Category Archives: Caribbean

by | November 17, 2017 · 11:25 PM

The Case for Splitting off Multiple English Dialects as Separate Languages

Here (on Italian dialects – actually many of which are separate languages).

One can make an excellent case that AAVE (Ebonics), Bayou/Cajun English, Deep South English, Appalachian English, New York English, Newfoundland English, and of course Jamaican creole and Scots are separate languages. Even Scottish English and Geordie probably qualify.

A recent study found only 54% intelligibility for Standard English speakers of Geordie. The speakers were L2 English learners in the Czech Republic, but they scored 100% on the “home” test, which was a test of a US television English. Another study found 42% intelligibility of Scots for native speakers of US English. Having heard Hard Scots spoken by the Scottish underclass, I would say my intelligibility of it was ~5-10% at best or possibly even less. It was almost as bad as listening to something like Greek, and one got the feeling listening to it that you were actually listening to some foreign tongue like, say, Greek.

At any rate, 42% and 54% very well qualify both Scots and Geordie as separate languages. Scots is already split, and it sure would be nice to split Geordie, but to say people would get mad is an understatement.

Scots and Jamaican creole are already split off. There is a lie going around the intellectual circles that it is still controversial in Linguistics whether Scots and Jamaican Creole are separate languages. In fact it is not controversial at all.

I have been listening to English my whole life as an American, and I still cannot understand Bayou speech, hard Southern English, Newfoundland English or the hard forms of Appalachian English or New York English. There are some very weird forms of English spoken on the US Atlantic coastal islands that cannot be understood by anyone not from there, or at least not by me. Gulla English in South Carolina is already split as a creole.

Generally the criterion we use is mutual intelligibility. Also if you can’t pick it up pretty quickly, it’s a separate language.

A speaker of hard New York English came to my mother’s school a while back, and no one could understand him. They still could not understand him after three months of listening to him – this is how you know you are dealing with a separate language. He finally learned how to speak California English, and then he was understood.

I have been listening to hard British English my whole life, and I still cannot understand them. I even had a British girlfriend for 1.5 years, and I still could not understand her on the phone. She went to my parents house for dinner, stayed a couple of hours, and my brother said he didn’t understand a word she said.

You can make an excellent case that the harder forms of British English (or Australian English for that matter) are not the same language as US English. The problem is that if you tried to split them off, everyone would go insane (including a lot of very foolish linguists), and there would be a wild uproar.

Generally we use 90% as the split between language and dialect. Less that that, separate language. More than that, dialect. We use this criterion to split languages from dialects everywhere, yet if we tried to do it for English, the resulting firestorm would be so ferocious that it would not be worth it, but it would be perfectly valid scientifically. Even the very well-validated split of Scots has driven the English-speaking world half-nuts.

I actually have a post in my drafts where I split English into ~10-15 different languages, but I have been terrified to post it. My post splitting German into 137 different languages did not go over well with the Net linguists (who are mostly loudmouths, fools, cranks, and idiots), although a major Germanist, a professor at a big university in Europe wrote me when I was only at 90 languages and said, “I think you are right!” Still, if I try to split English, I may ignite one Hell of a damned firestorm, and I’m just too chicken.

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Filed under Australia, Balto-Slavic-Germanic, Britain, Canada, Caribbean, Dialectology, English language, German, Germanic, Indo-European, Indo-Hittite, Jamaica, Language Families, Linguistics, North America, Northeast, Regional, Scots, Sociolinguistics, South, South Carolina, USA

by | November 14, 2017 · 11:18 PM

Liberation Theology: Jesus Christ as Marxist Guerrilla in the Jungle with a Machine Gun

From the Sandinistas of Nicaragua to the URNG of Guatemala to the guerrilla column in Honduras led by the Irish Catholic priest in 1983 to Father Aristide’s Lavalas in Haiti to the ELN in Colombia to the Chavistas in Venezuela, all of these radical leftwing groups had one thing in common: they all came out of Liberation Theology, more or less a “Jesus Christ, Marxist guerrilla in the jungle with a machine gun” type of armed to the teeth Catholicism.

Liberation Theology came out a movement of Professors of Pedagogy in Brazil in 1964, especially an influential book written by a priest named Gutierrez. The argument was that teaching in Latin America was an overtly political act, and teachers should ideally by Leftist revolutionaries. Out of this flowed many documents laying out Liberation Theology or “the preferential option for the poor.” It was most powerful among lay workers, of which there are many in Latin America. In heavily Catholic areas, Catholic lay workers are nearly an army.

The French Communist Party in  France long had Catholic roots as did the PCI in Italy. Near the end of his life, Fidel Castro praised Catholicism and said he was a “cultural Catholic.” Hugo Chavez and the Chavistas were of course a ferocious part of the Catholic Left. Chavez Leftism was heavily infused with the social teachings of the Catholic Church.

Even the viciously anti-Christian Sendero Luminoso in Peru had many supporters in the Catholic Church, mostly at the lay and priest level but surprisingly all the way up to the bishop level. Sendero killed many reactionary Protestant missionaries in their war, but they left the priests alone.

The great Edith Lagos, a 19 year old year revolutionary woman who led one of the first Sendero columns, was killed in battle in 1982. Her funeral in Ayacucho at night a bit later attracted 30,000 visitors, nearly the entire population of the town. Everyone was in line for the funeral – the local police, the local government and of course the entire local  Catholic clergy. The line wormed all through the city for hours far into the night. She was treated to an actual Catholic funeral right there in the church led by the local priest. Her casket stood next to the priest as he delivered his sermon. It had a Sendero Communist flag on it.

A communist flag on a coffin in a Catholic church! The crowd then filed out through the town to the graveyard where she was buried in the middle of the night. Her tomb exists to this day, although it has been repeatedly bombed by reactionaries. Local Indians make patronages to the tomb on a regular basis, leaving flowers at it. Rumor has it that she has obtained informal sainthood and is now Saint Edith Lagos in the local Catholic Churches.

FARC called itself officially atheist, although they had the support of many priests in the countryside where the FARC held sway. Nevertheless, most FARC rank and file were Catholics.

In Paraguay, a former guerrilla was elected president. He was also a former Catholic priest.

The armed Marxist Left in Uruguay and Brazil also had deep links to the Catholic Church.

In the US, we have something called Cold War liberals. This is the pathetic Left of the United States,  people who would be rightwingers or center-right anywhere else on Earth.

 

 

 

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Filed under Brazil, Caribbean, Catholicism, Central America, Christianity, Colombia, Conservatism, Cuba, Europe, France, Haiti, Honduras, Italy, Latin America, Left, Liberalism, Marxism, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Peru, Political Science, Regional, Religion, South America, Uruguay, USA, Venezuela

by | November 14, 2017 · 11:04 PM

Why There Is No Left in the US: The Pathetic Story of the Cold War Liberals

In Haiti, Father Bertrand Aristide was a Leftist Catholic priest, a follower of Liberation Theology, who ruled the country for years. He won completely free and fair elections with 94% of the vote. He was removed by the Bush Administration which funded an insurgency out of reactionary Dominican Republic to overthrow the state.

Aristide had been reappointed by Bill Clinton after being ousted in a previous coup, but Clinton demanded that Aristide the disband the army and the national police as part of a deal to put him back in power. In this way, Clinton the liberal Democrat assured that Aristide was helpless against the insurgency that invaded from the  Dominican Republic. Now you understand why I hate American liberal Democrats so much. They’re all reactionaries! Yes, they are more Left that the ultra-right Republican Party, but not by much. At best, US Cold War liberals are centrists or the center-right. At worst, they are just another species of conservative.

My own father, a dyed in the wool liberal Democrat and former member of Americans for Democratic Action, one of the most Left parts of the Democratic Party back in the 1950’s, supported both the removal of the Sandinistas and Aristide. My father was a Cold War Liberal. This is as Left as Democrats get in the US, and by world standards, my father was a reactionary!

Bernie Sanders is also a Cold War Liberal. His domestic policies are pretty good, but on foreign affairs, Sanders is a nightmare, just another damned reactionary. In the US, everyone is reactionary on foreign affairs – all of the Republicans and almost all of the Democrats. It’s the bipartisan reactionary consensus – they’re throwing it all down for US imperialism,  come Hell or high water. And this sorry fact makes a good case for the argument that there is no Left in the US –  or none to speak of for that matter.

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Filed under Caribbean, Cold War, Conservatism, Democrats, Geopolitics, Haiti, History, Imperialism, Latin America, Left, Liberalism, Political Science, Politics, Regional, Republicans, US Politics

by | October 4, 2017 · 8:54 PM

Jesus Was a Socialist

Modern Protestant Prosperity Doctrine is such a perversion of the spirit of Christianity that it can only be seen as a heresy.

Jesus famously said, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to get into Heaven.” This comment is very poorly understood – most seem to think he is talking about a camel actually walking through the eye of a sewing needle, which is of course not possible. However, at the time, “The Eye of the Needle” was a pass high in the mountains of Palestine. It was indeed passable, but it was such an ardous climb over such rugged mountains that many camels simply could not hack the trek and were not able to accomplish the journey. Hence, it was possible for a camel to go through the Eye of the Needle, but it was not an easy task at all, and many simply could not cut it. And so it was with the rich and their chances of heavenly grace and redemption according to Jesus.

Liberation Theology, the Catholic doctrine of the Social Gospel updated and radicalized in Latin America to “Jesus with a machine gun” was utilized by many armed guerrilla groups as a religion of revolution, even armed revolution.

The philosophy of this doctrine was to preach for “the preferential option of the poor,” and this is right in accord with Catholic Social Gospel if not a supercharged form of it. It is seen in Latin America as a nearly subversive and even insurrectionist doctrine, and in a sense it is, although most LT preachers and lay people are not armed.

In fact, Venezuelan Bolivarianism or Chavismo was profoundly influenced by Liberation Theology and there is evidence that many of the other New Left regimes in Latin America were also. LT was a huge influence on the Sandinistas, the FMLN guerrillas and now politicians in El Salvador, the ELN in Colombia (founded by an actual priest with a machine gun, Camilo Torres), the PT of Lula and Dilma Youssef in Brazil, Evo Morales in Bolivia, possibly Correa in Ecuador and certainly Paraguay under Fernando Lugo of Paraguay, a former priest and guerrilla who ruled that land until a US sponsored coup removed him.

The Lavalas Movement in Haiti of Jon Bertrand Aristide, also removed in a US-sponsored coup, was profoundly influenced by LT; in fact, Aristide himself was a preacher of Liberation Theology.

In recent decades, there has been a lot of discussion in Cuba about a “Catholic Communism” and now that believers may join the party, this movement seems to be on an upswing. The novel doctrine was that Catholicism and Marxism were indeed compatible with each other instead of being oxymoronic. Castro himself stated that he was a “social Catholic” a few years before he died.

The extent to which LT has influenced the regimes of Batchelet in Chile or Fernandez in Argentina, the former guerrillas in power in Uruguay under Jose Mujica, or Ollanta Humala in Peru is not known, although there were many LT preachers in Peru a few decades ago, and incredibly enough, many priests actually supported the Shining Path.

But the Social Gospel, Liberation Theology, and the “Catholic Communism” that developed in some European lands in the 20th Century have much more in common with a pure interpretation of Jesus’ teaching than the individualist and materialist Protestantism that developed in the US. “Jesus was a socialist” always makes more sense than “Jesus was a capitalist,” although most Evangelicals are loath to admit this. Nevertheless, they squirm and act uncomfortable when you bring it up, so it shows that on some level they at least worry it is true.

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Filed under Argentina, Bolivarianism, Brazil, Caribbean, Catholicism, Central America, Chile, Christianity, Colombia, Cuba, Economics, Ecuador, El Salvador, Latin America, Left, Marxism, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Peru, Regional, Religion, Revolution, Socialism, South America, Uruguay, Venezuela

by | August 31, 2017 · 12:01 AM

In Latin America, Hispanics Are Much Better off Catholic Than Converting to Evangelical Protestantism

At least Hispanic Catholics have the potential to go in a Left direction, and there is a long history in Latin America of them doing just that, especially with the explosion in the great Liberation Theology movement of the last fifty years. The Catholic Church, always a mechanism of stasis and reaction in the reaction in the region, has now also become a nearly revolutionary force since the early 1960’s. Camilo Torres is not some made-up person. He really existed.

The Sandinistas and the FMLN are both Catholics and Leftist. The ELN Colombian guerrillas were always Catholics, and their original leader was a priest with an AK-47. The Chavistas in Venezuela are Leftist and very Catholic.

Believers are now allowed to join the Cuban Communist Party, and there has been a lot of intellectual ferment in recent decades in Cuba around notions of Catholic Communism and the like. Actually there is a long tradition of Catholic Communism predating even Liberation Theology going all the way back to the 1930’s in Eastern Europe. Leftwing Catholics have been arguing that Catholics can be Communists for nearly a century.

How many Protestants do you see making arguments like that? Along with all of the idiocy and reaction of their backwards rules, at least Catholics in general seem to have a much greater tendency to go left, socialist or even Communist, and that tendency seems to be baked right into the religion. The Catholic Worker movement in the US is a good example. How many Protestant movements like the Catholic Worker movement sprung up back then? Basically zero.

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Filed under Caribbean, Catholicism, Central America, Christianity, Colombia, Cuba, Economics, Europe, Hispanics, Latin America, Left, Marxism, Nicaragua, Race/Ethnicity, Regional, Religion, Revolution, Socialism, South America, Venezuela

by | August 30, 2017 · 5:58 PM

The Mark of the Beast: Another Look

Interesting new view on the meaning of the Mark of the Beast in Biblical terms by commenter Judith Mirville. Turns out the Mark is not what we have always thought it meant. It is something else entirely.

Judith Mirville: This microchipping thing is getting creepier and creepier, but it is NOT the real mark of the Beast as referred to by the Bible.

First of all, it is no longer the ultimate state of the art in identity control: a microchip can be faked and hacked by the same ones who make a living producing computer viruses or phishing credit cards. In Nigeria, where it grew first very popular for night revelers to be able to go out drinking and womanizing in red light districts without the slightest change on them, it has proven unreliable as so many people discovered in that technology a way to dispose of infinite amounts of virtual money.

The latest technology is now purely digital identification by eye iris or even by fingerprint: the subject no longer needs carry any man-made piece of identity whatsoever.

By the way, that infamous IQ inferiority of Blacks no longer applies if a misdeed is what motivates one to solve a problem of the kind we imagine the Blacks the least fit for: quite the contrary, some faculties that might seem of paranormal nature are systematically at work.

The Beast referred to by the Biblical authors is not a man-made machine.

The Beast is the development of paranormal talents of the kind the occultists traditionally refer to and even more so the New Age system of spiritualism and occult magic, generally known under a neo-Hindu garb, but that can also be introduced to through many other currents, especially the Jewish Kabbalah. The so-called talents developed by New Agers have actually just no positive use: the more they are developed by often well-meant people trying to get evolved spiritually, the more injustice they produce of the kind India is champion.

All those who develop those talents participate in a real world totalitarian system that can actually get along without machines: there will come a time when you will need to practice the finest and nastiest forms of magic and paranormal power development just to carry on your daily survival tasks. That is already the case in some parts of India and other awful countries such as Haiti and Northern Brazil.

The problem is that you cannot efficiently use those paranormal powers without committing ritual crimes that provide you with the necessary psychic energy and without subscribing to an enterprise based on the deliberate causing of misery for the greatest number.

The problem also is that most talents nowadays used in the most advanced realms of human industry are of the same nature as were traditionally confined to explicitly magic acts: computer programming for instance is logically the same thing as witchcraft, though traditional witchcraft uses human brains for computers but with the same kind of results in view. Whenever you hear about Kundalini rising and chakra opening, you are facing the real Beast. Chakras are not a part of the natural body of man, nor are they the natural crowning of natural psychic growth. They are part of a system being installed in your body like a Windows or OSX operating system.

There will come a time when powers such as recommended by practitioners of Reiki, especially energy transmission through hand-laying and creative visualization through third eye opening, will be the corporate norm of the day and absolute requirement for new recruits in the very same way acquaintance with electronics is now required or taken for granted.

And whenever these powers are known and used on a massive scale they require the sacrifice of any notion of social justice: you have to subscribe to a view where everyone’s ill fate is deserved or needed by his evolution. There will come a time when only possessors of those powers will be entitled to work for an organized society, and where those who refuse them will no longer be considered humans. Late Brahmanic India approached such a state, but American New Age promises even worse as it progressively replaces older religions.

The microchip is under the hand’s skin only, while the Mark of the Beast is said to be even better carried in the eye.

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Filed under Asia, Brazil, Caribbean, Christianity, Computers, Disciplines, Haiti, Hinduism, India, Judaism, Kabbalism, Latin America, Regional, Religion, Science, Social Problems, Sociology, South America, South Asia, Yoga

by | August 12, 2017 · 10:31 PM

The US Government Always Tells Massive Lies about the Military Capabilities and Deeds of “Enemy States”

You must understand that the government always lies to us about the capabilities of the states it deems enemies.

They lied and vastly exaggerated the USSR’s military strength through much of the Cold War. They knew they were lying too. The project was led by Jews such as Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz. They deliberately exaggerated the danger posed by the Soviet military to keep Cold War panic levels high and keep US military spending high. Many people knew that they were exaggerating but the entire US media and multiple administrations winked and treated it like the Truth.

We lied about Saddam’s capabilities in order to justify a war of aggression to take him out. We lied about an upcoming genocide in the eastern Libya town of Benghazi in order to justify a war of aggression against Ghaddafi. We lied about Assad’s use of chemical weapons many times. In fact, Assad has apparently never used chemical weapons even one time in this entire war and he has certainly never used Sarin. All of the Assad chemical attacks the West has been screaming about were false flags designed by Al Qaeda, Turkey, the US (the DIA), the UK and France. The Syrian Civil War has sometimes seemed like one endless false flag. The US and its allies are using false flag attacks so often now that we are getting to the point where false flags are almost normal in war.

The war in Eastern Ukraine also saw many false flag attacks. Every atrocity committed by Ukrainian artillery was immediately blamed on the Novorussians. The M-17 passenger jet was actually shot down by a Ukrainian Air Force jet and it appears that the DIA was directly involved. That was one of many false flag attacks in that war. Every single one of them was uncritically reported by every news outlet in the West, none of which even bothered to do the slightest examination of the truth. The OECD, associated with the EU (currently occupied by the NATO military regime) send observers and the observers committed deliberate fraud in every investigation they undertook, always blaming the Novorussians and Russians in every false flag attack they looked at.

The war in Grenada was started by a deliberate lie that US medical students at a university there were under immediate threat. They were never under any threat at all. The invasion of Panama was preceded by countless fake reports of Noriega’s troops firing on US bases in Panama. Few if any of these reports were true.

The Vietnam War was started by a fake attack at the Gulf of Tonkin when North Vietnamese forces were said to have fired on a US ship. Actually the attack never even happened! They made up the whole thing.

Every time America goes to war for any reason, the buildup is preceded by a nearly unfathomable level of lying by the government and the controlled media. The American people, gullible suckers and fools that they are, fall for it every single time. Americans must be the dumbest people on Earth.

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Filed under Britain, Caribbean, Central America, Cold War, Eurasia, Europe, France, Geopolitics, Government, History, Iraq War, Journalism, Latin America, Libya, Middle East, Military Doctrine, Modern, North Africa, Panama, Regional, Russia, Turkey, Ukraine, US, USA, USSR, Vietnam War, War

by | August 7, 2017 · 8:37 PM

The Land Where Little Girls Turn into Little Boys

Here.

Wow, that is too weird.

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Filed under Biology, Caribbean, Dominican Republic, Gender Studies, Genetics, Health, Illness, Latin America, Regional, Science, Weirdness

by | August 5, 2017 · 3:19 PM

The Little-Known Story of Joanne Chesimard and the Black Liberation Army

The story of the Black Liberation Army, a radical armed Black revolutionary Marxist movement in the 1960’s-1970’s,  is little known. Although at first they were little more than thugs turned revolutionaries, they carried out some spectacular actions and seemed to always be one step ahead of the cops. You know that’s got to count for something. I believe in giving respect where it is deserved.

I always had a soft spot for the Black Liberation Army.

One of the leaders of the BLA was Joanne Chesimard, aka Assatu Shakur is fairly well known because of lying propaganda that she shot and killed a cop and subsequently is near the top of the US Most Wanted List. The truth is she is 100% innocent of that charge. She is probably guilty of some other things and she is certainly guilty of a spectactual prison break, but she is innocent of shooting that cop.

In fact, she was shot and badly wounded in the incident where the police officer was killed. She and four other BLA members were pulled over by the police in New Jersey and a wild shootout ensued. I believe the police officer was killed with his own gun. The man who killed the cop was also shot dead. Joanne was badly wounded, but she never fired a weapon during the whole shootout. In fact, I believe she was not even armed. Nevertheless, she has been charged with the officer’s murder though she had nothing to do with it. She was given political asylum by revolutionary Cuba. One of the US’ stupid and arrogant demands of the Cubans is that they give up Assata. Raul Castro said they never will. They should not. She’s innocent anyway.

Chesimard and other BLA members were very good, always escaping from close calls with the cops and even escaping from police custody a few times. Chesimard and some others escaped from a federal prison in Florida in 1979 disguised as laundry workers. Fellow BLA members disguised as laundry workers and drove a laundry truck in and broke the BLA out of a maximum security prison! There was a vast manhunt on for Chesimard all over the US, but she could never be found. There were a lot of people hiding her and they were very good at it. Suddenly, three years later, she popped up in Cuba and said she had been given asylum. No one knew how she got there, and no one has ever figured out where she was for three years.

This is one reason I can never get into any serious anti-Black racism. John Brown is one of my ultimate heroes! I don’t care how many people he killed. So what! A revolution is not a picnic! I liked the Black Panthers a lot too, and I still like them to this very day. I rather like the idea of armed Black revolutionaries running around waging a revolutionary war against the system. Good for them! And the Black Panthers’ armed self-defense was also a good thing. I loved Huey Newton and love Elaine Brown. I even have a soft spot for Stokely Carmichael and even Eldridge Cleaver. How can I be an anti-Black racist? What crap!

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Filed under Blacks, Caribbean, Corrections, Crime, Cuba, Florida, History, Latin America, Law enforcement, Left, Marxism, Race/Ethnicity, Racism, Regional, Revolution, South, US, USA

by | July 16, 2017 · 11:16 AM

Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen, “This Land Is Our Land”

This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York Island
From the Redwood Forest, to the Gulf stream waters
This land was made for you and me

And I went walking that ribbon of highway
And saw above me that endless skyway
I saw below me the golden valley
This land was made for you and me

I roamed and rambled and followed my footsteps
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts
And all around me, a voice was sounding
This land was made for you and me

There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me
A sign was painted said: Private Property
But on the back side it didn’t say nothing
This land was made for you and me

In the squares of the city, in the shadow of a steeple
By the Relief Office, I’d seen my people
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?

Nobody living can ever stop me
As I go walking that freedom highway
Nobody living can ever make me turn back
This land was made for you and me

When the sun come shining, then I was strolling
In wheat fields waving and dust clouds rolling
The voice was chanting as the fog was lifting
This land was made for you and me

This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York Island
From the Redwood Forest, to the Gulf stream waters
This land was made for you and me

Written by Woody Guthrie. Sung by Bruce Springsteen and Pete Seeger (age 80).

From the great inauguration of Barack Obama in 2008. I was in a doctor’s office and the news came on that Obama had won. I saw the crowds mobbing the streets, all marching towards the main park of Chicago. The volatile Spike Lee was there. “This changes everything!” He effused. There was a little Black girl sitting next to me, maybe seven years old. I asked her if she liked Obama. She nodded her head shyly. I had tears in my eyes. How dare these idiots call me racist! What sort of racist cries tears of joy when he hears that America just elected its first Black president?

The three bolded sections above are the “forbidden lyrics.” Although Guthrie included them when he wrote the song in 1940, they are seldom performed in modern versions as they were considered subversive as promoting socialism or Communism. The song is actually a great socialist anthem. Woody Guthrie was definitely a leftwinger.

Given the choice, I would rather have the land owned by me (the state) than owned by some private individual. What’s so great about private ownership of land? What’s better for me, land that I can walk on or land that I can’t walk on? How bout the land that I can walk on?

One of the reasons for China’s great success is that the state owns all the land. Everybody just leases the land where their home or farm is. In The Netherlands also, the state owns all the land. Everybody just leases out whatever land they use. Same thing in Cuba, but in Cuba now, almost everyone owns their own residence. And a great argument for China’s success against India’s failure is that much of the poverty, malnutrition, etc. in India is caused by the private ownership of land, especially in the rural areas. India said they were going to do land reforms and they claimed to do them over and over but the truth is that no real land reform has ever been done in India, and semi-feudal relations still prevail in the countryside. Hence the horrific poverty, starvation, etc.

One of the all-time great folk songs ever written. A purely American song like virtually no other. I believe we should replace that horrible Star Spangled Banner with this much better song. This song also captures the true American spirit. The land does indeed belong to all of us, you and me. All that land the government owns, it doesn’t belong to the government. It belongs to me! It’s my land, dammit! How dare the rich give away my land to malign corporations and the 1%! Forget that. You take my land, and you give it all away to the corporations and the rich to abuse and destroy. What sort of democracy is that?

Plutocratic rule is never democracy. How can it be? The plutocrats are what? 1% 5%? Where do idiot Americans get it in their heads that rule by the rich or the ruling class is somehow democracy. Aristocratic rule is never democracy at any time or in any place. It can’t be. You either have conservatism, which is rule by the rich or the aristocrats, or you have democracy, which is rule by the people. That’s your only two choices. One or the other? Which one do you want? The rich will never rule in favor of the people. They can’t. They literally cannot. They must rule in their class interests. It’s nearly a law of social science as hard and fast as a hard science rule.

Written by Woody Guthrie! One of the best working class folk singer-songwriters who ever lived. He was also a tough, macho guy, a redneck, a worker, a blue collar roughneck with a cigarette dangling from his mouth James Dean style. This is what the Left used to be before it was taken over by effeminate men, butch women, man-hating feminists, White-hating minorities who idolize common street thugs, anti-nationalists advocating to turn all of America into a teeming Third World Calcutta, all manner of sexual identity and sexual orientation freakazoids with so many weird subgroups that they are almost beyond classification, and in general idiots, fools, deviants and dumbasses.

Woody Guthrie is what the Left used to be. He’s what the Left is supposed to be. He was born too soon. He was Alt Left before there was an Alt Left!

This guitar kills fascists!

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Filed under Asia, Caribbean, China, Conservatism, Cuba, Cultural Marxists, Democrats, Economics, Folk, Government, India, Latin America, Left, Music, Obama, Political Science, Politics, Regional, Scum, Social Problems, Socialism, Sociology, South Asia, US Politics, USA, Useless Western Left