“Washington and the Cuban Revolution Today: Ballad of a Never-Ending Policy. Part II: Triumph and Reaction,” by Ike Nahem

Part 2 of a great 3-part series by Ike Nahem. Warning: long, runs to 47 pages on the Net.

The Triumph of the Cuban Revolution

On January 1, 1959 Cuban revolutionaries, led by Fidel Castro, swept into power and established a provisional revolutionary government across the length of the island, overthrowing the exceedingly venal, military regime of Fulgencio Batista.

The revolutionaries (including such remarkable figures as Juan Almeida, Raul Castro, Camilo Cienfuegos, Ernesto Che Guevara, Armando Hart, Celia Sanchez, and, Haydee Santamaria) marched into Havana culminating a three-year campaign that combined rural guerrilla war with a vast urban revolutionary underground.

The revolutionary struggle was led by a highly disciplined, politically centralized combat organization, the July 26th Movement.

Drawing behind it the support and sympathy of the vast majority of the Cuban population, and with a dedicated, self-sacrificing young cadre of men and women at its core, the Cuban revolutionaries wore down, demoralized, and defeated the neocolonial Cuban army, which vastly outnumbered them – at least on paper – in troops, military equipment, and firepower, courtesy of the United States government.

The military dictator Batista, backed by Washington almost to the bitter end, fled to the Dominican Republic while many of the personnel in his vast machinery of repression and pillage escaped to Miami with their loot. It was an astonishing turn of events that captured the imagination of the world.

The great US film, The Godfather Part II, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, portrays the fall of Batista and the triumph of the July 26th Movement with an uncanny verisimilitude via the prism of Batista’s alliance with US Mafia families.

Justice

Upon arriving in Havana and consolidating revolutionary power, the provisional government quickly moved to dissolve what remained, after the revolutionary war, of the police, army, and courts of the neocolonial Cuban state.

With enthusiastic mass participation, armed bodies of workers, peasants, and youth were established. These became the nucleus of a new National Revolutionary Police Force, and, alongside the veteran guerrilla commanders and troops, the new Revolutionary Armed Forces.

Tribunals were established in response to mass demands for justice for the killers, torturers, and thugs of the Batista dictatorship (over 20,000 Cubans were murdered by Batista’s cops, goons, and death squads during the revolutionary struggle), and also to counter the unchecked, spontaneous retributions carried out in the streets. The tribunals prepared the foundations of a new judicial system.

In my 2007 essay Our Che, I wrote:

Che [Guevara] was assigned the task of establishing a just and fair, but also transparent and certain, [system] to bring the process under revolutionary control, ensuring due process, defense lawyers, and fair proceedings. This was done in an exemplary way. Popular, public tribunals were organized.

Volumes of public testimony were given, with horrific testimony of the most vile tortures and bestial murder recorded and made public. Some 200 of the worst torturers and murderers of the US-backed Batista tyranny were shot by firing squads. No one has ever offered a shred of evidence that anyone innocent was executed.

Whatever one’s opinion of the death sentences that were implemented, backed by the great majority of the population, no one can say, or has ever shown, that the guilt of those executed was not established beyond the shadow of a doubt. Batista’s cops and thugs were, after all, known to all.

In their glory days, prior to the revolutionary victory, those brought to justice strutted their power and brutality over what they thought would be forever helpless victims; they never dreamed they would face their victims and their victim’s families in a legal proceeding.

This process of bringing to justice the worst criminals of the hated Batista regime led to an orgy of hypocrisy and phony moral outrage in the big-business press and among Democratic and Republican politicians in the United States.

The highly orchestrated propaganda campaign was the pretext for turning public opinion, which had been very sympathetic to Fidel Castro and the rebel cause, against the Cuban Revolution as radical social reforms began to be implemented which affected US business interests and US economic and financial domination of the island…

Washington and the big-business media’s crocodile tears for Batista’s torturers and murderers stands in sharp contrast to their approval or silence towards the mountains of corpses piled up by US-backed military regimes and death squads in Latin America and the Caribbean before and especially after the Cuban Revolution from Trujillo and Somoza to Pinochet and the Argentine generals.

All of these developments planted the seeds of a new state, with a distinct working class character. The new personnel staffing governmental and state bodies registered the social ascendancy of the formerly oppressed classes: the working people of the city and countryside, as well as Afro-Cubans, women, and youth.

Gone was the old social order where the cops, army, courts, and prisons of the old, neocolonial Cuban state manifested the class rule of landlords, capitalists, gangsters, racists, and the super-exploiters of women.

Despite warnings, pressures, and threats from Washington, the Cuban revolutionaries began to implement economic and social measures that came up against, and impacted adversely on, the economic domination of US monopoly capital on the island. These measures included rent and utility cost reductions and the closing and expropriation of Havana’s vast organized-crime enterprises from casinos to brothels.

Agrarian Reform

But front and center was the radical land reform and distribution that both greatly expanded small, private holdings for family farming, and liberated the large, seasonally employed, and particularly oppressed agricultural workforce that was permanently in debt to Cuba’s latifundia. (The Rebel Army had implemented rudimentary land reforms and social policies such as organizing schools and clinics in the territories liberated during the armed struggle.)

The “Law on Agrarian Reform” broke the social domination and political power of Cuba’s landlord class and included vast US holdings. The law stipulated that sugar plantations could not be under foreign ownership.

The agrarian reform was at the center of the social and economic transformations heralded by the Revolution. Deliberations to codify in law, and implement in practice, a comprehensive agrarian reform began within the central July 26th Movement leadership almost immediately after the military victory and the establishment of the provisional government.

The most profound direction and input came from contributions and collaboration between Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. The agrarian reform was seen as the necessary foundation and catalyst for Cuba’s industrial development.

Che Guevara gave a major speech less than a month after the January 1, 1959 seizure of power in Havana indicating the centrality of land reform to the program of the revolutionary government:

[S]ince the revolution’s triumph, [the peasants] have earned the right to freedom. They can use that freedom to…move forward, backed by law, to a true and broad agrarian reform.

We have begun to put the Rebel Army’s social aims into effect; we have an armed democracy. When we plan out the agrarian reform and observe the new revolutionary laws to complement it and make it viable and immediate, we are aiming at social justice.

This means the redistribution of land and also the creation of a vast internal market and crop diversification, two cardinal objectives of the revolutionary government that are inseparable and that cannot be postponed since they involve the people’s interest.

All economic activities are connected. We must increase the country’s industrialization, without overlooking the many problems accompanying such a process. But a policy of encouraging industry demands certain tariff measures to protect nascent industry, as well as an internal market capable of absorbing the new commodities.

We cannot increase this market except by giving the great peasant masses broader access to it. Although the guajiros have no purchasing power, they do have necessities to meet, things they cannot purchase today.

We are well aware that the ends we are committed to demand an enormous responsibility on our part, and we know that these are not the only goals. We must expect a reaction against us by those who control over 75 percent of our commercial trade and our market.”

To implement the Agrarian Reform Law, that is, the lever for the entire economic and social transformation of Cuba, the National Institute of Agrarian Reform was organized, with Fidel Castro as its President. Che Guevara was appointed head of the Department of Industrialization, with the central political and administrative responsibility within INRA, on October 8, 1959.

Che organized and trained an INRA militia of 100,000 which seized control of expropriated land, supervised distribution, and helped set up farm cooperatives. Nearly 500,000 acres of confiscated land was owned by US corporations. INRA, under Guevara’s direction, financed highway construction, built housing for peasants and farming cooperatives, and other industrial projects, including resorts for tourists.

Complementing these economic measures were a series of implemented radical policies and laws that fundamentally altered and transformed social relations on the island to the benefit of the oppressed and exploited overwhelming majority.

These included the abolition of racist Jim Crow-style segregation and discrimination policies; huge blows against the oppression of women including the right to abortion, the establishment of day-care facilities, equality in pay, greater access to education and professional training, and the eradication of organized prostitution with job training for ex-prostitutes (it is estimated that one out of three women in Havana were super-exploited in the gangster-run “sex industry.”); a massive, successful campaign to wipe out illiteracy; and, particularly annoying to foreign and domestic big-business owners, progressive labor laws that greatly expanded labor union membership and facilitated struggles for higher wages and better working conditions.

These measures were not yet explicitly socialist; banking, manufacturing, and large-scale wholesale and retail distribution remained in private hands.

However, the anti-capitalist tendency was clear and the encroachments on the prerogatives of domestic and foreign capital were intolerable to the ruling classes. Moreover, the evaporation of the old neocolonial state and its repressive apparatus left a vacuum in political and social relations, into which stepped the highly radicalized, organized, and mobilized Cuban working people and youth led by the team around Fidel Castro.

This was a leadership team of exceptional political and personal audacity and courage, who knew where they wanted to go and were not afraid of the dangers and consequences.

Washington Fights Back

The implementation of the land reform and the other measures described above set off alarms in Washington and could never be tolerated by the US ruling class. The US government as a whole was, above all, anxious that the victorious Cuban example would resonate in a Latin American soil fertile for revolutionary struggle and change.

Within months, and with an intensity that mounted exponentially, Washington, in the last two years of the Dwight Eisenhower Administration, set in motion bipartisan plans and programs to discredit, undermine, subvert, and destroy the Cuban Revolution. These included cutting off US markets for sugar and other Cuban products and refusing to refine Cuban oil, the first steps towards the generalized, sweeping economic sanctions that remain in force today.

Attempts at economic strangulation were complemented by more directly violent methods. Widespread terrorist violence and economic sabotage was directed by the CIA of the Eisenhower and (elected in 1960) John Kennedy Administrations, with their legions of recruited counter-revolutionary Cuban exiles.

Facing the US assault head on, the Cuban workers and peasants government sought and received military and economic assistance from the Soviet Union, Soviet-allied governments in Eastern Europe, and China. The Soviet government agreed, crucially, to buy Cuban sugar and refine Cuban oil.

Washington’s assault culminated in the April 1961 mercenary invasion defeated at the Bay of Pigs (Playa Giron to the Cubans). The Cuban revolutionaries did not retreat under the withering violent assault, but instead directed and led a mobilized and armed citizenry in a conscious socialist revolution that was openly declared after Washington’s Bay of Pigs debacle.

Capitalist property relations were overturned and private property in the means of production, finance, and large-scale wholesale distribution were abolished. By 1962, Cuba had become what Marxists call a “workers state.” That is, the old ruling landowning and capitalist classes were expropriated.

Major industries and banking became nationalized state property, where conscious economic planning began to gain predominance over “market forces.” Concurrently, a state monopoly over foreign trade was established. Decisively, this process would never have been possible without the prior dissolution of the old neocolonial state and its repressive apparatus, that is, its army, police, and judiciary.

Private enterprises directly tied to the officials and cronies of the Batista dictatorship, most of whom had fled Cuba, were expropriated without compensation.

Others, including foreign capitalists, were compensated, in negotiations with them and their governments. The US capitalist monopolies, on the same page as the US government, rejected, with contempt, negotiations and compensation, fully expecting that “Castro” and Cuban sovereignty could not survive long facing Washington’s full-throated hostility.

None of this could have been driven through without the political class-consciousness and mass participation of the Cuban working class and its allies, who had to learn how to operate and manage the industry and finance that was now “public.” This radicalization and transformation developed under both the blows of the intensifying Washington-driven counter-revolutionary drive and the collective organization and consolidation of the revolutionary vanguard.

This latter factor was inevitably accompanied by a class-political polarization and differentiation inside the July 26th Movement, as a more right-wing layer formed and organized in opposition to the radical measures outlined above.

The most prominent figure in this layer was the former Camaguey province guerrilla comandante Huber Matos. (Matos was in late-1959 convicted of treason and sedition for establishing links with counter-revolutionary armed groups connected to the CIA, sentenced to twenty years imprisonment, released in 1979, and lives in Miami today.)

In actual fact the divisions and splits within the July 26th Movement, the forces that went over to the US-led counter-revolution, were relatively small in numbers and political significance, due to the great popularity and political authority of the Castro leadership. Nevertheless, the voices of those “democrats” and “freedom fighters” who left the July 26th Movement were highly amplified with Washington’s giant megaphone at their disposal.

Not Aiming for a Third World “Welfare State”

What occurred in Cuba from 1959 to the beginning of 1962 was a dynamic process that went far beyond the most progressive and radical reforms and constitutional restructuring of existing state structures and juridical forms by progressive, populist, anti-imperialist, or left-wing governments in other national political upheavals.

There have been many examples, up to the present day, of such governments coming into power in Latin America (and other so-called Third World countries) through coups, mass struggles, or elections taking place under the institutions of the existing capitalist state which remain essentially in place and intact.

In Cuba, on the contrary, the revolutionary government, which came to power in an armed struggle, pulverized the old state structures, starting with its repressive machinery of police, army, prisons, and courts, establishing entirely new institutions in social composition and political content.

Cuba’s socialist revolution did not aim for a better “welfare state” under a capitalist “mixed economy,” with benefits for the working people dependent on the vicissitudes of world capitalist markets dominated by the richest imperialist powers (Washington, London, Paris) under conditions of unequal exchange (that is, cheap prices for “Third World” export commodities and raw materials, high prices for “First World” finished products, machinery and technology).

The Revolution fought rather to elevate the oppressed classes to political power and social predominance in the new state and forge entirely new social relations and new human beings.

Of course, the policies and practice of the Cuban Revolution in “social welfare” categories of medical-care access, education, pensions, maternity benefits, and so on are unsurpassed in any capitalist Third World country and even in many rich, advanced capitalist powers, who are all, in any case, working today to gut such conquests of past working-class struggles. But in Cuba such measures are not seen as “welfare,” but as the inherent rights and prerogatives of the working class.

Internationalists in Power

Cuban revolutionary theory and practice was animated by a strong anti-bureaucratism articulated in the speeches and writings of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, that was bound together by a profound internationalist spirit of solidarity.

This entire perspective and outlook was a return to – and spurred the revival of in a new generation of revolutionary-minded youth – a creative, and human-being centered, Marxism after decades of stultification and dogma in theory, as well as horrible crimes and betrayals in its name in practice, by the government led by Joseph Stalin and his acolytes in the Soviet Union and the so-called “socialist camp.”

See especially Socialism and Man in Cuba by Che Guevara, Pathfinder Press edition and Fidel Castro’s 1962 speech on sectarianism and bureaucracy.

The consolidation of the Cuban Revolution as a workers’ state meant that for the first time since the opening years of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, revolutionary internationalists were in the leadership of a workers’ state.

They not only held domestic power but, in their foreign policy, had the political perspective of extending the Revolution and using the political authority and material resources of the workers’ state – within the limits of the possible – to collaborate with and aid fellow revolutionists.

In the case of the Cuban revolutionaries this primarily meant in the arena of Latin America, which was in a state of permanent political turmoil and intensifying class struggle under conditions of massive poverty, social inequality, and foreign, mainly US, economic and political domination.

Since the 1898 Spanish-American War, which marked the origins of the modern American Empire, Washington engaged in frequent overt and covert violent invasions, interventions, and subversion across the Americas, over the subsequent decades.

US interventionist policy has continued into the 21st Century, albeit with more political limitations and counter-pressures …and less success. The US-backed April 11, 2002 military coup against Hugo Chavez’s anti-imperialist government in Venezuela was reversed and defeated following massive demonstrations in support of Chavez.

In September 2008 ultra-right forces in Bolivia, backed covertly by Washington, attempted to split the country on regional lines and bring down the government of President Evo Morales.

The big-business and large landowning-led forces were centered in oil and gas producing regions and furiously opposed Morales’s progressive policies of nationalizing Bolivian vast mineral, oil, and gas resources, promoting the interests of Bolivia’s indigenous Indian majority, and his close alliances with Cuba and Venezuela. This all failed ignominiously.

On February 4, 1962, Fidel Castro read the “Second Declaration of Havana” to a crowd of one million in Havana’s Revolution Square. The manifesto, drawn up by the Cuban leadership, was essentially a call for revolutionary struggle against US imperialism and the dependent capitalist-oligarchic order extant across the Americas.

World politics had seen nothing like this language, backed up with action, since the Bolshevik team around V.I. Lenin and the Communist International they founded, in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution and the end of the inter-imperialist bloodletting of World War I:

What is Cuba’s history but that of Latin America? What is the history of Latin America but the history of Asia, Africa, and Oceania? And what is the history of all these peoples but the history of the cruelest exploitation of the world by imperialism?

At the end of the last century and the beginning of the present, a handful of economically developed nations had divided the world among themselves subjecting two thirds of humanity to their economic and political domination Humanity was forced to work for the dominating classes of the group of nations which had a developed capitalist economy.

The historic circumstances which permitted certain European countries and the United States of North America to attain a high industrial development level put them in a position which enabled them to subject and exploit the rest of the world. What motives lay behind this expansion of the industrial powers? Were they moral, “civilizing” reasons, as they claimed? No. Their motives were economic…

Wherever roads are closed to the peoples, where repression of workers and peasants is fierce, where the domination of Yankee monopolies is strongest, the first and most important lesson is to understand that it is neither just nor correct to divert the peoples with the vain and fanciful illusion that the dominant classes can be uprooted by legal means which do not and will not exist.

The ruling classes are entrenched in all positions of state power. They monopolize the teaching field. They dominate all means of mass communication. They have infinite financial resources. Theirs is a power which the monopolies and the ruling few will defend by blood and fire with the strength of their police and their armies.

The duty of every revolutionary is to make revolution. (From The Second Declaration of Havana, Pathfinder Press edition)

The Cuban revolutionaries also supported revolutionary armed struggle in Algeria against French colonialism and in the Congo against the pro-imperialist neocolonial regime there that had come to power after the assassination of the Congolese freedom fighter and first President of an independent Congo, Patrice Lumumba.

Confrontation

These incredible events on a small Spanish-speaking Caribbean island shook up world politics. Not only did Cuba establish relations of economic and military alliance with the Soviet Union and the “Warsaw Pact” governments and states, but, much more significantly, revolutionary Cuba in the 1960s became the political and organizing center across the Americas for revolutionary struggle against US domination and the rule of the oligarchies – two things that were hand in glove.

This was an obvious challenge to US policymakers. If Havana became the Mecca for revolutionaries across Latin America, Miami became the counter-Mecca for those tied to the existing oligarchic order that was becoming unglued, a process accelerated by the presence and impact of the Cuban Revolution.

In the early years after the triumph of the Revolution, the CIA set up in Miami the largest base operation in its history. Daily operations were spun and run into Cuba involving plans for sabotage, terrorism, assassination, and so on. Organized, trained, funded, and directed from Washington, the operatives – by and large – were Cuban exiles. Thousands of Cuban citizens lost their lives as result of such actions over the years.

Many millions of dollars, and no doubt hundreds of personnel hired, were spent on so-called “psychological-warfare operations” (psy-ops) to spread “disinformation” and “misinformation” – that is, LIES – in the form of gossip, innuendo, and rumors made up out of whole cloth, on the theory that if you throw enough bullshit against a wall, some is bound to stick.

The modus operandi in the CIA’s factories of falsification were the spreading of conspiracy theories fabricated to cause confusion and, hopefully, cause divisions and splits in the revolutionary leadership. Among the most notorious lies spread far and wide:

Revolutionary hero Camilo Cienfuegos didn’t really die in a plane crash after a mission to counter anti-revolutionary activity centered around Huber Matos in Camaguey, but was actually killed by Fidel Castro. Che Guevara did not really go out of public view to organize anti-imperialist struggles in Africa and Latin America, but was actually imprisoned and even killed by Fidel Castro.

When that Big Lie was no longer operative, the new mendacity was that Fidel refused to “rescue” Che in Bolivia and “allowed” him to die, still peddled to this day.

Former CIA operatives like the ubiquitous Brian Latell, a top figure for decades on the CIA’s “Cuba desk,” has recently resurfaced to peddle the lie that Fidel Castro knew beforehand that President John Kennedy was going to be assassinated. As they say, old habits are hard to break and you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.

In the end, however, the ability to find a platform to spew lies and half-truths, is, for the Latells of the world, a small consolation prize that hardly makes up for the fact that their life’s work of destroying the Cuban Revolution, despite all their ingenious, inventive, creative lying has been a shameful, spectacular bust.

The role of the defeated Cuban businessmen, landowners, branch managers of US corporations, and gangsters was strictly to help “Uncle Sam” and do what they were told. It is laughable to think that these defeated bumblers would be calling the shots politically or in any other way.

But that is not to say that, like most clients and lackeys, the defeated remnants of the old Cuban ruling class did not chafe at their dependent position and the limits placed on their freedom of action. In fact, they were very resentful and sought to leverage their position and knowledge to maneuver within the framework of internal, tactical Washington divisions, to take relatively independent initiatives.

For example, over the years, CIA-trained operatives like Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles have “independently” carried out terrorist activities that were not under the concrete direction of the CIA and the US government, such as the blowing up of Cuban Flight 455 in October 1976 that departed from Barbados, killing all 73 people on board.

Bosch died in 2011 having been allowed to live unencumbered in the US since 1990 by decisions of the George Bush, Senior (the director of the CIA during Bosch’s most “productive” terrorist period) White House. Posada Carriles remains a free man in Miami today. And the US State Department has the temerity to put Cuba on a list of “nations supporting terrorism!”

Recriminations

The policy of overturning and destroying the “Castro revolution” was a unanimous one across the board in Washington, uniting Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives. This was true despite the tactical divergences which naturally emerged.

These differences actually led to recriminations among top US politicians and policymakers – and their media and academic clones – which became quite vicious at times, especially in the period after the CIA-trained mercenary army was crushed at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961. “Who Lost Cuba?” cried the US right wing. President Kennedy was blamed for the Bay of Pigs humiliation because he held back as the debacle unfolded from unleashing direct US bombing of the island.

Legions of conspiracy theorists, on the basis of these recriminations, concocted a plausible factoid asserting that “rouge” elements of the CIA using “embittered” Cuban exiles were behind Kennedy’s November 1963 assassination.

This is backed up by the false assertion that Kennedy was seeking a “rapprochement” with the Cuban government, and, with even flimsier evidence, that he was planning to abort US intervention in Vietnam. Not a few novels and films, some even brilliantly done, have come out of these fantastic conspiracies. See James Ellroy’s American Tabloid, Don DeLillo’s Libra, and Oliver Stone’s film JFK.)

Kennedy chose – no doubt wisely and prudently given the overall situation at hand – to cut US losses rather than double down on what was a real-time Washington political and military disaster. In making the choice to retreat and concede the defeat of the mercenary forces, Kennedy understood fully that the Cuban people had become armed to the teeth and were full of revolutionary enthusiasm and fighting will.

The political consequences of dropping bombs on Cuban territory, after the defeat of an operation the US government had been claiming publicly it had nothing to do with, would certainly have been politically and militarily catastrophic for Washington.

Who knows how many tens of thousands of US troops would have been necessary to gain control of the island? What would have been the reaction in Latin American and world capitals to any sustained bombing of Cuban territory and cities? In the Soviet Union and China?

Indeed, what would have been the reaction inside the United States, where a significant degree of sympathy with Cuba existed and where the mass Civil Rights Movement that was exploding across the South and North had many Black leaders and activists attracted to revolutionary Cuba and its sweeping anti-racist policies?

From the Bay of Pigs to the Missile Crisis

In any case, the Kennedy Administration chose to bow to a difficult reality, lick its wounds, emphasize that the origins of the scheme were with the previous Eisenhower Administration, and prepare for another round.

It quickly established, under the direct leadership of Attorney General Robert Kennedy, the infamous Operation Mongoose program of stepped-up anti-Castro propaganda and “psychological warfare,” economic sabotage, assassinations (literally hundreds of plots were hatched to murder Fidel Castro, which included collaborating with US Mafia families) and terrorism.

All in preparation, and to lay the foundation for, the next round of a direct US invasion, without, this time, the “leading” wedge of the Cuban exile mercenaries.

It was these plans, and this dynamic, barely hidden and, in any case, fully known by the Cuban and Soviet governments, that led to the so-called “Cuban Missile Crisis” of October 1962.

Earlier that year Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev talked a reluctant Fidel Castro into allowing the installation of nuclear-tipped Soviet missiles on Cuban territory. Castro has said publicly that Khrushchev’s appeal was two-fold: first, as a defense against the US invasion of Cuba everyone knew was coming, and, second, as an act of “socialist solidarity” with the Soviet Union, since US missiles were in Turkey, an equivalent distance from Soviet territory.

Castro felt that he was not in a position to refuse, especially given the indispensable role of Soviet economic and military aid at that point in Cuba’s defense from Washington’s multi-front assault.

Nevertheless Castro strongly objected to the secret installation of the missiles. He felt this would inevitably be exposed – as, of course, it was – and would likely give Washington the moral high ground. Better to be upfront and declare the policy openly on the grounds of defense of Cuba and create political pressure for a mutual draw-down of missile deployments near each power’s land mass.

But Castro’s advice and warnings were rejected, if not ignored altogether, by the Soviet leadership. When US spy planes revealed the missile sites, and with more missiles en route on Soviet ships, Kennedy effectively took the political offensive.

Kennedy organized a naval quarantine of Cuba and threatened to confront Soviet naval vessels approaching Cuban waters. This sequence of events nearly led to direct US-Soviet military engagement and an invasion of Cuba by the United States, not to speak of devastating nuclear exchanges between the United States and the Soviet Union and untold millions of deaths.

The crisis was resolved when the Soviet leadership removed the nuclear weapons from Cuba and turned their ships back. In return, the Kennedy Administration agreed, in a secret protocol, to remove the US nuclear missiles from Turkey. The deal supposedly included an informal (that is, not written down and signed in a formal document) pledge that the United States would not directly invade Cuba.

US government documents declassified since the “Missile Crisis” reveal that Washington policymakers fully understood that a US invasion of Cuba would have met truly massive, popular resistance – the entire population was armed to the teeth and in a state of full territorial mobilization.

The secret documents projected that the first days and weeks of an invasion would lead to 10,000 or more US casualties (in nearly ten years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, US combat deaths are under 7,000).

It was this reality – as much as any supposed “statesman-like cool” – that restrained President Kennedy from ordering an invasion and negotiating, without the participation of the Cuban government, a mutually agreeable settlement with an equally anxious, and politically and diplomatically outmaneuvered, Soviet government which had overplayed its hand.

Relative US Failure

Washington failed in its intense efforts in this period to overturn the revolutionary Cuban government, destroy the Cuban workers’ state, and restore capitalist property relations and the neocolonial order on the island.

That failure continues to this day and is often cited by Establishment dissenters as a reason to dump what is called an “ineffective” anti-Cuba policy. They fantasize that “engagement,” normalization, and the subsequent “exposure” to “American ideas” will actually undermine and do more to eventually defeat the Cuban Revolution than the US embargo, travel restrictions, and threats.

This argument is usually accompanied by the assertion that “Castro” and the Cuban government actually want and need US hostility as an “excuse” to avoid “democracy,” “human rights,” blah-blah-blah, so as to divert and manipulate mass discontent.

Of course this is all complete and utter nonsense. The dominant consensus among US policymakers, and in this they are completely correct, is that any unilateral dropping of US sanctions without a Cuban surrender and capitulation would not only be a historic political victory for Cuba and humiliation for Washington.

It would also be a tremendous boost to Cuba’s economic development and prosperity to have the legal ability to buy, sell, and trade in the US market. It would also create the conditions for rapid internal political relaxation and the further institutionalization of democratic rights and civil liberties. All of which would strengthen Cuban socialism and make it all the more attractive and resonant across the Americas and internationally.

But Washington’s failure to defeat the Cuban Revolution is not the end, but more like the beginning of the question. The failure is relative and must be qualified, aside from the obvious price Cuba has paid, in blood and economic development, from US sanctions and hostility.

That is, it must also be said that the US government and its allies in the Latin American oligarchies have been successful, for many decades, in the larger question of preventing the extension of the Cuban socialist revolution in the Americas. That “success”, of course, set up the nightmare decades in Latin America of brutal and murderous military-oligarchy rule.

The Nightmare Decades

In 1964 in Brazil, the progressive government of Joao Goulart, which favored friendly relations with Cuba, was overthrown and replaced with a military dictatorship backed by the US which lasted nearly 20 years; in September 1963 the Kennedy Administration’s CIA overthrew the elected left-wing government of Juan Bosch in the Dominican Republic, establishing a military junta.

After a Constitucionalista uprising led by Colonel Francisco Camano seized and held the capital of Santo Domingo, the Lyndon Johnson Administration ordered a US invasion in April 1965 which smashed the revolutionary process on the island in the name of preventing a “second Cuba”; in 1967 the revolutionary guerrillas led by Ernesto Che Guevara were defeated in Bolivia.

Subsequent guerrilla movements inspired by the Cuban Revolution were also everywhere defeated; in June 1973 a military coup replaced a civilian dictatorship in Uruguay aimed at crushing the revolutionary Tupamaros movement and militant trade union and student organizations.

Military dictatorship lasted twelve years until 1985 in Uruguay; in September 1973 the elected left-wing government of Salvador Allende in Chile was overthrown in a US-backed coup consolidating a murderous military regime that lasted 17 years; in 1976 the weak, elected Peronist government in Argentina was overthrown in a US-backed coup, ushering in vicious repression, killing some 30,000, until the military regime collapsed after the Malvinas Islands war fiasco in 1982-83.

For a number of years all of these military regimes established in the 1970s worked together, and, directly and indirectly, with US government intelligence agencies, in an international program of kidnapping, murder, and assassination called “Operation Condor.” (See The Condor Years by John Dinges, The New Press, 2004)

Washington succeeded in preventing the extension of the Cuban Revolution, and by the late-1970s Latin America was dominated by US-backed brutal military regimes upholding the naked rule of the oligarchies. But this rule was fragile and already beginning to unravel.

A political earthquake shook Central America with the triumph of the Nicaraguan Revolution in July 1979 and the intertwined rise in revolutionary armed struggles in neighboring El Salvador and Guatemala. A new reality and template for Washington’s policies in the Americas, and its confrontation with the Cuban Revolution, was set.

Part III of this essay will take up Washington’s Central America bloodbath, the demise of the Nicaraguan Revolution, the rise and fall of the “Neoliberal” decade in Latin America, and the Cuban Revolution’s remarkable resistance and survival.

Ike Nahem is the coordinator of Cuba Solidarity New York a member of the National Network on Cuba. Nahem is an Amtrak Locomotive Engineer and member of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, a division of the Teamsters Union. These are his personal political opinions. He can be reached at: ikenahem@mindspring.com.

“Libya – Setback for Anti-Imperialist Struggle,” by Peter Tobin

Peter Tobin is a sometime contributor to this site. Unlike me, Peter is a real Communist through and through. Right now, he is in Nepal working with the Maoists there, spending much of his time at party headquarters. There is a lot going on there right now, but I have not been writing about it much.

Unlike Peter, I’m just a socialist. As Communists are part of the wide spectrum of the Left, we more or less support them, but we also support the rest of the Left too, all the way to social democracy and even US-style liberalism. I figure we are all one big happy family.

LIBYA – SETBACK FOR ANTI-IMPERIALIST STRUGGLE

Gaddafi, lynched like Saddam Hussein, whatever his twists and turns of the last ten years, redeemed himself at the end, by dying fighting imperialism. The record shows that over the 42 years of his regime, he used Libya’s oil wealth against Western Imperialism, led by the US and its local military outpost – the white Zionist colony, Israel.

He utilized ‘terrorist’ methods that Arab militants found was the only military avenue of resistance open to them, a position that no Communist would criticize; it is for oppressed people to choose their way of struggle, according to their circumstances.

Therefore Gaddafi’s Libya bank-rolled many Palestinian resistance groups, and for decades was the most militant Arab leader on the Palestinian question, among Saudi Arabian lip-servers, Jordanian vacillators, or outright Egyptian traitors like Sadat and Mubarak after him.
He also came to see the African dimension, and uniquely for an Arab leader substantially funded the Organization of African Unity (OAU); an act of solidarity with the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa, a recognition that their sufferings under Western imperialism were no different from those of the Arab masses – genocide, dispossession, theft of natural resources and brutal colonial or neo-colonial rule.

Gaddafi was also a strong financial and political supporter of the African National Congress (ANC) when the West labeled it a ‘Communist terror’ group. The fact that the first person Mandela visited outside South Africa was Gaddafi shows the depth of his, and the ANC’s, gratitude. He will be mourned there as a mark of their continuing respect.

ROMANTIC & RUTHLESS NATIONALIST

Gaddafi’s attempt, as a devout Muslim, to counter the cultural imperialism of the West led to a radical interpretation of the Koran, which saw the ‘Ummah” (the body of the striving faithful) as the Arab masses desiring/requiring socialism. Hence the ‘Jamayriah,’ proposed in the ‘Green Book’ – an Islamist parody, a riposte and rival to Mao’s ‘Little Red Book’ and ‘Red Revolution.’

He furthermore thought, until the millennium, at least, that he could build ‘Green socialism in one country,’ staving off imperialist designs on Libya’s oil wealth and the deadly enmity of all the pro-Western Arab regimes, led by Wahhabi Saudi Arabia. His state tried to mobilize the masses through popular devolving committees. However, he had no formal role within the power structure, acting as a last ‘adviser/guru’ issues and policy.

RESISTANCE HOME & ABROAD

Libyan society, with a population of around 4 million, has not moved very far beyond four major ethnic groups into a cohesive voluntary civil society. It never was a nation, but always a collection of disputatious tribes, unified by Islam, if little else.

Hence, it was easily overcome by the modern industrial Italian state, looking for its ‘place in the sun,’ building an overseas empire with a series of incursions into Libya and subsequently Abyssinia, and in the former achieving imperial status in 1934. (Like clan Ireland fell to Strongbow & Henry II in 1169/71, and Native Americans fell to the white European colonizers on the North-American continent.)

The urban centres, mainly Benghazi and Tripoli, have a substantial free-market private sector with bourgeois and petit-bourgeois strata swollen by subsidies from oil revenues, and a largely Western educated, professional, media and technological elite, many of whom are culturally and ideologically hegemonized by bourgeois ideas, mores, and values.

This class has been prominent in all imperialist backed populist movements of the last few years – Ukraine, Lebanon, Iran, Burma, to list a few. They hang their hats on the ‘Human Rights’ and ‘Democracy’ banners against media demonised, ‘authentic’ villains , straight from Holly/Bollywood central casting.

Well – Gaddafi, in this gallery of Western ‘baddies’ was the baddest of them all! When Bin Laden was still wondering which of his father’s wives was his mother, Muhammar was Number One hate figure in Western media circles.

ECCENTRICITIES & ENTHUSIASMS

Take his relations with UK governments; he became convinced in the 1980′s that the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) was fighting a struggle of national liberation against British imperialism in the six counties of Ulster, one that reignited in 1969. I don’t intend to go into the pros and cons of this issue here, but the result was Libya that provided the PIRA with guns and most importantly, the new advanced Czech, plastic dynamite – Semtex.

This was a key factor in keeping the war going for another decade. PIRA did not bomb the million Protestants, loyal to Britain, into a republic, but they did bomb them to the negotiating table, as was graphically demonstrated by the effect of the campaign launched against the British homeland; the biggest attack devastating the entire square mile of London’s financial centre and seriously shaking the morale of the British Establishment.

Adams and Morrison would not be sitting on the Northern Ireland Executive were it not for his decisive, practical assistance, and the Provisional Sein Fein, both political and military wings, are also in his debt and owe his family condolences.

Another example – a tiny Trotskyite sect – the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) convinced Gaddafi that it was the authentic voice of the British Revolution, and seizure of state power was certain within a few years. All that was needed was a propaganda machine to convey ‘Bolshevik-Leninist-Trotskyist truth’ to the awaiting proletarian masses, eager to get on with the revolution by sweeping away their existing ‘reformist,’ ‘Stalinist’ leadership!

Gaddafi gave these buffoons millions, enabling them to produce a glossy daily newspaper, Newsline, something the entire British left wing movement, vastly outnumbering this semi-religious playgroup, could only match with the CPGB’s revisionist, economist, humanist, peacenik, plodding ‘Morning Star’, itself topped up by Moscow money in all events.

I cite these to show the weakness of charismatic leader systems – individuals who can act impulsively, emotionally, quixotically, often misguidedly and with impunity.

BONAPARTISM IN ARAB SOCIETIES

Certainly the cult of personality plays a progressive role in certain situations, the cult around Gaddafi, that caused him to become such a hate-figure in Western ruling, and thence through to popular circles, was because he stood up to the Americans/Zionists in Palestine, their stooges in the Arab League, and the West via OPEC to secure better prices for oil producers.

When you are so reviled by the Evil Empires of the West, then you must be doing something right?

But the truth is that the steam ran out of his ‘Green Revolution’ years ago, a national identity was never truly forged, with rural remaining tribal, and urban compromised by the developed world’s bourgeois culture – ‘psychologically colonized’ – as Franz Fanon, the formidable Algerian Marxist, put it, an ideological comprador class.

This class encompasses those successfully duped into believing that Western bourgeois democracy and capitalism express universal human values, demonstrating such a circle of perfection, as to constitute, in the words of the right-wing American ideologue, Fukuyama, parodying Hegel, the ‘end of history’.

Whereas Communists argue that Western, specifically Anglo-Saxon, global command, is a purely transitory, historical contingency, a stage like feudalism to be transcended, as Mao said, in the dialectical ‘action and reaction’ that has marked human society from pre-history.

Make no mistake, from General Ataturk, (four years after he kicked the bejasus out of the British ANZAC Dardanelles invasion) and the Young Turk movement, establishing modern, secular Turkey in 1919 out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, to the Baathist secular socialist message of Aflaq in Syria, to the great Colonel Nasser, and also to the comparatively long-lived Baathist-type regimes of Syria, Algeria and Iraq – all were genuine anti-imperialists, who achieved much for their societies.

Syria is ‘last man standing’ and the next immediate target for the imperialists and Zionists. Where it not for these regimes, the Palestinian cause would have been completely lost, and Lebanon would have been Balkanized. That is why they have incurred the enmity of the American-led West; it is simply a question of settling geopolitical accounts hiding behind the flag of ‘Human Rights’ – ‘Liberty’ – ‘Freedom’ and ‘democracy’.

But, as with charismatic systems, military ones, however progressive, have limitations, as there is ultimately no authority, institutional or popular, to which they are answerable. The reason it occurred in the Arab world was because the army was the only modern institution in society, equipped, not only with access to superior killing equipment, but with modern linguistic, cultural and political influences.

From Lenin’s support for Ataturk, against the imperialist 1919 Versailles carve-up of the Middle East, Communists have supported these progressive anti-imperialist struggles, while recognizing the limitations outlined above, and their often explicit anti-Communism. The fact is these regimes have faded and crumbled, under the pressure from growing Western economic and military post-1945 superiority.

They have, and are, being picked off one-by-one. Gaddafi is just the latest, demonstrating that these forces can no longer carry forward the struggle against imperialism – the dog has barked, but the caravan has moved on. In this century, only revolutionary Communism can successfully challenge imperialism, because it is the only polity and ideology that recognizes the primacy of the people and unleashes their historical potential.

Like Baathism, of which he is a Islamist mutation, the road ran out for Gaddafi; his desperate attempts to make peace with Western imperialists, get rid of his ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction,’ accept responsibility for Lockerbie, etc and avoid Saddam’s fate, have come to naught.

That’s the flexibility of the bourgeois democratic system – one day Tony Blair will come and hug you, another day one of his replacements will come and kill you (and your children – for good measure).

His Libya, like Saddam’s Iraq, was trashed and bombed, only the lies and the military modalities were different – against the former – to save the world from ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction” and latter – to save civilians from being massacred by a ‘evil regime’, in the hands of a certifiable ‘lunatic.’ The euphemism ‘humanitarian mission’ covers military aggression and invasion.

Both were lies based on the strategy of ‘Liberal Interventionism,’ another euphemism, propounded following the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, that abandoned the prohibition enacted in the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia ending the Thirty Years War in Europe against invading countries whose regimes you do not approve in order to replace them with more amenable ones.

The UN mandate to ‘protect civilians’ by enforcing a ‘no-fly zone’ did not sanction regime change, arming opposition forces, giving those forces close air support or assassinating the Head of State. NATO’s decisive intervention even exceeded the bounds of trans-national bourgeois jurisprudence with, among others, Gareth Evans, the co-chair of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty condemning the aggression, stating it was not allowed for under the explicit legal terms of the mandate.

This time also, America agreed the job be sub-let out to its junior partners-in-crime; principally Britain and France. The Secret Services of all NATO states were active in promoting the civil war, by arming and financially supporting a plethora of tribal, Islamic and comprador opposition groups who have they have shown themselves to be such an undisciplined, murderous Quisling rabble that they would not have succeeded without the sustained brutal NATO air assault.

Even so, we will see if Libyan patriots take Colonel Muhammar Gaddafi’s death as the end of hostilities? We will see if Gaddfiism has left any deep roots in Libyan society, or whether, like his ashes, it is blown away into the desert sands. He is probably the last effective member of a tough breed of nationalist Arab Bonapartist leaders who made history in the 20th century. The specific circumstances under which this genus flourished no longer apply, because imperialism is extinguishing its conditions of existence.

Successful Arab resistance, however, does continue, as Hamas and Hezbollah have shown, and while they are nominally Muslim organizations, albeit of Sunni and Shiite dispensations respectively, they are nonetheless closer to being genuine mass movements drawn from their peoples, and they are giving the Zionist/fascist US/Israeli expansionists a military run for their money.

WAR CRIMES FOR OIL

Like Iraq, this is about oil; it is about securing a crucial natural resource, which enables a decadent, gluttonous, wasteful consumer-capitalist, commodity-obsessed, Western society to continue dancing on the edge of a volcano at the expense of the rest of the World.

To a secondary extent, it is about the constant need, in an economy with a huge military-industrial complex, to test rapidly evolving military equipment on a real enemy – the more defenceless the better. War is continuous under imperialism, and the US leads the way as chief warmonger. Now it is even a great video game for the militarily-minded armchair warrior retard.

The French philosopher Baudrillard said of the 1990 attack on Iraq, it was: “a virtual reality war” designed for a society, with a popular culture saturated by violent imagery and corrupted by generations of imperial slavery, genocide and brutality against the peoples outside the ‘First-World’ heartlands, and with the technological capacity to participate and gloat in the death and suffering of peoples in far-away lands, without in any way suffering retribution, or even the threat of it. (Drones watching Drones?)

The German Communist playwright Brecht in ‘The Three Penny Opera,’ has a policeman and a criminal reminisce about the great times they had serving in the British Army on the Indian sub-continent:

(German)                          (Eng. trans.)
“und es begegnete,                “and when they met
Inhnen ‘ne neue Rasse             a new race
‘ne braune oder blasé,            a brown, or a white one
Dann machen sie vielleicht        They’d probably make
Daraus ihr Beefsteak Tartar       Mincemeat outta them.”

NATO’s war crime against the Libyan people, however dressed up in modern ‘PR-speak,’ is another blood-soaked imperial adventure, driven by greed and treachery, where the flags of the NATO aggressors against the Libyan people are better described as butchers’ aprons, and the so-called ‘liberators’ of Libya are no more than imperialist running dogs, (with the exception among anti-Gaddafi forces being the Jihadists who have their own anti-Western combined Anti-Arab secularist/heretic agenda.)

Finally, Gaddafi’s brutal termination shows again that the default position against Western gangster imperialism, however and wherever it is manifest, is People’s War. Between the international proletariat and the bourgeoisie there can be stalemate, realignment, defeat or victory– but never compromise or agreement.

1) I have not discussed the events in Libya in relation to its distinct Maghreb identity within the Arab nation, comprising the states across North Africa; Morocco, Algeria, Libya and Tunisia. Even here, Gaddaffi’s Islamic faith make him stand out among the leaders who emerged in the anti-colonial struggles of mid-century. Ben Barka, Ben Bella, Bourguiba &c. were all secular cosmopolitan civilian politicians. The best authority on this is the Marxist-Leninist political economist Samir Amin.

2) There is no reference on the Libyan civil war in relation to the ‘Arab Spring’, because I do not think there is homogeneity among the recent regional upsurges. In this light, I think the Libyan situation is uniquely important (even from its next-door neighbor, Tunisia), as it closes a chapter on an historical period of resistance to imperialist hegemony in the Middle East. Communists can draw precise lessons from it.

Muslims in France

Repost from the old site.

Clearly, the North African, mostly-Caucasian Muslims in France (primarily Algerians) have been a disaster. They are the ones that are rioting all the time and tearing up the country. Contrary to popular rumor, the N African Muslim population in France is ~10%, not 20%. The Black population is not known, but surely it is much smaller than the 10% North African population.

The North Africans are there primarily due to French colonialism and imperialism. Algeria was a former French colony, brutally ruled by France for 134 years, from 1830 to 1964.

The Algerians fought a horribly brutal war of independence, in which 25,000 French and 1 million Algerians were killed. Incredibly, the anti-Communist Right in the US still sings the praises of French colonialism in this war, and makes the revolutionaries out to be the bad guys.

It’s true that the Algerian revolutionaries did not fight a very nice or pretty war. Yet they paid for it with 40 times the casualties of the French. To the dead person, I don’t think it really matters how they got killed (an accusation against the revolutionaries is that they killed people in brutal ways such as beheadings).

It’s true that you can go on the Internet, usually to Zionist sites, and see some horrible photos of those killed by the Algerian revolutionaries. A specialty was chopping the head off, chopping the genitals off, and stuffing the guy’s dick in his severed head.

Anyway, colonialism is always wrong, period. The French were wrong, and they lost. After the war, Algerians started showing up in France in large numbers. White nationalists (who, by the way, never met a White imperialist or colonialist project they did not adore) claim that the Algerians are in France due to insane liberals bringing them there to diversify France and I guess to dilute the European Whites.

The French may be liberal, but they are not retarded like liberal Americans and liberal Scandinavians.

I would like to point out that none of this White nationalist bullshit is true.

First of all, the Algerian Muslim immigrants were not brought in as some loony liberal experiment in diversity, but instead as pro-French refugees fleeing soon before or after the FLN won the war. Think of the fall of Saigon.

The White nationalist line is that the French used to be hardcore and nasty and brutal (after all, the guillotine was still used until the 1970′s) and the French Foreign Legion was brutal as Hell in the Algerian Civil War, but now the French have gone soft and wimpy, and they are letting Muslim punks run all over them.

That hardcore France the White nationalists love so much was rejected by none other than the French people themselves after the criminal colonial wars of Algeria and Vietnam. There was a big scandal about all the murdering and torturing the French Foreign Legion was doing in Algeria.

The US anti-Communist Hard Right, to this very day, sees this humanist sentiment, and its attendant rejection of colonialism, and even, to some extent, at least in popular culture, embrace of national liberation movements (see Régis Debray and Fritz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth ) as a sign of weakness (see my prior post on the Straussian impulse driving the neocons).

Note that Fanon’s seminal work appeared in 1961, the year of his death, in the midst of the Algerian revolution, and that Debray started pushing his foco theories right around this time ( Revolution in the Revolution appeared in 1967).

The rebels were even worse than the Foreign Legion, but the French did not want to see themselves as brutal, colonialist maniacs.

This was also a period when France was supporting other imperialist and colonial powers in the Suez War in 1956, where British and French colonialism, with their colonial Jewish puppet state, attacked Egypt and tried to grab the Suez Canal back from Nasser, who had rightly and properly seized the canal as Egypt’s property.

After that, the French turned their backs on colonialism (more or less – they still, to their discredit, hold colonies in the South Pacific), and to some extent on imperialism – but not totally – see the crucial French role in the armed coup that threw out President Aristide in Haiti – elected with the support of 92% of the population.

France as a colonial and imperial power was more or less finished by the late 1960′s, Situationists and other crazies were rioting in Paris in the summer of 1968, and the torch of imperialism passed to the US after the British lost stomach for it after Suez.

Suez pretty much led to a “peasant revolt” in the UK against British imperialism due to the blatant and sickening imperialism of the Suez War. British imperialism, of course, continues today, even, outrageously, in the Labor Party, really the last place anyone would hope to find it. See British support for the imperialist invasion and colonial occupation of Iraq for more.

To the dismay of White nationalists, who assume any criminals rioting in the streets must be a bunch of niggers*, the problem kids are North African Caucasians, not Blacks. These Arabs don’t act this way in North Africa. The whole mess is really because they are Muslims and refuse to assimilate. All other theories seem to fall flat on their faces.

White nationalists try to blame this mess on France being taken over by multiculturalist liberal idiots, but France has always been extremely assimilationist and anti-multiculturalist, so this isn’t a failure of multiculturalism at all. In fact, France has been brutal and cruel towards the Bretons, the Basques and the Corsicans, all of whom have every right to take up arms against the French state.

The Algerians are just a problem immigrant group that flat out refuses to assimilate.

One problem here is that the French have always assumed that all immigrants would just lose it all and become Frenchmen. There was never much racism in France and everyone was French anyway, so there was no need for affirmative action.

There is good evidence that the Muslims experience widespread discrimination in employment. The French refuse to remedy this with the only working remedy for discrimination – affirmative action and enforcement of anti-discrimination laws.

White nationalists argue that the discrimination is to be expected based on the behavior of so many of the Algerians, but that misses the point. If amelioration of discrimination against Algerians makes them happier, would they not riot less?

The Muslim areas are not particularly dangerous, unless maybe if you’re a cop. They give off instead the impression that Little Italys used to give off in this country, of a safe zone where the state does not rule and someone else does instead. In the Little Italys, it was the Mafia, and they did keep the crime rate down.

If one were not a resident, people knew that, and you were being watched, but everyone left you alone. The Islamists have, in a similar fashion, taken hold over Algerian zones. Therefore, the Islamist shadow state in the banlieus has a lot of responsibility for the insane rioting that goes on there just about every night.

There is not much to be done at this point except for France to quit importing Algerians. White nationalists like to scream that the French should deport all the Muslims. But I believe that most of these rioting idiots are citizens and hence un-deportable.

If I were running France, I am not sure what I would do.

The Muslims are yet only 10%, so it will be quite a while, if ever, before they have a majority.

*used sardonically.

Does Oil Guarantee a 1st World Standard of Living?

We are having this discussion in the comments threads. The commenter suggested that an IQ of 95 is necessary for a 1st World standard of living. I said 90 IQ ought to suffice for a First World standard of life. Furthermore, there are oil states in the Gulf with pretty low IQ’s that have build up some very nice standards of living.

The commenter said, basically, the same thing that Zionists say whenever anyone notes that Riyadh looks like the suburbs of Phoenix. “Without oil, that place would be a shithole!”

But is that really true.

Oil does not guarantee a First World standard of living or even a decent country. It all depends what you do with the oil money and what kind of society you create with it.

Yeah but some oil states, such as those in Africa, live in complete shit. Look at Nigeria, Angola, Equatorial Guinea and Gabon. They live in shit, and they are swimming in oil. It’s hard to think of bigger shitholes than those countries. All of the oil money in those places has gone to foreign countries. The rest has been soaked up by tiny elites and their buddies who live like royalty, while the people live in 4th World misery.

All of those African countries have very low IQ’s. Perhaps it is possible that below a certain IQ, even all the oil in the world won’t help you build a decent country.

How high does national IQ need to be to build a decent country? The Gulf states of Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Oman and Kuwait have IQ’s of 78-83.

Perhaps I should amend my equation.

A 90 IQ is sufficient to create a 1st World country. Below that, you will have problems.

With extremely rich natural resources like oil, nations below 90 IQ may be able to build a decent country. The IQ’s of these lucky nations can go all the way down to 78 IQ. Below 78 IQ, you may have problems even if you sit on a lake of oil.

Even Venezuela has horrible crime and poverty for an oil state. For decades, all the oil money was stolen by a small elite, maybe 20% of the population. Ecuador has oil. Bolivia has oil and natural gas. Colombia has oil. Mexico had lots of oil, but they are running out. Those are all pretty much shitty countries, no matter what their PCI is.

Indonesia has oil too. Lot of good it’s done them.

Iran, Algeria and Libya all created some decent countries with their oil. I don’t know if they are 1st World, but they aren’t exactly 3rd World.

Oil is no guarantee of a decent country, and you can’t use the oil excuse if an oil state build a decent society with their own. Bully for them. Many oil states squandered their income, and their people wallow in shit.

Give the Gulf Arabs some credit.

For Latest on Revolution in the Middle East

Tune in to the Angry Arab’s blog. He is about the closest to my POV. Of course I support the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia to the hilt. I’m aware I have not written much about it, but I have been following it very closely.

Jordan: Things are cooking in Jordan. The King just dissolved the government.

Yemen: Possibly another domino to fall, but there are a lot of obstacles in the way. Protests at the moment are being led by college students in this poor and backwards country.

Qatar: Takes good care of its people. Nothing will happen. Also the home of Al Jazeera, the real winner in the latest mess.

Oman: Takes good care of its people. Nothing will happen.

Kuwait: Takes good care of its people. Nothing will happen.

Saudi Arabia: Takes good care of its people. Nothing will happen. It’s clear that they are frightened though. Look at their Arab media supporting Mubarak to the hilt.

UAE: Takes good care of its people. Nothing will happen.

Bahrain: This is a tough one, since the majority are Shia, and they are badly repressed by a ruling Sunni elite. There will be demos in the days to come.

PA: Nothing will happen here, but the PA in the West Bank just agreed to hold elections.

Libya: Rich oil state that takes good care of it’s people. Nothing will happen.

Algeria: They already have a rickety democracy. Nothing will happen here.

Syria: Demos scheduled for February 5, but I doubt if much will happen. It’s only pro-US regimes that are going down, and the regime is popular. Besides, they look at Lebanon and Iraq next door and see democracy and mass sectarian slaughter.

Sudan: Hard to say, but the South will go. I don’t expect much to happen here.

Lebanon: The pro-US regime is gone, and Hizballah is now in power. It’s already pretty democratic as it is.

Iran: Nothing will happen here. The Democracy Movement has been going for a while here, and it won’t gain steam.

“Joys of Muslim Women,” by Nonie Darwish

Some of this stuff is a bit over to the top, and I edited out about 15% of the text that I thought was complete crap. Nevertheless, most of what remains seems to be true.

Some of the stuff I removed: that Muslims are preparing a jihad against the West, apparently to convert us to Islam? I don’t agree with that. They think some of us are attacking Islam, so they are counterattacking. Another line said that in 20 years, there will be enough Muslims in North America to elect the President and Prime Minister of the US and Canada. No way is that true. It isn’t really true that non-Muslims are supposed to be killed or subjugated by Muslims, though there is a bit of truth to that.

Under Muslim rule, non-Muslims are clearly subordinate. But where Muslims are the minority, that is not the case. Muslims are supposed to try to convert and increase their numbers so they can be a majority.

Apparently conquest in the name of Islam – aggressive jihad – we have not seen that much in recent years. One exception is Southern Sudan. There have been some genocides of non-Muslims too – Greeks, Assyrians and Armenians in Anatolia, Catholics in East Timor.

In areas with a Muslim majority trying to secede from the state, it’s typically “kill the non-Muslims.” This is the case in the Southern Philippines, Thailand, the Moluccas, Chechnya and Kashmir. There have been localized massacres of non-Muslims in India, Iraq, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Bangladesh and Pakistan.

Muslim jihad is a complicated subject, and saying they want to kill us or convert us is a bit ridiculous, though that was more or less what was going on South Sudan, and there have been some cases of that in Iraq and Pakistan recently.

Joys of Muslim Women

by Nonie Darwish

In the Muslim faith a Muslim man can marry a child as young as 7 year old, consummating the marriage by 9. The dowry is given to the family in exchange for the woman (who becomes his slave) and for the purchase of the private parts of the woman, to use her as a toy.

To prove rape, the woman must have (4) male witnesses. Often after a woman has been raped, the family has the right to execute her (an honor killing) to restore the honor of the family. Husbands can beat their wives ‘at will, and the man does not have to say why he has beaten her.

The husband is permitted to have 4 wives and a temporary wife for an hour (prostitute) at his discretion.

The Shariah Muslim law controls the private as well as the public life of the woman.

In the Western World (America), Muslim men are starting to demand Shariah Law so the wife can not obtain a divorce and he can have full and complete control of her. It is amazing and alarming how many of our sisters and daughters attending US and Canadian Universities are now marrying Muslim men and submitting themselves and their children unsuspectingly to Shariah law.

Ripping the West in Two. Author and lecturer Nonie Darwish says the goal of radical Islamists is to impose Shariah law on the world, ripping Western law and liberty in two.

Ripping the West in Two

Nonie Darwish recently authored the book, Cruel and Usual Punishment: The Terrifying Global Implications of Islamic Law.

Darwish was born in Cairo and spent her childhood in Egypt and Gaza before immigrating to the US in 1978, when she was eight years old. Her father died while leading covert attacks on Israel. He was a high-ranking Egyptian military officer stationed with his family in Gaza.

When he died, he was considered a “shahid,” a martyr for jihad. His posthumous status earned Nonie and her family an elevated position in Muslim society.

But Darwish developed a skeptical eye at an early age. She questioned her own Muslim culture and upbringing. She converted to Christianity after hearing a Christian preacher on television.

In her latest book, Darwish warns about creeping sharia law – what it is, what it means, and how it is manifested in Islamic countries.

Westerners generally assume all religions encourage a respect for the dignity of each individual. Islamic law (Sharia) teaches that non-Muslims should be subjugated or killed in this world. Peace and prosperity for one’s children is not as important as assuring that Islamic law rules everywhere in the Middle East and eventually in the world.

While Westerners tend to think that all religions encourage some form of the golden rule, Sharia teaches two systems of ethics – one for Muslims and another for non-Muslims. Building on tribal practices of the seventh century, Sharia encourages the side of humanity that wants to take from and subjugate others.

While Westerners tend to think in terms of religious people developing a personal understanding of and relationship with God, Sharia advocates executing people who ask difficult questions that could be interpreted as criticism.

It’s hard to imagine, that in this day and age, Islamic scholars agree that those who criticize Islam or choose to stop being Muslim should be executed. Sadly, while talk of an Islamic reformation is common and even assumed by many in the West, such murmurings in the Middle East are silenced through intimidation.

While Westerners are accustomed to an increase in religious tolerance over time, Darwish explains how petro dollars are being used to grow an extremely intolerant form of political Islam in her native Egypt and elsewhere.

It is too bad that so many are disillusioned with life and Christianity to accept Muslims as peaceful…some may be but they have an army that is willing to shed blood in the name of Islam…the peaceful support the warriors with their finances and own kind of patriotism to their religion.

The 13% Solution: A Modest Proposal?

In the comments, Abiezer Coppe proposes a unique solution to the “Black problem” in US society:

I’m a White integrationist. I’m for integration to the extent that I feel whites in White countries should marry blacks to the extent that the blacks die out as a separate entity. That’s a very blunt way of putting it. Whites would also die out as a separate entity. we’d have “mixité”, a genuinely mixed race society.

If I went to live in Senegal I would expect to learn Wolof and integrate, live by the values if the majority Black society, not hang out in a ghetto of ex-colonial White French people, marry a Senegalese Black girl, and have lovely coffee coloured children. Egalité, Fraternité, Mixité….

Of course in reality this racial mixing is totally impractical. I wouldn’t force it on anyone. A milder version on the integrationist approach is that Blacks integrate with the values of the majority. For this reason I accept the French position on making the wearing of the hijab in public illegal. Black French Muslim women have to abide by the secular values of the French White majority.

Black intermarriage would enrich the white gene pool. Imagine if the USA was mostly White people, but instead of 13% Blacks you had White people who had 13% Black in their genetic makeup? That would be very satisfactory. “Mop’em up, Marry’em off and Wipe’em out”. A wicked thought? Not really. blacks would benefit from our genes and racial conflict would be diminished, because they’d disappear.

We would benefit from Black genes. Pure white people would also disappear. The more racial mixing the better. Mixed race people benefit from the strengths of both racial groups. That always been my view. So we’d all end a light shade of khaki, or slightly olive skinned. So what?

Black ghettos are a terrible thing in White countries. Any kind of racial segregation is. Brixton is partly Black ghetto. It can breed hatred, envy. To be honest I don’t really like living in all White city either. I’d prefer a mixture.

Leicester is a great city. I really like going there. It’s very vibrant culturally, and racial conflict seems to be minimal. But then it”s 30% South Asian, 5% Black, 5% other Asian, and 60% White. The Asians integrate well, and are good business people. I get the impression Chinese/East Asian IQ is high. Koreans, Vietnamese, Chinese and Japanese. Is that your conclusion?

On the question of differential and lower Black intellectual ability, and its inheritability, I remain agnostic because I haven’t seen the evidence.

The Blacks I’ve met have all been very bright – PhD types – with the exception of the Trinidadian woman friend I know, who isn’t intellectual at all. She’s affectionate and sexy as hell though. I would. She always has white boyfriends. She’s figured it out. She goes for White men because in her experience they (we) are more civilised and treat her better than her own kind.

She had two Black (one from Ghana, one from Trinidad) husbands before that. They both abused her and were violent. Anecdotal, I know…

Korean, Japanese and Chinese IQ is all ~108. Highest for any major racial group. Vietnamese IQ is quite high – ~102.5, probably due to Chinese admixture. (Both figures setting US White IQ at 103).

I’m not sure what to say about this except that it’s already been done in the Arab World in places like Libya, Tunisia and Algeria. The Berbers are precisely 13% Black. It’s also been implemented in the entire Arab World outside of Africa. In particular, the Gulf and Palestine already have a 13-19% solution, except there are some light Blacks in Yemen, who cause almost zero problems by the way.

Mexico and Argentina adopted a 4% and 3% solution, respectively. There was a large Black population in Buenos Aires in the late 1800′s. Somehow, they vanished off the face of the Earth and no one knows where they went. Clearly, they must have just bred into the population.

Mexico also had a significant number of Blacks, mostly on the Caribbean Coast. Mexicans will tell you that they mysteriously vanished into thin air, but the truth is that the average Mexican nowadays is 4% Black. Mexico doesn’t have a Black problem. It has a Mexican problem, but that’s another kettle of fish.

White nationalists go ballistic at proposals like this, calling them White genocide. I’m not sure it matters. They also say that the breeding in would not be across the board, and that Colorism a la Brazil would replace racism.

Other WN’s would talk about severe damage to the White gene pool, especially the White IQ. It’s hard to say what the effects on White genes would be. I suspect that there might be a ~2% reduction in the White IQ in the mostly White Berber types. Blacks would not really exist too much anymore, but to the extent that they did, their IQ’s would go up by about 11 points. The Achievement Gap would vanish. There would be no more seething Black ghettos. The crime rate would probably decline radically. Everyone would finally shut up about race for once.

Radical Blacks like the Abagond*-Ankheson Mie types would probably be furious and see this as Black genocide, but it would solve a lot of Black problems, albeit by making the group pretty much vanish.

*I hate to keep bringing up this guy’s name. Maybe I should call it the Abagondsphere. Suffice to say he’s not alone. There is a gigantic section of the Black blogosphere, including bloggers, commenters and readers, all linking to each other continuously, who sound just like this guy. Their whole playbook comes out of  Tim Wise Whiteness Studies Critical Race Theory stuff.

It’s hard to characterize them, but in general, these are educated, intelligent Blacks, often with good incomes. They often have a college education, and it’s not unusual for them to even have advanced degrees like Masters and PhD’s. They often make very good money. It’s almost like the more degrees they have and the more money they make, the angrier, whinier and more grudge-like and CRT-pitching they get.

As a good rule, you don’t hear regular Black people talk like this. I have Black neighbors all around me, and they know nothing of this nonsense. Your average working class type or even Underclass Black doesn’t think much about Whites. Here, they all hang out with Hispanics and Whites. If you’re nice to them, they’re nice to you. They hardly ever talk about White people. They see me wearing my Obama tshirt with my Obama bumper sticker and they run up to me and hug me.

Or they come up to me and talk about Tea Partiers. “You see these racist Tea Partiers? Can you believe that?” I’ll imitate Paul Mooney and say something like, “Yeah, fuck those crackers. Hell with those honkies. Those silly White people. They hatin’ on Obama. It’s all because he’s Black.” And they give me a high five.

They aren’t ingrates at all.

Musings on Dual Loyalty, Judaism as Zionism, and Anti-Semitism

Repost from the old site.

Always-perceptive commenter James Schipper makes some astute, terse and cut to the chase comments on my post, The “New Anti-Semitism.” In it, he moves beyond the typically vulgar anti-Semitism that much modern anti-Zionism descends into and offers a perfectly logical explanation for the dual loyalty accusation leveled at Jews.

He also brings up some very difficult questions about the differences between Judaism and Zionism and whether there is really any difference at all.

Schipper:

If criticism of Israel = anti-Zionism = anti-Semitism, then we should be proud to call ourselves anti-Semites.

What is really wrong with Israel? It is not such a bad country for Jews, or even for the Arabs in Israel proper. I would rather be a Jew in Israel than an Arab in any Arab country. Israel was born in sin, but so was every country in the Western hemisphere. Israel is oppressive in the occupied territories, but by historical standards, this oppression is hardly unique.

The real reason for opposing Israel is that it does not see itself as the country of its citizens but as the country of all the Jews in the world. According to Israel, Jews in other countries are living in exile, are really Israelis and should be loyal to Israel.

In other words, Israel expects the Jewish citizens of other countries to behave like Israel’s fifth-columnists, and that is exactly what Zionists outside Israel are.

No political party outside Israel should accept Zionists as members, and no government outside Israel should appoint Zionists to a senior government job. Instead, Zionist should be encouraged to put their bodies where their loyalties are: in Israel.

Suppose that Italy saw itself as the country of all Catholics in the world and expected Catholics everywhere to defend Italian interests, then it would be behaving exactly as Israel does. That would also be a good reason for non-Catholics in other countries to look at Catholics with suspicion and to regard Italy with hostility.

The late Arthur Koestler wrote in an essay that after 1948 all Jews should choose one of two options: go to Israel or abandon Judaism altogether. He is right insofar as Judaism implies Zionism.

Judaism has always posited that Jews are a people and that Israel is their promised land, which is also the position of Zionism. If Judaism implies Zionism, then Jews outside of Israel, it they want to remain Jewish, should emigrate to Israel or else detribalize and deterritorialize Judaism, which may be denaturing it.

Theological question: Why does Obama allow bad things to happen and evil people to prosper?

More seriously, why did Obama appoint a hard Zionist as his chief of staff? It is not a good sign.

I agree with several things in this post.

First of all, he attacks some of the usual broadsides leveled at Israel and dismisses them.

What I find disturbing, and many Zionists have noted this, is the particular vehemence many Israel-critics level at Israel’s oppression of Jews inside Israel, while they are silent or even supportive of even worse oppression by states against minorities outside Israel.

White nationalists think it’s awesome for Whites to treat non-Whites like shit, except when it comes to White Jews versus “muds” in Israel. Kurds in the Arab World are treated awfully bad, Berbers less so but still poorly, and the Shia are oppressed all over the Arab World. There is open oppression and violence against Christians in Egypt and Iraq.

Baha’i are treated horribly in Iran, Sunnis less so but still poorly, and the Ahwaz have some good beefs. Turks treat Kurds horribly in Turkey. Russia has massacred 20% of the population of Chechnya in what can only be termed a genocide. China’s treatment of the Uighurs and Tibetans is disgraceful. Treatment of Hindus in Pakistan is shameful, and NE Indian Asians are treated poorly by the Indian state.

Japan treats its Koreans, Burakumin and Ainu pretty badly. The Hmong are still treated like shit in Laos, and the Montagnards are not done well by Vietnam. Pygmies are openly genocided and cannibalized as a matter of custom in Zaire, and the Khoisan are nearly murdered at will in SW Africa.

There is a real genocide of Arabs against Africans in Darfur, and another one, Arabs versus Christians, has just ended in South Sudan. Africans are routinely enslaved by Arabs in the Sahel.

We could go and on, but you get the picture. What is disturbing about all of this is that most Israel-critics are either indifferent to, ignorant of or even supportive of, the maltreatment of minorities above. Zionists are correct that this is either ignorance or anti-Semitism.

All, or most all, modern nations were born in sin.

This was due to the nature of the modern nation-building exercise, which typically involved ethnic cleansing or some sort of mass killing or genocide of any existing indigenous people, sidelining, subjection, forced assimilation (cultural genocide) or outright genocide against anyone not part of the dominant nation of the nation-state, and forced destruction of all languages but the one chosen by the nation-state or that is the dominant nation.

The Modern Left in the West, which has adopted Third-Worldism, minority-hugging and European hatred with gusto, errs in singling out Europeans for particular abuse in terms of nation-building. It’s been bloody and awful everywhere and at all times.

Schipper also points out that although Israel is oppressive in the Occupied Territories, by comparative standards, they are relatively mild. Considering the outrageous provocations and attacks of the Palestinians, I am amazed Israel has gone as easy on them as it has.

Arabs do not believe in fighting wars in a civilized manner, and the Geneva Conventions are regarded by them as Western comedy. Any Arab state faced with Palestinian-type provocations by non-Arabs would have been vastly worse than Israel.

Truthfully, just about every nation fighting an insurgency has been more horrible that Israel by orders of magnitude.

Consider this: according to counterinsurgency doctrine, enshrined by the US military and state and promoted by the US media and both US political parties, any civilian who “supports” an insurgency needs to be arrested, beaten, tortured and killed. All counterinsurgencies supported by the US have routinely massacred, mutilated and tortured to death insurgency “supporters.”

This has been true in every counterinsurgency in Latin America, in Indonesia in 1965, the US counterinsurgencies in SE Asia during the Vietnam War, the counterinsurgencies in Mozambique, Algeria and Angola, Russia’s counterinsurgency in Chechnya, India’s counterinsurgencies in India proper and Kashmir, in Sri Lanka against the Tamils, in Indonesia against the Acehese and East Timorese, in the Philippines against the NPA, and in Nepal’s recent Civil War.

In these counterinsurgencies, hundreds of thousands of “supporters” of insurgencies were murdered, tortured and mutilated, while the US cheered, poured in money and looked the other way.

In contrast, almost 100% of Palestinians seem to support the Palestinian insurgency. Clearly, Israel has not been going around killing “supporters” of the insurgency. If they did, they would have killed tens of thousands of Palestinians so far.

Considering the provocations of the Palestinians, Israel has fought one of the cleanest counterinsurgencies in modern times.

Zionists are correct that these criticisms of Israel, combined with support for to indifference to much worse behaviors by non-Jews, are evidence of either ignorance or anti-Semitism.

But Schipper does hit it on the head.

The reason to oppose Israel is that it is not a state of its citizens. Israel openly says that it is the state of all Jews on Earth, not of its citizens. Hence, it is perfectly reasonable for non-Jews in every nation on Earth containing Jews to look upon their Jews as possible traitors and dual-loyalists. Dual loyalty, rather than being an “anti-Semitic canard” as many Jews shrilly screech, is actually grounded in immaculate reason.

Schipper also suggests that the wall between Judaism and Zionism may be little more than a wall of sand, and one that has been hit by so many waves that there’s almost nothing left.

Although anti-Zionist Jews offer various reasons for their non-support of Israel, the fact remains that Judaism has always said that Israel is the land of the Jews. Assuming the Messiah returns tomorrow, even Naturei Karta is willing to head to Israel and become fervent Zionists.

Hence the uncomfortable notion, typically parroted by ferocious anti-Zionists and some vulgar anti-Semites, that it is not just Zionism that is the problem, but Judaism itself, is lent some troubling weight. I don’t want to go near this thesis because to be honest, I’m a pussy when it comes to the Jewish Question.

Schipper finally suggests that the Jews of the world either renounce Judaism or practice what you preach and head to Israel. Once again, troubling stuff.

There’s nary a trace of anti-Semitism in Schipper’s comments, but the issues he raises are toxic as Hell.

Just some thought-meals.

Enjoy.

Top Maoist Leader Killed in India

Azad, one of the top leaders of the CPI-Maoist party leading the insurgency in India, was just killed in Andra Pradesh by the government. The state said that they killed him in a shootout, but as in so many cases, they simply murdered him. They arrested him several days ago, then took him out in the forest handcuffed and blindfolded, then shot him.

This is how they murder many Maoists who they capture. Like Colombia, El Salvador or Guatemala during their civil wars, the Indians don’t take a lot of POW’s in their insurgencies. If you’re going to be captured by the state in these conflicts, you may as well kill yourself or go down fighting. Arrest means death in most cases.

Another top leader, Chandranna, was also captured in Andra Pradesh.

It’s a blow to the rebels, but they should handle it ok. They have a chain of command, and there are folks waiting to step in in case any top official is captured or killed.

The group has not made its leaders into folk heros as the Peruvian Sendero Luminoso did with their leader, Abimael Guzman. In the case of Sendero, the capture of Guzman at the peak of the group’s power led to the collapse of the group. But it should not end any well-organized insurgency.

In the Algerian Civil War, the French kept capturing and killing “the top leadership” of the insurgents so many times that it got ridiculous. The Algerians just replace them with other folks, and the war went on.

The Saudhouse

Repost from the old site.

Are the Saudis behind Muslim terror most everywhere, or does it just seem like it?

After all, 80% of Al Qaeda were Saudis several years ago. What’s the figure now? We know that Zarqawi’s Iraqi Al Qaeda was full of men from the Gulf, not necessarily Saudi Arabia, but Arabia nonetheless. Fallujah was full of these guys in 2004 during the two horrible US invasions of the town.

And support for Al Qaeda is high in the Kingdom. A good 50% of the population supported bin Laden a few years back. The Al Qaeda unit inside Saudi Arabia, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, had vast support and was able to penetrate into the deepest recesses of the Saudi security forces during its operations. This is how it raided embassies.

There were also times during the worst of the AQAP operations that the Saudi security forces just let AQAP escape from their very hands. This was due to huge support for AQAP inside the Saudi security forces themselves. What’s happened since? With the death of the horrible Muqrin, the AQAP leader, the organization seems to have temporarily given up armed struggle inside the Kingdom.

The very decision to initiate armed struggle inside Saudi Arabia was very difficult for bin Laden, since there had always been an implicit agreement between Al Qaeda and Saudi Arabia to keep its attacks outside the Kingdom. That was part of the deal. The decision to initiate attacks inside Saudi Arabia was a momentous one, and was possibly controversial with its supporters.

For a long time there, maybe two or three years, there were regular shootouts with AQAP and the Saudi security forces, and the security forces lost a lot of men. During the peak of the conflict, AQAP had men in the streets at night and ruled whole districts of major cities when the sun went down, and the security forces just stayed out.

So what’s happened to AQAP? Why did they quit attacking the Saudi state? That’s an interesting story right there. Has anyone written about it? John Bradley? Anyone else?

Fatah Islam, an insane Salafist offshoot of a Palestinian group that took over a refugee camp in north Lebanon and shot up Lebanon for a few weeks last year, leaving lots of dead Lebanese soldiers and a wrecked camp, was 30% Saudis. Some Palestinian group, eh?

Everyone knows that Iraqi Al Qaeda is full of Saudis, that one of its leaders is a Saudi, that Saudis are the nationality with the most suicide bombers in Iraq, that Saudi preachers, even government preachers, praise the Iraqi guerrillas every week with no consequences.

In Saudi Arabia, there have been 1000′s of funerals of Saudis killed in Iraq. Probably at least 3,000 young Saudi men who went to fight there have come home in boxes. The funerals are a big deal in Arabia. Check out John Bradley on the Net for more.

How about all the Gulf money pouring into the Iraqi insurgency? Do you realize that that money only goes to radical Salafist type groups that are synonymous with Iraqi Al Qaeda for all intents and purposes? This is what has given the Iraqi guerrillas their Wahhabi – Salafist character and killed the secular and Leftist groups that were fighting in Iraq through 2003.

Afghanistan and Western Pakistan, home of Al Qaeda, the Taliban and like groups, is flooded with Gulf money, and all the money goes to Wahhabi mosques. These mosques churn out the Taliban types like assembly line plants.

The IMU in Uzbekistan, most active before 2001, but later transplanted to the FATA in Pakistan where they are still active as pretty much an arm of Al Qaeda, was created by young Uzbek men getting influenced by insane and evil radicalism in Saudi-funded mosques.

There is a major dust-up in Chechnya these days about Wahhabism and how much it has penetrated the Chechen guerrillas and Chechen society. Chechen religious leaders are preaching against Wahhabism, which, it is true, is alien to traditional Chechen religious culture. No one really knows how many Wahhabis there were in the Chechen guerrillas, but their communiques have gotten more Salafist in tone as time has worn on.

They used to say that 12% of the Chechen insurgency was Wahhabi. What is it now? The current leader of the Chechen guerrillas, in a bid to appeal to the anti-Wahhabi nature of Chechen society, has said that his group is in the Chechen tradition of Sufism, not Wahhabism. But then why do they refer to government security forces as apostates? That’s Al Qaeda Salafist talk.

Al Qaeda is still very big in Yemen, and they carry out major operations from time to time, operations that could not go down without penetration of security forces. A group of AQ in Yemen recently broke out of prison, and security forces involvement seems likely.

The Saudis are in Iran as we speak, preaching Wahhabism in the Ahwaz and converting the Shia Arabs to Sunni Wahhabism. And what upshot is this likely to have? Anything good?

Zarqawi’s group penetrated deep within Jordanian security forces and nearly carried out a mad acid attack on Western embassies in Amman. Zarqawi and his group of Shia-killers have mass support inside Jordan, among the tribes and among the regular folks. His ideology came straight from Jordan itself? Oh really now?

Why Hamas and its rise, and the decline of the PLO? All the Gulf, especially Saudi, money, goes to Hamas. They won’t give a dime to the secular groups. Looking for someone to blame for the radicalization of Palestine? Forget Iran and Syria. Look no further than the Gulf.

The hatred for the Shia that characterizes the Sunni radicals in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq, is to some extent all fed by the Saudis. In Pakistan, the homicidal anti-Shia war was actually initiated in the 1970′s by Saudi-brainwashed Sunnis.

The entire Sunni world as a whole contributes to the Shia-hatred in a much lesser way, though it has become louder since the Iraq War. These were seeds that were always there in Sunni society, but have been given a homicidal and even genocidal watering with Saudi money and especially propaganda.

What created the mad Salafist insurgency in Algeria? Was it just homegrown Algerian fanaticism? Did the Gulf have nothing to do with this? Why do they now call themselves Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb?

What can you say about a place where the women can’t even drive a car? You call it Saudi Arabia. And there is good evidence that the women are not too happy about this state of affairs, but the Kingdom is a very complex place.

The Saudhouse, the Saudhouse. Oh, such corruption. The prince who spent his 20′s frying on LSD and smashing up other people’s stuff with his motorcycle. The princes who drink and whore around and all of that opportunistic male homosexuality. The thieving princes who steal land, homes and businesses right and left, and no one can do a thing about it.

In the Kingdom, the girls’ colleges are known for lesbians on the make, and lesbian love affairs and their ferocious breakups tear up the girls’ high schools. All of the princesses on pills, depressed, somaticizing, and their frustrated and lesbian love affairs in the South of France, why will no one speak of these things?

Situational bisexuality among males is everywhere there, and a Kuwaiti female friend estimated it at 50% at least. That’s what happens when you focus on males and females getting together. There is also evidence that Wahhabism is making large numbers of Saudi young people depressed in one way or other, though it is often somaticized or covered up in other ways.

Nobody will ever say anything about the Saudhouse. Wherever you find Al Qaeda, you find Saudis, and Saudi money. To this day. And that is all there is to it. Why will nobody say a thing about this?

Oh we know, we know. We know about the advisors of the emirs of Qatar who have deep connections with Al Qaeda, who had connections with some of the folks involved in 9-11. We know about the 27 pages in the 9-11 Report that were torn out because they had to do with the Saudis. They discussed the role of Saudi Arabia or its citizens, or both, in 9-11.

The US government buried them and Americans haven’t asked to see them. Why? Americans don’t care? What are we, sheep?

The whole US elite is corrupted. By Saudi money. By Saudi oil money, as they bat the tennis balls in Washington, DC with the princes. Who? Dick Cheney. Colin Powell. The Bushes. On and on. The oil and the money, addicting as crack.

The Saudi terror. The Saudi Sunni terror.

Why will no one discuss this wound that moans so loudly as it limps through our injured world?