Maoist Attack in India

Here.

A convoy of political leaders from Chattisargh, India was ambushed by a huge guerrilla column of between 200-300 guerrillas. 16 people were killed, including 5 police officers. The Congress Party leader for the state and his son were missing and feared abducted, and a senior member of the Congress party in Chattisargh was killed. The police were escorting the convoy when it was attacked in a forested area between two valleys.

This is one of the more audacious Maoist attacks in the last few years. Attacks have gone down recently and the article speculated that government good and jobs programs might have cut support, but that seems really dubious to me.

A Trifecta of Three Phony “Scandals”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing Obama has done warrants impeachment or even a hearing.

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

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

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

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

          Benghazi #killed

Americans 4
Islamists 100

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Impeach the President. Seriously?

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

Of course, they want a special prosecutor.

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

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

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

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

Boston Bombings: Blowback or Not?

Tulio writes:

Well many non-religious people were incensed about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well but didn’t decide blow innocent people up in protest.

You don’t get it. The Muslims have the concept of the ummah. An attack on one is an attack on all of us. The Al Qaeda radical Islamists say that the US has to be counterattacked for killing Muslims in Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan and previously in Iraq. This is the mindset that this guy is buying into. According to Al Qaeda, it is ok to kill US civilians because the US killed Muslims.

Many US patriot types insist that the various attacks on the US, from 9-11 to the Boston Bombings, were not blowback for US actions abroad. If they were not blowback, then why did the attackers of 9-11 and the Boston Bombings attack us? Because they hate our freedoms? LOL.

US Conservatives Are Not Evil; They Are Insane

I really don’t think most US conservatives are evil or bad. I just think they are wrong. Actually I do not think they are wrong. I know they are wrong. Almost everything they say and believe is simply wrong. For the most part, what they believe are lies, nonsense, crap, idiocy and bullshit. If we know a human being whose beliefs are all nonsensical, we usually won’t say he is evil. We might be charitable and just say he is a nutcase.

Almost all of the problems with US conservatives are because they are ludicrously partisan. To be partisan is one thing, but a conservative will never admit he is partisan.

Let us look at some examples:

Benghazi Embassy scandal: There was no scandal. Al Qaeda is waging a global war on us, and they will attack our troops and embassies any chance they can get. The Administration tried their hardest to fortify the embassy, as hard as any other administration would have tried. The diplomatic aspect of the state in the State Department is nonpartisan. Embassy personnel are staffed via the Pentagon and the CIA and contractors. Under any administration, priority will be on protecting the lives of diplomatic personnel and the integrity of US embassies.

Democratic administrations are not so stupid as to scrimp on security overseas, and there is no evidence that Republicans protect embassies any better than Democrats. One of the worst attacks ever on a US embassy occurred in 1983 when Hezbollah hit the US Embassy in Beirut. Almost all the American “civilians” killed were working for the CIA, but don’t let that bother you.

As sometimes happens, our enemies got the best of us one day in Libya. This would never have happened under Gaddafi, but we overthrew him and put Al Qaeda in charge of Libya, so that’s why our embassy got overrun.

Truth be told, wasn’t the 9-11 attack on the US far worse than the Benghazi attack in which one ambassador was killed? On 9-11, 3,000 Americans were killed, on our own soil nonetheless. But somehow to conservatives this is not a failure to protect the US homeland and citizens, but an attack that kills one ambassador is? That’s just partisan bullshit; it’s nothing more and nothing less.

If the Benghazi attack occurred under a Republican President, conservatives would not have said a word. Security failures only occur under Democratic Presidents, never under Republican Presidents. If 9-11 would have occurred under a Democratic President, conservatives would still be screaming about how “the liberals let Al Qaeda attack us.” But since it happened under a Republican, you will never hear a word of this. This makes no sense. 9-11 was either a security failure or it was not. It can’t be the case that it would have been a security failure under a Democrat, but since it occurred under a Republican, it could not possibly be one.

Lie: Obama represents something called “Chicago-style politics.” The implication here is that Obama is corrupt to the core, a representative of corrupt Chicago Democratic Party-labor union machine politics going back decades. The truth is that that corrupt machine got dismantled quite some time ago. It is true that Democratic politics in Chicago used to be very corrupt, especially under Mayor Daley. Corrupt elections were the norm, and dead people voted early and often.

Corrupt Democratic crooks in Chicago stole so many votes in Chicago in 1960 that they probably gave John F. Kennedy the election. So JFK no doubt stole his way into office. The dead have not voted in Chicago in quite some time, and federal RICO prosecutions and raids have pretty much shut down the overtly corrupt aspect of Chicago politics. To my knowledge, Chicago politics nowadays is no more corrupt than the politics of any other large US city.

Furthermore, there is no evidence that Obama is part of any Chicago corrupt Daley-style machine. That machine was made up of old style ethnic Whites, and the new Democratic politics in Chicago is much more progressive, even radical, and clean. It’s true that Penny Pritzger, Rahm Emanuel and Bill Ayers were part of the local politics scene, but neither one is corrupt. In fact Ayers and other radical types would be very against that sort of thing. Emanuel and and Pritzger come out of US finance capital and are as corrupt or non-corrupt as anyone tied at the hip to Wall Street as almost 100% of the Republican Party is.

How about Obama since he has been in office? There is no evidence that the Obama Administration is particularly corrupt as an Executive Branch. Sure, they take lots of corporate money, but the Republicans take way more, and that’s all legal anyway. There have been very few serious corruption cases under Obama.

The truth is that corruption in the US reached an all-time recent high under Ronald Reagan. It was also very high under George Bush Jr. The more capitalist the political party is, the more corrupt it is. The Democrats are not so wedded to US big business and multinational corporations as Republicans are, hence you see a lot less corruption. Any political party with profound ties to Big Capital will almost always be extremely corrupt. This fact can even be shown on a worldwide scale. Parties that are more socialist or populist and less tied to the rich and Big Capital will tend to be less corrupt since there is less Big Money to go around and they at least pay lip service to the lower 80% of the population.

Conclusion: There is no “Chicago-style politics” anymore, and even if there is, Obama is not representative of it. The old machine is dead and gone, possibly never to be revived. That Obama is some corrupt, vote-stealing, bribe-taking, brutal Daley style machine crook is simply nonsense.

Lie: Obama is killing the Keystone XL pipeline because he has ties to the Waltons, heirs to the Walmart fortune, who will lose big money if the pipeline goes through. Truth is that Obama, corporatist that he is, largely supports the Keystone XL, but he is under huge pressure from environmentalists to cave in. So Obama the corporatist is caught between his Big Money backers in Big Oil (Obama is a strong supporter of Big Oil) and the environmentalists on the Left of his party.

Obama, being a rightwing corporate capitalist whore, is inclined to support the pipeline because his corporate pimps demand it of him. However, he is pressured from the Left to kill the pipeline. So he is caught in a bind. The only wavering he is doing at all is because he is under pressure from environmentalists. If he stops Keystone XL, it will be because the environmentalists convinced him.

Conclusion: Obama has no position on Keystone XL, but is inclined to support it. But he is under pressure from his Left to kill it. The verdict is up to him.

Lie: Environmental organizations lie about the environment because they are paid many millions of dollars to lie about it. This is simply not true. Environmental groups are not corrupt, and there is no money in protecting the environment. There are no rich or business interests paying off environmental activists to do this or that. The entire environmental movement really is anti-capitalist.

Its goal is to shut down or regulate various capitalist enterprises so they can not make any money at all since they are not allowed to start up or because their operations are shut down. In other cases, it seeks to regulate capitalist enterprises in such a way as to limit the profits of Capital. The capitalists are the ones with money in capitalist societies. Since the goals of environmentalists’ projects are to limit or in some cases to disallow capitalists’ profits, no capitalist will ever support this movement.

It is certainly possible that there are rich people somewhere dishing out millions of dollars to environmental groups in order to lie about environmental problems, but there is no evidence that this is occurring. Anyway, US environmental problems are bad enough that there is no need to lie about anything; the truth is bad enough as it is. I have been following this movement for decades now and I have never uncovered a single case of environmentalists inventing nonexistent problems or even exaggerating current ones. There’s no need to do so. If projects are environment-friendly, environmentalists are content to let them go forward.

Conclusion: There are no environmental groups lying about environmental problems as the truth is bad enough. 100% of the lying is on the side of the capitalist destroyers and polluters who obviously have huge pecuniary interest in lying. No one is giving millions of $ to environmentalists to make up lies, and there is no evidence that no one ever has.

Lie: China and India are causing the majority of global warming, so we needn’t worry about global warming here in the US. Pollute away!

The truth is that China and India together cause ~8% of global warming in the world. Sure it is on the rise, but that is the current figure. Most global warming is coming out of the West.

Conclusion: The West is causing global warming, not the rest of the world.

Lie: Barack Obama, radical Islamist Kenyan born Muslim, is supporting the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. The MB are radical Al Qaeda style terrorists who hate the US and Israel. It is true that the MB are radical Islamists and they are pretty nasty. But a Republican administration would probably also support the MB regime in Egypt. Egypt gets that $2-3 billion/year as a payoff for making peace with Israel back in 1979.

So all those billions are not going for the radical Islamist MB in Egypt, instead it is going for a bunch of Jews squatting in Palestine. It’s a payoff to the Jews, nothing more, nothing less. If you’re upset about it, head on over to Hymietown, find yourself a deli, and complain to anyone who will listen to you.

Truth is that due to geopolitics, a Republican administration would probably have to support the MB to the tune of $2-3 billion a year too. If you cut off all that aid, Egypt might just tear up that peace treaty with Israel, and we can’t have that. So the aid stays, no matter which administration is in charge.

Besides, there is not a whole lot of evidence that the Egyptian MB is any more radical Islamist than the radical Sunni Islamist regimes in the Gulf. Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Oman and Yemen are all run by radical Islamist regimes. In fact, the Egyptian MB has very deep ties to the Wahhabi clergy in Saudi Arabia, and it was the emigration of many MB Islamists to Saudi Arabia due to persecution by secular regimes that helped fuel Al Qaeda in the first place.

What created Al Qaeda? Al Qaeda was created when large numbers of MB activists from Egypt and then later from Syria migrated to Saudi Arabia due to persecution by secular regimes in Egypt and Syria. The Wahhabi clerics had been rather quietist up until this point. But the MB cadres were radicalized by persecution and torture in their homelands, and they riled up the locals, turning up the heat on the quietist Wahhabi clergy. It was out of this union of Mediterranean MB activists with Saudi Wahhabi clergy that Al Qaeda itself was born.

Conclusion: Obama probably doesn’t like the Egyptian MB regime any more than any Republican would. But the rules of geopolitics are that Egypt must be supported as a consequence of US support for Israel. As with so many things in the Middle East, all roads lead back to Jerusalem.

The Boston Bombings as Blowback

Matt writes:

Sorry, this just doesn’t apply to the Boston bombings at all. The U.S. gave these thugs the best it had to offer, and they bit the hand that fed them. Not to mention the fact that the U.S. had *nothing* to do with the situation in Chechnya.

The Boston Bombings were in fact blowblack. The older brother said he was very angry about the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan at the very least. According to these jihadis, they are only fighting back.

They say that we are killing Muslims in Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan and Afghanistan (not really in Iraq anymore). This is true. We are killing Muslims with drones in the first three places and with guns on the ground in the last. Supposedly they are all part of Al Qaeda (except in Afghanistan), but this is not really true. At least in Pakistan, we are mostly just killing Pakistani Islamists.

The drone war is only allowed by Congress to kill “members of Al Qaeda actively planning immanent attacks against the US homeland.” Obviously most drone attacks are not even sanctioned under US law, and are hence illegal even by our own laws. Not that any American even cares.

Perhaps we should be running around the world zapping Al Qaeda types from the skies. But Congress has not sanctioned us to do that, and that’s a problem.

And as long as we are running around the world hitting Al Qaeda and other Islamist types with drones and with real guns on the ground in Afghanistan, Salafists and Al Qaeda type jihadists say they are going to attack us back anywhere they can hit us, even on our own soil.

War is like a battle between preschoolers. It’s always, “He started it! He hit me back!”

In war, everyone is always “fighting back.” Even Hitler claimed his conquests as defensive. Most of the world’s offensive armies are paradoxically called “defense forces.”

A Critique of Islam from an Anti-Hindu India

India Land of Rapes is an Indian Hindu who is a strong critic of his society. But he also has a dim opinion of Islam:

Islam is a Semitic religion. Semites suffer from genetic psychological diseases.

They are mostly interested in Domestication, Control and Revenge.

These 3 are fundamental aspects of ISLAM. Domestication of infidel nations, Control of their wealth and Revenge against anyone who opposes their stupidity

The Bedouin landlord Muhammad created a religion of hate. Still these idiots are arguing over their lunatic book and can’t get over their differences.

Switch on any Arabic TV – its all about Shia vs. Sunni, Which Islamic verse sanctions beheading infidel and how much jizya must be imposed on infidels.

Islam today is in dark ages – no intellectual life – intellectual life is detested.

I don’t see any great intellectual life or schools from Islamic nations. Universities like Al Azhar teach lunatic texts.

Islamic idiots know very well that their culture cannot create anything.

A complete generation of human spirit is fucked by Islamic societies.

I am not saying Hinduism is great. Hindus are despicable creatures; most of them are parasitic – they lead parasitic lives.

And South Asian Muslims are seriously fucked in their brains; most of them belong to low caste tribes, and their identity is lost.

This is a most interesting critique.

How is that Islam tries to domesticate infidel societies?

In the past, they tried to conquer us, but honestly, that is not going on anymore. So how are they trying to neuter us at the moment?

Islam, a Religion Programmed to Conquer

Obviously the Islamic plan is to gradually take over all infidel societies via conversion and high birthrates. This is clear from statements out of CAIR, the major Islamic organization in the US. Once a society gets a large number of Muslims, strife and typically terrorism begins against the infidels for all sorts of reasons. Almost all societies with large Muslim minorities or a near parity between Muslims and infidels have a Muslim terrorist problem going on – some sort of a jihad.

Any infidel nation that gets a large number of Muslims situated in part of its land will end up having this part of its land beset by a Muslim separatist insurgency. Interestingly, no Muslim nation will ever allow similarly a heavily infidel part of its land to separate. This is what is behind all of the Islamist rage about East Timor, the Armenians, the Assyrians and even Al-Andalus: they had the nerve to secede. In part, this may also explain the opposition to Israel much as it pains me to say so.

In Islam, once the Muslims conquer a land, it is “consecrated by God to the Muslim waqf for all of time” (read the Hamas charter for more on that.) So Islam gets not only all the lands it has now but all the lands it has ever had. No infidel portion of a Muslim land may secede. Also to some extent, the infidel lands are up for grabs too via conversion, immigration and the jihad of the womb. This is a religion of conquest that is programmed for geographical stasis and at least not loss and at the most for geographical expansion: the lands of Islam must at the very least be constant and not shrink one inch and at best, they should be expandable.

I do agree to some extent with the Islamophobes who say that Islam is a religion of hate. It certainly has elements like that beyond that of most religions. Surely it is not generally a religion of peace.

And many to most Muslims do have violent tendencies in that they will support some sort of religious jihad.

A Pakistani friend supported most of the Muslim jihads around the world – in Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan, Chechnya and Kashmir. She probably would have supported the ones in Thailand and the Philippines too. And she was a moderate Muslim.

The Sunni Yemenis I know support the Syrian Sunni jihad against the Syrian Shia Nusairi heretics.

A local Yemeni told me that a Yemeni woman who has sex outside of marraige should be killed.

So you see the violence they support is not only against infidels to some extent but also against their own who transcend whatever version of Sharia is applied. Islam is one hardass, badass, mofo religion. It’s not a religion for pussies or sissies, and it is macho and scary to the core.

One thing I will say for Muslims is at least they fight back. In Iraq, Palestine and Afghanistan, the Muslims seem to reject infidel conquest and dispossession forever. For this, I bow down to them, as many Christians will simply roll over and allow themselves to be conquered by the imperialism du jour.

And Muslims will also defend their religion. In Syria, takfiri Sunnis are destroying some of the holiest sites of Shiism. Recently a tomb was desecrated and the body of this Shia holy man was carried off by Al Qaeda. Many Shia have responded to say they will form “sacrifice squads” to defend the Shia holy sites. This is proper and morally correct.

They should fight to the death to defend their religion against those who wage genocidal war against it. And the Shia tend to be pretty circumspect about who they blow up with their suicide missions. A look at Lebanon shows us that they mostly hit Embassies (CIA) and military barracks (US Marine Corps).

They don’t seem to go in for civilian slaughter so much like the Sunni Salafis do, perhaps because Shia holy mean are loath to sanction civilian massacre, especially of other sects. Hezbollah does seem to have been behind some terrorist attacks against Jews in Iran, Israel and Argentina. There have been murders of Sunnis in Iraq and now in Syria, but in those cases, the Sunnis were also committing mass slaughter of Shia civilians.

In Iraq anyway, the Sunnis seem to be killing a lot more Shia civilians nowadays than the other way around. This is because in hardline Sunnism, Shiism is seems as apostasy; the Shia are heretics. In Islam, heretics may be freely killed with religious sanction. Shia religious scholars offer no Islamically sanctioned way to kill Sunni civilians, as Sunnis are not seen as heretics in Shiism. In fact, modern Shiism tends to downplay hostility to Sunnism; in Iran, Sunni hatred for the Shia is even denied and said to be provoked by Israel, the US and the UK using the Sunnis as a tool.

Islam is not exactly the greatest thing on Earth for intellectual life, but Iran is developing some great weapons systems at the very least, and Pakistan invented the Bomb. Iran may well be working towards a bomb. No anti-scientific society can possibly produce an atom bomb. Universities in the Gulf strongly promote medical education and some of the hospitals there are among the world’s best. Even in the Gulf, Islam is not opposed to the life-breathing essence of medical science.

So in terms of guns and smocks, Islam pragmatically sees benefit here.

And just to point out, the Muslims I have met both online and in real life are often quite educated. In fact, they tend to be much more educated than your average American, and most of those that I knew had college degrees. I would hasten to say that your average Muslim values knowledge more than your average Moronican.

The Lesson of the Boston Bombings

Click to enlarge. Blowback, Moronican style.

They hate us for our freedoms! Durr.

The Catastrophe of the Iraqi Resistance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Basque Independence Movement

Repost from the old site.

Although it is not a popular cause in the US, this blog strongly supports the armed struggle of ETA, the armed Basque nationalist Red front. The Basque cause is very poorly known in the US and probably in most of the rest of the world, hence, here is a bit of a primer.

The Basque people are probably the last remaining group of the original populations that inhabited Europe before the Indo-European (IE) invasion and conquest about 8000 years ago. The best theory indicates that the IE people probably came out of the southern Ukraine near the Black Sea.

Their first stop was Anatolia, and this is why the Hittite languages (ancient languages of Anatolia, or Turkey) are by far the most divergent languages in the IE language family.

In fact, I subscribe to a controversial theory that renames Indo-European as Indo-Hittite due to this deep split. For those who don’t know about the IE language family, IE, or proto-IE (PIE), was the mother tongue of most of the languages of Europe.

European languages in the IE family include English, German, French, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Irish, Welsh, Scots Gaelic, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian, Czech, Slovak, Bulgarian, Romanian, Moldavian, Albanian, Slovenian, Greek, Serbo-Croatian, Lithuanian and Latvian and some lesser-known ones.

A few tongues in Europe are non-IE, such as Finnish, Hungarian, Turkish, Estonian and Basque. Outside of Europe, we have some other IE languages in some pretty distant places, including Kurdish, Persian, Hindi, Urdu, Pashto, Sanskrit and a variety of languages related to them that are not well known by Westerners.

Apparently a divergent group of PIE left the PIE homeland and moved into the area of India, Iran and Afghanistan thousands of years ago.

Before the IE people spread out over Europe 8000 years ago, Europe was home to a variety of peoples who are very poorly known. Almost nothing is known about their civilizations (such as they existed), who they were, what they did, how they lived, what they ate, much less what languages they spoke.

The original inhabitants of Europe at this time weren’t Cro-Magnons, but they weren’t exactly Manhattan metrosexuals with cell phones either. After the IE people spread out across Europe, they apparently displaced, intermarried with, or wiped out almost all of the indigenous people of Europe.

One group that held out for a while were the Etruscans, residents of Italy. We actually have some retained some scraps of the Etruscan language somehow, but it doesn’t seem obviously related to anything else. The only other group that held out was apparently the Basques.

The theory that the Basques are the last remaining original inhabitants of Europe has long been a popular theory based on the fact that the Basque language is unlike any other language in Europe, or, really, in the world. Formally, Basque is considered to be a language isolate – not related to any other language.

However, I believe, based on very controversial theories, that Basque is related to some languages of the Caucasus (such as Chechen), an obscure group of Siberian tongues known as the Ket Family, an obscure language in far northern Pakistan called Burushaski, and also to the vast Sino-Tibetan family, of which Chinese is the most famous member.

Basque seems to me to be closest to various Caucasian languages. The latest genetic research has shown that the Basques have a blood type frequency that is divergent from all other populations in Europe. Interestingly, the closest people with this blood frequency are in the Caucasus Mountains.

In their mountain hideaways, the rugged Basques fought off many intruders and managed to keep a lot of other conquerors out of their hair with a hands-off attitude. Although the Romans conquered the area, they basically left the Basques pretty much alone as too much hassle, a common attitude of many conquerors that came through the region.

The Basques converted to Christianity along with the rest of Europe, and are known for their passionate, conservative Catholicism. With the consolidation of the Spanish nation, the question of how to deal with the Basques came up. For centuries, most governments in Spain and France preferred to pretty much leave the Basques alone.

During the Spanish Civil War in 1936-39, the Basque Region was a hotbed of Communism, Socialism, Anarchism and all varieties of Leftism. It was a major Republican stronghold. The Spanish Anarchists even “ruled” parts of the Basque country for part of this time, probably the only time in history that any humans have ever lived under anarchist “rule”.

The Basques fought very hard against fascism. Picasso’s famous “Guernica” painting is a painting of the Franco-Nazi air raid on the city of Guernica in the Basque Country, a raid that killed 6,000 people and outraged the world. A Basque Communist female fighter named “La Passionara” became quite famous.

The flood of Nazi guns was too much for the Republicans. The Republicans lost the war and fascism, in the persona of Generalissimo Franco, came to Spain. During World War 2, many Basques fought for the resistance against the Nazis, especially in France. The Basque region was known as a major redoubt and rear base for the French resistance.

When Franco came to power, a new chapter of history opened for the Basque struggle. Franco tried to consolidate Spain as no ruler ever had before. He demanded that all regional minorities adopt a “Spanish” mindset, language and loyalty. He ferociously tried to wipe out all vestiges of the Basque, Catalan and Galician languages and cultures.

Catalans speak a Romance language in between Spanish and French and live along the southern coast of Spain by the French border in and around Barcelona. The Romance family is a subfamily of IE that is derived from Latin. Romance includes Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, Catalan, Sardinian, Corsican, Romansh (an obscure language in Switzerland) and some lesser-known tongues.

Galicians speak a dialect of Portuguese, believe it or not, and live along the rocky northern coast of Spain by the border with Portugal. Many Galicians are fishermen.

The Basque people resisted Franco for a while, but he put many of them in prison and really hurt the Basque movement. In 1959, a faction broke away from the Basque Nationalist Movement, formed the ETA, and took up arms.

They planted several bombs in Spanish cities that year. In 1968 , the ETA officially adopted armed struggle. The insurgency has been going on for 46 years now, though it is not as strong as it used to be.

Hardly any Americans realize the significant level of support for even the armed insurgency in the Basque country of Spain. As of a few years ago, there were regular street protests and even riots, as young nationalists run amok through the streets, smashing stuff and writing graffiti.

I have seen video footage in the past decade of very militant pro-ETA rallies in the Basqueland with large crowds of supporters milling around.

Many folks you would consider to be regular folks – middle-class people who dress well, drive nice cars and have good jobs – are strong supporters of even the armed Basque movement. It’s quite a shock to see dowdy-looking housewife types and middle-aged office workers with potbellies angrily waving banners supporting the ETA bombers.

Yet this is the reality of popular support for Basque nationalism, even the armed wing, in the Basque Country. Although Batasuna, the political wing of the ETA, was banned recently, another party took its place and garnered around 15-20% of the vote. Total support for complete independence in the Basque Country or Euskara, as they call it, is around 35-40%, or possibly higher, in my opinion.

Note: I just spoke to a German Communist friend of mine about the support level for the independence movement in Basqueland. Here is what he said: “Oh, I think almost all Basques support full independence. And even many Spanish migrants in Basqueland don’t really oppose the ETA or the independence movement.”

Note the presence of Spanish migrants who have moved into the Basque Country, mostly to take jobs. They are really the wild card in any poll about levels of independence support in Basqueland.

What is the struggle about, anyway? Well, a significant number of the Basque people (maybe almost 100% – see above) want independence from Spain.

Possibly a lesser number desire independence from France, but the struggle in French Basqueland is another matter and beyond the scope of this post. The Spanish government has always refused to hold a referendum on independence for Euskara, a key Basque demand.

The Czech Republic split from Slovakia, referendums have been held on independence in Scotland and Quebec, and yet Spain bucks the tide in the civilized world. The economy is surely a stickler. The Basque country holds much of Spain’s heavy industry, and how well Spain would fare economically after Basque succession is largely unknown. But it should at least be a subject of discussion, and Spain has put it out of limits.

As long as Spain refuses to provide a Basque referendum on independence, the Basque struggle, including probably the armed front, will go on. That’s all there is to it. Spain can end the insurgency tomorrow by opening peace talks with the ETA (Spain has never done this) and ultimately agreeing to hold a referendum on Basque independence.

An interesting sidelight to the Basque struggle is the role of women and feminism in the conflict. Some of the toughest ETA cadre have been women, often tougher than the men. And ETA male fighters, though nominally Marxist, have long been known to hold surprisingly conservative, Old World type views on the role of women in Basque society, opinions heavily tinged by conservative Catholicism.

What Can Be Done About the Problems of Islam?

Now, I have a pretty low opinion of Islam myself, but to tell the truth, I don’t even care about Muslims or Islam all that much. It’s a bit hard to see them as this huge threat that everyone says they are. The religion is pretty awful. It’s very backwards and very strict on morality. Muslims insist on the right to proselytize non-Muslims, but then non-Muslims cannot proselytize Muslims. That’s hypocrisy.

Muslims do wish to take over the world for Islam, but so do Christians for Christianity. Anyway, does it look like Muslims are taking over the world for Islam? Is Islam even expanding at all? Are Muslims invading non-Muslim lands to conquer them for Islam? No. Are non-Muslims converting to Islam in mass numbers? Not really. In fact, millions are leaving Islam every year, especially in Africa and Russia. Sure, Muslim separatists are fighting some horrific wars in places where they want to separate: in the Caucasus, Kashmir, Southern Thailand and Southern Philippines. Muslims are fighting in Palestine and Israel for a variety of reasons. Some are trying retake Muslim land stolen by the Jews.

 

There are a variety of monstrous civil wars going on in the Muslim world. The Taliban are fighting the state in Afghanistan. Taliban like groups are fighting in Pakistan. There is some terrorism going on India, but the reasons are obscure. There is a horrific civil war going on Syria, mostly Sunnis fighting against a Shia Alawite state.

There is some violence going on in Egypt and Libya in the aftermath of revolutions in those lands. There is minor violence in Tunisia in the aftermath of a revolution there. There is a civil war in Mali pitting Islamists against a secular state. In Somalia, there is periodic violence pitting an Al Qaeda type group against a more secular state. There is similar violence in Yemen with an Al Qaeda group fighting a more secular state. What is going on here for the most part is that Islamist groups are fighting against secular states. In some places, there is some horrible Sunni-Shia violence.

The truth is that none of these battles affect non-Muslims all that much. It’s disturbing that the Muslim world is going more fundamentalist, but it’s unclear why that is a concern for the West. Also, more secular Muslims everywhere are fighting the fundamentalists, and their numbers are not small.

The truth is that due to the nature of Islam and its history with the state, Muslims everywhere will tend to elect Islamists either by vote or by revolution. When popular votes are held in Muslim countries such as Gaza, Egypt, Iran and Libya, Islamists will tend to win. Islamists have not been winning elections in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Malaysia lately.

It’s true that Muslims seem to have some problems with democracy. Why this is is not certain. But in Turkey, Albania, Azerbaijan, Tunisia, Egypt, Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Iran, Pakistan, Indonesia and Bangladesh, elections are relatively free and fair recently.

There is a bit of Islamic violence in the West, but not much to be honest. Mostly it revolves around revenge against the West for the West’s military involvement fighting Muslims in Muslim lands. If we don’t fight the Muslims, they won’t attack us. Real simple. There have also been some revenge attacks against Muslim apostates and non-Muslims who attacked Islam in what they see as a blasphemous way, but these have been few in number. Al Qaeda is sometimes trying to attack the US, but they almost never succeed.

So the Islamic threat is no big deal.

The Islamic penal code is harsh. This is true. In some places, it is brutal, but strict Islamic law involving chopping off hands and heads is very uncommon. It’s mostly only practiced in Saudi Arabia. In other places where Islamists instituted Islamic law such as Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan and Mali, it has not been popular. It seems Muslims do not want to live under strict Islamic law.

Muslims do not treat non-Muslim minorities well in their Muslim lands. This is a fact. But what can be done about this state of affairs? Nothing. We have to leave the Muslims alone to treat their non-Muslim minorities however they wish. We can bitch and complain, but there is little to nothing that we can do.Increasing Islamism in Yemen, Palestine, Egypt, Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria, the Caucasus, Turkey and Pakistan has boded ill for the non-Muslim minorities in those places. But in most places, few non-Muslims have been killed.

Quite a few Muslims leave Islam. When they go to the West, 15% of Muslims leave Islam, mostly without consequences. Surveys in the West Bank and Gaza show that 25-30% of Muslims there are not particularly religious.

The Muslim haters rant and rave against Islam, saying it is the worst evil on Earth and that it has to be exterminated from the planet. Sure, it might be a better world with no Islam, but how is this going to come about. Citizens of Muslim states are not mass converting out of Islam or leaving the religion. Wars to wipe out Islam are not going to go anywhere. Muslims are willing to fight and die for their faith everywhere on Earth in great numbers. It’s not even possible for non-Muslims to conquer states like Iraq and Afghanistan, even putting in our figurehead Muslim governments to govern the places we conquered.

What are we going to do? Conquer the Muslim world and impose non-Muslim governments on them? It’s not going to work. It hasn’t even worked in a very shallow form in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Muslims will fight us forever if we do that.

The best thing to do with the Muslims is leave them alone. There is no solution to the problems of Islam and the Muslim world except to section it off from the non-Muslim world and quit importing them to the West, which seems to have been a terrible idea. Muslims in the West cause few problems as long we quit importing large numbers of them. Obviously if we import huge numbers of Muslims, we will end up with Muslim rule in the West, but that is not happening anywhere so there is little to worry about.

Leave the Muslims alone to sort out their messes and find their way to modernity. There is nothing else to be done. Sure we wish that Muslims would be more secular and less Islamist, but things actually seem to be working in the opposite direction, and there is not one thing we can do about it.