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.

Real Revolution Versus Fake Revolution

The Syrian Revolution as fake revolution.

I honestly do not think much of this Syrian revolution. Almost all of the revolutionaries are Sunni Muslim Arabs. Few to none of them are Shia, Alawite or Druze Arabs. There are almost no Christians in the ranks. And there are few to no Kurds in the ranks. In fact, the revolutionaries are hostile to all of these groups last time I checked. That’s why those other groups are not signing up. There have been many attacks on Syrian Christians, Shia and Alawites by the revolutionaries. Many from these groups have been kidnapped, beaten, tortured and murdered.

In a city of 50,000, all of the Christians were ethnically cleansed from the city. They received a “leave or die” order from the rebels. Many Syrian churches have been blown up or damaged by the rebels. The Druze are not signing up for the fight, and the Sunni Muslim rebels may not like the Druze very much. No doubt they see them as some sort of heretics or possibly even infidels.

The Syrian Kurds do not like the regime very much, as the regime has not been too kind to them to put it mildly. However, the regime made some huge concessions to the Kurds in recent days, and the regime has now vacated the Kurdish area and the Kurds are more or less in control of their own part of Syria. Why the regime vacated the area, I am not sure, but the Kurds are hostile to the rebels and maybe the regime just felt that the area was not worth fighting for.

A political party which is frankly the Syrian arm of the Turkish PKK has now taken over that part of Syria. The result is that Turkey has threatened to attack and occupy that part of Syria as it is serving as some sort of a PKK base. These threats have not been carried out. The Kurdish government in Iraq has refused to support their brethren in Syria as they are seen as too close to the PKK, and the Iraqi Kurds want to distance themselves from the PKK. The best description of the Syrian Kurds at this point would be to say that they are hostile to both the regime and the rebels. The rebels do not like the Kurds because the Sunni Arab rebels are Arab nationalists and see the Kurds as secessionists.

The revolution has a strongly Islamist character and has had it from the very start. Al Qaeda type groups now form a large part of the rebels. Al Qaeda types from Iraq and hardline Islamists from around the Arab world are going to Syria to fight in the “jihad.” It’s a jihad because they are fighting against the Alawi, who are seen as heretics by many Sunni Muslims. The fight is being manipulated from abroad. The rebels get much of their money and arms from Qatar and Saudi Arabia. The Gulf Arabs hate the Syrian regime because it is made up of Alawites, who they see as heretics.

Turkey has also helped the rebels a lot for reasons that are not clear. However, they are Sunni Islamists who have an Alawi type group in their country that they don’t treat very well. Turkey is also trying to be seen as the light among Sunni Muslims and is attempting to gain points with them that way. The United Snakes is also involved because Syria is one of the pillars of the resistance front against the Zionist regime in Israel. Syria and Iran along with Hezbollah and Hamas make up the resistance front at the moment, although the Egyptian regime may be leaning in that direction. Lebanon is also a sworn enemy of Israel, but they are usually not thought of as part of the resistance front.

Iran is listed because they support Hezbollah and Hamas with arms. The Syrian regime helps ferret those arms from Iran to Hezbollah and also gives Hezbollah a lot of arms of its own. In addition, Syria is still a sworn enemy of Israel because Israel occupies Syrian land in the Golan Heights. It’s also said that Syria supports Hamas, but all they do is give refuge to their leaders. Qatar also gives refuge to Hamas leaders and no one talks about that.

Israel also continues to occupy Lebanese territory in the Shebaa Farms and makes all sorts of phony excuses as to why they can’t give it back. One of the excuses is that the land is really Syrian, but Syria says that even if that is true, they don’t want the land, and Lebanon can have it. Israel is such a disgusting country! This occupation is the stated reason for Hezbollah continuing existence. I really don’t see why Israel doesn’t give the land back to Lebanon to get rid of Hezbollah. I don’t get it.

It is true that another issue is three Lebanese villages that Israel conquered in 1948. Israel invaded far south Lebanon during this war and conquered three villages. They ordered all of the Shia Muslims out at gunpoint, and they went to Lebanon as refugees. I am not sure of their status now. The towns are now 100% full of Israeli Jews. Lebanon says she wants those towns back.

If the Syrian regime can be removed, one leg of the Syria – Iran – Hezbollah axis can be eliminated. The new regime will be Sunni Muslim and will be hostile to both Iran and Hezbollah since Iran and Hezbollah have both helped the regime during the war. They would have been hostile to them anyway though because Sunni Muslims in that region are notorious Shia-haters and both the Syrian and Iranian regimes are Shia.

With the new regime in power, Iran would no longer be able to supply Hezbollah via Syria. She might be able to supply them directly, but that might be pretty difficult. Iran would then be even more isolated in the region. Without the support of its main patron, Hezbollah may wither on the vine. Hezbollah has currently moved into Syria to protect some Syrian Shia villages on the border. The Syrian rebels have ordered the Shia residents and Hezbollah both to evacuate these villages. They refused to leave, and there has been some heavy fighting in the area lately. There have been many reports that Iran has advisers in Syria helping the regime. The reports have been hard to validate, but they are probably true.

So the whole reason for the US supporting Syria is part and parcel of US support for the Zionist regime in Israel. It’s just more “USraeli” foreign policy (the two countries can be seen as one merged entity that I call “USreal”).

The Catastrophe of the Iraqi Resistance

Repost from the old site. This is a good article, the first article I wrote on the Internet in December 2004. It was widely posted all over the Net and got a lot of comments on the Net. I believe it is still relevant today.

By any progressive standards, the Iraqi resistance seems to have morphed in recent days into one of the most unprincipled, unethical, fanatical, unreasonable, and reactionary resistance factions on Earth.

From a progressive standpoint, it would seem the Iraqi rebels have some principled grounds to fight for – we see them as resisting a US imperialist, neocolonialist and Zionist invasion of Iraq, one intended to subdue all of those forces in the Middle East resisting US and Israeli desires for total economic, military and political domination of the region.

The US invasion was completely contrary to international law, there has been massive colonization and outright theft of Iraq’s resources and economic base, and the US appears to be demanding the right to establish several colonial garrisons in the conquered land in furtherance of its imperial plans for the region.

We could go on and on about the larger political and economic schemes at play here, but that’s all been dealt with extensively by others. The point I am trying to make here is that merely from anti-imperialist or anti-colonialist point of view, the Iraqi resistance would seem to have a valid cause for armed struggle to throw the invaders and occupiers off their homeland.

Given the seedbed for a patriotic, nationalist, principled resistance the US has sown in Iraq, what have the Iraqi guerrillas done? In 2003, one could still hold out hope for some sort of a progressive, secular, nationalist armed resistance in Iraq. Through 2003, a plethora of resistance groups appeared, with new ones popping up every week or so.

A number of them were standard nationalist groupings, others stridently opposed sectarian politics, and a number were decidedly secular. Some of these groupings were associated with the former regime, but many were not.

They were generally made up of Sunni Arabs, though there were also a number of Shia Arabs, along with a few Kurds, Turkmen and even Iraqi Christians filling out the ranks. Further, there were a number of openly Leftist armed groups, though their numbers were small.

From the point of view of the Iraqi resistance, the best thing to do would be to cast aside all sectarian nonsense and try to unite as many groups as possible against the occupiers. This is what a sensible, intelligent, nationalist resistance does. Even in a region where tribal politics holds sway, the fighters close ranks in the name of “national unity”, as the guerrillas in Palestine have done.

The resistance should avoid imposing noxious, draconian law on the peoples under its control, proceed cautiously in the case of spies, and avoid trying to form local government. The case of Palestine is instructive for how a “national unity” resistance should be run.

Prior to the founding of Hamas in 1987, Islamists in Palestine were hardly involved in the armed struggle – they spent most of their time, believe it or not, arguing about how long to grow one’s beard. If one took up arms, one was regarded as a “Communist”, since armed struggle against Israel was for “Communists”.

There was a great deal of sectarian conflict in those days and the precursors to Hamas killed and wounded many Leftists, who the Islamists despised.

Around this time, Israel helped found Hamas as both a divide and conquer strategy against the Palestinians and to Islamicize the face of Palestinian struggle in order to make it less appealing on the international front. In many ways, this strategy was a complete failure. Before the founding of Hamas, the Islamists were attacking Leftists in Palestine all the time.

This internecine conflict came to an end soon after the founding of Hamas. After things settled down a bit, the Palestinian resistance moved to a point of equilibrium called “national unity”. Presently, open Leftists and Communists in the PFLP and DFLP fight side by side, with no problems whatsoever, with the hardline Islamists in Hamas.

Professors on Palestinian campuses write openly atheist and blasphemous tracts against Islam and are not harmed. One of the top figures in the PLO is an acknowledged atheist and no one bothers him. There are large marches against suicide bombings. Hamas eschews all local law enforcement and refuses to implement an Islamic dress code.

In Ramallah, one can walk into a bar and order a drink during Ramadan – the only place in the Arab World one may do this – and Hamas refuses to even issue an official denunciation. Hamas has never tried to shut down the numerous bars in Palestine.

Although Hamas is officially the Palestinian branch of Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas keeps this a big secret because the MB is so disliked in Palestine (it is regarded as an Islamic extremist organization). Most Palestinians are not even aware of the relationship. Last Christmas, Hamas members actually presented gifts and toys to churches in Bethlehem – an unthinkable act for a hardline Islamist group.

Hardline Islamist imams in Gaza have called for Palestinian Christians and Muslims to fight side by side against Israel. Palestinian Christians, and some Muslims, wear whatever they please, and miniskirts and not unheard of, even in Gaza. The Islamists don’t like Western dress, and comments are made, but Hamas has never tried to enforce any kind of Islamic dress code in Palestine.

Palestinian papers are filled with articles that many hardline Palestinians would consider to be openly treasonous – calls for calling off the armed struggle, for settling for the most debasing peace agreements with Israel, for peaceful struggle a la Gandhi, for disarming the armed groups, etc.

Through it all, Hamas and the hardliners generally keep their mouths shut and tolerate openly “sellout” positions, all in the name of national unity. Although the differences between the Left, the PLO and the Islamists are often very wide, there is not much discussion of these differences – they are all temporarily glossed over in the name of national unity.

PFLP and DFLP fighters, open Leftists, came out for the funerals of Hamas leaders Sheik Yassin and Abdulaziz Rantissi and were seen fighting in the battles with the IDF that erupted afterward. Human rights organizations operate openly in Palestine, criticizing both the Israeli and the Palestinian sides, and the armed factions leave them alone.

Most importantly of all, all Palestinian factions have deep roots in their communities and do not brutalize the people they live amongst. In many places, almost everyone in the community is part of the resistance in one way or another, from young kids to women to old folks – everyone serves some function. You can’t get closer to the people than that.

Journalists, politicians, government workers, UN employees, aid workers, Christians, Druze, students, innocent civilians, even ISF volunteers, have nothing to fear from Hamas, the most radical of the Palestinian factions. Hamas has never been known kidnap foreigners for ransom, or to behead prisoners, much less to do so on videotape.

Hamas has never attacked a Palestinian school, store, campus, neighborhood, mosque, church, bar, press office, polling place, government office or hospital. Only informers for Israel have something to fear, and usually only after a serious investigation.

Even on the rare occasions when Hamas has taken an Israeli soldier hostage, the captives were treated fairly well, at least until Israel made the mistake of trying to “free” them. Hamas held them as ransom to try to get its own prisoners out of Israeli prisons.

When Israel refused to negotiate and stormed the hideout, the guerrillas executed the prisoner, which is a crime, but that is still not the same thing as wanton execution of all enemy prisoners or beheading prisoners on tape and peddling the gorefest around the Internet.

Even during the 90’s, while the PA spent much of its time arresting Hamas and Islamic Jihad activists as favors for the US and Israel, Islamic guerrillas generally refrained from attacks on the PA, a breathtaking show of self-restraint.

While controversy has swirled over the Palestinian terror tactic of suicide bombings against civilians, the world fails to recognize that almost all Palestinian attacks have been against military or settler targets in the Territories, and only a relative few attacks have occurred inside the Green Line.

Palestinian guerrillas have repeatedly offered to cease all attacks on civilians inside Israel, only to be endlessly rebuffed. One gets the feeling that Israel wants a suicide attack inside the Green Line now and again to malign the enemy and feed its propaganda machine. Even here, though, Palestinian terrorists have taken a nuanced stance.

Note the International Solidarity Movement’s (ISM) volunteers that swarm the Territories, standing by the besieged Palestinian people and helping protect civilians. Most people don’t realize that 1/3 of ISM volunteers are Jewish.

Generally, these Jews who have chosen to stand by the Palestinian people do not complain of racism from the supposedly Jew-hating Palestinians. How long would a Jewish civilian volunteer last in Iraq’s Sunni Triangle, no matter how pro-resistance he was?

The point here is that all of these people – atheists, blasphemers, bartenders and bar patrons, women in miniskirts, “sell-outs” and compromise at any cost types, human rights activists, journalists, humanitarian workers, Leftists, Communists, feminists, Christians – are basically left alone!

There may be some words exchanged here and there, but in general, no one threatens them, puts a gun to their head, beats them up, attacks them, tortures them, much less kills them or chops their head off on tape. This is the intelligent way to run a principled, intelligent, nationalist resistance to a colonizer, occupier or invader.

Why? Because by fracturing and fighting amongst themselves, the resistance serves the needs of the occupier. Divide and conquer is the age-old colonial game and the smartest resistance movements try not to fall for it.

So what has the Iraqi resistance done? Exactly the opposite of the Palestinian resistance! Instance of uniting for national unity, they are presently pursuing one of the most reactionary, backwards, barbaric, sectarian, fascistic, oppressive, domineering, racist, tribalistic, and downright stupid agendas imaginable.

Allow me to elaborate: In late 2003, after the capture of Saddam, the resistance started moving towards Sunni Islamism and the pro-Saddam factions started drying up. Although there have been a couple of serious, and commendable, flare-ups of Shia nationalistic Islamism with the 2 Sadr rebellions in 2004, at the moment, the resistance is probably 90% Sunni Arab.

Furthermore, as 2004 wore on, the Sunni Islamists became more and more extreme, with a movement towards Salafism or Wahhabism, the most extreme Sunni Islam with roots in the Arabian Gulf.

Through 2004 the Leftist, nationalist, and unified front type groupings gradually seemed to give way to this extreme fanatical Sunni Salafist Islam, which now dominates the Iraqi resistance with its bleak, cruel, Medieval, puritanical, theocratic agenda.

With each passing month, more and more Shia are alienated from the resistance as the Sunni extremists attack the Shia with increasing regularity. In the areas they control, the Sunni fanatics have imposed the most backwards, insane, brutal and stupid version of Islamic law since the fall of the Taliban.

Even Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Sudan are not this harsh. Women are threatened and then shot dead for the crime of wearing blue jeans. Drivers listening to music are pulled out of their cars, beaten, and ordered to listen to religious music. Stores selling musical instruments and music and video CD’s are ordered to close and attacked when they don’t close. Hairdressers and makeup shops are ordered to close.

Women refusing to wear the hijab are threatened with guns and sometimes killed for not covering up. Alcohol stores are ordered to close and bombed when they don’t comply. Alcohol sellers are flogged in public. Men with long hair are given mock public trials where they are beaten and their “Western” haircuts shorn.

In recent days, the Sunni guerrillas around Latifiyah in the so-called Death Triangle have committed the ultimate outrage of shutting down the schools in the region, either in “solidarity with Fallujah” or because “schools are cooperating with the Occupation”.

One has to think hard to think of a resistance group in recent years that has shut down the schools of very same people they are claiming to “protect”. The damage that could be done to the Sunni youngsters in these areas from long-term school shutdowns is hard to calculate.

Journalists are kidnapped, beaten, tortured, shot dead, and even beheaded on tape in a frenzy of delirious rage that is hard for the sane mind to comprehend. News agencies are attacked for not sufficiently toeing the guerrilla line.

And in the ultimate crime and the nadir of stupidity, an aid worker who dedicated her life to the Iraqi people and hated the Occupation was kidnapped and brutally murdered for reasons only an asylum inmate could comprehend.

God forbid, even hospitals are attacked; in the most egregious case, after the idiotic bombing of a Christian church, in order to doubly punish the “infidel Christian” victims of the blast ferried to the hospital.

Execution of “spies”, “informers” and the like is utterly random and at the whim of the guerrillas, often without much evidence or the slightest hint of a proceeding.

The upshot of all of this is that in the areas where they Sunni fanatics hold sway, they are often feared and hated by a certain number of residents, Sunni Arabs themselves. Some residents are so fed up with guerrilla high-handedness and cruelty that they have welcomed the re-Occupation of their cities by US troops.

When a guerrilla faction is reduced to ruling and surviving through terror and not through the deep, passionate support of the people, that resistance faction is utterly failing in one of the primary rules of guerrilla war.

This rule, cited from Mao to Che to the finest war colleges on Earth, that the guerrillas need to gain support from civilian populations through good deeds and by the passionate commitment to the guerrilla cause of the people the guerrillas live amongst. The people’s support for the guerrilla works best when freely given and not coerced – terrorizing the people you claim to represent only gets one so far.

And how are the Sunni Islamists treating other religious groups, whom any half-sane Sunni resistance ought to be trying to enlist in a national resistance? Christians are threatened, ordered to close their alcohol, hairdressing and makeup shops and wear the hijab. If they refuse, they are killed.

Some Christians are being ordered to convert to Islam on penalty of death and there have been a few deaths in these cases. Iraqi churches, some of the oldest and most beautiful in the Christian World, have been repeatedly and shamelessly bombed.

It is true that many Christians have supported the Occupation in the past, but many others have not, and some large Christian parties have recently strongly opposed the Occupation.

The Shia are threatened, bullied, humiliated and ultimately ethnically cleansed. An entire region, from Abu Ghurayb down to Yusufiya and Latifiyah, is being systematically cleansed of Shia in an attempt to expand the Sunni Zone west of Baghdad.

Clearly, this is no better than what Israel does in their Territories. In Latifiyah, Shia mosques have been ordered to close and Shia are being thrown off the land so that Sunnis can take their farmland. Landowners renting to Shia are threatened with death unless they throw the Shia off the land.

The Sunni Islamists have begun setting up checkpoints in Latifiyah, on the popular Shia pilgrimage route between Baghdad and Najaf/Karbala. When Shia pilgrims arrive at these checkpoints, they are pulled out of their cars and ordered to denounce Ali, their patron saint. If they refuse, they are shot dead on the spot.

Other Shia are pulled out of their cars, beaten, and ordered not to come that way again. A Shia armed brigade, the Fury Brigades, was formed recently in Basra to deal with the blatant Sunni racism and oppression of the Shia in Latifiyah.

This Shia armed group recently fought a battle with Sunni Salafists in Latifiyah. Of course, US forces sat back and watched for a couple of hours while they bloodied each other. Obviously, it serves the occupier, the US Coalition, Israel, and imperialism in general to have various Iraqi factions fighting against each. This is exactly what the US and Israel want – the better to control Iraq.

The long-term strategy of the Israeli Right has long been that in order for Israel to survive its hostile neighborhood, Israel needs to become the dominant imperialist state in the Middle East and take control of the neighborhood by attacking its various hostile Arab neighbors (or getting the US to do it for them) and breaking up hostile Arab states into endlessly warring ethnic statelets.

This strategy was laid out in an internal Israeli document published in 1980 and uncovered and revealed to the world by the brave Israeli dissident Israel Shahak. Other more recent documents echo the same line, especially Securing the Realm in 1996 (The Securing the Realm document appears to lay the groundwork for the Iraq invasion).

The 1980 Israeli paper said that the optimal situation for Iraq, from Israel’s point of view, would be endless civil war between the various sects and ethnic groups, especially the Kurds and the Shia and Sunni Arabs. An eventual breakup of Iraq into unstable ethnic mini-states would be ideal.

A number of prominent American thinkers have also recently published on the benefits of breaking up Iraq into unstable, weak, easily controlled ethnic statelets. So, in their bottomless tribal stupidity, the Iraqi resistance is playing into the precisely laid plans and wildest dreams of their worst enemies – the Israelis and the Americans!

At the moment, the Sunni resistance has various goals. The first and only noble goal, from the point of view of an ideal resistance faction, is to throw the US Coalition out of Iraq. Beyond that, the Sunnis increasingly fear a Shia takeover in the coming elections in January. The Sunni Arabs have brutally ruled Mesopotamia, and later Iraq, for many centuries, lording it over the Shia Arabs in the process.

This 20% oligarchic elite, the Sunni Arabs, feel somehow entitled to lord it over Shia Arabs and Kurds like the worst feudal overlords.

A Shia victory in the coming elections would be the end of the reign of this racist ruling class Sunni elite, the end of their supremacism and domination of the other groups in the nation, and the end to their ill-deserved privileges obtained by brutally exploiting the other groups. The Sunni Arabs need to get used to the fact that they are a minority in Iraq.

If the Sunnis had any sense, they would be negotiating deals with the Shia at this very moment. Instead, like a typical ruling class thrown out of power, they are not giving up the tiniest bit of their illegitimate power and privileges without a vicious fight.

These deals would take the form of some sort of apology rituals by the Sunnis, such as statements of apology by the Sunni clergy for the crimes the Sunnis have committed against the Shia over the centuries, or perhaps pilgrimages to Shia mosques where prominent Sunnis essentially repent to the Shia for their crimes and ask for their forgiveness. The fact that these rituals would be largely symbolic is not the point.

In this sort of socio-political ritual, the symbolism itself can have potent sociological and political ramifications. The Sunnis could also cut deals for some sort of affirmative action or power sharing in government, a la Lebanon.

The Sunnis could point out that the Shia can hardly run the country without Sunni expertise and wealth. In return, the Shia would offer the Sunni Arabs, say, 20% of the seats in Parliament, 20% of the positions in the Cabinet, and perhaps one top-ranking post.

The basis for this deal would be that sharing power is preferable to civil war and that Iraqi Muslims ought to unite against the US and Israel instead of serving the enemy by infighting. Now that’s if the Sunni Arabs had any sense. But it appears that deep-rooted tribalism and bigotry and the towering arrogance and sense of entitlement of an ancient ruling class is trumping pragmatism in Iraq.

The Sunnis feel that they have enough power, guns and money to both throw out the US Coalition and then put the Kurds and Shia back under their boot, just like in the good old days. And they are willing to gamble a lot to get it all back. The game here is the zero-sum game.

Each group – Sunni Arabs, Kurds and Shia Arabs feels that either their tribe gets it all, or their tribe gets nothing. There is one winner who gets everything, and two losers who get zero. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Certainly sharing the wealth and power is preferable to endless civil war that only serves the enemy.

There are plenty of logical, historical reasons for Shia Arabs, secular Iraqis, progressive Iraqis, nationalist Iraqis and even Iraqi Christians to oppose the Coalition’s Occupation of Iraq. In 1920, all these groups rose up against the British.

At the moment, many amongst these groups are either supporting the US Coalition or sitting on the sidelines because the Taliban-like Sunni resistance either offers them nothing or seems even worse than the US. In this case, the US presence at least offers Christians, the Shia, the secular, progressives and even nationalists some modicum of protection against the nightmare of a brutal Sunni theocracy.

The leading figurehead for this insane, fanatical, brutal Sunni nonsense is none other than Mr. Zarqawi. This man is a certified sadist, a sociopathic freak with the mind of a serial killer who delights in personally sawing off the heads of live human beings for the whole world to see.

A few of his more famous victims have been utterly innocent in any sense of the word. Zarqawi harbors a crazed, pathological hatred of Shia Muslims and Christians in general, not to mention Sunni Muslims who are insufficiently fanatical. One could hardly think of a more backwards, terrifying, medieval, monstrous, criminal, racist pig of a man to head the Iraqi Resistance.

The US and Israel must be delighted. Zarqawi is a grade-A villain right out of the movies, with virtually no redeeming qualities and a mortifying, bloodthirsty, genocidal vision. The elevation of Zarqawi to the symbolic leadership of the Iraqi resistance symbolizes the depths of the depravity and lunacy to which the Iraqi Sunni Salafist rebels have sunk.

On the one hand, we have the ultra-reactionary, backwards, racist, corrupt, sexist, cruel-hearted, supremacist, chauvinist, criminal, fundamentalist, crusading Bush Administration and its imperial armies smashing around the globe picking fights and bullying the planet.

Lined up against them, in Iraq and Afghanistan, are some of the most backwards, ultra- reactionary, supremacist, chauvinist, medieval, fundamentalist, racist, corrupt, sexist, cruel-hearted criminals on Earth, offering a vision at least as vicious, animalistic, cold, primitive and fascist-like as Bush’s crusaders, if not much worse.

Rational people realize that religious wars are some of the stupidest of all possible wars. This war – the “War on Terror” – is a becoming a war between insane reactionary religious fanatics, one side waving the banner of Christianity (and more surreptitiously, Judaism), the other the banner of Islam.

The failure of the rest of the Earth, inhabiting the relatively sane terrain between these terrifying extremes, to offer a substantive vision between these two utterly bleak alternatives, is profoundly dispiriting.

Does Multilingualism Equal Separatism?

Repost from the old site.

Sorry for the long post, readers, but I have been working on this piece off and on for months now. It’s not something I just banged out. For one thing, this is the only list that I know of on the Net that lists all of the countries of the world and shows how many languages are spoken there in an easy to access format. Not even Wikipedia has that (yet).

Whether or not states have the right to secede is an interesting question. The libertarian Volokh Conspiracy takes that on in this nice set of posts. We will not deal with that here; instead, we will take on the idea that linguistic diversity automatically leads to secession.

There is a notion floating around among fetishists of the state that there can be no linguistic diversity within the nation, as it will lead to inevitable separatism. In this post, I shall disprove that with empirical data. First, we will list the states in the world, along with how many languages are spoken in that state.

States with a significant separatist movement are noted with an asterisk. As you can see if you look down the list, there does not seem to be much of a link between multilingualism and separatism. There does seem to be a trend in that direction in Europe, though.

Afterward, I will discuss the nature of the separatist conflicts in many of these states to try to see if there is any language connection. In most cases, there is little or nothing there.

I fully expect the myth of multilingualism = separatism to persist after the publication of this post, unfortunately.

St Helena                        1
British Indian Ocean Territories 1
Pitcairn Island                  1
Estonia                          1
Maldives                         1
North Korea                      1
South Korea                      1
Cayman Islands                   1
Bermuda                          1
Belarus                          1
Martinique                       2
St Lucia                         2
St Vincent & the Grenadines      2
Barbados                         2
Virgin Islands                   2
British Virgin Islands           2
Gibraltar                        2
Antigua and Barbuda              2
Saint Kitts and Nevis            2
Montserrat                       2
Anguilla                         2
Marshall Islands                 2
Cuba                             2
Turks and Caicos                 2
Guam                             2
Tokelau                          2
Samoa                            2
American Samoa                   2
Niue                             2
Jamaica                          2
Cape Verde Islands               2
Icelandic                        2
Maltese                          2
Maltese                          2
Vatican State                    2
Haiti                            2
Kiribati                         2
Tuvalu                           2
Bahamas                          2
Puerto Rico                      2
Kyrgyzstan                       3
Rwanda                           3
Nauru                            3
Turkmenistan                     3
Luxembourg                       3
Monaco                           3
Burundi                          3
Seychelles                       3
Grenada                          3
Bahrain                          3
Tonga                            3
Qatar                            3
Kuwait                           3
Dominica                         3
Liechtenstein                    3
Andorra                          3
Reunion                          3
Dominican Republic               3
Netherlands Antilles             4
Northern Mariana Islands         4
Palestinian West Bank & Gaza     4
Palau                            4
Mayotte                          4
Cyprus*                          4
Bosnia and Herzegovina*          4
Slovenia and Herzegovina*        4
Swaziland                        4
Sao Tome and Principe            4
Guadalupe                        4
Saudi Arabia                     5
Cook Islands                     5
Latvia                           5
Lesotho                          5
Djibouti                         5
Ireland                          5
Moldova                          5
Armenia                          6
Mauritius                        6
Lebanon                          6
Mauritania                       6
Croatia                          6
Kazakhstan                       7
Kazakhstan                       7
Albania                          7
Portugal                         7
Uzbekistan                       7
Sri Lanka*                       7
United Arab Emirates             7
Comoros                          7
Belize                           8
Tunisia                          8
Denmark                          8
Yemen                            8
Morocco*                         9
Austria                          9
Jordan                           9
Macedonia                        9
Tajikistan                       9
French Polynesia                 9
Gambia                           9
Belgium                          9
Libya                            9
Fiji                             10
Slovakia                         10
Ukraine                          10
Egypt                            11
Bulgaria                         11
Norway                           11
Poland                           11
Serbia and Montenegro            11
Eritrea                          12
Georgia*                         12
Finland*                         12
Switzerland*                     12
Hungary*                         12
United Kingdom*                  12
Mongolia                         13
Spain                            13
Somalia*                         13
Oman                             13
Madagascar                       13
Malawi                           14
Equatorial Guinea                14
Mali                             14
Azerbaijan                       14
Japan                            15
Syria*                           15
Romania*                         15
Sweden*                          15
Netherlands*                     15
Greece                           16
Brunei                           17
Algeria                          18
Micronesia                       18
East Timor                       19
Zimbabwe                         19
Niger                            21
Singapore                        21
Cambodia                         21
Iraq*                            21
Guinea-Bissau                    21
Taiwan                           22
Bhutan                           24
Sierra Leone                     24
South Africa                     24
Germany                          28
Namibia                          28
Botswana                         28
France                           29
Liberia                          30
Israel                           33
Italy                            33
Guinea                           34
Turkey*                          34
Senegal                          36
Bangladesh                       39
New Caledonia                    39
Togo                             39
Angola*                          41
Gabon                            41
Zambia                           41
Mozambique                       43
Uganda                           43
Afghanistan                      47
Guatemala                        54
Benin                            54
Kenya                            61
Congo                            62
Burkina Faso                     68
Central African Republic         69
Solomon Islands                  70
Thailand*                        74
Iran*                            77
Cote D'Ivoire                    78
Ghana                            79
Laos                             82
Ethiopia*                        84
Canada*                          85
Russia*                          101
Vietnam                          102
Myanmar*                         108
Vanuatu                          109
Nepal                            126
Tanzania                         128
Chad                             132
Sudan*                           134
Malaysia                         140
United States*                   162
Philippines*                     171
Pakistan*                        171
Democratic Republic of Congo     214
Australia                        227
China*                           235
Cameroon*                        279
Mexico                           291
India*                           415
Nigeria                          510
Indonesia*                       737
Papua New Guinea*                820

*Starred states have a separatist problem, but most are not about language. Most date back to the very formation of an often-illegitimate state.

Canada definitely has a conflict that is rooted in language, but it is also rooted in differential histories as English and French colonies. The Quebec nightmare is always brought up by state fetishists, ethnic nationalists and other racists and nationalists who hate minorities as the inevitable result of any situation whereby a state has more than one language within its borders.

This post is designed to give the lie to this view.

Cyprus’ problem has to do with two nations, Greeks and Turks, who hate each other. The history for this lies in centuries of conflict between Christianity and Islam, culminating in the genocide of 350,000 Greeks in Turkey from 1916-1923.

Morocco’s conflict has nothing to do with language. Spanish Sahara was a Spanish colony in Africa. After the Spanish left in the early 1950′s, Morocco invaded the country and colonized it, claiming in some irredentist way that the land had always been a part of Morocco. The residents beg to differ and say that they are a separate state.

An idiotic conflict ensued in which Morocco the colonizer has been elevated to one of the most sanctioned nations of all by the UN. Yes, Israel is not the only one; there are other international scofflaws out there. In this conflict, as might be expected, US imperialism has supported Moroccan colonialism.

This Moroccan colonialism has now become settler-colonialism, as colonialism often does. You average Moroccan goes livid if you mention their colony. He hates Israel, but Morocco is nothing but an Arab Muslim Israel. If men had a dollar for every drop of hypocrisy, we would be a world of millionaires.

There are numerous separatist conflicts in Somalia. As Somalians have refused to perform their adult responsibilities and form a state, numerous parts of this exercise in anarchism in praxis (Why are the anarchists not cheering this on?) are walking away from the burning house. Who could blame them?

These splits seem to have little to do with language. One, Somaliland, was a former British colony and has a different culture than the rest of Somalia. Somaliland is now de facto independent, as Somalia, being a glorious exercise in anarchism, of course lacks an army to enforce its borders, or to do anything.

Jubaland has also split, but this has nothing to do with language. Instead, this may be rooted in a 36-year period in which it was a British colony. Soon after this period, they had their own postage stamps as an Italian colony.

There is at least one serious separatist conflict in Ethiopia in the Ogaden region, which is mostly populated by ethnic Somalis. Apparently this region used to be part of Somaliland, and Ethiopia probably has little claim to the region. This conflict has little do with language and more to do with conflicts rooted in colonialism and the illegitimate borders of states.

There is also a conflict in the Oromo region of Ethiopia that is not going very far lately. These people have been fighting colonialism since Ethiopia was a colony and since then have been fighting against independent Ethiopia, something they never went along with. Language has a role here, but the colonization of a people by various imperial states plays a larger one.

There was a war in Southern Sudan that has now ended with the possibility that the area may secede.

There is a genocidal conflict in Darfur that the world is ignoring because it involves Arabs killing Blacks as they have always done in this part of the world, and the world only gets upset when Jews kill Muslims, not when Muslims kill Muslims.

This conflict has to do with the Sudanese Arabs treating the Darfurians with utter contempt – they regard them as slaves, as they have always been to these racist Arabs.

The conflict in Southern Sudan involved a region in rebellion in which many languages were spoken. The South Sudanese are also niggers to the racist Arabs, plus they are Christian and animist infidels to be converted by the sword by Sudanese Arab Muslims. Every time a non-Muslim area has tried to split off from or acted uppity with a Muslim state they were part of, the Muslims have responded with a jihad against and genocide of the infidels.

This conflict has nothing to do with language; instead it is a war of Arab Muslim religious fanatics against Christian and animist infidels.

There is a separatist movement in the South Cameroons in the nation of Cameroon in Africa. This conflict is rooted in colonialism. During the colonial era, South Cameroons was a de facto separate state. Many different languages are spoken here, as is the case in Cameroon itself. They may have a separate culture too, but this is just another case of separatism rooted in colonialism. The movement seems to be unarmed.

There is a separatist conflict in Angola in a region called Cabinda, which was always a separate Portuguese colony from Angola.

As this area holds 60% of Angola’s oil, it’s doubtful that Angola will let it go, although almost all of Angola’s oil wealth is being stolen anyway by US transnationals and a tiny elite while 90% of the country starves, has no medicine and lives unemployed amid shacks along former roads now barely passable.

The Cabindans do claim to have a separate culture, but language does not seem to be playing much role here – instead, oil and colonialism are.

Syria does have a Kurdish separatist movement, as does Iran, Iraq, and Turkey – every state that has a significant number of Kurds. This conflict goes back to the post-World War 1 breakup of the Ottoman Empire. The Kurds, with thousands of years of history as a people, nominally independent for much of that time, were denied a state and sold out.

The new fake state called Turkey carved up part of Kurdistan, another part was donated to the British colony in Iraq and another to the French colony in Syria, as the Allies carved up the remains of the Empire like hungry guests at a feast.

This conflict is more about colonialism and extreme discrimination than language, though the Kurds do speak their own tongue. There is also a Kurdish separatist conflict in Iran, but I don’t know much about the history of the Iranian Kurds.

There is also an Assyrian separatist movement in Iraq and possibly in Syria. The movement is unarmed. The Assyrians have been horribly persecuted by Arab nationalist racists in the region, in part because they are Christians. They have been targeted by Islamo-Nazis in Iraq during this Iraq War with a ferocity that can only be described as genocidal.

The Kurds have long persecuted the Assyrians in Iraqi Kurdistan. There have been regular homicides of Assyrians in the north, up around the Mosul region. This is just related to the general way that Muslims treat Christian minorities in many Muslim states – they persecute them and even kill them. There is also a lot of land theft going on.

While the Kurdish struggle is worthwhile, it is becoming infected with the usual nationalist evil that afflicts all ethnic nationalism. This results in everyone who is not a Kurdish Sunni Muslim being subjected to varying degrees of persecution, disenfranchisement and discrimination. It’s a nasty part of the world.

In Syria, the Assyrians live up near the Turkish and Iraqi borders. Arab nationalist racists have been stealing their land for decades now and relocating the Assyrians to model villages, where they languish in poverty. Assad’s regime is not so secular and progressive as one might suspect.

There is a separatist conflict in Bougainville in New Guinea. I am sure that many different tongues are spoken on that island, as there are 800 different tongues spoken in Papua New Guinea. The conflict is rooted in the fact that Bougainville is rich in copper, but almost all of this wealth is stolen by Papua New Guinea and US multinationals, so the Bougainville people see little of it. Language has little or nothing to do with it.

There are separatist movements in the Ahwaz and Balochistan regions of Iran, along with the aforementioned Kurdish movement. It is true that different languages are spoken in these regions, but that has little to do with the conflict.

Arabic is spoken in Khuzestan, the land of the Iranian Arabs. This land has been part of Persia for around 2,000 years as the former land of Elam. The Arabs complain that they are treated poorly by the Persians, and that they get little revenue to their region even though they are sitting on a vast puddle of oil and natural gas.

Iran should not be expected to part with this land, as it is the source of much of their oil and gas wealth. Many or most Iranians speak Arabic anyway, so there is not much of a language issue. Further, Arab culture is promoted by the Islamist regime even at the expense of Iranian culture, much to the chagrin of Iranian nationalists.

The Ahwaz have been and are being exploited by viciously racist Arab nationalists in Iraq, and also by US imperialism, and most particularly lately, British imperialism, as the British never seem to have given up the colonial habit. This conflict is not about language at all. Most Ahwaz don’t even want to separate anyway; they just want to be treated like humans by the Iranians.

Many of Iran’s 8% Sunni population lives in Balochistan. The region has maybe 2% of Iran’s population and is utterly neglected by Iran. Sunnis are treated with extreme racist contempt by the Shia Supremacists who run Iran. This conflict has to do with the fight between the Shia and Sunni wings of Islam and little or nothing to do with language.

There is a separatist movement in Iran to split off Iranian Azerbaijan and merge it with Azerbaijan proper. This movement probably has little to do with language and more to do with just irredentism. The movement is not going to go very far because most Iranian Azeris do not support it.

Iranian Azeris actually form a ruling class in Iran and occupy most of the positions of power in the government. They also control a lot of the business sector and seem to have a higher income than other Iranians. This movement has been co-opted by pan-Turkish fascists for opportunistic reasons, but it’s not really going anywhere. The CIA is now cynically trying to stir it up with little success. The movement is peaceful.

There is a Baloch insurgency in Pakistan, but language has little to do with it. These fiercely independent people sit on top of a very rich land which is ruthlessly exploited by Punjabis from the north. They get little or no return from this natural gas wealth. Further, this region never really consented to being included in the Pakistani state that was carved willy-nilly out of India in 1947.

It is true that there are regions in the Caucasus that are rebelling against Russia. Given the brutal and bloody history of Russian imperial colonization of this region and the near-continuous rebellious state of the Muslims resident there, one wants to say they are rebelling against Imperial Russia.

Chechnya is the worst case, but Ingushetia is not much better, and things are bad in Dagestan too. There is also fighting in Kabardino-Balkaria and Karachay-Cherkessia. These non-Chechen regions are getting increasingly radicalized as consequence of the Chechen War. There has also been a deliberate strategy on the part of the Chechens to expand the conflict over to the other parts of the Caucasus.

Past rebellions were often pan-Caucasian also. Although very different languages are spoken in these areas, different languages are still spoken all across Russia. Language has little to do with these conflicts, as they have more to do with Russian imperialism and colonization of these lands and the near 200-year violent resistance of these fierce Muslim mountain tribes to being colonized by Slavic infidels.

There is not much separatism in the rest of Russia.

Tuva reserves the right to split away, but this is rooted in their prior history as an independent state within the USSR (Tell me how that works?) for two decades until 1944, when Stalin reconquered it as a result of the conflict with the Nazis. The Tuvans accepted peacefully.

Yes, the Tuvans speak a different tongue, but so do all of the Siberian nations, and most of those are still with Russia. Language has little to do with the Tuvan matter.

There is also separatism in the Bashkir Republic and Adygea in Russia. These have not really gone anywhere. Only 21% of the residents of
Adygea speak Circassian, and they see themselves as overrun by Russian-speaking immigrants. This conflict may have something to do with language. The Adygean conflict is also peripherally related the pan-Caucasian struggle above.

In the Bashkir Republic, the problem is more one of a different religion – Islam, as most Bashkirs are Muslim. It is not known to what degree language has played in the struggle, but it may be a factor. The Bashkirs also see themselves as overrun by Russian-speaking immigrants. It is dubious that the Bashkirs will be able to split off, as the result will be a separate nation surrounded on all sides by Russia.

The Adygean, Tuvan and Bashkir struggles are all peaceful.

The conflict in Georgia is complex. A province called Abkhazia has split off and formed their own de facto state, which has been supported with extreme cynicism by up and coming imperialist Russia, the same clown state that just threatened to go to war to defend the territorial integrity of their genocidal Serbian buddies. South Ossetia has also split off and wants to join Russia.

Both of these reasonable acts prompted horrible and insane wars as Georgia sought to preserve its territorial integrity, though it has scarcely been a state since 1990, and neither territory ever consented to being part of Georgia.

The Ossetians and Abkhazians do speak separate languages, and I am not certain why they want to break away, but I do not think that language has much to do with it. All parties to these conflicts are majority Orthodox Christians.

Myanmar is a hotbed of nations in rebellion against the state. Burma was carved out of British East India in 1947. Part of Burma had actually been part of British India itself, while the rest was a separate colony called Burma. No sooner was the ink dry on the declaration of independence than most of these nations in rebellion announced that they were not part of the deal.

Bloody rebellions have gone on ever since, and language has little or nothing to do with any of them. They are situated instead on the illegitimacy of not only the borders of the Burmese state, but of the state itself.

Thailand does have a separatist movement, but it is Islamic. They had a separate state down there until the early 1800′s when they were apparently conquered by Thais. I believe they do speak a different language down there, but it is not much different from Thai, and I don’t think language has anything to do with this conflict.

There is a conflict in the Philippines that is much like the one in Thailand. Muslims in Mindanao have never accepted Christian rule from Manila and are in open arms against the state. Yes, they speak different languages down in Mindanao, but they also speak Tagalog, the language of the land.

This just a war of Muslims seceding because they refuse to be ruled by infidels. Besides, this region has a long history of independence, de facto and otherwise, from the state. The Moro insurgency has little to nothing to do with language.

There are separatist conflicts in Indonesia. The one in Aceh seems to have petered out. Aceh never agreed to join the fake state of Indonesia that was carved out of the Dutch East Indies when the Dutch left in 1949.

West Papua is a colony of Indonesia. It was invaded by Indonesia with the full support of US imperialism in 1965. The Indonesians then commenced to murder 100,000 Papuans over the next 40 years. There are many languages spoken in West Papua, but that has nothing to do with the conflict. West Papuans are a racially distinct people divided into vast numbers of tribes, each with a separate culture.

They have no connection racially or culturally with the rest of Indonesia and do not wish to be part of the state. They were not a part of the state when it was declared in 1949 and were only incorporated after an Indonesian invasion of their land in 1965. Subsequently, Indonesia has planted lots of settler-colonists in West Papua.

There is also a conflict in the South Moluccas , but it has more to do with religion than anything else, since there is a large number of Christians in this area. The South Moluccans were always reluctant to become a part of the new fake Indonesian state that emerged after independence anyway, and I believe there was some fighting for a while there. The South Moluccan struggle has generally been peaceful ever since.

Indonesia is the Israel of Southeast Asia, a settler-colonial state. The only difference is that the Indonesians are vastly more murderous and cruel than the Israelis.

There are conflicts in Tibet and East Turkestan in China. In the case of Tibet, this is a colony of China that China has no jurisdiction over. The East Turkestan fight is another case of Muslims rebelling against infidel rule. Yes, different languages are spoken here, but this is the case all over China.

Language is involved in the East Turkestan conflict in that Chinese have seriously repressed the Uighur language, but I don’t think it plays much role in Tibet.

There is also a separatist movement in Inner Mongolia in China. I do not think that language has much to do with this, and I believe that China’s claim to Inner Mongolia may be somewhat dubious. This movement is unarmed and not very organized.

There are conflicts all over India, but they don’t have much to do with language.

The Kashmir conflict is not about language but instead is rooted in the nature of the partition of India after the British left in 1947. 90% of Kashmiris wanted to go to Pakistan, but the ruler of Kashmir was a Hindu, and he demanded to stay in India.

The UN quickly ruled that Kashmir had to be granted a vote in its future, but this vote was never allowed by India. As such, India is another world-leading rogue and scofflaw state on a par with Israel and Indonesia. Now the Kashmir mess has been complicated by the larger conflict between India and Pakistan, and until that is all sorted out, there will be no resolution to this mess.

Obviously India has no right whatsoever to rule this area, and the Kashmir cause ought to be taken up by all progressives the same way that the Palestinian one is.

There are many conflicts in the northeast, where most of the people are Asians who are racially, often religiously and certainly culturally distinct from the rest of Indians.

None of these regions agreed to join India when India, the biggest fake state that has ever existed, was carved out of 5,000 separate princely states in 1947. Each of these states had the right to decide its own future to be a part of India or not. As it turned out, India just annexed the vast majority of them and quickly invaded the few that said no.

“Bharat India”, as Indian nationalist fools call it, as a state, is one of the silliest concepts around. India has no jurisdiction over any of those parts of India in separatist rebellion, if you ask me. Language has little to do with these conflicts.

Over 800 languages are spoken in India anyway, each state has its own language, and most regions are not in rebellion over this. Multilingualism with English and Hindi to cement it together has worked just fine in most of India.

Sri Lanka’s conflict does involve language, but more importantly it involves centuries of extreme discrimination by ruling Buddhist Sinhalese against minority Hindu Tamils. Don’t treat your minorities like crap, and maybe they will not take up arms against you.

The rebellion in the Basque country of Spain and France is about language, as is Catalonian nationalism.

IRA Irish nationalism and the Scottish and Welsh independence movements have nothing to do with language, as most of these languages are not in good shape anyway.

The Corsicans are in rebellion against France, and language may play a role. There is an independence movement in Brittany in France also, and language seems to play a role here, or at least the desire to revive the language, which seems to be dying.

There is a possibility that Belgium may split into Flanders and Wallonia, and language does play a huge role in this conflict. One group speaks French and the other Dutch.

There is a movement in Scania, a part of Sweden, to split away from Sweden. Language seems to have nothing to do with it.

There is a Hungarian separatist movement, or actually, a national reunification or pan-Hungarian movement, in Romania. It isn’t going anywhere, and it unlikely to succeed. Hungarians in Romania have not been treated well and are a large segment of the population. This fact probably drives the separatism more than language.

There are many other small conflicts in Europe that I chose not to go into due to limitations on time and the fact that I am getting tired of writing this post! Perhaps I can deal with them at a later time. Language definitely plays a role in almost all of these conflicts. None of them are violent though.

To say that there are separatists in French Polynesia is not correct. This is an anti-colonial movement that deserves the support of anti-colonial activists the world over. The entire world, evidenced by the UN itself, has rejected colonialism. Only France, the UK and the US retain colonies. That right there is notable, as all three are clearly imperialist countries. In this modern age, the value of retaining colonies is dubious.

These days, colonizers pour more money into colonies than they get out of them. France probably keeps Polynesia due to colonial pride and also as a place to test nuclear weapons and maintain military bases. As the era of French imperialism on a grand scale has clearly passed, France needs to renounce its fantasies of being a glorious imperial power along with its anachronistic colonies.

Yes, there is a Mapuche separatist movement in Chile, but it is not going anywhere soon, or ever.

It has little to do with language. The Mapudungan language is not even in very good shape, and the leaders of this movement are a bunch of morons. Microsoft recently unveiled a Mapudungan language version of Microsoft Windows. You would think that the Mapuche would be ecstatic. Not so! They were furious. Why? Oh, I forget. Some Identity Politics madness.

This movement has everything to do with the history of Chile. Like Argentina and Uruguay, Chile was one of the Spanish colonies that was settled en masse late. For centuries, a small colonial bastion battled the brave Mapuche warriors, but were held at bay by this skilled and militaristic tribe.

Finally, in the late 1800′s, a fanatical and genocidal war was waged on the Mapuche in one of those wonderful “national reunification” missions so popular in the 1800′s (recall Italy’s wars of national reunification around this same time). By the 1870′s, the Mapuche were defeated and suffered a devastating loss of life.

Yet all those centuries of only a few Spanish colonists and lots of Indians had made their mark, and at least 70% of Chileans are mestizos, though they are mostly White (about 80% White on average). The Mapuche subsequently made a comeback and today number about 9% of the population.

Because they held out so long and so many of them survived, they are one of the most militant Amerindian groups in the Americas. They are an interesting people, light-skinned and attractive, though a left-wing Chilean I knew used to chortle about how hideously ugly they were.

Hawaiian separatism is another movement that has a lot to do with colonialism and imperialism and little to do with language. The Hawaiian language, despite some notable recent successes, is not in very good shape. The Hawaiian independence movement offers nothing to non-Hawaiians (I guess only native Hawaiians get to be citizens!) and is doomed to fail.

Hawaiians are about 22% of the population, and they are the only ones that support the independence movement. No one else supports it. It’s not going anywhere. The movers and shakers on the island (Non-Hawaiians for the most part!) all think it’s ridiculous.

There are separatists in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh, but I doubt that language has much to do with it. Like the myriad other separatist struggles in the NE of India, these people are ethnically Asians and as such are not the same ethnicity as the Caucasians who make up the vast majority of the population of this wreck of a state.

This is another conflict that is rooted in a newly independent fake state. The Chittagong Hill Tracts were incorporated into Bangladesh after its independence from Pakistan in 1971. As a fake new state, the peoples of Bangladesh had a right to be consulted on whether or not they wished to be a part of it. The CHT peoples immediately said that they wanted no part of this new state.

At partition, the population was 98.5% Asian. They were Buddhists, Hindus and animists. Since then, the fascist Bangladesh state has sent Bengali Muslim settler-colonists to the region. The conflict is shot through with racism and religious bigotry, as Muslim Bengalis have rampaged through the region, killing people randomly and destroying stuff as they see fit. Language does not seem to have much to do with this conflict.

I don’t know much about the separatist struggle of the Moi in Vietnam, but I think it is more a movement for autonomy than anything else. The Moi are Montagnards and have probably suffered discrimination at the hands of the state along with the rest of the Montagnards.

Zanzibar separatism in Tanzania seems to have nothing whatsoever to do with language, but has a lot more to do with geography. Zanzibar is a nice island off the coast of Tanzania which probably wants nothing to do with the mess of a Tanzanian state.

The conflict also has a lot to do with race. Most residents of Zanzibar are either Arabs or descendants of unions between Arabs and Africans. In particular, they deny that they are Black Africans. I bet that is the root of the conflict right there.

There were some Talysh separatists in Azerbaijan a while back, but the movement seems to be over. I am not sure what was driving them, but language doesn’t seem to have been a big part of it. Just another case of new members of a fake new state refusing to go along for the ride.

There were some Gagauz separatists in Moldova a while back, but the movement appears to have died down. Language does seem to have played a role here, as the Gagauz speak a Turkic tongue totally unrelated to the Romance-speaking Moldovans.

Realistically, it’s just another case of a fake new state emerging and some members of the new state saying they don’t want to be a part of it, and the leaders of the fake new state suddenly invoking inviolability of borders in a state with no history!

In summary, as we saw above, once we get into Europe, language does play a greater role in separatist conflict, but most of these European conflicts are not violent. In the rest of the world, language plays little to no role in the vast majority of separatist conflicts.

The paranoid and frankly fascist notion voiced by rightwing nationalists the world over that any linguistic diversity in the world within states must be crushed as it will inevitably lead to separatism at best or armed separatism at worst is not supported by the facts.

Video: Violent Crackdown in Hama, Syria

A very shocking video of the protests in Hama, Syria on Friday after prayers which turned very violent. Security forces cracked down heavily, as you can see in the video with plainclothes officer and uniformed officers opening fire on protesters.You can hear gunfire ringing out all through the video, which seems hard to play for some reason. 34 people were killed.

The protesters don’t exactly seem peaceful. They are throwing rocks and lighting fires in the streets. At 1:20 in the video, you can see protesters laying siege to what is probably some sort of govornment office.

These videos are hard to find on Youtube because they are all written in Arabic. My Arabic is not that good, but I was able to figure out that this was shot in Hama, Syria on Friday, June 3, 2011.

Hama has long been the most conservative Sunni Muslim city in Syria. This is where the Muslim Brotherhood staged their uprising in 1982. Hafez Assad smashed it with massive force, killing 30,000 people. That shut down the Muslim Brotherhood for some time. The MB in Syria is very militant, partly as a result of their decades long war with the state. After 1982, many of them left and went to Germany, where quite a few became active in Al Qaeda. Some of these folks were involved in the 9-11 plot.

The cities of Homs, Hama, Rastan and Jisr As Shughur are the center of the insurgency right now. They are all in the heavily Sunni Muslim northwest of Syria.

The situation is very confusing and it’s hard to know where to take a stand. The Western media hates Assad’s guts and is rooting for the rebels. Hence, Western coverage is biased.

My overview found that Syria is utterly polarized. Almost all Alawites, Shia, Druze, and Christians are with the regime. In fact, they are increasingly fanatical in their support for it. The rebels are now armed and are being led by the Muslim Brotherhood. The Christians and Alawi and others look east and see Iraq. Look what happened to the Christians and the Shia there. A Civil War in Syria could conceivably see the Syrian Christians subjected to genocide as the Iraqi Christians were, and the Shia Alawites may also be subjected to mass murder campaigns.

In recent days, in contrast to the lying Western media, the Kurds seem to be turning towards the regime. The Sunni Arab regime next door in Iraq was not very nice to the Kurds, nor was the Sunni Turk regime to the north. Assad recently granted citizenship to all of the Kurds who had been denied citizenship for decades. Also, the Kurds are fairly secular, and they don’t think too much of the MB.

Syria is still a confessional state, and sectarian tensions run very deep. Each group has a sense of superiority and thinks they are better than the others.

It’s hard to say what more Assad can do. Increasingly, the protesters are demanding the end of the regime, and they want Assad to step down. So there’s really nothing Assad can do to mollify them at this point. That’s essentially a non negotiable demand. Another argument is the Israeli-US type argument that the Arab leaders who gave in to demands of the protesters all had to resign. Hence, consessions just emboldens the rebels and makes the regime even weaker. So why give them anything?

There is a question of the economy. How much longer can it hold out as Syria slips towards civil war? It’s hard to say, but Algeria carried on with a vicious civil war for a long time. Iraq’s economy went to Hell with the sanctions, but Saddam held on. Syria’s economy is still pretty much closed to world, hence there’s not that much the world can do to it.

At the moment, the protesters are almost all Sunni Muslims. There are a few Shia Muslims and Kurds, and some Leftists and atheists/secular. There are about zero Christians and Allawi down with the protesters at the moment.

Chaos in Syria

Anti-regime demonstrations in Syria have been going on for about six weeks now, and things are really getting out of control. An excellent resource on all things Syrian is Syria Comment, by Joshua Landis. He doesn’t take a particularly pro- or anti-regime stance. Instead, he’s pretty unbiased.

The demonstrations began at a town called Daraa in the far south of Syria near the Jordanian border. They may have been about economics. The Syrian government has been planting a lot of wheat in the area near the town, and I believe the project was drying up people’s wells. The Syrian state reacted harshly to the demonstations, and a number of people were killed.

Demos then started springing up in some other places. The city of Homs in central Syria has been the center of a lot of protests. It’s a mostly Sunni city in the north. Hama, the city where the Muslim Brotherhood uprising in 1982 was so brutally crushed by Syrian leader Bashar Assad’s father, killing 30,000 people, apparently has little appetite for another round. There have been demos of various sizes in most large Syrian cities and in some towns too. They have even occurred in Damascus.

After the Daraa killings, Assad announced some major changes. He fired the governor of the province that Daraa is situated in, announced municipal elections for many Syrian cities, granted citizenship to 300,000 stateless Kurds in the north of Syria, freed many old political prisoners and hundreds arrested in the latest round of demos and announced that he was ending the hated Emergency Law that Syria has labored under since 1963.

Back then, Syria was highly unstable, with many armed local revolts and assassinations of government officials. At the same time, Assad announced a new law immediately effectively banning all new demos.

The Emergency Law gives the police very wide powers and is essentially martial law. It is widely hated in Syria and it makes no sense that it’s gone on for 48 years.

The Kurds were said to be illegal immigrants who arrived from Turkey sometime around 1950. Because they were illegals, they were denied citizenship in a cruel move. Many other Kurds were already citizens. The lack of citizenship was one of the major sticking points for violent Kurdish demos in recent years, centering around the city of Qamishli on the Turkish border. Getting rid of Emergency Law and giving citizenship to the Kurds were big moves.

After he did that. Assad basically said, “Ok, now no more demos.” But the demos have continued. The state has reacted brutally, many times opening fire in unarmed demonstrators or attacking them with club-wielding gangs of pro-regime thugs. Ambulances were prevented from taking the dead away, and the wounded were hauled out of hospital beds and taken away. Funerals have been fired on.

In response, the demonstrators have begun arming themselves and fighting back. The latest I heard was 90 casualties among the security forces, but I am not sure if that includes both dead and wounded. There are definitely about 40 security forces who have been killed.

All told, about 600 people have been killed since the demos started, at least 85% of them demonstrators, armed or not. It’s a great big bloody mess. In recent days, Assad has ramped up the crackdown, and some cities and towns have been surrounded by the army. Security forces make house to house raids in demonstration wracked cities, hauling lots of suspects away.

But the regime has a problem. The anti-regime forces are new and largely unknown, so the regime doesn’t have much intelligence on them, unlike the old opponents, who were widely known and kept under tight surveillance.

But all of the crackdowns just seem to be emboldening the demonstrators who are now furious about their friends and relatives being killed, injured or arrested. There have been shootouts in the army when units refused to fire on protestors. The recalcitrant troops were then fired on by other units. Some soldiers have reportedly been executed for refusing to fire on demonstrators.

The protesters are getting weapons from Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq.  There are indications that the Saudi government may be arming the protestors.

This is probably because the Shia Alawite government is probably widely hated by the Saudi Wahhabis. The Alawi are a highly heterodox sect of Shiism that incorporates elements of other religions, including pre-Islamic paganism, Judaism and Christianity. They don’t go to mosques and in fact they have no mosques to go to. They don’t go on hajj. They often don’t fast during Ramadan. Most Sunnis despise them as heretics and non-Muslims.

Most of those demonstrating against the regime are Sunnis. Sunnis are 70% of the population, but the Alawis, with 12% of the population, run the state. Christians are 10%, including many refugees from Iraq. There are also Ismailis, Druze and a tiny group of Jews. In general, the Alawi, Christians, Ismailis and Druze all support Assad.

They fear a total breakdown which will result in civil war. Civil war will no doubt turn into Islamic jihad just like in Iraq. Surely the Christians and Alawi will be slaughtered just like the Shia and Christians have been in Iraq. The Druze and Shia Ismailis also support the state and fear getting attacked in a civil war. The Syrian Jews have stated that they support Assad.

Any civil war will probably be sectarian, as in Iraq. The Sunnis will attack the Christians, the Alawi and probably the Ismaili and the Druze. It will probably be a horrific sectarian massacre as in Lebanon and Iraq. I don’t see how an anti-regime civil war, as in Libya, will not turn into a sectarian mess.

More and more Sunnis, even secular Sunnis, are turning against the state, especially in Homs. They are angry at Alawite rule. Further, the President’s family and friends have enriched themselves outrageously while cracking down harshly on the population. This was particularly the case in Homs. Sunnis are also probably angry at the Alawi over their perceived heresy and secularism. A Homs Sunni said that during Ramadan, government workers, all Alawis, would smoke and drink tea in their offices all day, “just to annoy the Sunnis,” as he put it.

The Iranians have been helping Assad to crack down on protesters, but their help has been minimal so far.

Hezbollah is pulling all of the missiles they have in storage out of Syria and is trying to figure out how to get them across the border to Lebanon without Israel attacking them. These includes Iranian Fatah-110 and Syrian analogue M-600 and advanced SA-8 Gecko (Soviet?) anti-air batteries. The missiles are so wide ranging that they will put most of Israel under threat and the air battery will make it hard for Israeli aircraft to fly over southern Lebanon.

It doesn’t look like anything good will come of this. The regime can’t defeat the protesters, and the protesters won’t give up. Assad will not resign. Things look bloody ahead.

The Whites of Asia

From the Pastmist site. It’s in French, but you can muddle through.

A truly amazing site with a wealth of photos showing very European looking natives from all around the Central and South Asia region.

Areas covered include Afghanistan, Tajikistan, northern Pakistan, northern India, Iran, Kurdistan and Xinjiang.

Peoples covered include Uzbeks, Kirghiz, Tajiks, Iranians, Kurds, Indians, Pashtuns, Chitralis, Nuristanis, Burusho, Kalash and Uighurs.

It’s quite clear to me that these are by and large the remains of the ancient Indo-Europeans. Most are probably related to the Indo-Aryans, but the Uighurs are probably related to the Tocharians. The Tocharians later received an infusion of Mongoloid genes, the result of which is the mixed people you see today.

Most people in Kazakhstan and Kirghistan probably looked like this until 1300 YBP when Mongolian hordes moved through, bringing Asiatic genes and Turkic languages.

The Burusho complicate the IE-European look theory, as they speak a non-IE language that is not related to any other language. However, languages related to Burushaski were probably widely spoken in the region before the Indo-Aryans moved through. So how did the Burusho get so White looking? It’s a mystery.

Settler Criminals Not Innocent Civilians

Repost from the old site.

Via Joachim Martillo, we have this interesting piece, Settler Criminals Not Innocent Civilians, on the attack on the Yeshivat Merkaz haRav in Jerusalem that killed 8 young Israeli male yeshiva students. There are some errors in this piece.

Yohai Livshitz and Neria Cohen are from Jerusalem, but according to Martillo, they both live in land colonized by the Israelis in East Jerusalem after 1967. This never-ending theft of Palestinian land in East Jerusalem is an ongoing project that is rarely remarked on in the US press. Like most settler issues, it gets orders of magnitude more press in Israel than the US. In this sense, the US is much more of a “Jewish state” than Israel.

Although Martillo justifies this attack, I have a hard time doing so. The attacker definitely picked a pretty good target, but the problem is that half of the students are minors. If it can be proven that these young men were involved in violence against Palestinians in the Territories, perhaps that makes them a target, but I am not sure.

As it stands, four of the eight males killed were adults and one of those was a resident of Israel proper. That does leave Yonadav Haim Hirschfeld, Yohai Lifshitz, and Roee Roth as legitimate targets, but three out of eight is not so good.

Martillo also notes that when he visited the yeshiva, well over half of the student body was over 20 years old. This would imply that the attack could have been justified in the planning phase. You’re still attacking adults with a bunch of minors mixed in, and I’m not sure that is ok.

My position is simple. Targeting of adult settlers in the Territories is right and proper. They are living on stolen land the natives have a right to drive them off with force. I feel sorry for those that are too poor to move, but there may not be many like that. I do feel that minor settlers should not be targeted, for the simple reason that they have no choice about whether or not to occupy stolen land – that is their parents’ decision.

Theoretically, when they are 18, they can decide to move away from the Territories and back inside the Green Line. That may not be possible in many cases, but at least they have the potential option not be living on stolen land.

This would at least accord some civility to this settler-native conflict, in line with Native American practice in defending their lands. It is true that Native Americans did kill some minors, they often captured women and children and took them to live with the Indians. I am not sure whether Native Americans would have killed teenagers or not. Boys grew up awful fast on the frontier.

Sadly, the Palestinian resistance has deliberately targeted kids, even babies and infants, from Day One. One wonders how they justify as 2-year-old as a “settler”. Come on.

Unfortunately, most Palestinian groups are targeting Israeli civilians inside the Green Line. Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Popular Resistance Committees, the PFLP and the Al Aqsa Martyr’s Brigades all do this.

Fatah always condemns such attacks (especially Abbas, as Arafat was not so sincere) but their armed wing, the Al Aqsa Martyr’s Brigades, continues to engage in these attacks. Truth is that the AAMB is probably a pretty autonomous organization these days.

For those who find all this queasy and still want to support the Palestinians, there is always the DFLP. This small group only targets Israelis in the Territories. I guess theoretically they target military targets inside the Green Line, but in practice they hardly do this.

This group does carry out armed attacks, usually in conjunction with other armed groups, often Hamas. The DFLP is a staunchly secular armed group that split from the PFLP in 1969 in part due to their queasiness over the PFLP’s Arab nationalism. The DFLP had the typical Leftist worries about ethnic nationalism in general as leading to fascism.

Their leader is Nayef Hawatmeh, a Jordanian Christian. Originally, they pushed Maoism, but I think they have junked that recently. There are regular calls for the merger of the PFLP and the DFLP, but these never go anywhere, mostly due to the PFLP’s reluctance. The DFLP has a presence, armed and otherwise, in Gaza.

Hawatmeh met with an Israeli leader on a stage in the 1990′s and shook the Israeli’s hand. The PFLP, ultimate hardliners, condemned this act. George Habash, asked about his opinion of this, said, “Absolute condemnation!”

On to this attack on the yeshiva. This is looking more and more like a Hezbollah hit. The group named was the Imad Mughniyeh Liberators of Galilee. It looks like this was a revenge attack for the killing of Imad Mughniyeh by Israeli in Damascus recently.

The only announcement of responsibility occurred on Hezbollah TV, and the name Imad Mughniyeh portends a Hezbollah link. Hezbollah has deep links to the Israeli Arabs of North Israel. Galilee is the part of northern Israel that has a large Israeli Arab population.

In recent years, there has been a sickening process of Judaization, in which Jewish towns are built to encircle and close off most Arab villages, towns and cities. It’s ethnic warfare by any definition, and is typical of extremely racist settlement policies practiced by states against separatist movements – i.e. Indonesia in East Timor and West Papua, China in Tibet, Morocco in Spanish Sahara and Syria in the Kurdish North.

It looks like Hezbollah used an Israeli Arab from Jerusalem who had an Israeli ID card in this attack. He was dressed up as a haredi when he carried it out. The attack was pretty bloody, but war is a nasty thing. We knew there were going to be paybacks for Mugniyeh’s killing, and that’s what this looks like. This may be the end or there may be more.

I do not buy the typical Arab line that it is ok to kill a bunch of Israeli civilians because Israel killed some Palestinian civilians, but it’s typical Arab thinking. Arabs are incapable, like most of the world’s people, of fighting by the rules of war laid down by the West.

Furthermore, guerrillas are seriously limited in their ability to fight fair in war. Guerrillas try to fight by the rules of war and they will probably just get massacred. The only way to even the fight is probably to go “asymmetrical”, as Iraq War speak described terrorism.

The rockets coming out of Gaza seem increasingly nihilistic, but I think there is a method to Hamas’ madness. I think that Hamas really wants a cease fire or truce out of this, but Israel won’t even sit down and talk to them. That Hamas even talks of a truce at all shows their maturation as an organization from a terrorist group into a more mature political entity.

Israel refuses to talk to them on the basis that Hamas agree to three conditions:

• Renounce violence
• Recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state
• Agree to all past agreements between the Palestinians and Israel

Hamas will not agree to any of these things, not now, not ever. As Israel will not renounce violence, I do not see why Hamas should either. Hamas will never recognize Israel as a Jewish state, and will not agree to past agreements negotiated by Fatah.

But Israel ought to talk to them anyway. The stronger parties in guerrilla wars, typically states, tend to refuse to talk with guerrillas. It’s the language of strength talking.

In addition to a cease fire, Hamas also wants some sort of a role in regulating traffic flow back and forth from Egypt to Gaza. This may not be as bad as it sounds, but when Hamas bashed down the fence a while back, they also used that opportunity to smuggle in Iranian Grad rockets that they have been firing at the Israeli towns of Ashkelon and Ashdod.

Israel is reluctant to do anything that will make it easier for Hamas to smuggle high-powered weaponry into Gaza. They also claim that Hamas will just use a truce, which Hamas acknowledges can be lifted at any time (the concept of hudna in Islamic law) to rearm and then to attack Israel later with much more powerful weapons.

Tit for tat, it goes on and on in the Middle East. Cycle of violence is a cliche, but there is no better word.

This yeshiva was founded by the son of Rabbi Kook, the most famous Israeli religious Zionist. Originally, Zionism was a secular movement, but Kook the elder, a Lithuanian Jew who came to Palestine in the early 1920′s, introduced the concept of religious Zionism.

At this time and until after World War 2, most Jews, and surely most Orthodox Jews, opposed Zionism as some sort of religious heresy at best and a very bad idea at worst.

The religious Zionists have become some of the most fanatical of all. Many of them feel that the Israeli state is illegitimate in the same way that Islamists feel that secular Muslim states are illegitimate. The Jewish state must be religious and the Muslim state must be also. Some of them refuse to fly the Israeli flag and others try to get out of paying taxes.

Many religious Jews are supported by the state to just study all the time. The secular Israelis regard this as a complete waste of manpower and money. There is quite a bit of bad blood between religious and secular Jews in Israel and even in the Diaspora.

by Joachim Martillo

In the Occupied Territories Palestinians are squeezed between the mostly off-camera aggressive anti-Arab violence of the settlers and the official theoretically defensive violence of the IDF.

Jews in Occupied Poland circa 1940 had a similar situation, for they were subject to alternating and sometimes combined SS and Wehrmacht violence.

Yeshivat Merkaz haRav is the flagship educational institution of Gush Emunim nowadays called Faithful of the Land of Israel (נאמני ארץ ישראל, neemanei eretz yisrael). It is the ideological command center for the Settler Movement

The ideology of Yeshivat Merkaz haRav is generally called religious nationalist, but it really educates its students in the occult mystical intellectual current of Zionism.

This Yeshiva is essentially a college level seminary with a large graduate (kollel) program. The students eventually develop an almost mythographic mentality

• that rewrites reality to support a nearly psychotic set of extremist fanatic beliefs and
• that puts them beyond any rational persuasion.

The students are often in combined military-Talmudic study programs. Many carry weapons and are involved in brutalizing or in abusing the native population in the Occupied Territories.

Yeshivat Merkaz haRav under US law would be considered a combined terrorist training and indoctrination center if the same laws applied to Jews that apply to everyone else.

Traditionally in Eastern Europe the best students were already immersed in deep Talmud study by bar mitzvah (13), but combined “religious nationalist” military-Talmudic study programs usually run for about 5-6 years, generally start at around age 15-16, and involve about 16 months of official military service with some physical and military training before official induction.

Here is the list of the students killed:

• Doron Meherete, 26 years old
• Yonadav Haim Hirschfeld, settler, 19 years old
• Yohai Lifshitz, settler, 18 years old
• Roee Roth, settler, 18 years old
• Yonatan Yitzhak Eldar, settler, 16 years old
• Avraham David Moses, settler, 16 years old
• Neria Cohen, settler, 15 years old, and
• Segev Peniel Avihail, settler, 15 years old.

In his completely legitimate act of resistance against the Zionist state currently breaking all just war standards in Gaza, Alaa Abu Dhein unlike the IDF carefully chose targets among willing participants, activists, and trainees in the commission of atrocities. He is to be commended for choice of target and for tohar haneshek (Hebrew: purity of arms).

Is the “White” IQ So Superior?

Repost from the old site.

I confess that I love to beat up White nationalists, or for that matter ethnic nationalists of any sort (this is why I verbally eviscerate Zionists – they are nothing but the Jewish equivalent of White Nationalists).

There is nothing like nationalism, not to mention the super brain-killer of ethnic nationalism, to turn a smart person’s brain to useless mush. The problem is that beating up on WN’s is cruel. It’s like slapping a retarded person and ridiculing them in public. So I feel kind of guilty when I do it.

For a look at what a nightmare the White Nationalist movement is, and what a racist horror it represents, check out the sanest, most moderate outlier of the movement, American Renaissance. I hang out there a lot, and post lots of comments, when they do not get deleted, which is 75% of the time.

I post mostly on illegal aliens, which is all I care about race-wise, as I am utterly indifferent to the “Black problem”, anti-immigration xenophobia, Islamophobia, and all their other crazy obsessions. This is a good, frightening post to get you started.

It is a common, and fairly disgusting, White Nationalist argument that Whites are superior to all other groups in IQ, with the exception of NE Asians. WN’s typically define Whites as Europeans, but no one quite knows where to draw the line there.

For instance, many White Nationalists are so insane that they say Southern Europeans such as Spaniards, Portuguese, Italians and Greeks, and Balkans such as Macedonians, Serbians, Albanians, Croats and Bosnians, and West Eurasians such as Armenians, Ashkenazi Jews, Georgians, Caucasians and Turks, and Middle Easterners such as Iranians, Kurds and Assyrians, are not White. Most of these groups are clearly White.

There is a bit of a question when it comes to Iranians, Kurds, Turks and Assyrians, but most of these groups are White by any sane definition.

So WN’s like to crow about how they are smarter than just about everyone else on the Earth. It follows that letting in anyone from any of the stupid races or ethnic groups to a White country is going to pollute the gene pool, result in growing stupidity, an inability to think and compete and a declining standard of living.

I do think that they have a point, and I am not opposed to IQ tests for prospective immigrants other than spouses of Americans. Where I object is to the typical WN insanity of labeling entire races and ethnic groups as idiots who should not be allowed to set one foot on our soil.

First of all, Western culture is good for IQ, independent of genes. This alone should throw a serious monkey wrench into WN crap about intellectually inferior races being banned from immigrating to White countries.

Look:

Everyone knows that the East Indian IQ in Europe is 96 (Lynn 2005), and it’s 81.5-83 in India and Pakistan. Merely living in an improved Western environment raised it 14 pts. Jamaicans raise their IQ’s from 71 to 85 within one generation of living in the UK – 14 points. Most sane people think selective immigration could have only raised either of those scores only a few points.

Even if we grant 3 IQ points for selective immigration, we still get an 11 rise for both E. Indians and Jamaicans just for a Western environment. Even Moroccans raise their IQs from 84-89 (5 points) within a generation of living in Holland, and there was probably no selective immigration there at all, as the Europeans were just looking for manual labor.

73 IQ US Negro Blacks (taking a base African Black IQ of 67, adding in 17.5% White to raise it to 73) raise their IQ’s to 85 in the US merely by our Western environment – a 12 point raise. There was no selective immigration to America by Africans at all; in fact, the smartest ones might have died on the trip or been killed afterwards, or never got caught in slave raids in the first place, and slaves were chosen for brawn only.

Much of the Black raise has occurred since 1920. Everyone except WN lunatics agrees that US Negroes have raised their IQ’s by 1/2 a standard deviation (7.5 points) since 1920.

Hence, we can posit that Western environment raises the IQ of the vast majority of races and ethnic groups to 85-96 merely by its increased stimulation. For groups with IQ’s of 71-82, they typically see about an 11-12 point IQ rise merely by living in the West.

One of the things that WN’s like to crow about, when they are not preening about how Whites are naturally more beautiful than anyone else, is how Whites are surely smarter than those nasty, inferior SE Asians, at the very least. Sure the NE Asians are smarter, but Whites are surely better than short, flat-nosed, brown-skinned, backwards SE Asian house pet-eaters.

Well, let us take a look at this. First of all, Vietnamese are clearly more intelligent that 32 out of 42 White groups, less intelligent than eight White groups, and the same as two White groups. Vietnamese are clearly more intelligent than most White ethnic nations.

Averages of Vietnamese IQ studies done in recent years in Vietnam has come up with a score of 99.5. WN’s are invited to crow about how this is a whole .5 point below Whitey (although see the chart below for evidence of major variability in White IQ).

Richard Lynn, a serial liar who is a favorite of WN’s, has deliberately lied about the Vietnamese IQ in order to promote his stupid theory about Ice Ages and IQ scores. As high Vietnamese and Southern Chinese IQ’s fly in the face of his nonsense, he deliberately falsifies data. To arrive at a Vietnamese IQ of 95, he averages a Thai IQ of 90 with a fake Chinese IQ of 100 (actual Chinese IQ is more like ~105).

It is axiomatic among White Nationalists that Polynesians and Mestizo Hispanics are idiots. They sometimes exclude Chileans, Argentines and Uruguayans as Whites, but Argentines and Chileans are about 80% White, 20% Indian, and Uruguayans are probably around the same. In this way, Mestizos of the Southern Cone are not tremendously different from the 60% White, 40% Indian, Mexican-Hispanics in the US.

The chart below will show us some interesting things. First of all, if Mestizos are inherently inferior to Whites, why do Southern Cone Mestizos beat 4-15 different White nations on IQ? Second, since WN’s always call US Hispanics idiots, are WN’s also willing to condemn their White Balkan Croatian, Bosnian and Albanian brothers as idiots too, since their IQ is about the same as US Hispanics?

Since WN’s love to call Maori Polynesians of New Zealand stupid, are they willing to call the Whites of the Balkans stupid too, since their IQ’s are the same as the Maori?

Also note that the White IQ is highly variable in and of itself. Yes it is around ~100 or so in the US, but it is not necessarily that high in other places. In fact, the high US White IQ almost seems to be an outlier among the White groups of the world, towards the high side.

As far as White IQ’s go, you would think that folks who love Whites (WN’s) would know something about this. Guess not. Just to be fair, we will use the WN’s very own buddy Richard Lynn, except as noted.

US Hispanics   89
Croatia        90
Bosnia         90
Albania        90
Maori          90
Serbia         91
Cyprus         91.5
Chile          91.5 1
Greece         92
Macedonia      92.5
Ireland        93
Bulgaria       93
Armenia        93.5
Georgia        93.5
Israel         94
Romania        94
Argentina      94.5 2
Portugal       95
Slovenia       95.5
Moldova        95.5
Uruguay        96 3
Slovakia       96
Malta          96
Russia         96.5
Belarus        96.5
Ukraine        96.5
Spain          97.5
Czech Republic 97.5
US             98
Australia      98
Finland        98
Canada         98
France         98
Denmark        98
Andorra        98
Estonia        98
Hungary        98.5
Norway         99
Poland         99
Belgium        99.5
Iceland        99.5
Vietnam        99.5 4
Sweden         100
UK             100
Germany        100
Luxembourg     100.5
Netherlands    101
Austria        101
Switzerland    101
Italy          102

Notes

1. “Inferior” Chilean Mestizos beat four White groups, tie one.

2. “Inferior” Argentine Mestizos beat 13 White groups.

3. “Inferior” Uruguayan Mestizos beat 16 White groups, tie two.

4. “Inferior” Vietnamese beat 34 White groups, lose to eight, tie two.

References

Lynn, Richard. (January 2005). Business Today.

Smith, Douglas K., Wessels, Richard A., Riebel, Emily M. August 1997. Use of the WISC-III and K-BIT with Hmong Students. School Psychology Training Program University of Wisconsin-River Falls. Paper presented at Annual Meeting of the American Psychological Association, Chicago, IL.

Support For the Uighurs

Repost from the old site.

Since it seems like virtually no one outside Muslims supports the Uighur battle for independence, I will support it. I realize that this is a tough time for China and that imperialism, particularly US imperialism, would love to use a new Uighur state to plant bases in it and surround China, but still I believe that something can be worked out.

A major stumbling block for the self-determination of nations, long a Left hallmark for which we Leftists can all be proud, is the cynical abuse of this right by hypocritical imperialist and Realpolitik-dealing large states.

Imperialist states, as I argued in a previous post, have no consistent values at all. They will support secessionism to further imperial goals or weaken enemies and oppose it everywhere else. An imperialist nation has the morals of a hardened criminal -> no legitimate morals at all.

If you follow this article, it seems like the vast majority Uighurs support the armed groups, which is how they are able to function at all in the locked-down police state of China. China has seeded East Turkestan with settler-colonists, as it has despicably done in Tibet. It treats the Uighurs like shit.

Almost no one seems to support Uighur secessionism. I’m sure that Muslims do, but Muslims do not have a very consistent basis for supporting secessionism. Most Muslims I have run into only support secessionism when it involves Muslims separating from non-Muslim states.

In all other cases, I guess they don’t support it! In particular, most oppose the liberation struggle of the Kurds, who have as good a case for a state of their own as anyone does.

In the comments section, Dragon Horse, a very smart commenter, made the case for the territorial integrity of borders.

He made several arguments: First, why should we be creating brand new mono-ethnic states?

Second , that what I was arguing for was radical devolution.

Third, that when the OAS was formed, the member states agreed on the territorial integrity of even colonial borders that made little sense in order to avoid endless secessionist wars. Hence, that in Africa, the principle of territorial integrity had a good record.

Fourth, that I was arguing for a world full of 100′s to 1000′s of Luxemborgs or Leichtensteins.

Fifth, that in an integrating globalized world, the last thing we needed was to move in the opposite direction.

My response is as follows:

The truth is that most nations on Earth simply do not wish to break away from the states of which they are a part of.

Legitimate secessionist movements are actual nations embedded with states that have a valid case for secession. I may evaluate that case in a later post.

In Latin America, I can think of no legitimate secessionist movement.

There are not many secessionist movements even in Africa, which you mention as the horrorshow of secessionist theory. The rebels in Darfur and South Sudan can leave Sudan for all I care. Sudan has forfeited its right to exist as a state. They can break it up into pieces for all I care. Somalia has no right to exist either. When a state is so failed that it cannot even govern its own citizens, it’s time to say goodbye.

In the Arab World, we have only the Kurds and that is all. Who have a most powerful case for independence.

I do not think that independence movements are trying to make monoethnic states, but even if they were, it would be more logical than multicultural states, which do not seem to work very well in praxis.

Your logic, in opposing all secessionist movements, leads to endless bloody wars for the bullshit cause of “territorial integrity of states”.

Tell me, why did Georgia, instantly birthed as a state in 1991, suddenly have any territorial integrity at all? Let us note that this territorial integrity became immediately sacrosanct the very hour that Georgia became a new state! Brand new states with no history behind them at least have to ask their citizens if they want to be part of this baby state. Those who wish to leave are certainly entitled to do so.

The world is not going to break up into hundreds or thousands of Luxembourgs because tiny states are not viable in the modern era either economically or militarily. There are advantages to being part of a large state in terms of both economics and military.

Even a world of small states could function well. Europe has an increasingly integrated military and economy in the OECD and NATO despite being made up of numerous mostly not very large states. Self-determination and regional integration are not contradictions.