Category Archives: Poland

by | November 17, 2017 · 11:17 PM

Fake Controversies, Fake Settled Questions, and Ideological Authoritarianism in Modern Linguistics, with an Emphasis on Mutual Intelligibility and the Dialect/Language Question

There is a lie going around that the dialect/language question is controversial in Linguistics. It really isn’t. Most linguists have a pretty good idea of where to draw the line. If you don’t believe me, study the internals of the Summer Institute of Linguistics change request forms for languages. The field is a lot more uniform on this question than the cranks think. Hardly anyone thinks Valencian is a separate language. Romagnolo and Emilian were split with zero controversy. All it took was a few authoritative statements by the experts in these varieties to settle the question. There were 5-10 experts writing in on Valencian and they were all in agreement. In other words, the language dialect question is what is known as a fake controversy.

Really the only controversy about this question comes from nationalists and language activists.

Sadly, many linguists are nationalists, and their work has been poisoned by their ideology for a long time now. Some of the worst ones of all are in Europe. Linguistics in the Balkans and Poland has been badly damaged by nationalist linguists for a long time, with no sign of things getting better. Similar nonsense is going on in of all places ultra-PC Denmark and Sweden. Bornholmian and Southeast Jutnish should have been split from Danish long ago. In fact, Jutnish was split, but Danish nationalist linguists pathetically had it removed. The many langues d’oil have never been listed and probably never will be. No doubt this is due to the state of Linguistics in ultra-nationalistic France. There are easily 10-15+ langues d’oil that could be split off.

Greek linguist nationalists have raised their ugly heads over splits in Macro-Greek.

Bulgarian Linguistics is all nationalist and has been lost in retardation forever now. No, Macedonian is not a Bulgarian dialect.

There have been some ugly and ridiculous fights in the Baltics especially with Estonian and Latvian, neither of which is a single language. I doubt that Estonian and Latvian linguists are comporting themselves well here given the fanatical nationalism that overwhelms both lands.

There are easily 350-400 language inside of Sinitic or Chinese according to the estimate of the ultimate Sinologist Jerry Norman. The real figure is clearly closer to 1,000-2,000 separate languages. Chinese nationalism is mandatory for anyone doing Sinitic linguistics. No one wants to bring down the wrath of the Chinese government by pulling the curtain on their big lie that Chinese is one language. I am amazed that SIL even split Chinese into 14 languages without getting deluged with death threats.

Arabic is clearly more than one language, and SIL now has it split into 35 languages.  This is one odd case where they may have erred by splitting too much. That’s probably too many, but no one can even do any work in this area, since Arabists and especially Arabic speakers keep insisting, often violently, that Arabic is a single language. Never mind that they routinely can’t understand each other. We have Syrians and Yemenis at my local store and no, the Syrian Arabic speakers cannot understand hard Yemeni Arabic, sorry. Some of the Yemeni Arabic  speakers have even whispered conspiratorially in my ear when the others were not around that speakers of different Yemeni Arabic varieties often cannot even understand each other and that’s not even split by SIL. I have a feeling that the Arabic situation is more like Chinese than not.

A Swedish nationalist wiped out several well documented separate languages inside of Macro-Swedish simply by making a few dishonest change request forms. SIL pathetically fell for it.

Occitan language activists wiped out the very well-supported split of Occitan into six separate languages based on ideology. They are trying to resurrect Occitan, and they think this will only work if there is one Occitan language with many dialects under it. Splitting it up into six or more languages dooms the tongue. So this was a political argument masquerading as a linguistic one. SIL fell for it again. Pathetic.

No one has talked much about these matters in the field, but a man named Harold Hammerstrom has written some excellent notes about them. He also takes the language/dialect question very seriously and has proposed more scientific ways of doing the splitting.

SIL was recently granted the ability to give out new ISO codes for languages, and since then, SIL has become quite conservative, lumping varieties everywhere in sight. This is because lumping is always the easy way out, as conservatives love lumping in everything from Classification to Historical Linguistics, and the field has been taken over by radical conservatives for some time now. Splitters are kooks, clowns and laughing stocks. One gets the impression that SIL is terrified to split off new tongues for fear of bad PR.

As noted above, the language/dialect question is not as controversial in the field as Net linguist cranks would have you believe. SIL simply decides whatever they decide, and all the linguists just shrug their shoulders and go back to Optimality Theory, threatening to kill each other over Indo-European reconstructions, scribbling barely readable SJW sociolinguistic blather, or whatever it is they are crunching their brains about.

SIL grants an ISO code or refuses to grant one, and that’s that. No ISO code, no language. The main problem is that they refuse to split many valid languages mostly out of PC fear of causing a furor. Most of the opposition to splitting off new languages comes from linguistic hacks and cranks who exist for the most part on the Internet.

Most real linguists don’t seem to care very much. I know this because I talk to real linguists all the time. When it comes to the dialect/language split, most of them find it mildly intriguing, but hardly anyone is set off. You tell them that some dialect has now been split off as a separate language or two languages merged into one, and they just perk up their ears and say, “Oh, that’s interesting.” Sometimes they shrug their shoulders and say, “They (SIL) are saying this is a separate language now,” as if they really don’t care one way or another.

Linguists definitely get hot under the collar about some things, but not about the dialect/language question which is regarded more as a quizzical oddity. Most linguists furthermore care nothing at all about the mutual intelligibility debate, which at any rate was resolved long ago by SIL way back in the 1950’s. See the influential book by Cassad written way back then for the final word on the science of mutual intelligibility. Some enterprising linguists are finally starting to take mutual intelligibility seriously, but even they are being much too wishy-washy and unsciency about it. A lot of very silly statements  are made like “there is no good, hard scientific way to measure mutual intelligibility, so all figures are guesswork.”

There’s no need for these theoretical shields or hyper-hedging because no one cares. No one in the field other than a few nutcases and kooks  on the Internet even gives two damns about this question in the first place. The mutual intelligibility question is actually much less controversial in the field that the linguist kook loudmouths on the Net would have you believe.

We have more important things to fight about, like Everett’s resurrecting of the hated Sapir-Worf Hypothesis, Chomsky’s Universal Grammar (defended pathetically by the Old Guard and under attack by the Everett crowd who everyone hates), not to mention Altaic, Joseph Greenberg’s poor, regularly pummeled ghost, and mass comparison in general.

The field is full of many a silly and pretty lie. One for instance is that Linguistics rejected the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis long ago, and now it is regarded as a laughing stock. Actually that’s not true. Really a bunch of bullies got together and announced very arrogantly that Sapir-Whorf was crap, and then it become written in stone the way a lot of nonsense our field believes does.

If you back over the papers that “proved” this matter, it turns out that they never proved one anything thing. They just said that they proved Sapir-Whorf was nonsense, and everyone fell for it or just got in line like they were supposed to.

Not to mention that Linguistics is like an 8th Grade playground. Let’s put it this way. If you advocate for Sapir-Whorf in academia, I pray for your soul. You also damn well better have tenure. I don’t know how anyone advocates for Altaic these days. I would never advocate for Altaic or even any remotely controversial historical linguistics hypothesis without tenure. The field is out for blood, and they burn heretics at the stake all the time. We’ve probably incinerated more wrong thinkers than the Inquisition by now.

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Filed under Afroasiatic, Altaic, Arabic, Balto-Slavic-Germanic, Chinese language, Comparitive, Danish, Denmark, Dialectology, Europe, France, Germanic, Greece, Greek, Hellenic, Indo-European, Indo-Hittite, Indo-Irano-Armeno-Hellenic, Italic, Italo-Celtic, Italo-Celtic-Tocharian, Language Classification, Language Families, Linguistics, Nationalism, Occitan, Poland, Political Science, Regional, Romance, Semitic, Sinitic, Sino-Tibetan, Sociolinguistics, Sweden

by | November 14, 2017 · 11:15 PM

Catholic Communism: The Story of the Catholic Left in Europe

The link between Catholicism and the Left has been ongoing for some time now. In Eastern Europe, especially in Czechoslovakia, Catholic Communists were common enough to form an actual movement. Obviously there were Catholic Communists in Spain and particularly in the Basque Country. The ETA was virtually a Catholic Communist revolutionary movement. The armed Left, especially the Communists, started killing priests in the Spanish Civil War. Although burning churches has been an odd tradition in Spain for a good century now, the actual killing of priests did not go over well. Of course the same could be said of the great IRA in Ireland, most of whom were Catholics.

In Poland, Ukraine and Lithuania, unfortunately, the Catholics were virulently anti-Communist for whatever reason. The Communists under Stalin brutally repressed the church, killing many priests and lay workers. In Poland and Ukraine, Catholicism got wrapped up in an anti-Communism in a horrible way. One of the main beefs against Communism particularly in Poland was that the Communists were not only anti-nationalists but mostly that they were anti-Catholic. At any rate, Catholicism and nationalism are so wrapped together in Poland that one can hardly see where one ends and the other begins.

Nevertheless, most of the virulent Polish nationalist Catholic anti-Communist were committed socialists. However, many of these folks who were often also anti-Semites as these Poles linked Communism with Jews. Anti-Semitism in Poland is as old as dirt. Yitzhak Rabin once noted that Poles learn their anti-Semitism at their mother’s breast – it’s that deeply rooted in the culture. There was a nationalist rally in Poland recently that drew a huge crowd of 50,000. One of the things that they demanded was a Judenfrei Poland. The problem is that there are probably no more than 4,000 Jews in Poland to this day. One wonders what evil effects such a tiny community could have on the national body politic, yet this shows you the intensity and paranoia of Polish antisemitism.

In Eastern Europe, there is a big difference between a socialist and a Communist. Almost everyone you meet in Eastern Europe is a socialist or practically one, although Poland is particularly pathetic in this regard, a sorry habit in light of the centuries of abuse the reactionary feudal lords committed against the 95% serf Poles for centuries. The Polish ruling class is still feudal in nature and has changed little since the days of the lords of the land. It also has deep ties to a deeply conservative Polish army, which has always had strong links to the feudal royal ruling classes.

It is a little told story, but when Communism first came to Poland, it was quite popular, particularly among the downtrodden peasants. It was also very popular among the urban proletariat and to some extent among intellectuals. But the brutality of the Polish Communists working in the model of Stalin quickly doomed the project. The Polish Communists were hoist on their own petard. Even Stalin recognized the futility of the project. “Imposing Communism on the Poles,” Stalin said, “Was like trying to put a saddle on a cow.” Basically doomed from Day one.

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Filed under Anti-Semitism, Catholicism, Christianity, Czechoslovakia, Economics, Europe, Ireland, Left, Lithuania, Marxism, Nationalism, Poland, Political Science, Racism, Regional, Religion, Socialism, Spain, Ukraine, USSR

by | September 24, 2017 · 10:25 PM

Poland Talks Alt Left! Polish Left Political Journal Discusses the Alt Left movement with a Focus on My and Rabbit’s Writing: “Race Realism, Or Center-Left on Culture,” by Michael Smolen

Race Realism, Or Center-Left on Culture

MICHAŁ SMOLEŃ

Writer for Respubliki Nowa. He writes about social philosophy and innovation.

March 13, 2017

Krytyka Polityczna

Two marginal racist bloggers from the US claim to start a new movement on the Left.

We are beautifully different on the Left, and it’s one of the great things about us.. Each leftwing tendency focuses on a slightly different target group and offers a slightly different view of the world situation. So it is worthwhile to rise above the divisions, often driven more by personal conflict than actual ideology, and to open ourselves up to the entire spectrum of the leftwing media, all the way from liberal center-left to very radical. Disagreement is natural, and ferment is creative. Sometimes, nevertheless, people on the left advocate disappointing ideologies that are hard for the rest of us to get behind.

THE LATEST FASHION

The article started out interesting anyway: “I would like to criticize the leftwing of the Vistula backwater for not being aware of the latest leftwing tendencies emanating from our leftwing brethren from the Fatherland of the World Creative Class” – begins an article about the “Alt Left” written by Dr. Hab. Jaroslaw Tomasiewicz which appeared in New Citizen, a Polish leftwing social justice magazine. I regard foreign influences as inevitable and often useful, so naturally I was interested in this new leftwing movement outside the mainstream which has so far escaped my attention.

After today often encountered failure characteristics “Hipster-Left”, focused on easy wojenkach culture, the author writes about the new collective actor on the political scene, “The Alt Right – a rebirth of the “Old Hard Right” – ethnopolitical, traditionalist, populist – in a new postmodern form. A sort of return to the roots. And the Alt Right managed to overcome the Mainstream Left on its own home turf: to win the support or the workers by emphasizing economics and de-emphasizing cultural issues. Think a somewhat obsolete Thomas Frank.

A flashing red light at this point heralds a warning. Did Donald Trump really gain the support of part of the White working class through the efforts of the teenage racist trolls under the leadership of Richard Spencer – the elegant (at least when not performing a Seig Heil), erudite, and informal leader of the Alt Right?

You are probably thinking of the Centrist Democrats so disliked by Tomasiewicz. It seems however that the notion that the anti-elitist mood of working class Trump voters (many of whom supported Obama in the past) was powered by the notions of the Alt Right leader Spencer is not only factually questionable but also overly bleak in that it elides the appeal of Trump to a section of the electorate steeped in US nationalism. Or perhaps this is just a problem of the Old Left?

Tomasiewicz :

Some believe that the challenge posed by the Alt Right requires a symmetrical response: the creation of an alternative to the Mainstream Left emphasizing the forgotten foundations of Leftism, such as the primacy of economics over culture, the relationship of the base to the superstructure, and a return to the Marxian thesis that ‘existence shapes consciousness.’

Next there is a quote from a manifesto from Alternative Left writer Robert Lindsay proclaiming,

We will be leftwing on economic matters […] but rather Centrist in the sphere of culture.

Tomasiewicz later cites another vague point in Lindsay’s manifesto of the Alternative Left. This vision paints a picture of the Social Democratic movement distanced from the alleged excesses of Cultural Left, materialistic in the old style, although “small and diverse” – which, although it should not be imitated in the dark (we as Poles have common sense), nevertheless deserves our at least with fingers crossed.

RACIAL REALISM

So what’s wrong with this picture? More than you’d expect. The author refers to two online sources for information about the Alt Left, and clicking on either of them reveals some rather disturbing content. The Altleft.com site notes at the top of the page that it is The Left Wing of the Alt Right. Nothing dziwnegi therefore that it is enough time to go through the lengthy scraps to find the few real gems. In the text quoted by Tomasiewicz, we find this passage:

Though I disagree with him on some ideological points…It just so happens that I support Richard Spencer and repeatedly defended him when some oversensitive (and often sanctimonious) factions or some prominent individuals of the AltRight unsuccessfully tried to sacrifice him to improve the image of the movement.

In another text by the author of the site (who goes by the pseudonym “Rabbit”) in response to an appeal to downplay the racial aspect of the Alternative Left brand, he said:

The Alt Left always been about race realism and gender realism. This is the whole fucking nail on the head!

What is race realism? It’s the familiar old and frightening idea that believes in biological differences between “races” of people, eg. in terms of IQ, which it stipulates as very important for races to gain social or political significance. AltLeft.com openly promotes White Nationalism, and at the same time is quite honest, which clearly shows in the title of one of his posts talking about the “unreality” of nonracist “race realism”. The post notes the hypocrisy of the supposedly nonracist race realists and asks a rhetorical question:

“What’s wrong with hatred anyway?”

What of the second author of the Alternative Left manifesto commented on by Tomasiewicz? Robert Lindsay is a prolific blogger who refers to himself as a “liberal race realist” (the title of his previous ideological project), who rejects Political Correctness and “Cultural Marxism” and in their stead proposes “positive White identity” and masculinity for men (to fight Gender Feminism and Radical Feminism).

Once again though – it is not difficult to see where Lindsay is really coming from. Although in the manifesto quoted by Tomasiewicz, Lindsay rejects “racist fascism”, it begins with an attack on the Black Lives Matter movement and ridicules people who talk about White privilege or have an “obsession about structural racism.”

According to Lindsay, to belong to Alt Left, one should accept “racial realism”, which is one of the three pillars of Alt Left ideology – the other two are leftwing views on economics, to which Lindsay moreover dedicates little space, and a special form of moral libertinism who boils down to formally supporting the basic rights of minorities combined with a gut hatred against the movements that are fighting for those very rights.

Lindsay seems to be less directly hateful – and more eccentric – than Rabbit, but his journalism nevertheless includes discussions about the abominations of gay sexual practices, alleged reasons why women cannot lead Western civilization, and complaints about aggressive and obnoxious “Jewy Jews” who are themselves responsible for anti-Semitism.

As for the Alt Left, this is all we need to know about it right here. Tomasiewicz refers only to Lindsay and the author of a blog about the “Left Wing of Alt Right” because that’s all there is to the Alternative Left. Otherwise, the concept still appears occasionally as a rhetorical device in journalism, primarily as an insult. So the entirety of this new and noteworthy movement is a small group of readers of two marginal blogs that are attempting to enrich the standard White Nationalism of the Alt Right with an aversion to neoliberalism and a promotion of anti-feminist libertarianism (the latter being merely a rejecting the traditionally conservative views of women).

LEFT PRIEST JOHN

The detailed reasons why this leftwing website published a fictitious post about a couple of marginal racists in the chronicle New Citizen are not something that should concern readers. Suffice to say that it is difficult to believe in the sincerity of the author, who was after all the one who first discovered the sites of these bloggers. Why did he go out of his way to ferret out these marginal bloggers? Nevertheless, I do not think however that one could accuse the editor-in-chief of tolerance for “race realism,” nor is the readership enthusiastic about this concept.

The case recalls to me deeper concerns of some Polish Left intellectuals’ dislike for the “Left of Manners” or Cultural Left. Often it is not so much about the demands of this faction but more about the alleged incompatibility of this project with the conservative nature of the Polish people. These charges are often simply unfair.

For this often based on fantasies – Maciej Gdula in Political Critique accurately dismantled the idea of the conservatism of the people that is shared by anti-elitist liberals as well as the current anti-elitist Left. A plea to keep the Left only about the workers and to reject helping different minorities seems particularly unfair when we look at the development in recent years of leftwing movements and characters (like Total in Poland or Bernie Sanders in the US), fully and harmoniously integrating cultural issues and economics.

The spectacular failure of this article on the “Alternative Left” to resonate on the Polish Left brings to light another problem. This article published in the New Citizen is the modern equivalent of the medieval legend about the state ruled by Father John, a Christian enclave somewhere in the distant Orient.

We can see that the Cultural Left is an imaginary issue on the Left in anecdotes written by various intellectuals as diverse as Remigiusz Okraska, Stephen Twardoch and David Wildstein that the notion of the good old-fashioned Polish people who do not care about these newfangled cultural oddities is every year moving further from reality.

Tomasiewicz article, in which the role of Father John played the Richard Spencer, stands out as an apology for some particularly nasty and in the Polish context completely unacceptable notions such as race realism (perhaps even our extremist ONR does not openly promote the idea of biological racism). We need only barely scrape the surface of almost any “Morally Centrist” manifesto’s concern for ordinary people to see the usual hatred and disgust for certain disadvantaged groups – sometimes consciously  but more often probably not. In this situation, to put on a mask of folk naiveté seems to be at best frivolous and at worst insincere and wicked, and we have not even begun to deal with the extreme views of of Rabbit of AltLeft.com which go so much further than that.

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Filed under Conservatism, Culture, Democrats, Economics, Europe, Labor, Left, Liberalism, Libertarianism, Nationalism, Neoliberalism, Poland, Political Science, Politics, Race Realism, Race/Ethnicity, Racism, Regional, Republicans, Sane Pro-White, US Politics, White Nationalism

by | August 24, 2017 · 7:51 PM

Polish Political Scientist on the Alt Left

This is a very important article, the first review of the Alt Left ever written by an actual expert on politics, in this case a Political Science professor. The only problem is that he lives in Poland and he wrote this article in Polish! He seems to support the Alt Left. He discusses both me and Rabbit, but most of the focus is on me. And why not? I am the one who started this whole mess after all.

Here it is translated in the best translation I could do.

Alt-Left

Dr Hab. Jarosław Tomasiewicz

02-10-2017

For a decade I have criticized the Polish Left for intellectual impotence expressed in the mindless import of foreign designs. CTRL + C, CRTL + V. It is such a vicious circle: the peculiar combination of geopolitical, historical, socioeconomic and cultural factors has left the Left in Poland (aside from some historical exceptions) a lone minority.

The feeling of isolation meant that the Left waited for outside help (“Moscow yesterday, today Brussels”); elevating “brotherly international solidarity” instead of concentrating on the workers at home deepened the alienation of the Left. Where, a hundred years ago, the Left flourished intellectually (Brzozowski, Abramowski, Luxembourg, Kelles-Krauz, Machajski, Hempel – and many, many others), nowadays, after decades of importing foreign ideas and attempting to implant them in Polish culture, the Polish Left has become intellectually sterile. Bringing the Polish Left to the role of translator of external trends, I see not only me – a “very strange figure” as one of the leftwing editors once called me – but also the Left-leaning generals.

But there is no need to repeat myself as my position on this is well-known. On the contrary – I will criticize the Native Left of the Vistula Backwater for remaining unaware of the latest cutting edge Left political programs from our brethren born in the homeland of the World Creative Class, that is, America.

This latest development followed this pattern:

In recent years, the Hipster Left, now pretending to be a Radical Left, has sunk in the warm sun of a Liberal Mainstream now dominated by the geopolitical system. It was safe to fight for progress behind the back of the liberal state – obviously not to seek any pure utopia ostensibly criticized for “errors and distortions”, but it was still considered less evil than the menace of populism.

The Left was kept in check by the “enlightened absolutism” of the European Union and America reasserting itself as as the keystone of the global order under the leadership of  the benign Uncle Barack. In this way, a phenomenon characteristic of the final days of empires emerged.

First, the Imperialist Left who finance social reforms in the metropolis of the First World profited from the Developed World’s hegemonic oppression of the periphery – the people in the Third World – and therefore was interested in maintaining the existing oppressive geopolitical order This situation was described well by Bernard Semmel.

Next, the toothless Mainstream Right, centered on maximizing corporate profits, could still attempt to launch a Cultural War but was instead generally pushed into a deeply defensive position due to the increasing domination of culture by the Cultural Left.

Finally, the Far Right was more interested in their hysterical, sensationalist, and conspiratorial media than in the real world .

Until one day a Demon returned from the the past.

An “Alt Right” appeared on the scene. “The Alternative Right”: alternative to the Mainstream Right. The phenomenon is otherwise uneven. This is not a reactionary neoliberal/neoconservative New Right whose last expression was the Tea Party. Alt Right is the rebirth of the hard-core “Old Right” – ethnopolitical, traditionalist, populist – in new postmodernist forms. A unique return to the roots. And it was the Alt Rightists who managed to beat the mainstream left in its own field: to win the support of the workers using non-cultural terms (Thomas Frank was a bit outdated) and economics. Workers from the Core Belt backed protectionism against globalism.

For the Left, who has already forgotten the anti-imperialism that once characterized it, this is a geopolitical earthquake like a reversal of the Earth’s magnetic poles. Suddenly there was no point of support, no reference point. The Left must find himself given the reality of this new situation. We need self-criticism, reorientation, and re-evaluation. Answer the question: What is to be done? The most popular answer is: What we have always done, only moreso. Purge the ranks, dig in their positions.

This is a bourgeois reaction frightened by the status quo. The bureaucracies of the safe zones become the universities and the liberal self-governments of the big cities. Rolling Stone Magazine describes the formation of the anti-Trump coalition . There will be pro-immigrant groups, environmentalists, feminists, sexual minorities, gun control advocates, and  interestingly, “true conservatives” (the neoconservatives) who are reluctant to support Trump. Did I miss anyone? Did you notice? One group I failed to mention is the unions. It seems that the Left has insulted the workers. Instead of Democrats meeting with union leaders, Trump meets with them.

However, not all American Leftists are carnal cult members, confident that the repetition of certain rituals will provide them with prosperity. Some believe that the challenge of Alt-Right requires a symmetrical response: to create an alternative to the Left mainstream harkening back to the forgotten foundations of the left. Opponents see the emergence of the Alt-Left phenomenon as a new embodiment of the alliance of extremes, “the place where Pat Buchanan meets Ralph Nader, ” although Alt-Leftists reject any form of cooperation with actual fascists, hardcore racists, and obsessive and conspiratorial anti-Semites. Proponents argue that this is a de facto return to the tradition of the Old Left – “the Left as it was from the Second World War to the counter-culture of the 1960’s.”

This implies first and foremost, the primacy of economics over culture, the primordial basis of superstructure, and a return to the Marxian thesis that “being forms consciousness.” Contempt for the poor and losers in capitalist society is condemned as one of the worst sins of all.

“We will be Left on economic matters [but] more Centrist on culture,” wrote Robert Lindsay, a leading Alt Left thinker.

This approach puts the Alt Left in opposition to both technocratic social democrats that have long since taken up neoliberalism while abandoning the working class on the Right and the “Cultural Left” on the other side of the political spectrum. The Alt-Left sees the Right as simply “traitors to the working class – our class enemies,” according to Lindsay. But it is towards the second group, which the Alt-Left sees as “rootless cosmopolitans,” that the Alt-Left devotes most of its polemical fervor.

Alt Left tolerates the Cultural Left as long as they are relatively quiet about their antagonizing views. The Cultural Left is criticized not for the legitimacy or direction of cultural change but rather for its extremism.

Lindsay writes:

Gay Rights – yes! Gay politics – no! Support and tolerance for biological homosexuals to live their lives as they wish in freedom and happiness. On the other hand, homosexuality should not be exalted or promoted […].

Women’s rights – yes! Women’s politics – no! The Alternative Left supports equity feminism while rejecting  the gender feminism of radical feminists who hate men.

According to Alt-Leftists, the “Identity Politics” promoted by the Cultural Left led to the replacement of class struggle with racial and/or sexual conflict. In this view, White people were evil…and anyone who was not White was automatically a saint. This meant not only that all Whites were part of a racist class but that they also all shared collective responsibility and guilt. Let us note that while class membership can be changed relatively easily, race or gender cannot, which makes any antagonism engendered by race or gender insurmountable.

Another aspect of the Alternative Left is internationalism, but here it is understood as anti-imperialism instead of cosmopolitanism. Lindsay emphasizes that the desire of people to have a national, ethnic or religious identity should be seen as a right that can not be interfered with. The result is an acceptance of  the multiculturalism of immigrants in the first generation but the promotion of assimilation in the next. On the one hand, extreme patriotism and Western imperialism are also criticized –  the Alt Left even singles out Bernie Sanders, as as a “Cold War liberal”. On the other hand, the view that “the West is pure evil” is rejected. The Alt Left detaches itself from both anti-Semitism and Radical Zionism, accepting anti-Zionists but also moderate Zionists.

The American Alt Left has been around for only little over one year (the site Altleft.com appeared in November 2015), and is a small movement made up of a number of different strands or wings.

One of Lindsay’s followers wrote:

Unfortunately, Alt Left attracts a wide variety of weird people, and each one has their own clichéd ideas for what Alt Left should be.

Well, beginnings are always difficult.

Should Poles mimic the Alt Left? No. It is enough to return to our native traditions, a matter-of-fact, homegrown analysis of reality – simply common sense. Swallows can be seen.

Dr Hab. Jarosław Tomasiewicz,.born in 1962, is a political scientist and researcher at the Institute of History of the University of Silesia, a journalist, and an author of a number of books in recent years, Terrorism against Political Violence: An Encyclopedic Outline (2000), Between Fascism and Anarchism: New Ideas for a New Era (2000), New National Democratic Party Groups in the Third Republic (2003), Evil in the Name of Good: The Phenomenon of Political Violence (2009) and National Revolution: The Nationalist Ideas of Social Revolution in the Second Republic (2012), as well as many magazine, newspaper and journal articles. He is a regular contributor to The New Citizen.

New Citizen 13
Publisher: Association of Citizens
Website: kooperatywa.org

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Filed under Anti-Semitism, Anti-Zionism, Capitalism, Conservatism, Cultural Marxists, Democrats, Economics, Europe, Geopolitics, Immigration, Imperialism, Internationalism, Labor, Left, Liberalism, Nationalism, Neoconservatism, Neoliberalism, Obama, Poland, Political Science, Politics, Race/Ethnicity, Racism, Regional, Republicans, US Politics, USA, Vanity, Whites

by | June 3, 2017 · 4:59 AM

No Conservatives Allowed on This Website!

We have had a few conservatives posting here in the past few days. These are US-style conservatives, which are the worst kind of all. US-style conservatives are absolutely banned from posting here in any way, shape or form.

Conservatism means different things in different countries, so conservatives from much of the rest of the world (except Latin America and the UK) can continue to post. Even Canadian conservatives can continue to post, as I do not mind them. It’s not conservatism itself that is so awful. Almost every country on Earth has people who call themselves conservatives, and there are conservative parties in almost every country on Earth. But being a conservative just about anywhere outside of the Americas is more or less an acceptable position for me. I probably won’t like their politics much, but I could at least look at them and say that this is an opposition I could live with.

US conservatives and their brethren in the UK, Latin America, the Philippines, Nepal and and Indonesia are quite a different beast.

I have to think hard about conservatives in Eastern Europe, especially Estonia, Latvia and the Czech Republic. These fools had such a bad experience with Communism that they went 180 degrees in the other direction. I would have to see the positions of these conservative parties in those countries to see whether they would be OK or not.

Just to give you an example, Vladimir Putin is considered to be a right-winger, and his party United Russia advocates a politics called Russian Conservatism. Looking at the party’s platform, this is not only a conservatism that I could live with but one I might even vote for!

Conservatives in South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, and most other places in Asia are acceptable. The conservatives in the Stans, Georgia, Ukraine, and Armenia can be rather awful, particularly in the nationalist sense, but I will not ban them.

I dislike Indian conservatives, but I will not ban them.

Conservatives from the Muslim World are all acceptable. In the Muslim World, conservatism just means religious and sometimes nationalist. I can live with that. Even the ones in Iran are orders of magnitude better than the US type.

Conservatives in the Arab World are acceptable. They are mostly just religious people.

Turkish conservatives are awful, but I will not ban them. They are just religious and a particularly awful type of nationalist.

African conservatives are OK.

Conservatives in Ireland, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany,  the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Italy, Switzerland, Italy, the Balkans, Bulgaria, Greece, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, and Romania are sometimes good, sometimes pretty bad, but they are all acceptable here. Conservatism in Europe mostly means nationalism. I am actually rather fond of the conservative running Hungary, Orban. LePen conservatives leave something to be desired, but they are acceptable. They’re mostly just nationalists. Hell, I might even vote for Marine LePen! If it was down to LePen versus Macron, I would absolutely support LePen!

Conservatives from Indonesia, Nepal and Philippines are not OK. These are an “everything for the rich elite, nothing for anybody else” type of conservative. Some of them even hide under the labels of Socialist or even Communist.

The word conservative has no real inherent meaning. It means whatever people say it means.

Anyway, the conservatives in the US are pure garbage and recently they have become out and out fascists after moving in that direction for a long time. And a particularly horrible type of fascist at that, a Latin American/Filipino/Indonesian style fascist. I will not allow any US conservatives to post on this board. You all are lucky I even let you lurk here. That’s an idle threat as I can’t ban lurkers, but if they all stopped lurking, I would not mind frankly.

You all really ought to go back to the gutters you crawled out of.

PS This especially applies to Libertarians, the very worst of all the US conservative vermin. We shoot Libertarians on sight here, so you better watch out.

*This applies only to economic conservatives. If you are not an economic conservative, and your conservatism is only of the social variety or you are only conservative on race, religion, guns, law and order, respect for tradition, American nationalism, the military, gender, sexual orientation or gender identity issues, you can stay. I’m not crazy about some social conservatives, but I can live with them. I will probably even let patriotards post as long as they are not economic conservatives.

I am an American nationalist myself. I just don’t like patriotards. Of course, I very much dislike and even hate the country as it is right now, but I sure don’t want to make it worse! I have to live here too you now, and it might as well be as pleasant as possible as long I stay here.

I want what’s best for my country. I don’t want to harm this country or screw it over. That will be bad for me! And believe it or not, most US patriotards do not want what is best for the country! I have dreams of a greater and better America. It’s not impossible, but we will have to undergo some serious cultural changes. One of the reasons I am so against illegal immigration is because it is ruining my country and making this place even worse. Also illegal immigration is terrible for US workers and I am for the workers. I am against H-1B visas for the same reason – they are wrecking my country. IT workers are workers too, so they are my comrades. I want what is best for America and American workers.

I cannot live with economic conservatives. I like cancer way more than I like US conservatives. Cancer is much more decent and respectable.

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by | December 2, 2016 · 9:17 AM

The “Taiwan Miracle” Nonsense

The people who ran Taiwan were the same folks who had completely run China into the ground by 1949, resulting in a life expectancy of 1949. Their legacy was repeated famines, foot-binding, murder of female children, epidemic wife-beating and more or less feudal relations in the countryside. Most Chinese peasants were little more than slaves or serfs. They were serfs on a landlord’s feudal estate.

The landlord or his buddies could go visit the serfs at any time and do whatever he wanted to with them? He had the power of life and death over them. He could kill or beat up any serf he wanted to at any time. He could steal any of their property. And especially he could rape the wives and daughters of the peasants, which he did in epidemic form.

When the Communists took over, in the first few years, they did a land reform, dissolved the feudal estates and distributed the landlords’ land to peasants with no compensation. The Communists simply stole the landlords’ land. And in same time  period, the Communists decided to  put the landlords on trial. The trials were held in the villages and towns and the peasants were to serve as judge and jury. These were wild raucous public trials and in most cases, the peasants convicted the landlords of many of the crimes above and sentenced them to death. Up to 3 million landlords were executed by the peasants themselves.

This is what happens in peasant uprisings under feudalism. Study the subject of peasant uprisings down through time, and this is how they always end up. For centuries before feudalism was dismantled, there were peasant uprisings the world over. They even occurred in Peru under Inca rule! Usually they were horrifically bloody and if the peasants won, typically they simply killed all the feudal lords and everyone who helped them. The Chmielnicki Uprising in the 1500’s in Poland resulted in all the landlords and half the Jews because they were tax collectors for the landlords. But it also caused the deaths of 1/3 of the population of the country!

Under the Nationalists, feudalism and warlordism was the way in China. There was almost no state at all. Feudal landlords also served as warlords. Their warlord armies held sway in the countryside.

Go read The Good Earth by Pearl Buck sometime. That is what life was like in China under the Nationalists and that was the same way it had been for centuries. The Nationalists did not give a damn about anyone who was not rich. It was a feudal party of landlords and warlords.

The Taiwan miracle happened because when the Nationalists fled China, they took almost every nickel in the country with them. That’s why Mao had such a hard time at first. He was starting with more or less nothing. Also they completely dismantled the feudal landlord-warlord system under severe pressure from the US. Then they did a land reform under heavy pressure from the US also. Then the US flooded money into Taiwan for decades in an effort to make Taiwan an anti-Communist showcase, sort of a propaganda exhibit to compare it with China.

Sure the Nationalists turned around Taiwan. Taiwan has a population of what? 50 million? Try doing that with 1.3 million. And the only reason Taiwan junked warlordism, landlordism and feudalism and did a land reform was because Mao won the war. If Mao would have lost the war, China would have just continued with their landlordism, warlordism and feudalism because that was how the Nationalists had governed for decades before and how their predecessors had governed for centuries before that.

If Mao wouldn’t have won, why would the Nationalists have dismantled the system? And don’t forget that 4% of the population left the country and took almost every dime in the place with them when they left. If they would have stayed the money would have stayed in China, so the nationalists would have had 96% less money. Show me how they do their miracle now? And if there had been no revolution, why would the Nationalists have made those massive economic changes they did when they went to Taiwan. Getting rid of landlordism, feudalism and warlordism was a response to the threat of Communism. If they would have continued on with the system the Nationalists were running in China on Taiwan, they would have had another Communist uprising on the island for sure.

Oh and one more thing. When the Nationalists fled to Taiwan, one of the first things they did was to kill 300,000 Communists in Taiwan.

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Filed under Asia, Asian, China, Chinese, Economics, European, Geopolitics, History, Left, Maoism, Marxism, Nationalism, Poland, Political Science, Regional, SE Asia, SE Asian, Sociology, Taiwan, USA

by | October 25, 2016 · 12:04 AM

Anti-Communist Lies about Vietnam, Belarus and Ukraine

Actually Pretty Funny: The problem is the middle of the city was originally designed by Frenchies, and it had never been flooded. I heard your argument too. Let me clarify, since there was no regulation for 30 years, people built, and built and built with permission from their political connections, until there is no more more land left for the water to reach the water-table. Moreover, the water for that is lackluster. And since everyone has political connections, everyone has built, except my family who was kinda…samurai.

People endure, of course, pretending that’s life is beautiful in that wretched condition. Until the infrastructure collapses totally, and then the political chaos comes like in East Europe and Russia of the 1990s. And then depressed and enraged people kill each other heartily, like in Russia.
The middle of the city:

Funds for Water drainage is lackluster

You are quite unreasonable.

In Vietnam, the Vietcong had to scare the Indians, the Chinese to quit the country to somewhat make it work. See photo.

Saigon under the rain.

Of course people live to, Socialists have roads too, but…A large chunk of the money was cut before being pumped into the economy.

Ok so a crappy Communist government that wasn’t even Communist because it was corrupt and didn’t even put any regulations on anyone like a Communist government is supposed to screwed up and left the situation totally unregulated and let people do whatever they wanted to and it fucked up everything.

In other words, a totally free market situation with no government oversight which is typical of 3rd World countries screwed up everything.

You know what 3rd world capitalist countries are like? Even worse. They have no regulations on anything ever because that’s the way capitalism often works in the 3rd World. Everyone gets to do what they want.

Also it quite common in former colonies that the stuff that the colonial power built was very made but the stuff that the newly decolonized independent government made is junk. This is typical, even in 3rd world capitalist countries.

I have known people in the Philippines and those roads flood all the time. So capitalist Philippines is better than Communist Vietnam?

I will tell you one more thing. Capitalists do not believe in flood control or roads or any of that. They always starve the government of money because they don’t want to pay taxes or out of anti-government or small government ideology. The only people who believe in spending lots of money on public works are leftwingers, socialists, Communists and even liberals. They believe in Big Government. The only way to get all those roads and public works done is to have Big Government.

Actually Pretty Funny: I don’t hate Lukashenko, but you need to know that Socialism only works in very, very, rare cases. And you don’t even know what like underneath. Do Belarus have road problems, of course you don’t know. You need photo for it to work.

You lied again. I Googled “roads Belarus.” I found nothing remarkable that said there  were any  road problems in Belarus. I saw photos and videos of roads in Belarus and frankly, they could have been driving in the US. The roads look and feel exactly like our roads.

In the video above, the videographer is apparently going from Russia to Belarus. The road in Russia is completely terrible  –  the worst you can imagine. They go over the border to Belarus and the road suddenly becomes fantastic. So it seems like you are just lying.

Actually Pretty Funny: Since East Ukrainians were quite tired of the own industry, when people of other regions rose up, they didn’t even lift their hands. Being privileged with useless industry is not very fun, people still had to pay for the old (mis)management Soviet class. Of course they would have fought tooth and nail to protect the system 20 years ago, since the industry was still quite new by Soviet standards back then.

I caught you in another lie. You said that Ukraine had not grown like Belarus because it retained Soviet industry. In fact, the place that retained Soviet industry was Belarus! The place that privatization failed was Ukraine. Ukraine failed horribly in privatization because for 25 years they have been electing thieves who have been stealing every nickel in the place. Going from Communism to capitalism was a disaster for Ukraine. That is why the people in the East are so nostalgic for the USSR.

Actually Pretty Funny: But time changes, and people evolve. I mean Poland has evolved and has become a role model. People tend to look around and up.

https://www.reinisfischer.com/img/ukrainevspolandgdp.png

You are lying again. You are comparing two countries that both did Shock Therapy and completely privatized. In one, Poland, it worked very well. In Ukraine, another, it was a failure. You are trying to say that Poland is capitalist while Ukraine is still Communist, but that’s not true. I don’t know how you make an anti-Communist point by comparing two capitalist countries that privatized.

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Filed under Asia, Belarus, Capitalism, Capitalists, Colonialism, Economics, Eurasia, Europe, Government, Left, Liberalism, Marxism, Philippines, Poland, Political Science, Regional, Russia, Scum, SE Asia, Socialism, Ukraine, USSR, Vietnam

by | May 31, 2016 · 9:13 AM

Manufacturing Consent: What Good Is Freedom If No One Uses It?

SHI writes:

You do realize that Russia isn’t free in any sense of the word. That makes any comparison with the current situation in the West totally pointless.

Maybe the Russians have always preferred it that way but for last three centuries, that entire expanse of land called Russia has settled for nothing but one strongman dictator after another. From the autocratic Tsars to tyrannical leaders like Stalin, Khrushchev and Putin now, if you’re a child growing up in Russia, you have not known freedom the way a Western child does. There are exceptions though, Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin broke away from Russian iron man traditions and tried to be benign leaders but their short-lived experiments failed.

There is no disputing the fact that Vlad the Putin is the biggest autocratic tyrant at the moment, not very different from Gaddafi, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, Assad or Pinochet. This man oppresses his own people. Given a choice, most Russians would want to escape their country but they can’t as the State still puts a restriction on emigration. If you were born in Russia, you simply can’t defect to another country unless you’re married to a person over there. That is why the Russian mail order bride business has always been booming.

Why do you think the Polish, Lithuanian, Romanian and Hungarian people like to distance themselves so much from Russia? Not only are their countries most active NATO members but the people themselves are anti-Russia. Why do you think Ukrainians want to escape the shadow of Russia to merge with Western Europe and the Schengen region? While Britain can’t wait to escape from EU as the overall sentiment over there favors Brexit, the former countries of the Soviet Bloc can’t wait to join the Western Hemisphere.

Thing is, people in the West take their freedoms for granted. They simply have no concept of what it feels like to raise your child in a tyrannical, dictatorial regime. There are things like internet censorship, forced incarcerations and murders that you take as “normal”.

Maybe the recent US elections seem like a complete joke when you find that your Final 2 happen to be Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. But that’s a problem that can be fixed within four years. If you were born in Russia, you don’t have that choice in the first place. You have to put up with your autocratic government day in and day out. And so will your children.

It might sound cliched but the US is indeed a free society. Just check the annual rankings of Freedom House. There are other freedom indices including the UK-based Democracy index, Canada-based Fraser Institute’s “Index of Freedom in the World” and Press Freedom Index compiled by Reporters without Borders. Countries like China, Russia and Islamic countries are consistently scoring “not free” in every independent assessment each year the rankings are prepared. Just check this year’s Freedom House map, no one really emigrates to any country that isn’t marked “blue”.

Let us take this apart one by one.

You do realize that Russia isn’t free in any sense of the word. That makes any comparison with the current situation in the West totally pointless.

Russia is far freer than we are. There is a huge dissident media, mostly funded by the West. There are large dissident websites that are very popular, and there are a number of dissident newspapers, radio stations and even TV from outside. You can buy dissident newspapers anywhere you want in Moscow. Dissidents are quoted every single day in the Russian media.

How many large dissident websites do we have? How many dissident newspapers are there in the US? How many dissident newsmagazines? How many dissident radio stations? One, Pacifica, and no one listens to it. How frequently are dissidents quoted in the US media. Never.

Maybe the Russians have always preferred it that way but for last three centuries, that entire expanse of land called Russia has settled for nothing but one strongman dictator after another.

Yes, they like it that way.

From the autocratic Tsars to tyrannical leaders like Stalin, Khrushchev and Putin now, if you’re a child growing up in Russia, you have not known freedom the way a Western child does.

It is far freer under Putin than it ever was under Communism.

There are exceptions though, Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin broke away from Russian iron man traditions and tried to be benign leaders but their short-lived experiments failed.

Yeltsin looted the country. The Communist Parliament was blocking all of his free market reforms, so he dissolved Parliament by decree and when they refused to accept his decree, he called out and the military and he attacked his own Parliament with tanks and guns. 600 people died, including a lot of legislators. That would be like Obama calling out the US military to open fire with tanks and guns on Congress and killing a bunch of Congressmen. Hell, even Putin hasn’t done that.

The US media cheered wildly. Not one single outlet failed to cheer. They had an election and the West sent over moneybags guys with literal suitcases full of illegal money for the campaign. These guys were photographed walking down the street carrying literal boxes of money. They flooded the campaign with illegal money and he won. 100% of the US media cheered for this. Yeltsin sold out the country to the US. He sold the whole place for 10 cents on the dollar to a bunch of Jews in the UK, the US and Israel and bankers in the US, UK and Frankfurt. They looted the whole country bare until there was nothing left to steal. Why do you think Putin came in. The Yeltsin supporters now have 1% support in the population.

87% of the population loves Putin. The opposition is miniscule.

Yeltsin was NOT a Democrat. He was way worse than Putin. Things are much freer under Putin than they were under Yeltsin.

There is no disputing the fact that Vlad the Putin is the biggest autocratic tyrant at the moment, not very different from Gaddafi, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, Assad or Pinochet.

Those are actual dictatorships. And they also killed a lot of people. Putin has hardly killed anyone. Putin does not have a dictatorship. There are free elections, however most media is state media, and the state media is biased for Putin, but how is this different from the West? Putin wins all the elections because the dissidents are all seen as traitors.

This man oppresses his own people.

How can you oppress people with 87% support?

Given a choice, most Russians would want to escape their country but they can’t as the State still puts a restriction on emigration.

My understanding is that you can walk out of that place anytime you wish. Anyone can leave, it’s just that most do not want to. If 87% support the President, why would they all want to leave?

Why do you think the Polish, Lithuanian, Romanian and Hungarian people like to distance themselves so much from Russia?

Because they were formerly under the thumb of the USSR which more or less forced Communism on them. They got rid of Communism, and they have been mad at Russia ever since, although the Hungarian leader is pretty pro-Russian. They’re all just drinking the Koolaid.

Of those countries listed, only Poland and Lithuania are Russia-haters, and the Lithuanians are Nazis. They have statues of Nazis up all over the country. All of their big heroes are Nazis.

The Poles are simply insane. They hate Russia far more than they hate Nazis. The Nazis war on Poland killed 10 million Poles. The Soviets killed 275,000 Poles. So the Poles hate Russians. The Poles are insane.

Not only are their countries most active NATO members but the people themselves are anti-Russia.

Everyone in the West is anti-Russia because of the brainwash. There is not one single dissident pro-Russia media outlet anywhere in the West. With anti-Russian propaganda on every media outlet, how do you expect people to think?

However, most Hungarians are particularly anti-Russia because they elected a pro-Russian leader. Most Romanians don’t care about Russia.

Why do you think Ukrainians want to escape the shadow of Russia to merge with Western Europe and the Schengen region?

Because they hate Russia.

But they didn’t even want to join the EU. The EU supporters never had more than 35%. Ukraine was split between pro-EU and pro-Russia factions until the Nazi coup. After the coup, all of the pro-Russian parties were outlawed and a number of their legislators were murdered. The leader of the biggest pro-Russia party, the Party of Regions, fled to Russia after the regime tried to kill him by setting his house on fire, but they set his neighbor’s house on fire instead. Before the coup, the country was badly split between pro-Russian and pro-EU factions.

The Ukies think they will join the EU and get rich. But they are poor because all of their leaders have been stealing from them since Independence, not because they are close to Russia. They won’t get rich by joining the EU.

While Britain can’t wait to escape from EU as the overall sentiment over there favors Brexit, the former countries of the Soviet Bloc can’t wait to join the Western Hemisphere.

They’ve all already joined, not that it’s done them much good. The Greeks want out too.

Thing is, people in the West take their freedoms for granted.

What freedoms? If you have no dissident press, you have no free press. If you have no dissident press, you have no freedom of speech. If you have no dissident politicians, you do not have a free politics. Russians are far freer than any Western country.

They simply have no concept of what it feels like to raise your child in a tyrannical, dictatorial regime.

Yes but that’s not Putin.

There are things like internet censorship, forced incarcerations and murders that you take as “normal”.

There is no Internet censorship in Russia. The Russian-language web is flooded with dissident sites, all paid for by the West.

Hardly any dissidents go to jail in Russia. They might arrest a few from time to time, but dissidents are quoted in the Russian media every single day. Most of them are free to yap along all they wish.

Yes, there have been a few killings of dissidents, but Putin was not involved in the most recent notorious one outside the Kremlin. There have been a few killings of journalists, but there were many more killings of dissidents under Yeltsin than under Putin. Yeltsin had many of his opponents killed.

Maybe the recent US elections seem like a complete joke when you find that your Final 2 happen to be Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. But that’s a problem that can be fixed within four years.

No dissident politician ever runs in the US, or at least one never gets very far. Trump is very interesting in that he is an actual US dissident politician who has made it into the final round. I cannot remember the last time that happened, but it was probably Kennedy, and he was murdered by the Deep State who run the US. See what happens to dissident politicians in the US? See what happens when the American people elect a dissident? The Deep State kills them. That’s why few politicians go against the Deep State and the System because they are afraid of getting the “Kennedy treatment.”

If you were born in Russia, you don’t have that choice in the first place.

Actually elections in Russia are quite fair other than the media issues. The worst dissidents you could possibly imagine run against Putin. I mean almost out and out traitors. We never have any dissidents like that running for President. Putin wins overwhelmingly because the population thinks the Opposition are traitors.

You have to put up with your autocratic government day in and day out. And so will your children.

Sure, but this is how they like it. I know Russians, and they tell me they are fine with the system.

It might sound cliched but the US is indeed a free society.

It isn’t. There is no dissident press, so there’s no freedom of the press. Because there’s no free press, there’s no freedom of speech. There are no or almost no dissident politicians, so we don’t have free politics, although Trump is changing that.

Just check the annual rankings of Freedom House.

You realize that Freedom House is run by the reactionary Reaganite Republican nuts, and their joke indexes are worthless, right?

There are other freedom indices including the UK-based Democracy index, Canada-based Fraser Institute’s “Index of Freedom in the World” and Press Freedom Index compiled by Reporters without Borders.

Like I said, what good is some abstract freedom of press if you have no dissident media? What good is freedom of the press if there is no dissident media to voice it in? What good is free politics if there are few if any dissident politicians? You might as well be living in a dictatorship. Freedoms are no good if you can’t use them or if nobody ever uses them. When everyone goes along with the program automatically, you’re no different than North Korea.

Countries like China, Russia and Islamic countries are consistently scoring “not free” in every independent assessment each year the rankings are prepared.

I would agree that China is not free, however, there are many political protests. There are 100 political protests every single day in China. The authorities just let almost all of them go on, and they don’t do anything about it. There is no free press though, I agree.

Islamic countries are not free because they can’t handle freedom, and they do better under dictatorships. Look what happens when they try to do democracy in the Arab World. It doesn’t work. Malaysia is a pretty free country, and Pakistan does have dissident political parties that regularly get 15% of the vote. There is a large dissident political party in Turkey, though they are under siege. Lebanon is a free country, as is Tunisia. Algeria is free.

Yemen is such a free country that a dissident movement just overthrew the government by force! You can’t get much freer than that. In Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, dissidents are armed to the teeth and are threatening to overthrow the government. You can’t get much freer than that in a sense anyway! The Iraqi Parliament is split; Sadr’s party and the Sunni parties are very much dissident parties.

Just check this year’s Freedom House map, no one really emigrates to any country that isn’t marked “blue”.

This is not true. There is a lot of immigration to China from all over the world. There is also a lot of immigration to Russia from Ukraine and the former Soviet states to the south and east. Under Ghaddafi there was huge immigration from Sub-Saharan Africa. Egypt was the same – mass immigration from Black Africa to Egypt. There is huge immigration to the Gulf nations from all over the world to work. Before the crash, many Colombians had immigrated to Venezuela for a better life. There is huge immigration of Central Americans to Mexico.

Just check this year’s Freedom House map, no one really emigrates to any country that isn’t marked “blue”.

That map must be some sort of a joke. Venezuela is the freest country in Latin America. The opposition has many media unbelievably outlets, and they all resemble Fox News X10. They tell constant lies, and they have regularly called for assassinating the President. They continue to do so now, and now all of the Opposition press is agitating for a coup. Could you imagine if the US had huge media outlets that told the most vicious lies on a regular basis and regularly called for the assassination of Obama, and now were screaming for the US military to stage a military coup and overthrow Obama to put in a military dictatorship? Venezuela is a 10X freer than the US.

The Opposition has taken over Congress and stages constant demonstrations/riots in the streets. And recently the Opposition is armed and has started assassinating government officials.

Venezuela has the fairest elections on Earth.

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by | May 9, 2016 · 9:53 AM

“The Only Thing I Hate More Than Communists Are Anti-Communists”

First of all, I want to say that I agree somewhat with a famous Russian dissident who said, “The only people I hate more than Communists are anti-Communists.”

Sure, Communism has some issues to be sure, and I’m not exactly a Leninist myself. But however bad Communists are, anti-Communists are so much worse. By anti-Communism I do not mean reasonable people who simply feel that Communism is a lousy idea. I mean the anti-Communist fanatics, most of whom are about as insane as any other fanatic. Anti-Communists lie, and they are crazy. Most of what they say about Communism is nothing but lies. Communism has a pretty serious downside, and you would think they could limit themselves to the facts and still make their case, but no, they have to lie like all ideologues. First of all, truly socialist or Left anti-Communists are not common. I do not mind such folks myself. You would be interested to know that most of the Cuban dissident groups (last time I checked there were 250 different groups) are actually socialists, albeit social democrats. Socialist anti-Communists are fairly common in places like the Czech Republic, Poland, Germany and honestly most of Europe nowadays. Most of Europe has been socialist for a long time now, but it is a ty0pe of socialism (social democracy) that is pretty hostile to Communism.

The nutcases in Europe are the psychos who run the North Atlantic Terrorist Organization (NATO), most people in the Baltics, far too many East Europeans, way too many Finns and the entire political caste of the UK, where there has not been any Left since Tony Blair destroyed it in the 1990’s. The NATO maniacs are actually fascists and they have long had links to Nazi and fascist organizations all over Europe.NATO set u the Gladio Network or Stay Behind Network which was supposed to conduct guerrilla war in case of a Soviet takeover of Western Europe. Unfortunately almost everyone in Gladio was either a fascist or an out and out Nazi. During the Cold War, the Gladio Network was not somnolent but was actually active. They carried out assassinations all over Europe for decades and in Italy they set off many false flag bombings which they blamed on the Left during the Strategy of Tension. The US, NATO and the CIA were up to their necks in all of this insanity.

The US-backed Nazi government in Ukraine is based on the Gladio Network in that region.

Anti-Communists are almost always rightwingers, and they are some of the worst, that is murderous, rightwingers of all. And they have a curious definition of Communist. You raised the minimum wage? You are a Communist who needs to be removed in a coup or shot, and the CIA will help us do just that. You a member of a labor union? You are a Communist who needs to be killed. Are you anyone who is leftwing in any way? You are a Communist. Everyone on the Left from the wimpiest reformist to the guerrilla with an AK-47 is a Communist who needs to be killed.

Anti-Communists are truly the worst. And the tragic and enraging part is that anti-Communists have been running the US state via the Deep State since World War 2, and since World War 2, US culture has been based on the same insane anti-Communist philosophy as the ideologues. The true religion of America after 1945 was Anti-Communism.

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by | February 14, 2016 · 3:20 PM

What Was the Worst Cultural Genocide Ever?

How about the Romanization of the Celtic World?

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Yes, all of that land was formerly controlled by the Celts. Even Southwest Poland was Celtic. There is an endangered language spoken there called Silesian that has at its very base a Celtic layer which is the oldest layer of this Slavic language. The French language was Celtic Gaulish, the influence of which can still be seen in the odd French phonology. I do not think there is much Celtic left in the Iberian languages, but I could be wrong on that. Surely there is little or no Celtic left in Turkish. One wonders about Celtic traces in Dutch, German and the rest of Slavic.

In our modern era, Celtic languages only (barely) survive in Ireland (Irish), Scotland (Scottish Gaelic), Wales (Welsh), the Isle of Man (Manx) and Cornwall (Cornish) in England, and Brittany (Breton) in France. In Eastern Europe, Celts were supplanted by Germanic, Iranian and Slavic tribes. In France, Iberia and the Balkans, the Celts were assimilated to the Roman Empire.

It is not particularly difficult to convert a native elite to the language of a conqueror, but converting an entire population to a new language in a short period of time is quite a feat. The Romans did this mostly by showing the superiority of the Latin language and convincing the natives to give up their Celtic words.

In fact, the Romanization of Dacia where the original Celtic speaking people were completely converted to Latin which then turned into Romanian is cited by Wikipedia as one of the worst cultural genocides ever.

Of course there are many other examples of cultural genocide, some of them ongoing.

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