Hindutva and the “Unfinished Partition”

Aakash is an interesting Indian Hindu living in the US who rejects much Indian Hindu culture as insipid, toxic and diseased, yet still embraces a Hindu identity. He also admits that caste is crap and it needs to go. Surely a casteless Hinduism could be formulated since all religions are human creations.

If religions are human creations, than Hinduism was created by man. If so, it could be constantly molded by men too.

Many religions have been through Reformations. The horrors of Early Christianity are long gone and probably never to return. Not long ago, non-Catholics were told to convert or die. That’s not happening anywhere no, and there are no Inquisitions on the horizon either. Lands are no longer conquered by Christendom, nor are heathens put to the sword. Christian heathens are not burned at the stake. Religious authorities are no longer in charge of Christian states via the throne or otherwise. In all of Christendom, separation of church and state is nearly complete. No Christian justifies slavery anymore or owns slaves.

If Christianity can go through a Reformation, Hinduism surely can too since it is generally less divinely inspired than Christianity.

Aakash:

Robert

While the attempt to finish partition is indeed a primary driving force for the Hindutvas, the bigger picture needs to be understood here.

Ask yourself the question: was the partition of India on religious basis fair or Justified? If anybody believes that it was, it was the most unfortunate event in the history of Hindus. The fact that by force (as in west Pakistan) or genocide (east Pakistan), Hindus have been eliminated in Pakistan and Bangladesh while Muslims still to this day have a strong presence in India has to hurt even the most rational of Hindus.

Ironically, this is where the Hindutvadis are barking up the wrong tree. Instead of focusing on the objective to expose the “nations” Pakistan and Bangladesh and showing solidarity with whatever number of Hindus that remain there, their hatred extends to all Muslims in general including Arabs, Turks, Persians etc who have nothing to do with present day India.

Hindutva movement is at best a display of high entropy randomness swinging from hating Muslims in general extending all the way to couples holding hands (most of them being Hindus themselves). There is no identity and will never be one simply because it has zero left wing element to it. Majority of poor in India are Hindus themselves and the Hindu right wing does nothing for them.

If, on the other hand, you believe (like I do) that the partition of India, if at all, should have been based on a more logical basis such as language/region, I urge you to start writing articles calling for the elimination of the rogue state of Pakistan and the shitty country that is Bangladesh.

I can understand Hindutva rage and where it is coming from. But the way they go about their business lacks reason and subtlety to say the least. This is in line with other South Asian crazies like Muslims.

Aakash is absolutely correct. The partition in a sense was a crime. Hindus were more or less ethnically cleansed in one way or another from both Pakistan and Bangladesh. In Pakistan, they were mostly just made to disappear via emigration and conversion to Islam (some of the conversion was pretty much forcible). In Bangladesh, Pakistani Muslims and their often Islamist collaborators massacred 3 million people, maybe 80% if whom were Hindus. It was truly a genocide. There are about 13% Hindus left in Bangladesh, and they are subject to regular serious persecution whereby their neighborhoods are burned to the ground and some of them are killed. It’s not quite Gujarat, but it’s nearly Kristallnacht.

Blaming Bangladeshi Muslims seems wrong as Bangladeshi society is horribly divided on this question. The more secular minded folks associated with a Congress-like party are outraged at the genocide, perhaps because a lot of Muslims were also killed. The more Islamist-minded mostly think the genocide was all well and good. An Islamist was recently put on trial for war crimes committed during the war, and this ignited passions in Bangladeshi society that have left a number of folks dead amid serious riots. Indian Hindus need to realize that a large section of Bangladeshi society thinks the genocide of 1971 was a horrific crime.

But on the surface, it does look unfair. Bangladesh and Pakistan were nearly cleansed of Hindus, yet there remains many Muslims in India. However, in the case of India and Bangladesh, the comparison is not a good one. India is 13% Muslim, and Bangladesh is 13% Hindu, so the proportions are the same, though the Hindus of Bangladesh look to be on the decline, and Muslims in India are set to rise.

One problem is that Islam always offers an out to the persecuted infidels, which does make Islam better than most forms of racism. In most racism, there really is no way out. In Nazi Germany, even converting to Christianity was enough to save a Jew as the persecution was racially inspired. One can hardly change one’s race at any rate.

Persecuted infidels in Muslim nations can always convert to Islam, and then the persecution will generally grind to a halt. This option is often heavily encouraged in Muslim nations as infidels are often under varying degrees of pressure to convert. Infidel females in particular are often kidnapped by Muslim men, raped and forced to convert. Intermarriage is another way as a Muslim man can marry an infidel woman and the children will all be raised Muslim, hence the infidel woman’s offspring are lost to the infidels. Female Muslims, the breed stock of Islam, are forbidden to marry out or if they do, the infidel man just convert. Islam gets the intermarried either way.

Muslims, no matter how they intermarry, end up having their offspring raised as Muslims. This is the sort of religion that is nearly programmed to multiply like a bacterium, a weed or an amphibian. In most societies, the Muslim population will tend to rise as the infidel population will tend to decrease. This simply another form of Islamic conquest, this one being the “jihad of the womb.”

I do not believe that Bangladesh or Pakistan should be broken up, at least not now. Pakistan actually needs breaking, but not until India breaks too. Neither one will split without or before the other, so neither will break up. If India breaks up, they lose to Pakistan. If Pakistan breaks up, they lose to India. Both nations are paranoid of the other, China and the US and they fear assimilation by outside powers.

The Saffron Brigade

Frightening video about Hindutvadis (Hindu Nazis) in India. Note how the Hindutvadi talks about sending all Indian Muslims back to Pakistan. This is the “unfinished partition” that the Hindutvadis are always talking about.

They talk about a “genocide” of Pakistani Hindus and imply that there needs to be similar treatment of Indian Muslims. The truth is that there was no genocide of Pakistani Hindus. The population did decline from 20% to 2% from 1947 to present, but the vast majority of them were surely not killed, though some were. Most simply converted to Islam (though there were a number of more or less forced conversions, often of young Hindu women). The rest simply emigrated to India.

This collapse of a minority in a Muslim state is typical of most Muslim states. The minorities are persecuted so much that over time, they slowly convert to Islam to get better treatment. In some cases, there is mass emigration, though historically this has not been typical.

In many countries, a Muslim minority conquered the land and ruled over a non-Muslim majority. Once again, over time, the infidel majority simply converted to Islam to avoid persecution. In a few places such as the Balkans, Iberia and India, this did not occur. Muslim minorities ruled Serbia, Macedonia, Bosnia and Bulgaria in the Balkans, Spain and Portugal in Iberia and all of India for centuries though the populations remained either Christian or Hindu in the case of India.

It would be interesting to see why some non-Muslim majorities refused to convert to Islam while others did. Hindus do not have any special immunity to Islam. In Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh, there was mass conversion of Hindus to Islam for some reason, while in the core of India, “the cow belt” and in the South there was little conversion.

Nor do Christians have special immunity to Islam? Neither do they. Syria, Palestine, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Turkey and Egypt were formerly Christian lands that mass converted to Islam.

The pre-Muslim religions of Libya, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, the Gulf, the Gulf, the Stans, Xinjiang, the Caucasus and Indonesia are not well known.

In Iran, the population was mostly Zoroastrian with some Christians mixed in. The Zoroastrians probably experienced one of the worst mass conversions to Islam ever seen for unknown reasons.

Red Revolution For Bangladesh

Repost from the old site.

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

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

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

Even more reasons.

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

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

Prostitution in the Muslim World: A Survey

North Africa (includes Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Libya and Egypt): I am not aware of much open prostitution in any of these countries. There is definitely prostitution in Egypt (both male and female – male being much more common!) but I do not think that the female prostitution in places like Cairo is so open. In the rest of the lands, I am not aware of much prostitution at all.

Sahel: I don’t know much about these countries, and I’m not aware of much prostitution there.

Eritrea and Ethiopia: There is some prostitution here, but it is not that open. But these land are 50-50 Muslim-Christian.

Palestine, Jordan, Iraq: Little open prostitution. There was little prostitution under Saddam either. There was a case where Uday had ~300 prostitutes murdered. There is a lot of honor killing in these places too, and that tends to discourage prostitution to say the least.

Syria: There has traditionally been some prostitution in Syria in nightclubs. In recent years, many Iraqi women are working there. But Syria is a very secular society. There is some honor killing here though.

Lebanon: For sure there is prostitution in Lebanon, but how open it is is not known. Lebanon has a huge Christian population that liberalizes things.

Turkey: Apparently there is prostitution in Turkey, but how open it is, I have no idea. Turkey also has  legal pornography and it’s supposedly even on TV late at night. But Turkey is a very secular European type society.

Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Azerbaijan: Prostitution levels and openness are not known, but these are pretty open, Europeanized, secular Muslim societies, and Azerbaijan is Shia.

Kuwait, Oman, Yemen, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain: My understanding is that prostitution is nearly nonexistent in all of these places, but I stand to be corrected. Anyway, it is certainly not open. There is a lot of honor killing in Yemen.

UAE: There is quite a bit of prostitution in Dubai anyway, but the girls are almost all foreigners, often Europeans or Russians.

Iran: Discussed earlier. There is quite a bit of prostitution in the religious city of Qom sanctioned under the temporary marriage gambit. There is also more than you might think in Tehran, especially in the more rundown outskirts.

The mullahs have been mulling over making prostitution legal under the rationalization of temporary marriage on the grounds that the girls need to be in houses in order to be better protected. Women arrested for prostitution are often sent not to jail or prison but to houses run by women for rehabilitation under a compassionate interpretation of Islam sanctioned by the mullahs. Iranian Shiism believes that Islam must be constantly updated with the times, and the mullahs can rationalize all sorts of accretions under this theory.

Afghanistan: There is some prostitution, but it is certainly not open, and it is quite hidden. But I was always surprised at how much there was, and I wondered how Hinduized Afghan Muslims were.

India: Prostitution in the Indian Muslim community is not known, but it may be as prevalent as in Pakistan.

Bangladesh: Prostitution levels are not known, but they may be on the level of Pakistan. Bangladeshi Muslims are heavily Hinduized, maybe worse than Pakistani even.

Thailand: I understand that prostitution is known among Thai Muslims, and it may be as open there as elsewhere in Thailand.

I have seen photos online of Thai Muslim prostitutes in the South. I know a Thai Muslim woman on a social networking site, and her sexual openness stunned me. She has married a variety of sociopathic Muslim males, typically Arabs. If you look at her public photos, she is acting very dirty in many of them, posing very sexually. There are even some nudes and partial nudes of her in there! But she is very much a Muslim, and there are photos of a Muslim man and teenage boy there, one holding what looks like a bomb and the other holding an automatic weapon. The juxtaposition between her dirty pics, her nudes, her murderous looking Arab lovers and the armed Islamist jihadis was something else!

I conclude that Thai Islam has a lot of pre-Islamic accretions in it, and furthermore that Thai Muslims may be a highly sexualized people, like the rest of the country.

Malaysia: Prostitution levels not known, but may be relatively open. I understand that most of the prostitutes are Chinese though, who are not Muslims.

Indonesia: There is a lot of prostitution here, and it appears to be pretty open. But Indonesian Islam is full of a ton of accretions from local and pre-Islamic traditions. In addition, they are an easy going tropical Asian people who tend to have loose and relaxed attitudes about sexual matters.

Bangladesh, a Muslim Country Ruined by Hinduism (Hindu Culture)

Xera, an Egyptian-American, talks about when he took a recent trip to Bangladesh recently. What was obvious to me was that this place has problems that go far beyond those of a typical Muslim country.

In fact, this Muslim country doesn’t seem all that Muslim at all! It seems like a Hindu country or a country with some other non-Muslim culture instead. The shocking truth is that Muslim culture has probably made few inroads at all into Bangladesh. For all their praying and fasting, Bangladeshis may as well have just stayed Hindus and saved themselves some time and some hunger pangs. It also shows that you can’t look at the religion of a country and decide what kind of culture it has.

For Bangladesh is a Muslim country that lacks a Muslim culture. Instead, it’s a country where the religion is Muslim but the culture is Hindu. It’s amazing since Bangladeshis have been Muslims for probably 500 years, yet Islam has hardly made a dent in the place.

And once again, this post shows how deadly and ruinous Hindu culture really is. There are many analyses lately about the failings of Muslim culture. That’s all interesting, but Muslim culture has still given us some very wealthy and advanced socieites in the Gulf. A Hindu culture could never have created Dubai.

For all its failings, Islam as a religion and a culture is still vastly superior to Hinduism in that sense. As long as seculars are bashing Islam as Medieval, we may as well join and bash Hinduism. Hinduism is worse than Medieval. We had advanced a lot by the Middle Ages. Good God, Hinduism is nearly Chalcolithic! If Islam is still in 700 AD, as it may well be, Hinduism is stuck in 1700 BC. Which is more advanced?

I had a similar experience when I once went to a third world country (although now identified as a developing country for a reason I can’t fathom) a while back after not having been there since the age of 7 and living in emerging & post-Industralized countries in that period between when I last went there.

At first when I went in the Airport to head to said country, I had never seen so many ugly people congregated in the same space in my life at this point.

There were obviously from there, but I told myself that I was being too shallow, and maybe these people were dealt a bad hand coming from a poor impoverished country. Thus the utter contempt and scorn they received from the upper echelons of American society because of the fact that they were too much the result of whatever background they came from. Hence they were unable to meet the highest ideals set down by modern American society until maybe 2 generations after.

Then I saw their behavior, their lack of hygiene, their filthiness,  backwardness, and of course their close-mindedness. They were disgusting & childlike, obnoxious, (things I took note when I was on the airplane) and just childish primitive assholes. This is not because I am a condescending jerk, as I tried being polite and decent with them, but I didn’t see any attempt at civilized behavior or manner in return. They were uncompromising, irritating, disgusting and narrow-minded.

I was in this country for two months for a friend, and the whole time I was there, I was sick of the attitude and short-sightedness of the people that resided there. The sheer ugliness of the people here inside & out gave me shudders. The place I resided in was severely overcrowded, the roads weren’t even made correctly and they were half-done roads that people were crowding around blocking the cars.

The traffic the design of the cities & places was so fucking bad it took me 4-6 hours just to cross 4 blocks during noon. I had to wait until there was actually space to drive on the roads, which was, I swear to God like waiting to win the lottery. The traffic was fucking terrible, they were people walking on the fucking roads and there so much smog & congestion that it suffocated me. You had to add the extreme heat during the afternoons and and holy shit you could die.

Even Mexico or Brazilian favelas would be paradise compared to this shithole. They’re was garbage and shit in this one river because no had the decency or will to clean it up, let alone not throw shit in it. Everything else wrong with the country was someone else’s problem, and someone else had to fix it.

The state was corrupt of course, to the point where someone had the money to fix all these things – we are talking some billions of dollars – yet these people were so callous, self-serving and short-sighted that they wasted it in on building useless shit. What kind of shit?

Like a fucking planetarium, on Ipads, Iphones, cellphones, outdated former model cars, flat screen TV’s, Macbooks, pirated DVD’s, alcohol, big screen home theaters (in private apartments in 3rd World countries, yes those apparently exist).

Yes they would spend all their money on this stuff when they could use the money to install a proper sewage system, sanitation, waste disposal, toilets, sidewalks, roads, public water, clean air, windmills for cheap power or proper traffic control. And there were none of these things.

They could have fed the malnourished, dying, horribly desperate children on the streets that would come and beg at car windows, but they didn’t.

Did I mention power? Of course, the power went out every single day in the evenings, sometimes even in the afternoons, where there were masses of mosquitoes that would try to come inside my apartment. Where did the mosquitoes breed?

In ponds and the same garbage rivers that were spread out throughout the city and no one was willing to pay someone to clean these up (which they had) and fill these rivers with mosquito eating fish or had the brains to even figure out that masses of mosquitoes were breeding there.

It was irritating because I had to sleep in a makeshift net in my room to prevent mosquitoes, and if I moved there was a possibility the entire net would unbalance itself.

I couldn’t even find a public trash can to throw trash in the streets, because if I actually found a trash can outside a store and threw my trash in it there was a possibility I would get arrested!

People however had the time to fucking watch T.V for 12 hours a day, pray to a nonexistent God that most likely was some sort of an extra-terrestrial, congregate in family meetings and argue over the most childish things, while there was disease rotting outside in public.

Who was to blame for their miserable existence? Why Americans of course, because Americans are the cause of everyone’s problems worldwide according to these people.

And Americans are all too stupid to study science and do the science & engineering jobs in their own country, and apparently all of it was done by 3rd Worlders like them & other “immigrants.” Hence they have the right to come here and take the wealth created by the hard work of Americans.

Thus jobs are outsourced and the best & brightest of America’s scientific progress are done by primitive turds from these backwater cesspools. And apparently Americans took everything away from them even though America never colonized that country.

They had no real concept of self-respect or that of a higher society or civilization. They just watch to eke out a primitive existence in forced urbanization imposed by past European colonists. They were too greedy, idiotic and self-righteous to figure that they’re culture & religion was not right, and that was one of the reasons why their country was shit.

They seemed to have no self-reflective analytical abilities save for whatever they could get their hands on to show how much better off and powerful then they were of the next guy. I really had sympathies for them at first, but then I lost all my sympathy for them.

Why? Because I realized they don’t want to change, they don’t understand the concept of self-respect or civilization and they don’t have the self-analytical ability to penetrate outside their world views or the shields of society passed down to them.

After that experience which I don’t want to repeat again, I firmly began to believe in some sort of race biology & realism. These people don’t give a damn about higher concepts of honor or are too stupid for civilization, and yet they use immigration status  and yet don’t really understand the concept of assimilation nor do they want to assimilate in the first place.

They would gladly siphon all the wealth out of Western countries and wouldn’t feel guilty about it one bit. God help you people if you think bringing the best & brightest of a callous stupid, primitive, backwards, self-serving group from downtrodden countries is somehow going to augment Western civilization or be held up to the same standards here.

Yes I realize a lot of you have more thicker skin then me, and a lot of older people here can easily filter & disregard these things, but I don’t really have guts or the thick skin to handle these things.

But thank god I live in North America, and I would definitely be careful about bringing people from these environments, especially in mass numbers, which would be suicide on a civilization scale unless you can lessen the damage by extreme interrogation & filtration of them when they immigrate.

This place was an absolute toilet bowl.

How Indian Hindu Culture Poisoned Its Muslim Neighbors

One must understand. Islam simply does not accept that sort of horrible poverty and inequality that we see in Muslim South Asia or SE Asia. This is one great thing about the religion of Mohammad. Mohammad was never down with rightwing economics, the rule of the rich or Social Darwinism. He opposed all of that.

So Bangladesh has hope only to the extent that it is Islamic and not Hindu. Pakistan also has hope in that in that it is Islamic and not Hindu. Now the problem with these two Muslim nation is that their Islamic culture has more or less been polluted by the poison of Hinduism. So what you have here is a Hinduized Islam which is really a sick caricature of the best of what the Islamic religion can produce – a rigid class system, rule by the rich, contempt for the poor, caste (of all things), all of the shit of India without the shit religion.

Another problem is that Islam has made it almost impossible for any real Left alternative to take hold in Bangladesh, Indonesia or Pakistan. In Indonesia, 1 million Leftists were massacred. Indonesia continues to be one of the worst and most backwards and un-Islamic Muslim nations on Earth. The Left in Indonesia were killed for being “atheists.” In Bangladesh, Islamists have also slaughtered the Left for being “atheists.” These Islamists are a sick parody of Islam.

They are killing these Leftists on the grounds of being nonreligious while making their peace with some of the sickest, most unequal and un-Islamic class systems on Earth.

In the Arab World, Left economics went over quite well because the Arabs have always been this way. Arabs have always been more or less socialist in line with the original teachings of Mohammad, who was not a capitalist in any way, shape or form. It wasn’t much of a problem in Iran either. Pakistan and Bangladesh were poisoned the Social Darwinist sewer of Hinduism, so their Islam was neutered.

Indonesia and Philippines have always been home to the most reactionary Social Darwinist systems in all of East Asia. In Philippines, it is a legacy of Spanish colonialism. Its origins in Indonesia are obscure.

But in Indonesia, Islam has always allied itself with the most reactionary and vicious fascist elements of the banana republic system. Why they did this is not known, but keep in mind that Indonesia was also deeply poisoned by Hinduism. Whether they were poisoned worse than SE Asia per se is not known, but Indonesia is certainly anomalous in the collectivist Far East.

Does Multilingualism Equal Separatism?

Repost from the old site.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is not much separatism in the rest of Russia.

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

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

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

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

The Adygean, Tuvan and Bashkir struggles are all peaceful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are Some Muslim Countries “Hinduized”?

Cartoonist Rex May argues that the diversity of India is why there is no sense of the common good.

Oh. Well, it’s like you said. It’s divided into religions and castes and, actually, what almost amounts to nations (Punjabis, Bengalis, Gujaratis, etc.) And these groups don’t seem to have much regard for each other, hence, as you say, they have no notion of a common good. I’m trying to say, I guess, that the solidarity has to come first, leading to the common good notion, before you can have any kind of economic system that can work without massive corruption and deception.

The lack of a sense of the common good, I think, comes from Hinduism. I am trying to figure this out. Even Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh, I think, are “Hinduized.” Basically an extreme class or caste system in all of those places. Most Arab countries are relatively socialist places. That goes right along with Islam. But Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh are not. They are largely feudal, as is India. Hinduism is a feudal religion.

Why are these three countries so feudal? I believe they were “Hinduized.”

Quality of Life in China Versus India

I’ve said before that India is a shithole, and I mean it.

Here is an excellent article by Amartya Sen which compares quality of life in China versus India. Sen is a leftwing Indian scholar. Whether or not he’s a Marxist, I am not sure. I know that he is widely despised by the middle class Indians I know.

It was Sen who noted that that from 1949-1979, there were 100 million excess deaths in India as opposed to China, based on differential life expectancy rates. Assuming that this has been ongoing since then, Indian capitalism has apparently killed about 200 million people as opposed to the system in China. These would be excess deaths based on differential life expectancy.

You guys wonder why I’m a socialist. It’s about life, for Chrissake! Socialism is life. Capitalism is death. For the off chance of getting rich, capitalism decrees that X number of people must die. They’re sacrificed to the get rich system. Even US capitalism kills 40,000 Americans every year through lack of health care, and I think that figure is low. 40,000 Americans must be killed, murdered I would say, so some of us can have a chance at getting rich. The heck with that.

Indian capitalism has had 64 years to get it right. 64 years later, 650 million Indians (52%) are shitting outdoors, in the streets, fields, riversides and gardens. Only 20% of urban Indians are hooked up to a proper sewage system. When it rains in Bangalore, torrents of raw sewage flood through town. When journalists went to interview the real life model for Slumdog Millionaire, they found the family’s slum dwelling flooded with raw sewage up to ankle deep. It appears that India is a shithole not only figuratively but literally.

52% of Indians are malnourished, starving. They don’t have enough food to eat. After 15 years of neoliberalism, the figure is the same – 52%. Indian neoliberalism is failing. Possibly tens of millions of Indians are homeless and live on the streets of big cities.

Apologists for Indian capitalism say, “These things take time!” Really? How much time? For God’s sake, you’ve had 64 years to deal with these basic problems. It seems clear that the Indian state is never going to come anywhere near solving any of these problems.

You wonder why I support the Indian Maoists? Is there anyone else who can provide food, toilets, sewage systems and homes for Indians? I figure they’re the last hope.

Let’s look at some figures:

%                    India           China

No toilets            52              4
Malnourished          52              7
Life expectancy       64.4            73.5
Infant mortality      50              17
Under 5 mortality     66              19
Maternal mortality    230             38 
Literacy              74              94
Mean yrs schooling    4.4            7.5  
Fem Literacy, 15-24   80              99  
Immunization*         66              97

Even Bangladesh beats India on many variables, and Bangladesh has a lower per capita income. The more you look at it, India seems like a failed state.

Revolutionary Women’s (MLM) Movement Formed in Bangladesh

This is from a new Maoist women’s movement forming in Bangladesh. There is definitely an armed Maoist movement in Bangladesh, but it is not very large. They carry out armed attacks on a fairly regular basis and take and inflict casualties. It’s been going on for a pretty long time, but I’m not sure whether they have made much progress.

They are up against some serious issues, namely Islam. Islam is simply not friendly for Left movements. The debacle in Afghanistan should have shown us this. Many of the armed Maoist Bengali cadres are killed in attacks by armed Islamist movements, with which Bangladesh is rife. The Islamists kill the Maoists apparently on the grounds that they are atheists or some such.

This is a long-term trend. In the 1970′ and 1980′s, the Palestinian Islamists were not armed. They mostly argued about how long you should grow your beard or what not and often killed the actual armed Palestinian cadres on grounds that they were Communists (atheists).

In 1965, 1 million Indonesian Communists were rounded up and murdered with the help of the CIA. Islamist organizations played a major role in this genocide.

The sorry state of Pakistan’s Left is probably due in most part to Islam and the role of Islamists in society.

The Afghan Left is now quite weak after the debacle of 1978-1992.

When the Islamists came to power in Iran, the first people they killed were from the Left – the Communists. The Iranian Communist Party – Tudeh – was devastated by major massacres. I knew an Iranian woman who was a member of this party and many of her comrades were killed. She lived in a safe house for three months and was then smuggled out of the country on a donkey in the middle of the night across a desert border.

I am not sure how true this group’s portrayal of the glory days of early human society is. I figure men have always been in charge. As my mother says, men are bigger and stronger, so they simply force their will over will. Very Darwinian and brutal, but exactly what one would expect.

I wish the Bangladeshi Left well.

March 8 is the International Women’s Day. On this day in 1908, women workers in Chicago city in USA finally demanded reducing working hours, women’s right to vote, a humane factory environment, maternity leave, etc.

What is the real condition of our women?

Regardless of whether they live in rural or urban areas, women of workers, peasants and middle class are bound to give birth of children, raise them and do all the household hold work.

In the garment prisons [It’s like a prison] they have to work hard. There is neither a minimum wage nor a decent working environment in the factories. Bosses roam the aisles, berating the female workers and treating them worse than the male workers. In many cases, workers have burnt to death after the doors of the factories were locked by the management and a fire broke out. The female workers get a lower wage than a male worker only because they are women.

What is this outlook?

This is a male chauvinist outlook. It’s a special method of exploitation of human by human in exploitative society. Its origin lies in the imperialist world system and our semi-feudal semi-colonial society. This outlook pervades all arteries of this society.

Male domination over women began with the class system. When there was no class in primitive communist society, women were equal to men. Agriculture was invented by women. There was more work generated by farming than by hunting. Women were also honored by continuing the human line human generation by giving birth to children.

Later, a few people became clan chiefs, and they, by exploiting various opportunities, seized ownership of society’s property and riches, and then made the mass majority of people slaves. At that point, a class society emerged. After the invention of the plow, men captured agriculture from women. Men created a male chauvinist system by establishing ownership over children. As consequence, women came under the total domination of men. This male chauvinist system was sustained in slave society, feudal society and the present capitalist stage.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels first showed that the exploited class of society – the proletariat – can destroy capitalist society and construct a socialist and communist society. In Russia, under Lenin’s leadership,  the first socialist society was established, which continued under Stalin’s leadership. In China, the trend of new democracy – socialism – communism was initiated by overthrowing feudalism and imperialism.

The trend of women’s liberation is closely linked with the trends initiated by the great Marx, Lenin and Mao.

In Bangladesh, the imperialist collaborator bureaucrat bourgeois drags women to factories and confines them there, overworking them to get a maximum profit by paying tiny ages. The major portion of the profit goes to imperialists who use it to buying houses, shopping malls and big shops.

In those garment industries, women workers don’t even have fixed working hours. They are forced to work overtime, sometimes all night. Many times, those extra working hours have no payment, or if they are paid, they are paid very little, while the workers are the ones who are giving the country the major part of its foreign currency.

Religious fascism is carrying absolute feudal repression over women. Many women in rural areas and smaller towns are still subjected to the repressive veil system. Sometimes women are murdered by Fotwabaji [Fotwa is a so called Islamic rule in which Mullah give out various verdicts]. Recently in South Bengal, a young girl, Hena was killed after being targeted by a Fotwa.

On the other hand, the killing of Felani, a young handicapped girl, by the Indian BSF is an example of imperialist oppression over women.

A lot of women are working as housemaids for negligible wages. That work has neither respect nor a fixed wage. In reality, they are often subjected to unpaid labor or work for very low wages. In many cases, they have been tortured to death by members of the household they work for. Many women work as cooks in hotels. A lot of women work  breaking bricks (for building construction), digging soil (for road construction) or other hard physical work along those lines.

Despite having a great deal of responsibility as nurses and maids in hospitals, women are still brutally discriminated against in these workplaces. Men still pay dowry to marry a women. Innumerable women are still subjected to dowry system. Many divorced women suffer serious discrimination.

A lot of women, driven by poverty, are forced to take up prostitution. There too, the owners grab the major portion of her income.

The bourgeoisie is using women as commodities in in TV, movies and the theater.

In cottage industries, women work very long days manufacturing special products which only create huge big profits for capitalists and large markets, while the workers themselves can barely survive on meager earnings.

Grameen Bank, Brac, etc and other NGOs exploit and cheat rural women via compound interest. Many women commit suicide when they can’t pay back this debt.

In the nineteenth century, Begum Rokeya dreamed of emancipation for women. She wanted to break the restrictions over women prevalent at the time.

Similar feminists Priti Lata, Kalpana Dutt, erstwhile Ila Mitra and Shikha (of Payarabagan) are the pride of Bengali women.

Taslima Nasrin is a rebel but is not useful for women because of her surrender to imperialism. Bourgeois feminists don’t want to join the revolutionary movement, as they don’t want a revolutionary transformation of society.

On the other hand, the bourgeois reformists of the women’s movement, despite mouthing a few things about reforms like jobs and education for women are not doing anything useful for women because they want to protect the rotten semi-feudal semi-colonial society. But ideally the progressive part of these two trends should be convinced or swept to the revolutionary women movement.

This is why we commemorate great women’s leaders like Klara Zetkin, Rosa Luxemburg and Chian Ching who talked of a communist society where there would be no exploitation and where we will no longer be oppressed by capitalism, so male chauvinism will therefore disappear.

So, struggling women,
Let us unite to break the chain.
Let us unite under the banner of Revolutionary Women’s Movement to overthrow the semi-feudal semi-colonial society with the goal of creating a communist society.

Revolutionary Women’s Movement

March 8, 2011