5 million “non-Turks.” This same fascist ideology resurfaced again in the Balkans in the 1990′s.

The Han want to believe that Southeast Asians are inferior to Northeast Asians. This way of thinking is also prevalent among Japanese, but most Japanese don’t even bother to think about Southeast Asians. They are more concerned with Koreans. The reason for the inferiority of Southeast Asians, according to Han racists, is that they are part Australoid. Strictly speaking, this is not really true.

What is true is that the transition from Australoid to Mongoloid took place much later in Southeast Asia than it did in Northeast Asia. The NE Asian transition took place 9,000 years ago, and the SE Asian transition, at least in Vietnam, took place ~2,200 years ago. Nevertheless, actual Australoid genes in SE Asians are few in number. The Malay and the South Vietnamese have a few Papuan genes, but the numbers are very small. Filipinos only have a sprinkling of genes from the Negritos, similar to the Amerindian genes in many White Americans.

Southeast Asians do tend to have darker skin than Northeast Asians. The fact that they have lighter skin is one of the reasons why North Chinese look down on South Chinese so much.

Even Southern Chinese can have fairly dark skin – see the group below.

Southern Chinese. Note that some Southern Chinese can have fairly dark skin.

Some Filipinas have skin that is so dark that they could well be Blasians – Black-Asian mixes. However, the woman below is a pure Filipina.

Some Filipinas look very dark. This Filipina could even be a Blasian, but she is 100% Filipina.

While most Filipinos have no observable Negrito blood, in the urban slums, you can sometimes see Filipinos with Negrito elements. The girls below seem to be mostly Southern Mongoloid (Filipino) but they seem to have a small Negrito element.

Slum dwelling children in the Philippines. These kids appear to have some Negrito in them. Some Filipinos have observable Negrito elements, but most do not.

Below are Filipino Negritos. They would be regarded as an Australoid people.

Pure Ati from the Philippines. These Negrito people have very low population numbers and may even be going extinct.

The Negrito woman and her child below have quite a bit of Mongoloid genes in them.

The true Australoid-Mongoloid types would be the Eastern Indonesians, the Melanesians, the Micronesians and the Polynesians. The Polynesians are ~50% Austronesian and ~50% Melanesian. Micronesians have more Melanesian in them. Melanesians are a mix primarily of Austronesian and Papuan.

A Timorese woman, a true Mongoloid-Australoid mix. Timorese are about 80% Melanesian and 20% Southern Mongoloid (Austronesian)

A Trifecta of Three Phony “Scandals”

This is a letter I just received. The Republicans are going to gin up another fake impeachment proceeding, along with another Congressional investigation. We are back in the Clinton years, when US democracy dove to the stinkingist fascist and totalitarian depths in its history with endless investigations of one phony scandal after another.

Finally, they impeached Clinton on totally ridiculous grounds (Clinton beat the impeachment handily at a trial). There is one place you see the sort of sick, twisted, corrupt politics crap, and that’s in the 3rd World. The Turd World. The Republican Party has turned America into a gigantic Turd World country.

In the Turd World, there are constant fake investigations of fake scandals, and Presidents are always being impeached on phony political grounds. In addition, Presidents are assaulted, placed under arrest, tortured and even murdered on a regular basis, generally in the context of a military coup. This is particularly prevalent in the Sewer of the World, Latin America. This nonsense has gone on in most Latin American shitholes, including Venezuela, Bolivia, Argentina, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Grenada, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Ecuador, Guyana, Colombia, Brazil, Peru and Chile.

All of these coups and assassinations have been done by the Latin American rightwing, which is an objectively fascist rightwing movement and always has been. Whenever any populist or progressive government comes in, the rightwing in that Latin American country tries to oust them via assassination, coup or a fake impeachment. The US has supported 100% of these radically antidemocratic and fascist incidents in Latin America. There has never been a single fascist coup in Latin America that did not have the 100% backing of the United Snakes.

In the rest of the world, it is as bad or worse. In Pakistan, presidential candidates are murdered on a regular basis.In the rest of the Turd World, opposition candidates are often jailed or worse. This is what is happening in Turkey at the moment, and it was going on earlier in Iran. Opposition party candidates are murdered on a regular basis in the Philippines.

Scandal hearings should be reserved for the worst of the worst. Iran-Contra and the S & L Crisis are good examples. If you recall, the Democrats did not turn either of those hearings into impeachment proceedings. Impeachment should only be for the worst of crimes. A good example was President Nixon, who would have been impeached had he not resigned, for bugging the headquarters of the Democratic Party during the 1972 campaign. I can hardly think of a single impeachable case since 1972. This is just dirty politics and nothing else, and it is sleazy as Hell.

Every Administration will have scandals of various types. It is inevitable under our money infested system where both parties are tied to big money and corporate rule. In almost all cases, these scandals are run of the mill things that any Administration goes through. However, whenever a Democratic President is in office, any of the usual scandals that any Administration deals with will have huge hearings in Congress, threats of impeachment and special prosecutors.

Objective evidence shows that there were far more scandals and there was far more corruption under Bush and Reagan than under Clinton or Obama. But no matter how corrupt or scandal ridden a Republican is, the spineless Democrats will never do anything about it. Not a single hearing, no special prosecutor, no impeachment proceedings. On the other hand, the far fewer scandals under a Democrat will be turned into a Ringling Brothers affair that dominates the idiotic headlines for months to years.

Nothing Obama has done warrants impeachment or even a hearing.

The Benghazi Consulate was a CIA office – 80% of the personnel there were CIA officers. The Islamists knew that, and that is why it was attacked. The CIA failed to provide enough security for the consulate, and they relied too much on unproven Libyan security.

The call for backup amounted to a call for “4 men” to arrive. Do you think 4 armed US forces would have turned the situation around? There was a call to bring in a helicopter gunship to fire missiles or machine gun fire or a jet to bomb the area. However, the area is surrounded by civilians, and in the initial attack, no one really had any idea what was going on.

There was an order given to stand down and not send in air power until more could be learned about the confused situation. The forces on the ground evacuated the Americans from the consulate to a safe house, but the Islamists were waiting at the safe house for them.

In a hazy situation were no one knew what was going on, it would have been madness to drop bombs or shoot missiles at the heavily inhabited area at the consulate, the safe house and the area in between. The forces at the consulate fought very well. Although 4 Americans were killed, 32 were rescued. In addition, ~100 Islamist attackers were killed.

          Benghazi #killed

Americans 4
Islamists 100

This was a battle in a war we are fighting with Al Qaeda and allied Islamists. By any standard metric, we won this battle. It is beyond me why this is some sort of a scandal. We fight battles all the time in the war with Al Qaeda, the Taliban and other Islamists. Some we win, some we lose. Sometimes our men are killed or wounded. Should there be hearings, special prosecutors or impeachment proceedings every time an American is killed by the enemy overseas? What kind of insanity is that?

The IRS scandal is a joke. As a result of Citizens United, many political outfits such as Karl Rove’s Crossroads set themselves up as tax exempt social welfare organizations that do not engage in political work. Obviously, this is a lie. This was mostly done on the Right, as word went out via Karl Rove to the rightwing grassroots to claim social welfare status to pay no taxes.

Approximately 250-300 groups with “tea party” in their name engaged in this crime by lying and calling themselves social welfare organizations. The IRS identified all of these groups engaged in this fraud and crime and sent them letters demanding to see their paperwork.

Since a vast amount of “tea party” groups were engaging in this sort of crime, lower level IRS officials in Indianapolis targeted every group with “tea party” in their name and sent them these letters demanding that they prove they were a political group or a social welfare group. Unfortunately, a number of liberal organizations also committed these crimes and called themselves social welfare groups to claim tax exempt status. All of these liberal groups were also targeted by the IRS and they received letters demanding to see their paperwork.

The IRS was completely correct to do what they did. There was no scandal, not even the whiff of one. When 300 groups with tea party in their name are engaging in crime, it looks like smoke. Where there is smoke, there is fire. That massive crime spree by tea party groups was enough to put every group with tea party in their name under suspicion.

It is right and proper for the IRS to determine if any political group of any stripe of committing crime by falsely representing themselves. In addition, liberal groups committing these crimes were also questioned. When you commit crimes, you may get called in for questioning by authorities. This is the job of the authorities. If you abuse tax laws and cheat on your taxes, expect a call from the IRS. This was no political prosecution. The local Indianapolis office was 100% correct in what they did.

Obama caved in spinelessly as usual, firing the IRS Director for the crime of enforcing tax law and fighting tax criminals and massive tax fraud and evasion. A cop was fired for enforcing the law because the Republican criminals and their friends demanded he be fired.

I do not know enough about the targeting of AP reporters’ phone records. This is not a prosecution of the media. Instead, they were trying to find out who was leaking to the AP about the CIA’s secret wars overseas. So this is part of Obama’s war on whistleblowers.

The war on whistleblowers went completely wild under Ronald Reagan, who attacked whistleblowers more than any previous president. It has continued to this day. It was particularly nasty under George Bush and included the outrageous outing of active CIA agents for political purposes. Republican and Democratic Administrations both have gone after whistleblowers in a vicious way.

Republicans screaming about this were utterly silent when George Bush and Ronald Reagan waged all out war against whistleblowers. In addition, Republicans have, up until this point, backed all of Obama’s anti-whistleblower activities.

In fact, they have accused him of being soft of whistleblowers – see the Bradley Manning case, where Republicans have called for Manning to be executed – and the Wikileaks case, where the Republicans have called for Julian Assange to be arrested, sent to the US, tried and executed for treason. They have also called for Assange to be assassinated by a US hit squad. So you see, even if Obama wages a war on whistleblowers, the Republicans support it and even double down on it.

Impeach the President. Seriously?

That’s where the Republicans are going. Rep. Jason Chaffetz could barely keep from giggling at the possibility on CNN yesterday. Even Wolf Blitzer looked a little uncomfortable.

Of course, they want a special prosecutor.

Scott Walker spent his day telling everyone from the La Crosse Tribune to middle-school tour groups that we must appoint a special prosecutor. Guess who’s running for president?

Anyone old enough to remember the nineties knows this can turn ugly fast.

Meanwhile, back in reality, there’s a real scandal taking place: Tens of thousands of kids have been kicked out of preschool. Teachers are being laid off. Meals on Wheels for housebound seniors have been cut.

While GOP consultants across the DC area put Ken Starr back on speed dial, millions of people are suffering from the sequester. The young, the poor and the elderly. Every day, it will get worse.

Islamophobes are Insane

Despite the fact that I have some critical views about Islam myself, I continue to hold that the Islamophobes of the world are insane. They make no sense at all. Another commenter noted recently that the Hindutvadis of India (really nearly all middle to upper class high caste Hindus) have a hatred of Islam that makes no sense whatsoever and is completely irrational. I would agree with that. The Hindutvadi commenters on this blog have a truly irrational hatred of Islam.

To some extent it is true that Islam is a menace, and it is a violent religion, but it’s mostly a problem in the various sandboxes that are ruled by Islam. In other words, Islam is mostly a problem for Muslims and not for the rest of us. To the extent that it is a problem for the rest of is is mostly due to the fact that we can’t seem to stop attacking and killing Muslims. As long as we do that, they will wage defense or revenge based Islam on us.

The truth is that that most Islamophobes are motivated by reaction. There are very few progressive Islam-haters (there are some in Afghanistan and Iran) because Islamophobia is not a progressive value.

Almost all Islamophobes in the West are motivated by political reaction. In other words, they are beasts themselves – they are the very beasts that they accuse the Muslims of being. In Europe, Islamophobes are associated with the most reactionary elements of Europe – European and even White nationalists. They are also associated with all of the fascist and quasi-fascist parties in Europe.

They are strongly aligned with Zionism, a vile imperialist and settler-colonial fascist project that occupies and conquers Arab lands and has expansionist aims on the rest of it.They are politically reactionary, and many of them have begun to rail against socialism and the welfare state and have started to rail for radical neoliberal economics. In the UK, they are responsible for Crusade-like invasions of Muslim lands in Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan.

In Russia it is much the same, except the Islam-haters are even worse – more racist, more fascist and much more violent. They are associated with a violent project to deny the majority-Muslim lands in the Caucasus their right to self-determination, which is their inherent right after all. Instead, like Crusaders of recent European colonizers, the Russians have made much of the Caucasus into colonies. In the meantime, they committed genocide against the Muslims of Chechnya.

In Israel, the Islamophobes are associated with the most fascist,  backwards, conquering and expansionist elements of the Jews. I should note that these same elements hate Christians and non-Jews about as much as they hate Islam. These are the monsters of the Jewish people, as wicked as they accuse the Muslims of being. This group is also politically reactionary, and is responsible for imposing radical neoliberalism on Israel which has resulted in many social problems, including widespread homelessness.

In Lebanon, the Muslim haters are associated with the Maronite Christian Falangist movement, a true fascist movement that has the distinction of being the first movement to bring European style fascism (like the Nazis) to Lebanon. The founders of this movement worshiped Hitler. This is a true monstrosity, a blood and soil fascist movement that has deep roots in Maronite society. In addition, this group is politically reactionary, supporting the closest thing to radical neoliberalism anywhere in the Arab World.

In India, the Muslim haters are the most poisonous, backwards, fascistic and casteist elements of Indian society, strongly associated with the high caste Hindu elite. There is a lot of evidence that the hatred of Islam by Hindutvadis is because the Muslims humiliated the high castes and removed them from their position of privilege in Hindu society. This is an extremely fascist movement whose leaders also worshiped Hitler. They are responsible for a genocide against Muslims in Gujarat in which 2,500 Muslims were slaughtered with state support.

This movement is associated also with radical neoliberal economics and hatred for socialism and the poor and lower castes of India. It is an elite movement designed to deepen poverty in India, enrich the high castes and restore the high castes to their position of privilege which they felt was denied them in a movement since Independence. They represent the most primitive and barbaric elements of Hindu culture, which is backwards, cruel, amoral  and parasitic anyway. These are the monsters of India and the monsters of the world, a danger to the SubCon and to the rest of us as they spread out like a plague around the globe. They are every bit as vicious and monstrous as the Muslims they hate so much.

The bottom line is that Islamophobes are simply bad people.

Everywhere it exists on Earth, it is associated with idiotic and barbaric religious fundamentalism, either Jewish, Christian or Hindu. It is generally associated with the most reactionary elements in every society, and it usually wishes to impose radical rightwing economics on society in the form of neoliberalism.

This is an elite project designed to enrich the top 20% of society while impoverishing when it is not starving or killing off the bottom 80%. It has been responsible for many millions of deaths in the last few decades, mostly via denial of medical care through mandated state kickbacks. In some societies like Israel, Europe and Russia, it is associated with racism in the form of ethnic nationalism – Jewish nationalism in Israel and White nationalism in Europe and Russia.

If Islamophobes were decent people themselves then we might have a movement to counterpoise the backwards and violent nature of Islam. Instead they are just as bad as the Muslims and in fact in many cases, they are probably even worse. They vastly exaggerate and lie about Muslims and Islam, and ridiculous overplay the dangers associated with this religion, which is mostly a danger to its own adherents anyway.

The Internet Hindus

An interesting segment from Al Jazeera TV about the “Internet Hindus.” The Internet Hindus are the Hindutvadi Hindu nationalist fascist Indians who have flooded the Internet in the past few years. Let us think for a minute about who these people are. Only 6% of Indians even has a computer. And how many of those are on the Net. As you can see, almost all Indians on the Net will be the upper class and the upper middle class, the richest of India, the bourgeois and ruling class sector. Hence, these folks are not representative of India as a whole.

The top 6% of Indians are obviously almost all high caste Hindus. So it follows that if almost all Internet Indians are Hindutvadis in one form or another, this shows that Hindutvadi is an ideology of the Hindu ruling class and bourgeois, of the Hindu ruling class and upper middle class. It is also apparently an ideology which has extremely high support among high caste Hindus. Is it mostly a high caste movement? This is hard to say, as surveys are hard to come by. But almost all Hindutvadis on the Net are high caste Hindus for sure.

Hence, this is no populist or working class movement of the people. It’s an elite movement of the bourgeois. Bourgeois revolutionary nationalist movements that attack minorities and are predicated on volkisch nationalism are properly seen as fascist movements. Note how Hindutvadis hate “internationalists,” “international movements,” and how they call all of their opponents Communists and Marxists. They also accuse their “Marxist” opponents of being anti-national or opposed to the country. Ringing any bells now? Sounds like fascism, right? Even sounds like Nazism.

Really, most ethnic nationalist movements are fascist, quasi-fascist or nearly fascist in some sense. The Nazis were nothing special. They were just a typical ethnic nationalist fascist movement, though granted they were quite a bit more bloodthirsty, genocidal and imperialist than most of them.

The lesson of the Nazis is that the Nazi germ is in all fascist movements. All fascist movements are potentially genocidal against the “enemies of the nation,” the internal enemies, usually coded as citizens who are not really members of the nation and the “anti-national” Left which seeks to promote solidarity with other nations and sanity in international relations and offers a critique of society, the state and even the nation. These are the “traitors” in any fascist movement, and their fate in any fascist country is tenuous at best.

That the vast majority of the Hindu upper class and upper middle class and large segments of the Hindu middle class has gone over to an overtly fascist ideology is very troubling.

Russian Neo-Nazi Violence is Out of Control

To be honest, I had not expected anything reasonable on this subject from a group called the Union of Councils for Jews in the Former Soviet Union (UCSJ) but in this report, they really outdo themselves.

Groups like the disgusting ADL in the US spend most of their time engaged in worthless activities like promoting a fake anti-Semitism crisis in the US. Some examples?

An execrable attack on the sublime Walt/Mearshimer report. A shrill screech against some guy saying “Holocaust” and not referring to Jewish folks. A depressing and relentless push for scary hate crime laws. Stoking the fires with the Catholic Church after the Vatican buried the hatchet. Shamelessly shilling for the Israeli gangster state.

Ludicrous anti-Semitism surveys that only ask folks if they are aware of the obvious. Waging total war against the noble academic boycotts of Apartheid Israel.

I could go on but why? Someone got their feelings hurt, wah wah. 1 million humans lie dead in a charnel house called Iraq and the ADL says some Jewish folks got their feelings hurt. I am supposed to really care about this? I don’t think so.

So I dubiously clicked the link on UCSJ page, at best hoping to find an obsession with the Jewish victims and short shift of the Gentile victims of Russian Nazis. To their credit, the UCSJ did a bang-up job, and I salute them.

This is the real deal, the stuff Jews ought to be really concerned about, instead of wasting time chasing phantoms, persecuting innocent people who “criminally” don’t genuflect enough in front of the Jews and shuddering over fake persecution crises.

The entire month of April 2006 was a great big party in all of Russia. It was Adolf Hitler’s birthday, and the skinheads were partying with guns, knives, fists, etc. When the shindig was over, seven innocent people were corpses, and over a dozen more were seriously wounded. The list itself is worth reading in its numbness and outrage.

Victims were Tajiks, Azerbaijanis, Armenians, Turks, Muslims in general, people from the Caucasus, Syrians, Mongolians, Tuvans, Chinese, North Koreans, Vietnamese, Malays, Indians, Gypsies, Jews (of course), anti-fascists like me, Senegalese, Zambians, ordinary Russians (??), and fans of rock music (they hate people who listen to “racially inferior” Black music like rap and reggae).

In one case, Tajiks in a market fought back, and a Nazi was killed. Good show!

That was last year. This year is 25% worse.

Sean’s Russian Blog has a good rundown on the crisis, suggesting that the Russian Far Right is becoming radicalized. He blames the socioeconomic structure of Putinism itself.

This stuff has been going on for a long time now. The gangs formed around 1993, but the attacks did not start until 1995. In 1994, police began beating immigrants from the Caucasus repeatedly in public, and there was no punishment for them. This seemed to set an example for the Nazis.

By 1998, they were using weapons in most attacks. Already in 1998, there were many attacks against Indians in Russia, mostly students. So many that the Indian Embassy lodged repeated complaints. That year, neo-Nazis pledged to kill “an Asian a day” and “a Black a day” during April when they celebrate Hitler’s birthday. April 1998 was a particularly bad year for attacks on Indians in Russia.

And in the month after April 20, 1998, an average of four Blacks a day were attacked in Russia. One died. Victims came from Nigeria, Benin, Sudan, South Africa and India. Two Pakistani women were badly beaten. In the following years, synagogues were bombed, police were attacked and bombs were planted in the streets.

There are now at least 70,000 skinheads in Russia and probably many more. That is 50% of the world’s skinhead population. 2/3 of the population agrees with nationalist slogans like “Russia for Russians” and blames all problems on foreigners.

1/2 of Russians want to restrict the rights of Russian national minorities. The Russian neo-Nazis probably have quite a bit of popular support, though it has been difficult to gauge the true level of it.

In the past couple of years, they have crossed a previous red line – no attacks on children. They now usually use screwdrivers, baseball bats and knives, and increasingly the attacks end in homicide. In 2004, they killed Nikolai Girenko, an anti-skinhead activist who had helped convict a number of skinheads in court. He had received many death threats and the entrance to his building was covered in Nazi slogans and symbols.

A good, but long, report on the subject is available here.

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 Weakness of the Hindutva Troll

Here.

Outlines the Hindutva troll on the Internet, a new species that has only appeared in the past few years. We have had a few of them on this blog, and their erroneous fascist views have been obvious to all who care to look.

It is interesting to look at the comments. Last time I looked at the comments, 100% of the commenters supported the Hindutva line. Which brings me back to one of my original arguments, which is that nearly every Hindu you as an American will ever meet is for all intents and purposes a Hindutvadi. Most of the Hindus I met online are upper and upper to middle class (depending on how you define those words). Almost 100% of these persons were Hindutvadis in one way or another.

So Hindutvadi is simply the voice of the upper caste and higher economic class Hindus. Hindutvadi has become a vehicle for the mindset of the ordinary Hindu, the “Hindu of the street.”

This is of course reminiscent of any fascist philosophy. Trotsky warned of the dangers of fascism, describing fascism as the typical mindset of the ordinary man, of the man of the street. Juan Peron, sometimes thought to be a fascist, had the support of the “shirtless ones,” which was shorthand for the typical man of the street.

There is a bit of  the beast in every man. This populist essence, typically manifested in the uneducated, emotionally driven, knee jerk reactions of the “ordinary man on the street” has been distilled and distributed effectively by all fascist movements. And we see here in India a replay of the 20th Century fascist nightmare, even down to its typical adherents, the petit bourgeois or middle class, always the fertile soil for any fascist movement.

Conn Hallinan, “Hugo Chavez: Lest We Forget”

Nice piece on Chavez.

Hugo Chavez: Lest We Forget

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

Conn Hallinan
Dispatches From The Edge: March 11, 2013

Paying Last Respects

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

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

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

Would that we had paid the man some attention.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He will be missed, indeed.

Greg Palast on Hugo Chavez

This article shows exactly how US imperialism works in the world today. It also shows just how evil US foreign policy really is. Now whether the behavior portrayed below is evil or good is a value judgment. I say it’s evil. Someone else may feel it’s the right thing to do.

But one thing for sure, the true story, as Greg Palast lays out below, is one you will never hear on US TV or radio or read in any US newspaper or magazine. The US media won’t even bring up charges like this even to deny them. Can you imagine if every day in the US you could turn on your TV to a debate on whether or not the US is an imperialist country? That’s a debate they don’t want you to have, even to deny it.

Problem is that no matter how hard they deny it, they don’t want you to hear the other side at all. There is too much risk that no matter how hard they ridicule the other side, a few people might decide to side with the opposition. A few Americans here and there might decide that, yes, the US is an imperialist country.

That the US is an imperialist country and that US capitalism is based on imperialism is beyond a doubt. There’s nothing to debate. It’s obviously true. Even the scores of US military bases and the huge US military are the armed faction of that imperial system. When you go enlist in the US military, you are joining as a foot soldier for imperialism, in general. You are carrying a weapon for Heinz, the Koch Brothers and Chevron more than you are defending US soil from shadowy enemies.

Almost all supporters of US capitalism (and we have many here on this blog) refuse to acknowledge that US capitalism is based on imperialism. Imperialism is its bread and butter.

It’s fine and dandy to support capitalism (I am not completely against the market myself), but I think if you support US capitalism, you ought to at least agree that it’s based on imperialism. That would be the brave and principled thing to do. And now do you support this system, this particular US capitalism buttressed by imperialism as laid out below. To me, that is a much harder thing to do, but supporters or US capitalism need to do that. They need to take a stand on imperialism. You either support US imperialism or you oppose it. Which will it be? No more dodging the question and pretending that imperialism doesn’t exist.

It is also interesting that we have Blacks on this board who hated Hugo Chavez. Yet Chavez was the great champions of the Blacks and Browns of Venezuela, as laid out below. Venezuelan capitalism, as is the case with capitalism in many parts of the world, was racially based. The Whites took all the money and left the Blacks and Browns with crumbs – starving, sickened, squatting in hovels with sewage running down the steep gutters. Why US Blacks would support such a racial spoils system is beyond me.

There is much talk that Chavez and other Latin American Leftists were all given cancer by the US. It’s an interesting theory, but there is no evidence for it at the moment.

I had an Argentine girlfriend once. We talked about the Dirty War in Argentina, supported to the hilt by the US (Henry Kissinger notoriously backed them to the hilt), in which 30,000 mostly unarmed and peaceful Leftists were murdered by a rightwing military dictatorship.

“Well,” she said thoughtfully. “The Latin American Left dreamed of a better world. And in Latin America, that is a dangerous thing.”

So it is with Hugo Chavez, so it is with the Americas, of which we in the north are increasingly a part.

“But why the GW Bush regime’s hate, hate, HATE of the President of Venezuela? Reverend Pat wasn’t coy about the answer: Its the oil. This is a dangerous enemy to our South controlling a huge pool of oil.”

Vaya con Dios, Hugo Chàvez, mi Amigo

By Greg Palast

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Venezuelan President Chavez once asked me why the US elite wanted to kill him. My dear Hugo: Its the oil. And its the Koch Brothers and its the ketchup.

Reverend Pat Robertson said, Hugo Chavez thinks were trying to assassinate him. I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it.

It was 2005 and Robertson was channeling the frustration of George Bush’s State Department. Despite Bush’s providing intelligence, funds and even a note of congratulations to the crew who kidnapped Chavez (we’ll get there), Hugo remained in office, reelected and wildly popular.

But why the Bush regime’s hate, hate, HATE of the President of Venezuela? Reverend Pat wasn’t coy about the answer: It’s the oil. This is a dangerous enemy to our South controlling a huge pool of oil.

A really BIG pool of oil. Indeed, according to Guy Caruso, former chief of oil intelligence for the CIA, Venezuela hold a recoverable reserve of 1.36 trillion barrels, that is, a whole lot more than Saudi Arabia.

If we didn’t kill Chavez, we’d have to do an Iraq on his nation. So the Reverend suggests, We don’t need another $200 billion war…. It’s a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with.

Chavez himself told me he was stunned by Bush’s attacks: Chavez had been quite chummy with Bush Senior and with Bill Clinton.

So what made Chavez suddenly “a dangerous enemy”? Here’s the answer you wont find in The New York Times:

Just after Bush’s inauguration in 2001, Chavez congress voted in a new Law of Hydrocarbons. Henceforth, Exxon, British Petroleum, Shell Oil and Chevron would get to keep 70% of the sales revenues from the crude they sucked out of Venezuela. Not bad, considering the price of oil was rising toward $100 a barrel.

But to the oil companies, which had bitch-slapped Venezuela’s prior government into giving them 84% of the sales price, a cut to 70% was no bueno. Worse, Venezuela had been charging a joke of a royalty just one percent on heavy crude from the Orinoco Basin. Chavez told Exxon and friends they’d now have to pay 16.6%.

Clearly, Chavez had to be taught a lesson about the etiquette of dealings with Big Oil.

On April 11, 2002, President Chavez was kidnapped at gunpoint and flown to an island prison in the Caribbean Sea. On April 12, Pedro Carmona, a business partner of the US oil companies and president of the nations Chamber of Commerce, declared himself President of Venezuela giving a whole new meaning to the term, corporate takeover.

U.S. Ambassador Charles Shapiro immediately rushed down from his hilltop embassy to have his picture taken grinning with the self-proclaimed President and the leaders of the coup détat.

Bush’s White House spokesman admitted that Chavez was, democratically elected, but, he added, Legitimacy is something that is conferred not by just the majority of voters. I see.

With an armed and angry citizenry marching on the Presidential Palace in Caracas ready to string up the coup plotters, Carmona, the Pretend President from Exxon returned his captive Chavez back to his desk within 48 hours.

Chavez had provoked the coup not just by clawing back some of the bloated royalties of the oil companies. Its what he did with that oil money that drove Venezuela’s One Percent to violence.

In Caracas, I ran into the reporter for a TV station whose owner is generally credited with plotting the coup against the president. While doing a publicity photo shoot, leaning back against a tree, showing her wide-open legs nearly up to where they met, the reporter pointed down the hill to the ranchos, the slums above Caracas, where shacks, once made of cardboard and tin, where quickly transforming into homes of cinder blocks and cement.

He [Chavez] gives them bread and bricks, so they vote for him, of course. She was disgusted by them, the 80% of Venezuelans who are negro e indio (Black and Indian)and poor. Chavez, himself negro e indio, had, for the first time in Venezuela’s history, shifted the oil wealth from the privileged class that called themselves Spanish, to the dark-skinned masses.

While trolling around the poor housing blocks of Caracas, I ran into a local, Arturo Quiran, a merchant seaman and no big fan of Chavez. But over a beer at his kitchen table, he told me,

Fifteen years ago under [then-President] Carlos Andrés Pérez, there was a lot of oil money in Venezuela. The oil boom we called it. Here in Venezuela there was a lot of money, but we didn’t see it.

But then came Hugo Chavez, and now the poor in his neighborhood, he said, get medical attention, free operations, x-rays, medicines; education also. People who never knew how to write now know how to sign their own papers.”

Chavez Robin Hood thing, shifting oil money from the rich to the poor, would have been grudgingly tolerated by the US. But Chavez, who told me, We are no longer an oil colony, went further…too much further, in the eyes of the American corporate elite.

Venezuela had landless citizens by the millions and unused land by the millions of acres tied up, untilled, on which a tiny elite of plantation owners squatted. Chavez congress passed in a law in 2001 requiring untilled land to be sold to the landless. It was a program long promised by Venezuela’s politicians at the urging of John F. Kennedy as part of his Alliance for Progress.

Plantation owner Heinz Corporation didn’t like that one bit. In retaliation, Heinz closed its ketchup plant in the state of Maturin and fired all the workers. Chavez seized Heinz plant and put the workers back on the job. Chavez didn’t realize that he’d just squeezed the tomatoes of Americas powerful Heinz family and Mrs. Heinz husband, Senator John Kerry, now U.S. Secretary of State.

Or, knowing Chavez as I do, he didn’t give a damn.

Chavez could survive the ketchup coup, the Exxon presidency, even his taking back a piece of the windfall of oil company profits, but he dangerously tried the patience of Americas least forgiving billionaires: The Koch Brothers.

How? Well, that’s another story for another day.

Elected presidents who annoy Big Oil have ended up in exile or coffins: Mossadegh of Iran after he nationalized BP’s fields (1953), Elchibey, President of Azerbaijan, after he refused demands of BP for his Caspian fields (1993), President Alfredo Palacio of Ecuador after he terminated Occidentals drilling concession (2005).

Its a chess game, Mr. Palast, Chavez told me. He was showing me a very long, and very sharp sword once owned by Simon Bolivar, the Great Liberator. And I am, Chavez said, a very good chess player.

In the film The Seventh Seal, a medieval knight bets his life on a game of chess with the Grim Reaper. Death cheats, of course, and takes the knight. No mortal can indefinitely outplay Death who, this week, Chavez must know, will checkmate the new Bolivar of Venezuela.

But in one last move, the Bolivarian grandmaster played a brilliant endgame, naming Vice-President Nicolas Maduro, as good and decent a man as they come, as heir to the fight for those in the ranchos. The One Percent of Venezuela, planning on Chavez’s death to return them the power and riches they couldn’t win in an election, are livid with the choice of Maduro.

Chavez sent Maduro to meet me in my downtown New York office back in 2004. In our run-down detective digs on Second Avenue, Maduro and I traded information on assassination plots and oil policy.

Even then, Chavez was carefully preparing for the day when Venezuela’s negros e indios would lose their king but still stay in the game. Class war on a chessboard. Even in death, I wouldn’t bet against Hugo Chavez.

“War’ s never a winning thing, Charlie. You just lose all the time, and the one who loses last asks for terms. All I remember is a lot of losing and sadness and nothing good at the end of it. The end of it, Charles, that was a winning all to itself, having nothing to do with guns.”
–Ray Bradbury, from the short story, The Time Machine, 1957

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.