A Bridge Too Near
Science does not have a moral dimension.
It is like a knife.
If you give it to a surgeon or a murderer,
each will use it differently
--Wernher von Braun
It is like a knife.
If you give it to a surgeon or a murderer,
each will use it differently
--Wernher von Braun
___________________
[Note: "Circle Jerk III: The Frontier" coming soon.]
For the last few months we have been bombarded with emotional drivel about removing the statues of Confederate States of America heroes. (This being but one example of the copious multitudes of emotional drivel on the media tap that RAW chose to look at.)
But the opening football game of the ACC college season in Atlanta, GA, brought the matter into its technicolor hypocrisy for Ranger. Specifically, it was the location.
Why, you ask?
The game was held in the Mercedes Benz Stadium. You may know that Mercedes Benz, along with BMW, Volkswagon and IG Farben all supported Hitler with his racist fantasies. They robustly enabled his international criminality and crimes against humanity, and specifically, his program to eradicate the Jewish people.
All major German corporations actively engaged in the genocide by using slave labor subjected to abysmal conditions and starvation diets, and worked unto death, times. But it doesn't seem to bother us as we sit fatted before the football game in the stadium funded by their ill-gotten monies.
No, in fact, we are untroubled by the re-location of these same German industries to the Southeast right-to-work states in order that they may hire workers at one-third the cost they would have to pay workers in Germany -- and the U.S. workers have no benefits, to boot. This outrage gets nary a peep, while we seem to have the attention and energy to attack memorials of our own Civil War, and a few pathetic slogan-carriers who look like Cousin It frozen in time from the The Munsters.
While we see fit to attack our pathetic marginalia holding anti-Jewish signs at a march to retain Civil War memorial statues, we do not bother to attack anti-Semitism in all of its guises. In fact, it is a convenient good when enlisted by liberals to support a plethora of entrenched anti-Semitic organizations.
This is called "hypocrisy".
Are we the people who supposedly won War World II? Are we now become their servants?
Since we seem so keen these days to get up in arms, why do we not bulldoze their factories, and leave our CSA heritage alone?
Ranger would rather see a Confederate statue than a monument to a foreign-owned factory with blood on its hands employing non-Union labor to avoid paying what they would pay their own -- shades of 1945. Our Southern population is the newly-exploited cohort in a time-honored behavior for these companies.
And while we are in the protest mode, why not dismantle all NASA memorials to U.S. space programs since all or our efforts sprang from the efforts of SS Maj. Wernher von Braun and his Nazi comrades? Their factories also enslaved and starved workers in the V1 and V2 rocket experiments, experiments later happily assimilated by U.S. efforts.
This should be more egregious to us than a Confederate statue.
It's amazing how quickly we forget. Is it from convenience, poor education or lack of attention spans, or a combination thereof?
We vote for Rebels over historical Nazi corporations any day of the week.
Labels: anti-semitism, Confederate States of America, CSA, CSA statues, German factories in right-to-work states, media bias, Mercedes Benz
posted by rangeragainstwar at 4:59 PM
94 Comments:
I'm doing even more credit hours than last semester so I'll pop in only briefly but I'm sure I'll be back by the end of the year.
I think its a testament to how terrible race relations are (having a little something to do with the country's very foundation as a white supremacist and biased state) and how propagandized and ignorant its populace is that America hasn't even gotten to taking down its Confederate statues, let alone the Nissan factories that most probably used forced labor, including American, to build its supply lorries for the Imperial Japanese Army. Was Mitsubishi, while it still had an assembly plant in Illinois, the good guy here because it was the only Japanese factory in the United States that was unionized? If so, its long confirmed that it used death and forced labor camps of Chinese and American POWs to build its Mitsubishi A6M Zero, the killer of countless American military personnel.
If we're going by this logic, shouldn't we burn down the plants of DuPont, IBM and that All-American Protectionist Patriotic company of Ford? I know a Jewish Communist Iraqi War Veteran that works in its unionized plant down south incidentally (they infact exist :-D). He makes an easy $70,000 without so much as telling his management hes a vet and is probably paid the best salary for screwing nuts and bolts into chassis in the country. Henry Ford's anti-semitism was legendary and his factory in Germany was worked with the slave labor of hundreds of French prisoners of war. For his support of Hitler, the German consul in Ohio personally awarded Ford the Grand Cross of the German Eagle bestowed with swastikas. He accepted it gleefully.
If you follow me, I think you see where I'm going here. From the slave ships and plantations that led to the murder of millions of Africans in the superfeudalism of the South (which the Confederacy arguably was) to the Jews, Roma and other undesirables worked to death in the factories of modern industrial capitalism, no CEO who is known to have "succeeded" has done so with his hands clean in the economic system that blights most of the world today. Frankly, I don't see monuments to atrocity, whether built in marble or steel, moving until something like Cuba or even civil disobedient Nicaragua/Venezuela happens in the First World West.
Most of the Third World will have to do the same before that comes even close to fruition. I gather that if Capitalism is allowed to run its course into oblivion unchallenged, the angry people that survive, if they do, will become Pol Potists let alone communists.
Addendum: Coming from a communist who has no favorite between an Imperialist-Capitalist military leader and a Feudalist one, if remembering history is such a pressing issue for detractors, perhaps replacing General Lee in Charlottesville with General Sheridan would be apt. His masterful command of the Cavalry Corps of the Army of the Potomac led to General Lees early surrender in the Appomattox Campaign in what Lee wanted to be a fight to the death. The black slaves of Charlottesville, who made up 52% of the population before the Ku Klux Klan terrorized and ethnically cleansed them, met General Sheridan with open arms. I don't think they would of done the same with Lee.
Of course the lobbying of the Ku Klux Klan, among others was instrumental in putting up these Confederate statues on public land-even right onto government buildings- decades after the war more as a message to black Americans finally being lifted up from second-class citizenship and not as solemn icons of remembrances. Needless to say, I think we should heed the advice of the descendants of these monuments.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/16/us/robert-e-lees-grandson-comments-on-statue-removal/index.html
Or take it from the horses mouth itself. When Andrew Johnson assumed the presidency after Southerner Boothe's assassination of Lincoln he was furious. Married to his wife by Lincolns uncle, he wanted General Lee executed for treason. At the insistence of Imperial General, and future elected President of a fully United States, Ulysses Grant, he was spared. On reflecting on the end of the war, famously gracious it was so terrible lest people grow to like it, “I think it wise not to keep open the sores of war," Lee wrote in response to Southern efforts to put up monuments in his name in 1869 "but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife, to commit to oblivion the feelings engendered.”
Well, Germany at least paid (and continues to pay) compensation to Holocaust survivors in an attempt to make amends. After the war was over the US government actually rolled back compensation given to slaves during the war. To date, there has been no recompense plan enacted in an attempt to make amends.
Still, us lucky ones get to choose our hills. If Ranger is going to organize a movement against rapacious multi-national corporations with fascist roots operating in "right to work states", I would be willing to support him with a token monetary donation.
I love RAW's sense of irony. It's a lot like my own and it's why I call BS on all the social justice warrioring.
Mercedes Benz built many war machine for Nazis, supported Hitler and even supplied his special staff car.
avedis
NL,
mitsubishi used /starved and tortured US pows in their coal mines.
needless to say these slaves that lived were never compensated.
Avedis.
for irony= the isralelis are trying to buy state of the art submarines fron thysses/krupp.
these are non nuclear.
heres the rub; krupp starved slaves at their factories, many were merely kids.
oh well, even the israelis have short memory spans.
jim
Jim,
My father, who was WIA fighting Japs, would never drive a Japanese car, use a Japanese camera nor eat at a Japanese restaurant. He had a close friend that drove a Mercedes. Dad always referred to it as the "Nazi-mobile". Yes, Dad was a little nuts in a savage kind of way by conventional societal standards, but at least he was consistent and had a long memory (not to mention an unlimited capacity for maintaining strong hatred, vendettas, etc).
I was with him sometime in the 90s when he was closing a deal on some real estate. The title agent was Japanese. He stood up and walked out of the room and told the other parties he wouldn't work with a "Jap". Get a new title agent or the deal was off. Someone tried to lecture him on manners and the virtue of forgiveness. He told that person "sikteer" (which in Turkish means "fuck you" - old school people of Armenian background use Turkish curse words so as not to profane the Armenian language). I bet the lecturer - based on what I know of him - is one who supports the removal of the statues. Where is his sense of forgiveness in that case?
avedis
Avedis, just because I figured (rightly) that you weren't going to agree with me on health insurance doesn't mean I'm enforcing a site-wide cold shoulder. Infact you could of commented on that very post I made before.
But I understand you don't like many of the very people who voted for Trump if your comments on the opoid and meth-addicted "Appalachians" is anything to go by. I'm afraid the meth epidemic started in Oregon and then marched west across the Mississippi River over decades (they do teach some accurate things in colleges, especially in health classes). The same region, by the way, where the Trotsky-Leninist Socialist Equality Party got reelected for a city council seat incidentally and contested a second just over the water in Minneapolis. The opiod death epidemic of course, as that research shows, goes far beyond West Virginia and is rooted everywhere- even in former Democratic strongholds.
http://www.npr.org/2016/12/17/505965420/study-communities-most-affected-by-opioid-epidemic-also-voted-for-trump
So I guess that includes me (until the Socialist Equality Party sets up shop in my area, I'm switching my voter registration from my previous third-party to Republican. I'll vote for Trump in the primaries, thank God my deep blue state means I can avoid doing so in the general). I think with the size of the Empire in question that we're dealing with, the American one needs to be discredited first before it can be abolished back to a decent Republic. Plummeting approval ratings for America worldwide might just do the trick.
I'll press the question though. Would you forgive (but in this case, perhaps not forget) if a General Sheridan replaces General Lee in that public park or if all these provocative war-normalizing monuments were placed in museums where they belong (as Robert E. Lee would of wanted)?
Jim,
Yep. But to be fair, the topic of reparations for African-Americans would of never come up if the Jews wouldn't of fulfilled their stereotype of being greedy bastards and accepted the reparations. My grandparents were Holocaust survivors, but being working-class Soviet citizens, they eschewed handouts. The reparations they got for the Leningrad Siege came in the mail though even though they were never told the case against Germany was even being heard. Without the reparations of course, the colonization of the native Palestinian people by the genocidal Israeli state would of been impossible. Its the Zionists that live there that pursue these cases most heavily into the 21st century.
Food for thought.
But I digress. Besides being a Hitler-adoring scumbag, Henry Ford famously was the last auto magnate to agree to unionizing and only on the insistence of his wife. She was the Christina Maslach to his Stanford Prison Experiment, as it were.
Long after he died Ford Automotives, which continues the founders tradition of keeping much of his factories stateside, still sends cars to Germany for the final phase of production. Germans, technical experts in all things machine, are the best engine tuners on the planet apparently. I believe the Chinese now supply all the converters that are used in the high-tech models however, like they do for all auto makers.
Capitalism today has evolved (or regressed if you like) to a point where even a con-man like Trump, if he even half-assedly tried to fulfill his campaign promises couldn't stop the world economy from globalizing-at least while its modes of production still stand, but I guess thats the point.
Avedis,
i'm sitting in a coffee shop in quincy fl. looking out at a statue installed in 1884.
it's time worn and exposed to the elements.
shortly it will be obe. the talk is that it will be removed. the question is to what good end.
but here's my thought after examining it. it says-for our fallen heroes and in latin-we will never forget.
doesn't this sound familiar?
btw its not a soldierly statue. the soldier is bas relief and fairly small at that.
quincy is interesting b/c the quincy grey militia marched on the chatahoochee arsenal and expropriated the arms and munitions for the southern cause.
the arsenal is now a hospital for the criminally insane.fwiw.
jim
Jim (and all)
Although I've never been, it's my understanding that there are many war cemeteries and memorials in Germany.
I don't remember the removal or defacing of these sites being a condition of our agreement to rebuild Germany or admit them into NATO.
I'm not comparing the Confederate states to Nazi Germany but observing that especially with the passage of time surely there is a way to remember the dead without having to smash icons. The Nazis were the ones waving torches in Charlottesville, but it was the "anti-fascists" who were there for a book burning.
IMO,
The truth here is that there are a lot racists that would like to erase a certain race that they blame for all the ills in the world.
The statues are symbolic of that dynamic.
avedis
David , to my memory every small german town had a war memorial, but they were ww1 oriented.
after ww2 they were occupied and didn't have time to tidy up cemeteries.
here in conus i've seen ww2 german and italian cemeteries for the pow's that died while held as pow's.they are clearly marked with ranks etc.. an example is located at ft. mc clellan al.
these have never touched our news reports.
btw forts benning,bragg and hood,and others are named for confederate gen'ls.
will we rename them ft. angela davis and such?
heres a winner=fort muhammed alli(sp)
jim
Jim,
Probably sans Pres. Trump, there would be a Fort [Clesea] Manning in by now. It would have happened.
Harvard made zir - an uneducated enlistedman and convicted fellon - a "fellow" recently. How dare they call it a "fellowship"? Shouldn't it be a zipship?
Or maybe just a friggin' "spaceship".
avedis
Chelsea, I meant to say
avedis
I'm very disappointed. As soon as I saw Jim's comment I scrolled down to propose Fort Manning and saw Avedis had beat me to it.
As for Harvard, I gather they canceled it and denied ever intending to give her an "honor." Which in many ways is even worse. At least if that's what they believe, they should have the courage to hold to it.
David,
LOL. You know what? You're alright.
Yes, I se now that Harvard decided to reverse themselves and some former spook resigned over the whole idea. Assuming that the story isn't more fake news.
avedis
Jim -
Name branding states with anti-union laws as 'right-to-work' states was a smart move by the wingnuts. They always have been very good at giving great sounding titles to laws or issues that actually mean just the opposite. Do they hire the Madison Avenue advertising guys? Or is it just their evil genius at work?
I could only wish that the Lefties could afford to hire PR firms. Instead of always trying to explain the boring details that are important but make people stop reading or turn off the set.
Avedis
Well there is definitely something fake somewhere, either it is Harvard's first announcement or their second one.
For what it's worth I don't care in the slightest who is a Harvard fellow. It doesn't make me take anyone more seriously. Although amusingly one of that same Kennedy School's profs did go on leave to run for prime minister of Canada about ten years ago now.
But one can sympathize with them. Should a liberal school side with the identity politics it's trying to promote, or with the practitioners of empire who fund it and recruit its students? Decisions, decisions.
Ironically back when Wikileaks was releasing its revelations years ago, some of the major foreign policy schools advised their students not to read Wikileaks because it could jeopardize their job prospects in government. I don't know if the Kennedy School was one of them, but if it was, that would make this about-face even more farcical.
Mike,
Well Sanders socialized medicine bill has so many boring details that he, out of infinite kindness, spared us all of the details. What a guy! Trust him. It's affordable.
And yeah, Clinton with her $gazillions has never paid a PR firm. Sure. Nor even a make over artist. That not a rubber face used to cover the wrinkles and help cushion the blows when she fall on her face. You gotta be kidding me.
Come on man.
David,
Agreed re; Harvard fellowship. It's all madness or slap stick humor, depending on how you look at it. I don't take Harvard seriously at all. Just another self licking ice cream cone.
avedis
Oh come on indeed. Is that supposed to be bait or do you really believe that?
Mathew Heimbach of the Traditional Workers Party attacks Richard Spencer of "Hail Trump" fame for a funny reason, Avedis. His Russian ultranationalist wife is as white as snow, but his problem with her is shes half-Georgian and Central Asian and thus not worthy of being called white.
I don't think anyone has done a run-down of how many Americans are classical Neo-Nazis in this way and those who are of the American flavor of Rockwell neo-Facsist bent who include Southern Europeans as blood brothers. British Neo-nazi hooligans desecrate the graves of IRA hunger strikers and attack Irish soccer fans for just this reason. Irish are sub-human whites after all who never proved themselves by conquering subhuman races and building empires on their bones. Go in the direction of these ideologies at your peril. I don't believe Armenia is featured as a white people in any white nationalist atlas.
I don't think statues are an issue if they're on private land, like that famous giant golden statue of KKK founder General Forest on a property I don't care to remember. Fine. Keep that land too, those Indians didn't need it anyway. Its those that are on public property and maintained by public money that people are pissed off about. Statues aren't cheap and the cost of replacing and washing them is thought of to blacks (and whites too) as a form of neo-slavery. If a private museum wants 'em I agree with the living Robert E. Lee The Fifth (and the first by the way) let 'em have em'. Just don't make descendants of people, some of whom fought a guerilla war against the Confederacy in the South (like in North Carolina) pay for them. Thats all.
Meanwhile. Remind me. Are you shedding tears for actual races being erased as we speak? Right along with their language, culture and way of life? Even if the oh so horrifying prospect of a mestizo race covering the earth comes to pass, it looks like most people will be speaking West European languages, living like West Europeans and even thinking like modern West Europeans (perhaps to their regret) as fascinating languages, among them those missing the word "murder" in their lexicon are inevitably wiped out.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/29/opinion/the-genocide-of-brazils-indians.html?mcubz=3
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/7b798x/the-guarani-are-occupying-their-land-to-stop-it-being-taken-by-murderous-cattle-ranchers
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/dp4abq/brazil-sent-their-military-to-deal-with-protesting-tribespeople
https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/xdvxaq/plowboys-and-indians-873-v16n5
https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/xd3z4d/illegal-loggers-the-tribe-waging-war-in-the-amazon
Read it and weep for humanity. The frontier didn't vanish, it simply moved. Only one culture- and those allied to it- is enforcing itself upon all others today and the riches underneath the feet of these stragglers they so covet appear to only delay the disastrous contradictions that doom it to oblivion. If no America investors are profiting from the ongoing Indian Wars, I'll eat my hat. Case closed I guess. I happen to be studying Bronze Age and Classical Greek civilizations this semester, particularly the disastrous Trojan War and the Great Cataclysm that destroyed the Greek's after that Pyrrhic victory before there was a Pyrrhic victory. I've come to conclude that accomplishments like the first phonetic alphabet, the first urban democracy and among the first aqueducts are in vain if the violent maintenance of this civilization mean it will vanish when those who live by their swords die by their swords.
The Europeans only rediscovered how to rebuild aqueducts by the stroke of luck of a few monks taking all the discoveries they could carry and handing it to a civilization just starting its own Golden Age. They were the Saracens. The works were translated into Arabic, added and expanded upon and taught in the first forums of learning they called "universities".
A veteran becomes a pariah when she blows the whistle on war crimes, not when she commits them. What did you expect? This is the same military that brought the world the Wounded Knee Massacre and Hiroshima.
I guess some Harvard big whig's conscience only woke up when they heard Manning was transgender. But that error was quickly reversed and the institutional Imperialist wall of silence proved it still stood once again.
Niko
Somebody in the middle of the academic food chain obviously thought it would be edgy and valuable to have Manning sit on a panel or some such.
I suspect that their "conscience" conveniently woke up several minutes after Morell's resignation alerted them to the fact that if they kept Manning's honorific, the value of the reference letters they write for students applying to State, DoD, and CIA would plummet. Transgender rights are nice, but access is better.
As for the statues, I would say that your equation of paying taxes to maintain statues to the actual condition of slavery is exponentially more offensive than the statues themselves ever could be, even if you want to dress it up by putting the word "neo" in front of it. I think you'd have to be even more libertarian than Avedis to argue with a straight face that taxation was equal to slavery. If I'm selling him short here, he can correct me. How far do you want to take this, exactly? Personally, I don't want my taxes to go to fighting wars. But they do. Does that make me a slave?
We can talk about Brazil if you like, although I would begin by challenging your implication that this is just somehow an extension of the American frontier.
You know Avedis, when you look at all the friendships you've apparently lost, know friendship is a two-way street. Cold shoulders aren't friendly.
Indeed. If Manning wasn't transgender, the Harvard faculty wouldn't even give her the time of day.
Dave, I'm a Leninst. But if they were ever capable of abolishing the government, I would be perfectly happy living under(?) anarcho-primitivism or anarchist-syndicalism. Even Karl Marx identified states and corporations both as dictatorships. Some simply have more freedom than others. Although he believed the steering of the biggest economies into classless socities like the whole of his native Germany was neccesary for the Age of States to pass. Its bullshit like this that makes me have contempt for any captialist nation state however. If they want monuments to treachery on display on public land, they can secede and get their own country where they become their founding fathers. Only a minority of those who want the statues to stay want to take this principled action.
If a museam or private individual wants to put it on their land and pay the costs of maintaing it, thats fine by me. You better believe I'm for taking them down until then.
Looks like my laptop broke and this tablet is garbage. Another time.
.
Please consider the fact that the "vaqueros" or Mexicans made up most of the cowboys in American history and corporations based in Europe owned most of the cattle. This is replicated today in South America only more internationally. Whatever you consider it, illegal gold interets, logging interests and cattle are intent on destroying the sovreignty of the last Native Americans and that should make the latter a sworn enemoy of anyone with a conscience.
So to ahswer your question, I don't believe that when the REAL ACTUAL Antifashistiche Aktion (Antifa) knocks over some cops or destroys a private property or two that its neccearily effective at overthrowing capitalists even if I don't apologize for it. That would mean starting a violent revolution, trying them by Revolutionary Tribunals and executing them by firing squads, rather than trying to vote them out. I'm not saying I endorse anything. I'm saying Cubans are living longer, fuller, happier lives than citizens in the richest nation in the world for doing so and the Venezuelans are suffering from far-right rioters more murderous (the direct killing of Venezuelan police officers and black citizens) than any Antifa Black Bloc.
Take that observation as you will.
Fucking A *I meant the former. This damn tablet.
Looks like Avedis is posting it up in the other thread, so I'll add what I think about one specefic detail you asked about.
Its not slavery, but its the best state-sponsered solution these bastards could come up with to remind black Americans what they think of them. Outside of the Prison-Industrial Complex that the 13th Amendemnt gave them of course. You didn't think the KKK lobbied for these statues to be erected for a reason, did you?
Nikolay,
Since you're asking me, I'm not responding to you b/c I really don't have anything constructive to say. You sure are down on the Confederates and you've chosen to see them in the worst light possible. Wasn't your hero Lenin a revolutionary that helped overthrow a government? Many citizens of the USSR considered living under that regime slavery or worse. Who had a rougher time; someone sent to the gulag and/or getting a bullet in the back of the head or a slave on a Southern plantation?
If you elect to see the statues as monuments to slavery and treason, I sure can't talk you out of it; especially given that you are no doubt surrounded by academics that support your opinion. I will note, however, that there was no law that said that states could not withdraw from the union at that time. None. So how can it be treason to decide to do so?
Also, many Northerners fighting the war - General Grant being just one - owned slaves. We all know what Lincoln had to say about blacks and slavery before and during the early stages of the war.Very few confederate soldiers owned slaves. So how is it that the war was all about abolition? It would behoove you to learn to take your professors with a grain of salt.
My ancestors on my mother's side (two of them, Father and son) fought in Lee's army. I like having statues to memorialize their commitment, honor, valor and sacrifice in a cause to preserve their way of life and to be free from the yoke of Northern oppression. I bet Lenin would have approved.
Screw the slaves. Those same people would have been enslaved by Africans in Africa. At least white people ended slavers in their own countries and then enforced that to the extent they could around the world. If Muslims or Africans or Native Americans were running things, they'd still be a thriving slave trade. Slavery was on the way out in the South anyhow due to mechanization and the economics involved. The war was over states rights.
The statue thing and all the hand wringing over slavery - that ended more than 150 years ago - is excuse making by a motley crew of communists, racists of color, freaks and useful idiots to end modern society as we know. The strategy is to demolish the moral authority of the current order via various undermining tactics (like declaring the dominant culture that built the country to be evil due to slavery and Indians, etc), then move in and steal control of the infrastructure and wealth that was built by it. Period. You people don't fool me for a second. That's why I lose friends over this. I call them on their BS.
avedis
Niko
Setting aside Avedis's questionable interpretation of slavery and the causes of the Civil War for the moment, mainly because you were responding to me and he wasn't...
Our differences are twofold I think, at least in this context. First, I just don't see the statues as worth removing. We are surrounded by statuary to remind us of wars that should not have been fought. There's a World War I monument a few blocks from my house. I'm still not clear what objective tearing down old artwork is supposed to accomplish. I do know that movements that begin by destroying artwork usually end badly. Usually it's the cultural conservatives who are upset over the social meaning of artwork. I guess the roles have flipped temporarily. But one way or another, I doubt that historians 200 years from now will say, "Race relations in America used to be awful, but fortunately in 2017 they started removing the Civil War statues, and then things really turned a corner."
Second, Marx and Lenin were wrong, and their ideas won't work. The Soviet Union failed. Maoist China failed. Even if it were possible in small states like Cuba, it obviously isn't possible in large ones. Yes, the academics can continually revise Marx to make him relevant the same way the clergy continually reinterprets the Bible to make it relevant, and yes, you can blame all the faults of the Soviet Union on Stalin instead of Lenin if you want, but frankly, that's what happens when what sounds like a nice idea on paper meets the messiness of the real world. If it doesn't hold up in the real world, then it's not worth adhering to.
As for Cuba, virtually every industrialized democracy in the world has a higher life expectancy than Cuba.
David and Niko,
If being triggered over past injustices is really the reason for any of this, we'd all have to kill ourselves after killing everyone else. We're all humans, personally and culturally "guilty" of numerous sins and transgressions against each other.
I could do this...when I hear gangsta rap music and see black people I think about some people I know who got hurt (and even killed) because they were white in a black neighborhood. I could be having my own trigger/PTSD episodes from getting in some pretty heavy fights (I believed for my life, once or twice) with blacks who didn't like them no honky crackas in dey hood. My father hated Japanese right on through the day he died. The Japanese did horrible things to a lot of people. My dad was triggered by Japanese cars...where do you think this ends, assuming you want equal application of law and "justice" (both man made and karmic) to all?
No one thinks it through because it's not about justice. That is merely some label somewhat cleverly placed upon a stinking pile of crap to scare the weak minded away from calling it a stinking pile of crap. Why! You're not against "justice" are you? You hater!
The commies like to play this game because they want to see capitalism destroyed. They think that by siding with poor minorities, they can con the minorities into backing them up in confiscating wealth from those who have it (free shit for everyone!).
The gays and allies just want to be histrionic libertine personalities and get lots of attention. Many are totally mentally ill on top of that (witness the recent Georgia Tech shooting of a trannie by campus police).
Minorities want to play it because they're tribal, want free shit and basically pissed off about being excluded from the game because they can't follow the bouncing ball and no one taught them discipline, rational thought or even basic manners. In fact they were taught that all of that is bad and acting "white". Who taught them that? Their own malfunctioning brains, the other fatherless kids on the streets and the commies and politicians.
Why did the politicians teach them that? For votes of course. The stupid ignorant undisciplined irrational minorities will vote for the people that "feel their pain" and promise them free shit. Although none of that is ever delivered.
cont....
cont.
Now some individual minorities have a few things going in their favor and they go to school to learn and do the things that white people do to be materially successful, but then, on top of pressure from their idiot peers, they encounter teachers who are reinforcing all the crap mentioned above. Why? Because they work for the government, that wants to keep the minorities stupid and dependent and because a lot of the teachers are, basically, commies in their idealistic outlooks. So it's an uphill swim for those trying. Where did the teachers learn to be commies? From other teachers in stupid places like university liberal arts programs where the commies who lost their platform in the streets at the close of '60s retreated to subvert society in a quitter, albeit more sinister way.
All of this and much much more is aimed at the white male who has been working his ass off for generations. I feel it, personally, as a white male that has worked his ass off for his entire life.
I don't care about slavery because that isn't happening now. If slavery becomes relevant, then my father's attitude toward japs becomes relevant. His attitude (and my own) toward muslims become relevant (I'm referring to the Armenian genocide and current events that, if allowed to further fester, would have been a repeat - thank you Mr Putin and Mr Assad for doing the right thing when Obama and Clinton wouldn't). If slavery becomes relevant then ALL aspects of slavery must be relevant and blacks must look in the mirror and ask why muslims and their own bros practiced slavery and sold them to be brought to the US. If slavery becomes relevant then the Irish have a legit beef over how they were treated when first arriving here. As do Asians. ....you don't get to pick and chose what injustice should be driving reparations and special treatment so as to avoid offense and all the rest. if you want to do it, then let's really do it. let's get on with it and unleash mad Max world right here and right now. let's slaughter each other over the past until rivers of blood run through the streets. What's yours is mine because you owe me. And vice versa.
Otherwise, STFU and check yourself out and get on with developing yourself to be the best you can be. When you meet challenges, as we all do, adapt and overcome. The bigger the challenge the better a man you'll be for having faced them. then teach what you learned to your children.
It really is pretty simple and solid once you stop listening to the politicians, the eggheads in universities and the mentally ill.
Semper Fidelis
avedis
That is my opening address to the latte and beer summit.
avedis
Ah, a life without politicians. Something libertarian Avedis and anarcho-primitivist Niko can agree on.
Now if only we could figure out how to make that work for a nation of 300 million people, and you'd be all set.
David, I'm glad you brought that up.
Because these nations have become too big and with peak oil well into motion and shale polluting water reservoirs a lot more than it fuels anything, its time to break them up into manageable chunks.
But irreconcilable differences will do it too. I see no valor in starting a war that did not need to be fought or executing black prisoners of war at Petersburg, Poison Springs and Fort Pillow. Bedford Forrest's war crime at the latter should give no surprise to those who know he murdered Federal troops after hostilities had ended and terrorized and ethnically cleansed African Americans, most of whom fled north in the largest unacknowledged refugee crisis (the "Communist" historians still call it a migration) in American history, larger than even the white grape pickers on the West Coast during the Great Depression-immortalized by John Steinbeck- who have of course been replaced by MesoAmericans today.
Listen, if it means the breakup of the empire I might even envision fighting alongside you for a Neo-Confederacy where you can put up as many monuments to war criminals as you'd like. That would be some moral principle. If you insist on a United States however, communities have a right to decide where their local taxes go to; including if it goes to the maintenance of monuments they don't care for or if it immortalize men who murdered their grandfathers. Of course that includes Union states. Thats the federal government you insist on right, Avedis?
Avedis, just so you know, Karl Marx personally corresponded with Lincoln and many of the Germans that fled the failed 1848 Revolutions of whom Marx was also a refugee, helped the Union to victory (or Empire I could say). Theres a reason why I refer to them as Imperial Generals. I would have to assess it centuries out when we're all long gone if the demise of capitalism was sped up by eliminating the last remnants of Feudalism in the New World as Marx had hoped (kind of, Brazil admittedly tried to keep up the ghost even afterwards but they're better racial relations and publicly financed education after slavery ended [and they accepted Confederate immigrants] there may not be something you endorse). I find it ironic however that you endorse public welfare for stone caricatures rather than living breathing people.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/07/opinion/slavery-isnt-a-thing-of-the-past.html?mcubz=0
But slavery still exists. Because Capitalism exists. I'd like to see you forced to sleep with fifty men a day and be beaten if you didn't meet your quota and see if your definition of hardwork changes. Ditto the Meso Americans who end up believing manipulative coyotes (smugglers) about decent paying jobs and their landowning collaborators just to find that that pesticide-laden field they're working on is not paid work or those Texan developer SOBs who have migrants build a house and then forget to pay them. That article doesn't go into that too much but its common. For all the work being put into "fighting" immigration its estimated that over half of Houston's population is composed of illegal immigrants. As Vietnam Veteran Fred Reed, no professor he, who married into and lives in Mexico can attest; the only honest option is to close off immigration forever or open the borders completely like Venezuela. Otherwise no matter whos in office, the immigration laws will always be written so employers can secretly pay coyotes to import as much illegal labor as they like and then call the police to report "illegal aliens" when they ask for some kind of paycheck for their labor or a day off for once. Maybe theres a fair middle ground. I doubt the best Congress lobbyists can buy is going to do it. This is why even #AmnestyDon is caving. You'd have find the puppet masters who pull Donny's strings to know why but then you might find that he might be a white guy, right?
Oh please. When did a slave marry into his plantation owners family? Or become a Confederate citizen? Because thats what slaves were allowed to do in African slave kingdoms (Ghana in this case) and Native American tribes respectively. Almost all the slaves in either culture were POWs. It was never the well oiled machine that was summarized in that Anglicized word. You say slave. I say Slav. Because the earliest 8th century Western European empires considered an entire people. My people. A source of eunuch laborers and concubines. And nothing else. I'm not "triggered". I'm just taken aback by the ignorance, and seek to inform.
Once again, Mike is right. College professors are bourgeois liberals. Not Communists. After the Red Scare and the McCarthy era I can count the number of Marxist professors in this entire country on one hand. Two maybe if you included Community Colleges and Leninists. I learned everything I knew from self-effacement, humility and self-research. Why, any Leninist worth his salt is so pissed off at the Liberal faction of the elite they'd prefer they be executed first and the kulaks later if they excused a particularly brazen capitalist dictatorship, especially after they stabbed the Communist Party of America in the back in the 1950s after they reluctantly closed ranks for the sake of WWII. Personally I don't think there would be a problem with the dominant culture in the U.S. if it didn't turn up uninvited in the jungles of the Amazons or in the poppyfields of Afghanistan. But then this is a global corporate cancer now that even older Americans can't recognize as American. Google the old-fasioned Redneck Virginian and Vietnam Veteran Joe Bageant for that spiel.
Which brings me to Lenin. For the last time. A country that has a shortage of Ibnprufen and Vitiamn E, has to import buses from Japan and their internet from Venezuela because of a criminal blockade only defended at the UN by two genocidal squatter states (Isreal and U.S.) is conducting an atheist miracle by achieving a higher life expectancy than even the richest empire in the world. This does not count the hours American workers put in and military servitude they have to suffer through so Europe can get the free shit Avedis is talking about, including Canuckland :D (my uncle lives there and its a fine place, Canada is where there are infact, actual tenured Marxist professors Avedis). Americans should be pissed (including the illegal ones that literally work for free). Because someone is getting free stuff, and its broadly not them. American's acceptance of their wage slavery for Western Europe's sake is a lot more embarrassing to me than Trumps Twitter tirades, Dave. Name me one Carribean country though or any country with the same GDP that can accomplish as much with their little capitalist democracy and then come back to me with a fair comparison.
Still Uruguay voted into power the country's notorious Communist Party, and ended up with a President, Jose Mujica, who was a former Communist guerilla. Marijuana was legalized in defiance of the U.N. and Mujica moved out of the presidential palace onto his tiny farm and with the money saved, started a program helping single mothers in an abortion-unfriendly Latin America. Portugal did the same recently, although the Marxist-Leninists had to share power with the damn Leninst-Trotskyists, they raised the minimum wage, uplifted trade unions and told the EU to renegotiate the loans Portugal supposedly owes for the EU Central Banks and the Fed in the U.S. gambling a stock market bet too far. And of course, don't forget the Socialist Alternative city councilwoman Kshame Sawant in Seattle whose one-woman show is enough to push the complacent Democrats into passing the first $15 minimum wage increase in the country, passing a 2.5% tax increase for the rich scumbags in Microsoft who are trying to stall, with their enormous lobbying money, the closing of a loophole to pay at least some tax in the EU and spending half her $100,000 salary for putting fuel onto the local activist fire. The only politician in the nation that I know of thats doing anything like that.
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-seattle-income-tax-20170711-story.html
Leninism is back with a vengeance baby and that even with terrible pushback by Capitalist tumors. It proves that voting Leninism sure beats voting for anyone else. I wish it weren't the truth but I fear it will take a ruthless coup of an elected Communist president, perhaps, a daring raid on a barracks and the mass execution of gusano landowners before real change comes. But voting in Leninists while they aren't rigging the ballots or you still can is doing better than nothing. And its better than any capitalist party. That proof is in the pudding.
P.S. Those Masai warriors abhorred slavery and fought with all kingdoms that practiced it.
Avedis, I'm sorry about what you went through but I did want to clarify a few things. For perspective.
P.S.S.-From 1980 to 2013, there 2,269 officers were slain in non-traffic related incidents. 52 percent of the killers were white, and 41 percent were black.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/01/09/are-black-or-white-offenders-more-likely-to-kill-police/?utm_term=.2b60754169df
P.S.S.S-"Although the Trump administration is reportedly planning to restructure the Department of Homeland Security’s countering violent extremism (CVE) program to focus exclusively on radical Islam, a 2014 national survey of 175 law enforcement agencies ranked sovereign citizens, not Islamic terrorists, as the most pressing terrorist threat. The survey ranked Islamic terrorists a close second, with the following top three threats all domestic in origin and sometimes overlapping: the militia movement, racist skinheads, and the neo-Nazi movement... According to data from the Anti-Defamation League, at least 45 police officers have been killed by domestic extremists since 2001. Of these, 10 were killed by leftwing extremists, 34 by rightwing extremists, and one by homegrown Islamist extremists... In 2009, a man with white supremacist and anti-government views shot five police officers in Pittsburgh, three fatally. In 2012, self-described sovereign citizens shot four sheriff’s deputies, two fatally, in St John the Baptist, a Louisiana parish. In 2014, two Las Vegas police officers eating lunch were killed by a husband-and-wife pair inspired by the Patriot movement; the couple were killed by police before following through on their plan to take over a courthouse to execute public officials. The same year, survivalist Eric Frein ambushed a Pennsylvania state police barracks, assassinating one state trooper and wounding another, then led law enforcement on a 48-day manhunt... In fact, a 2016 report by the US Government Accountability Office noted that 'of the 85 violent extremist incidents that resulted in death since September 12, 2001, far-rightwing violent extremist groups were responsible for 62 (73%) while radical Islamist violent extremists were responsible for 23 (27%).' (The report counts the 15 Beltway sniper shootings in 2002 as radical Islamist attacks, though the perpetrators’ motives are debated.)"
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/15/sovereign-citizens-rightwing-terrorism-hate-us-government
P.S.S.S.S- When they find Black Panthers in police departments in America let me know. How would this hurt race relations anymore than this has already. You think these fascists become cops by accident? They had help. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/fbi-white-supremacists-in-law-enforcement/
P.S.S.S.S.S-"I don’t wanna talk about no fucking Ferguson and shit because I don’t live over there!' He added. 'I live in fucking Soho and Beverly Hills. I can’t relate." This is the bullshit I was talking about in the other thread. I actually didn't want to elaborate on this too much after all. Is this what capitalist success means? Is this living up to the white ideal? Then I want nothing to do with it. If success is having the attitude of "I got mines, fuck everyone else", thats not how I roll. What a life to live though, trying to avoid giving a damn. About anything.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/nov/10/rap-black-lives-matter-lil-wayne-vic-mensa-beyonce-asap-rocky
(Looks like I'm the blog hog now. There more in common between us Avedis than you acknowledge. On more than one thing.) P.S.S.S.S.S- Since you asked, Dave. "War isn’t hell at all. It’s man at his best; the highest morality he's capable of … it’s not war that’s insane, you see. It’s the morality of it. It’s not greed or ambition that makes war: it’s goodness. Wars are always fought for the best of reasons: for liberation or manifest destiny. Always against tyranny and always in the interest of humanity. So far this war, we’ve managed to butcher some ten million humans in the interest of humanity. Next war it seems we’ll have to destroy all of man in order to preserve his damn dignity. It’s not war that’s unnatural to us – it’s virtue. As long as valor remains a virtue, we shall have soldiers. So, I preach cowardice. Through cowardice, we shall all be saved.
I don’t trust people who make bitter reflections about war. ... It’s always the generals with the bloodiest records who are the first to shout what a Hell it is. And it’s always the widows who lead the Memorial Day parades … we shall never end wars ... by blaming it on ministers and generals or warmongering imperialists or all the other banal bogies. It’s the rest of us who build statues to those generals and name boulevards after those ministers; the rest of us who make heroes of our dead and shrines of our battlefields. We wear our widows’ weeds like nuns and perpetuate war by exalting its sacrifices. My brother died at Anzio – an everyday soldier’s death, no special heroism involved. They buried what pieces they found of him. But my mother insists he died a brave death and pretends to be very proud.
[Y]ou see, now my other brother can’t wait to reach enlistment age. That’ll be in September. May be ministers and generals who blunder us into wars, but the least the rest of us can do is to resist honoring the institution. What has my mother got for pretending bravery was admirable? She’s under constant sedation and terrified she may wake up one morning and find her last son has run off to be brave. -- Charlie Madison, in The Americanization of Emily
http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/search?q=americanization+of+emily
Mankind must put an end to war before war puts an end to mankind. -John F. Kennedy
War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today -John F. Kennedy
I suppose monuments to Revolutions French, American, Russian can stay. They imply a choice of embarking on a worthy cause, and in some cases, defense against Imperialist assault. I wouldn't miss them though if it meant taking them down too to ensure peace is celebrated more than war. Theres a great quote from Silber up there. Theres about as use putting up monuments to dead in an earthquake as it is to a war. Thats its contribution to humanity, at best.
There has never been a good war, or a bad peace -Benjamin Franklin
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. - Jiddu Krishnamurti
The main difference between the American Civil War and the other civil wars and rebellions you mention is that the Confederates lost. I imagine plenty of them, too, believed they were "embarking on a worthy cause."
But since you mention worthy causes, and since slavery seems to bother you, why keep up the monuments to the American Revolution? Britain abolished slavery internally effectively in 1772. Its colonies were abandoning slavery by the 1790s, and the entire empire ended slavery in the 1830s. By that measure, surely the American Revolution was not a worthy cause! An entire generation of people would have been freed from slavery if America had remained a British colony.
I've been to schools in both countries and I have a hard time finding these Marxist professors of yours. Sure, they write about Marxist themes. But they draw the same salaries as the non-Marxists, live in the same privately owned houses as the non-Marxists, and fly to the same conferences at posh hotels as the non-Marxists.
There's something slightly pathetic about presenting a conference paper on one's moral opposition to liberal capitalism in the ballroom of a four-star hotel's convention center for which one's employer pays you a six-figure salary or very nearly so.
Being north of the 49th parallel does not magically free Marxists from hypocrisy.
You are a prolific writer and there are many postscripts. I hope you'll forgive me for not addressing them all at once.
That's all right I think we're winding down here. Yes its a lot. So much so that I'm putting it up on my blog because I haven't thought of something else to say on it for years. Might as well preserve it if I'm writing essay collections for free and not for any classes I actually paid for.
Plus it is useful, you're memory might not be what it used to be David. I can always point out what I said before if thats what I already did :-P.
I had this debate with that Communist vet I mentioned, the one who was so ashamed of the war and his government that he doesn't even acknowledge that he is a veteran, even to the special Veteran Committee of his trade union. On his weekend online hangout we debated whether the French (and by extension the American) revolutions were bourgeoisie affairs or revolutionary. I think we agreed on the Maoist view. Everyone brought something to the table, although I guess the French revolution arguably a lot more than the American. Marx, who was a fan, mentioned that the French Revolution tripped up because although it might have brought liberty (a modern Capitalist republic), fraternity (nationalism), it did not bring égalité and that this was the task of the revolutionaries who should learn from and succeed the French; just as revolutionaries in the future would learn from the Soviet Union and enduring Cuba among others. Of course, even the French liberal experiment in democracy was stunted when every monarchy and their mother- even wittle baby Malta and all the way over to the Ottomans- raised armies to crush it. Just like they did the Soviet Union. I would think that that would be pertinent. But at least with the learning curve, you can learn a lot. Especially since communism turned out to be more unpalatable to the tyrannical greedy powers that be than liberal republicanism.
I would call the 1st Amendment and the 2nd Amendment accomplishments. Even if they may be the only ones. But the philosophy of Thomas Paine would not have been minted but by the fires of the French and American revolutions both. Do you think the Magna Carta should of never been written just because the Kings still kept serfs in bondage?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itvtwoVCTxM
Who says socialism is an alien ideology to America? Still. Again. I am willing to compromise and take them all down, even those commemorating battles one could actually be proud of if I must. Its the ideas put into practice that matter, not necessarily the amount of blood spilled to be able to do so.
At this point even liberal skeptics with fancy degrees are being forced to acknowledge Marx as an economist in his own right, whose analysis identified the very real contradictions that has roiled capitalism historically and is tearing it apart contemporaneously. French economist Thomas Piketty's and former John Hopkins University prof Branko Milanovich is required reading for that. With the falling rate of profit alone, I'm going to be dealing with a capitalism collapsing as a system in fifty years or less. You old goats don't have to worry about living that long, I do.
Canada has community colleges too and from what I read they are very similar to the United States. I believe most of them are there and I'm not sure how many are tenured, let alone making six figures. If you're in a capitalist university you have to follow capitalist conventions I gather however and of the two Marxist economists still in academia in America, they remain faculty because they use their knowledge of Marxism to make capitalists money, both Richard Wolff and Michael Hudson respectively. The rest have been all but blacklisted including Parenti, Russell, Finkelstein and others. This doesn't stop Wolff from advising cooperatives in the United States with Gar Alperovitz and Hudson from advising third-world countries in how to deal with bastards like the IMF and World Bank. After all, there is a reason even Stephne Bannon reads Lenin. It can even win you elections in the biggest anti-communist empire in the world.
My favorite Canadian Marxist and Leninist academic is Susan Babbitt of Queen's University. It could be she was forced to go to conferences as part of her job. She preferred her seminars with Fidel Castro however in unairconditioned rooms, whenever he had the time. Her work can be found here.
https://www.counterpunch.org/author/jaklvjleawjei/
People have been predicting the imminent demise of capitalism for quite some time now and it hasn't happened yet.
I have to keep cycling back to my own first rule in analyzing policy alternatives. Marxism has not proven successful. Most experiments in communist revolution have ended so disastrously that it is necessary every so often for the remaining Marxists to remind themselves that the failed revolutions weren't truly Marxist after all, in exactly the same way that Christian evangelicals occasionally feel compelled to announce that a fallen brother or sister was "never really saved.
Weirdly, there is no greater testament to the failure of Marx as an intellectual than the places communist revolution seemingly "succeeded." The revolution was supposed to happen in the heart of industrial "democracy" but instead it happened among the rural lumpenproletariat of Russia, Cuba, and China.
Incidentally, if my memory serves, "lumpenproletariat" is a German term that roughly translated means "deplorable."
This is still true. For capitalism to truly die, it has to die in its capitals (pun perhaps intended). This includes its expansion into the United States, although its technically just an expanded Colonialist Euro-superstate.
You could call the "Revolutions" that happened mere rebellions if you really want to be macro about it. Even then, the Soviet Union quickly became capitalist after Stalin relented and let scumbag investors like the Koch brothers develop Soviet oil fields for private profit and allowed American corporations to have exclusive rights to sell farm machinery in the country to top it off thus satisfying Americans enough to lift embargoes that would never cease to terrorize Stain's country. Because as remains true today, the "Holodomor" or famine that was historically caused by American sanctions could never be construed as anything other than a "genocide" because the corporations owned all the major media worldwide thus ensuring that only one side was competitive in the information war. With the breakdown of business as usual thats only breaking down now of course. You should ask an average Kazakh today (not those who simply parrot Robert Conquest's lies) whether they believe there was some kind of genocide in Ukraine. Its insulting to the Kazakhs that the Ukrainian right-wing and Nazi propagated propaganda version of the story is official gospel when more Kazakhs died as a proportion of the population due to a tragic famine which was a commonplace occurrence in Czarist Russia but merely the final instance of famine in the Soviet Union.
Mao of course betrayed his own ideas late in life as even post-Maoists today will say, whether by senility or craven motives. Tito in Yugoslavia never implemented anything more than a social democracy that relied on fatal IMF money and Kruschev made the Soviet Union's sudden turn onto the capitalist road to ruin permanent.
I take the Mikhail Bakunin view actually that Declasse middle-class and even upper-class leaders like Lenin and Castro became the leaders of revolutions and not the lumpen-proletariat (who are technically considered more criminals and beggars than sweatshop workers), anarchist though he was. Infact, with Trumps dealing with the mafia he could be called lumpen-bourgeoisie :). Here Marx was wrong admittedly. Marx, as it turned out, was a better analyzer of capitalism than predicting its demise and replacement by socialism of which he wrote very little and which he died before completing any magnum opus on it. He died infact before finishing his theory on the labor of value which is debated by scholars today. Leave the various Leninist, Maoist and Hoaxist (and more) factions to decide which actual implementation of socialism is better (I prefer a mix).
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/25/13-crises-we-face-trump-soil-loss-global-collapse
Although theres some boilerplate liberal hand-wringing here, hes otherwise spot on. The trends are clear even without reading a word of Marx, especially with first worlders insisting on eating meat. Hard, cold science means we are looking at mass famines all over the world in sixty years unless veganism and a sane economic system is adopted hard and fast. I never guaranteed socialism, but we could very well collapse into barbarism instead as either Friedrich Engels or Rosa Luxembourg warned. Its telling that it took this long for even one Communist Party (Portugal) to simply break into a liberal governing coalition of a Southern European Second-World country and this only with an alliance with a bourgeois Green Party. But while we're dealing with uselessly slow republican parliamentarian hogwash we're running out of time.
Thats not counting rising Fascism, Terminator-dystopian automation and peak oil. We'll see how effectively capitalism will be enforced being increasingly put under pressure by these many crises.
https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2008/mar/01/scienceofclimatechange.climatechange
Prophets have been foretelling Armageddon since time began, he says. "But this is the real thing."
Read Dr. Lovelock's constant confirmations of his predictions and see if its not time to get prepped.
Wait, wait. America is responsible for Stalin's famine? I have to say, that's a new one, but no doubt you're right. Truly there is no evil in the 20th century that can't be blamed on the American government, or at least on American corporations.
Oh, and let's not forget: Marx, the great environmentalist! Honestly you guys's incessant genuflecting before the altars of the great philosopher-kings of the movement is really very religious for a movement that's supposedly so atheist. You're indeed right, although I think not the way you meant it: I can understand the entirety of contemporary environmental decline without reading a word of Marx. In fact, I very much encourage it.
We're going to collapse into barbarism, all right, but not because of the inevitable progress of the capitalist system or because of the evils of American imperialism. Simply because this is what humans do. There are too many of us now, and our brains are too small, and we're headed off into the deep end. The population is too big to cope with anything less than intensive industrialized farming, too well-armed to tolerate mass depopulation without blood in the streets, and too much of it is too ignorant to be aware of it. I don't need Marx to see what's coming.
You'd be surprised. I probably should be fair and add only 95% of the First World embargoed the country too. By then though, the United States embargo was by far the most pressing.
Funny that the United States never embargoed Muslim Indonesia went it committed actual bloodsoaked genocide against the Christian East Timorese even after Indonesian Special Forces assassianted an Australian journalist and crushed the skull of an American one.
Oh! Right. Indonesia was a regular customer of Western death merchants at the time, including the sale of helicopter gunships and machine guns which for some reason Indonesia required outsized the threat the Timorese resistance posed. It was also odd that the East Timorese were denying multi-national oil corporations their God-given right to drill in their territory right before the Indonesian invasion began. Shucks. Indonesia's still ongoing atrocities in Papua have nothing to do with this, right?
Could it be that the POTUS Gerald Ford secretely signed off on the operation, not even days before; as declassified documents show? Well I did enough research for tonight. How about you do your own and prove me wrong for a change.
Nothing the CIA didn't do in El Salvador against actual communist guerillas (who I forgot were recentely elected into power). I see American aid *cough* blackmail *cough* to rebuild their country from the aftermath of another instance of CIA frolicking has tempered their ambitions and has only led them to ban the toxic mining of metals within their territory. Still better than Brazil where illegal (and legal) gold miners regularly poison the Amazon with the caustic metals it takes to mine it.
The difference between reading say, a tafsir and hadith versus a work of a Marxist is we realize our philosophers and leaders are mortal human beings who only deserve to be remembered if they add something significant to the tradition of capitalist or revolutionary theory and practice. In example, pastoral societies on the way to evolving to horitculturists. We're constantly reminded of this when Marx suddenly died before finishing his works and Fredrich Engels was enlisted to complete it from what could be recovered from Marx's notes. You can read up on a lot of environmental science alone, sure. But only one country has recovered more acres in a national park per capita than any other, grows the most organic food per capita (ironically, to save on fuel costs) and gets the best score by the World Wildlife Foundation and United Nations Human Development Index on achieving the highest living standards with the lowest carbon footprint. It happens to be Marxist-Leninst.
Think of Cuba as a city state or even a megaopolis like LA (it has a couple million less residents than the sprawling continental city.) With good policy for urban planning (I know the West loves its decadent, unsustainable lifestyle. Like the alcoholic it might have to hit rock bottom, or in this case, civilizational collapse before it realizes the errors of its ways, should they survive.) It proves that environmentally sustainable civilization is possible with a little dicipline and idealogy. I realize your trying to play grumpy old man, who can't remember when there wasn't a Western civilization. And considers it the only way of life possible. But when the latter collapses to ruins, lets just say that there are things worth preserving and things I'll let become history. In order to not upset you, I won't disclose either.
Or the madmen in charge of it could rather nuke their nose to spite their upper torso. I think Western civilization then will leave a big enough gash in the geological record for the bipedal cockroaches who will replace us to deduce what an abomination and failure it was for all time.
Stalin as a poor victim? OMG. Definitely through the looking glass around here.
David, I think taxes - within reason - are necessary and should be paid. Which leads me to politicians. Politicians are supposed to represent the people. As we move from house of representatives to the senate, the politicians are supposed to become increasingly wise and concerned with the long term well being of the country while maintaining the relationship of law making to the spirit and letter of the Constitution. Mob rule (aka direct democracy) isn't what it's supposed to be. Nor is it supposed to be career politicians first ensuring the maintenance of personal power and control - unfortunately that is what has happened.
Identity politics = mob rule. Fueling identity politics = a tactic to establish and maintain personal power in a most craven and seditious manner.
I listen to mouth pieces for the various hot button identities. These people can't even reason. They're just yelling and emotional. They're selfish and demanding. They're like undisciplined out of control little children. They are products of the public school system, affirmative action and liberal universities. And, often, fatherless households. You can argue otherwise all day long. I don't care. I know what I see and hear.
As for communism, it's a flop and everyone knows it. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
avedis
You know, people do know about the British Empire starving the Irish in the millions while exporting potatoes. Almost no one (in the West) knows about the repeated negligent and criminal famines that the British orchestrated in India, killing tens of millions plus Indian people because they forced them at the point of the gun to grow cotton instead of rice. The British bastards were never under debilitating sanctions and embargoes either time.
Avedis, you keep on saying that while overdoses and suicides continue to spike in this country and across the First World and the people still alive become fascists and identitarians (yes infact, including certain toxic black groups and bourgeois feminists I admit and who altogether are now outnumbering actual communists in said Imperialist West) keep on growing, insisting on throwing the baby out with the bathwater rather than having patience with a long rotting liberal parliamentary political system waiting to die. In a way, I sympathize with all of them, but can see liberal democracy has had its day.
Yes Avedis, we should go back to the Dark Ages and only have private schools for a small segment of the population instead, right? Oh and affirmative action is now illegal in nearly a dozen states and growing, so you increasingly can't use that excuse. But, in a certain way, I agree with you. The expulsion of Marxism from not only the social sciences but even of tried and proven vaguely left-wing economic schools (like Keynesian) let alone Marxism, has left the Capitalist class with no available reason to explain why they're system is making life increasingly miserable for almost everyone else but the top 1 or 20 percent except because: "identity politics". Don't associate this with actual Leninism. Don't be that dull. Communism and Liberalism isn't the same thing (for the millionth time), and the Liberals punch left a lot more frequently then they punch right. See Hillary vs. Bernie Sanders (even though he was arguably a liberal social democrat and not even a communist, least not one I'd call a comrade). We would know. Engels, Lenin and Castro never used the word feminist for a reason. This was relegated to the unique bullshit politics of schizophrenic capitalist republics that make up the Imperialist West. To give some perspective of academia today, my Greek-obsessed English professor that fetishizes Western Civilization writes for the soft Neo-Nazi Richard Spencer. His tenure protects him. It did not save Palestinian Professor Salaita or Leninist Dr. Michael Parenti despite being a PhD from Yale and publishing an anti-identity politics political science textbook taught in college classrooms. The formers far-right work can be found here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_F._Bertonneau
Don’t look for a Communist black cat in a dark cave, as the Russians say. You might still find a Communist unfriendly bourgeois liberal one though.
Avedis, lets put it this way. When tech workers making six-figure salaries are so pissed off at their bosses gentrifying property prices that even six-figure hard-working tach workers can't live the American dream, the majority of the working-class is fucking fed up with the corporate political system and want to change it. Especially if they're the ones whose donations make it possible for a Leninist in American public office (although since its Trotskyist, I'd call them Jeremy Corbyn social democrats) to pass an unprecedented tax increase on the rich in their city which the fascist bastards are trying to fight in court. History shows theres one people that hate democracy the most and its the Capitalist ruling class. But with their hatred and eventual sabotage they show their hand, and make people realize them as the crafty King Louis XVI they are. Thats what happened when the plantation owner gusanos asked General Batista to overthrow the democratically elected Communist president, thats what happened to the corrupt and greedy Portuguese Republic when the pissed off (and secretly Communist) military generals overthrew the President in a popular coup and thats what happened to Nikolay II and Prime Minister Kerensky, even after the Duma parliament was finally introduced because their extremist generals (led by General Kornilov) refused to stop plotting to exterminate Communist women and children like the back-stabbing Chinese Nationalists did to the Maoists in the Shanghai Massacre. Communism has never come to power in a country that was not disrupted by war or corruption, or both. John F. Kennedy . Name a capitalist country that has had neither.
(How the hell did this get so long?) Theres a reason even the majority Americans are certain JFK was assassinated by the CIA and the bankers even as the baby boomers are dying off. Even a capitalist that could save capitalism is disposed of, all private ruling classes becomes this remorseless eventually. Just ask the slaveowners that illegally tore up the Articles of Confederation and introduced the tyrannical "Constitution". The Confederates who wanted and want to secede for just this reason I still identify and agree with, the history of Capitalism just makes its restoration impossible without violence (which is the unfortunate truth).
http://news.gallup.com/poll/165893/majority-believe-jfk-killed-conspiracy.aspx
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/18/bernie-sanders-techies-support-socialism-capitalism
By the way, what a great track record capitalism and liberal democracy has in lasting, what with the collapse of the Greek empire (twice), the Romans, the German and Russian Empire and of course even what people thought was the invincible British Empire. Name me a Communist country that had its later leaders betray its principles and fall and I'll name you capitalist liberal republic that fell. That makes the two of us.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us-plutocrats-108014
Some required reading Avedis. If you don't believe a working-class Joe-schmo like me, how about a zillionaire? You say you've mingled with the top of the corporate food chain and "understand" them. How about asking a guy that holds court in an actual boardroom in what was (for a few seconds mind you) the richest company in the world (incidentally headquartered on the same coast as the reigning richest corporation)? Someone who will make more money in a year than even you will ever make in a lifetime?
"If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when... Many of us think we’re special because “this is America.” We think we’re immune to the same forces that started the Arab Spring—or the French and Russian revolutions, for that matter. I know you fellow .01%ers tend to dismiss this kind of argument; I’ve had many of you tell me to my face I’m completely bonkers. And yes, I know there are many of you who are convinced that because you saw a poor kid with an iPhone that one time, inequality is a fiction. Here’s what I say to you: You’re living in a dream world. What everyone wants to believe is that when things reach a tipping point and go from being merely crappy for the masses to dangerous and socially destabilizing, that we’re somehow going to know about that shift ahead of time. Any student of history knows that’s not the way it happens. Revolutions, like bankruptcies, come gradually, and then suddenly. One day, somebody sets himself on fire, then thousands of people are in the streets, and before you know it, the country is burning. And then there’s no time for us to get to the airport and jump on our Gulfstream Vs and fly to New Zealand. That’s the way it always happens. If inequality keeps rising as it has been, eventually it will happen. We will not be able to predict when, and it will be terrible—for everybody. But especially for us."
The whole piece should be read in full. He also had the chance, where he lived, to spot the growing Leninist movement in Seattle before anyone else did. Now I don't want to talk about whether liberal democracy and freedom is becoming less and less possible anymore. That the forest fires burning more and more farm land every year and the Ogalala Aquifer drying out in a few years (do I have to tell how bad dairy farmers are hurting and going out of business in the Upstate drumlins you prefer?) and how it will cause an unprecedented refugee crisis right in the Mid-West means that its too late to do anything else but a planned economy as the only option left for civilization as we know it to remain. Rising inequality, left unchanged, historically means revolting peasants and if they don't overthrow the upper classes the first time, like the French revolution, they'll get them the third. Lately they've been Liberal Democrat, Communist and Fascist, in about that order. If the Communists (or more unlikely, willingly taxed capitalists) take power I feel there'll be a chance to set things right. If the Fascists are allowed to grow and get their race war, it will destroy America as an entity and break it up into several banana republics which will be neo-colonized and manipulated against each other for the benefit of the Great Indian and Chinese Empires for a thousand years. Although he never hacked any election, maybe that’s why Putin is encouraging far right-wing activism all over the First World, especially through Russia Today. Thats the history, if you want to wait for that. Even without an economic system thats getting too fat and too ravenous for the earth to sustain it.
I am indeed curious though. Name me a time when societies escaped these circumstances otherwise?
P.S.- I just read in the New York Times that syphilis is somehow spreading in Oklahoma City, a disease long wiped out in Cuba along with HIV. How long will you tolerate the living standards of more Americans making third-world countries look good? When in your opinion should we act on conscience?
P.S.S.-I do appreciate the response. Although it does take out massive chunks of my time (To the point it looks to me blogger is allowing shorter and shorter comments). Maybe waiting for the breaks to write out my unofficial dissertation is wise :D.
I doubt Cuba eliminated either of those diseases, but perhaps you could care to back up that claim. They did announced they'd ended maternal transmission, which is nice for them.
Look, you can write at length if you want, and you do fairly well, but my only quibble with your broad thesis of environmental and social decline is that the Marxist bit isn't necessary. Human societies that grow too dense run through their available resources and then decline. If they also grow in absolute numbers, then the political systems that used to serve them well stop doing so and similarly decline. This is not magically unique to America or to capitalism.
So far as I can true, these laws are true throughout history. Communism is neither necessary to diagnose this problem nor is it a solution: the Soviet Union was an environmental disaster unparalleled in the capitalist west.
I think you mentioned a blog in your last series of posts. If you don't mind sharing the address, I would like to read it, although perhaps I'm not the sort of commenter you're looking for.
To all with an emphasis to david.
i consider you to be a valuable asset to raw.
but i admit we have lost our way here on the blog.
we have morphed from ranger simple to evolutionary biologists etc...
we have an agreement here to get back to basics,like waylon and willie in luckenbach texas.
i write against war.plain and pretty simple.
to do so i must be a subject matter expert and i am,nor am i bound by any ties to any business or political group. this is my strength.
i feel that we (raw) have become too close to supporting a particular politician, by trumpeting truth in the media.
we are going to get back to military topics or i'm just gonna throw in the towel.
i feel(which is an emotion) that we are on the road to perdition and we ain't gonna end up well.
when a potus can go to the un and call a foreign leader a rocket man, and threaten to destroy an entire country then we are surely on undemocratic ground.sorely humanism is not our goal.
we have idiots running the dos/dod and security services of the country.
sanity is lost and we cruise along as if the world is beautiful.
think of this.
mexico has just been whammied by a natural disaster and the us hasn't even sent them a bottle of water.is this what america has become?
threats to destroy half of a peninsula.
so you see i'm not much interested in marx.
during the w years i tried to treat the potus with a modicum of respect for the office.
it didn't matter that i felt him to be pond scum.
i find it impossible to be polite or to feel any loyalty to craziness and bluster that is not beneficial to the american people.
we are so far adrift that i can't find the words to assess the situation.
i want to make a point.
IF NOKO is such a threat then why don't we just shoot down all the missiles that they launch.
we have spent untold billions over the years saying that we are developing starwars.
wheres the beef.
the point is=trump needs a war, just as did gwb.
not a good thing.
jim hruska
Jim,
Received and understood. I will limit my comments to the topic at hand and restrain from digressions and tangents.
RAW has attracted some interesting and diverse intelligent commenters. The urge to engage is strong, but must be resisted.
I would be interested - at some point - in Ranger's opinion on scoped rifles in combat versus iron sights. Short barreled carbines versus full length barrels as well (CAR15/M4 versus M16/M14).
avedis
Jim
Understood. We do tend to wander off in tangents and it is, after all, your and Lisa's house.
On North Korea, a question from what you say there --
Obviously this is another branch of the army -- or maybe it isn't even in the army anymore -- but I get the sense that despite all the money poured into missile defense and the way in which the units are moved around the world like fancy tokens of American power, that there isn't much actual trust for the system to work as advertised.
Is that your read or am I way off there?
Maybe it's just being smart about risks. Better not to have the missiles launched at all. But nowhere in all of this has anyone high up said, "Even if they did launch a missile, now that THAAD is there, we're probably okay."
David,
During the Gulf War US anti-missile defense systems got most of the scuds launched by Iraq, but not all. Of course that was a long time ago by tech standards. Then again, the scud made for an easy target. There was also a pretty high dud rate with US high tech ordnance generally, btw.
I'm certain that the effectiveness of the anti-missile system is an extremely closely guarded secret. We'll never know until we have to use it. I doubt that even people tasked with planning truly know how effective (or ineffective it is).
avedis
Ah. It needs a little working up on. Plus, aside from one post bashing the revisionist Trotskyist "Leninists" I used to run with its just a rehash of the comments I make on this site. You're not missing much :) (plus allowing comments for the time being would interfere with my studies).
Still I am keeping that blog for one good reason. Counting all the times I have to repost links >:-0.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2014/11/21/the-climate-crisis-is-capitalism/
"Graph (1) above: atmospheric CO2 levels from burning fossil fuels to power industrial production began to rise dramatically around 1850. The widespread use of automobiles and other fossil fuel powered transportation began in the early twentieth century. Framed by Western economists as ‘consumption,’ transportation is necessary to get to and from work in much of the West because of decisions around economic organization made by self-interested industrialists. Note the drop in CO2 emissions in the 1930s, the Great Depression. While the data in the graph ends in 1960 to avoid outsourced production that misrepresents national CO2 emissions, total emissions doubled again between 1970 and 2011. Units are MtCO2. Source CAIT.
Graph (2) above: from the large scale industrialization of the second ‘industrial revolution’ to the most recent waves of globalization the overwhelming preponderance of CO2 emissions were directly tied to capitalist production. In the 110 years between 1850 – 1960 ‘ the West,’ the U.S., U.K. and Germany, put over ten times as much CO2 into the atmosphere as the far more populous combined Russia and China. China didn’t evolve into the world’s largest emitter of CO2 until the U.S. and Europe began outsourcing dirty production there in the 1990s. Units are MtCO2. Source: CAIT
I'm not posting this again. Next time I might just refer you to my blog after all :P. I am not sure if this counts the Third-World factories and plants where simple peasants were thrown off land that they at least could work and own and into sweatshops that were owned and operated by said remorseless Western investors (and of course they bribed the military juntas that crowded these people in crime-ridden cities at the point of a gun) but the contrast couldn't be more starker in any case. But if you had to ask, I don't care about the Soviet Union. Thats history. I don't judge the United States with the same lens I judge the coal dust caked Great Britain at the start of the Industrial Revolution. Here and now Cuba presents the highest standard of living that an environmentally sustainable society can achieve. This is despite having the GPD (naturally so because of its population and limited landmass) of a Third-World country. It has something to do with eliminating the exploiter class from the exploited class and starting from zero, even as I'm sure and you definitely, the bureaucracy is sometimes corrupt and its democracy imperfect. In a way, Cuba shouldn't be a model for development because it cannot be compared to a country that isn't hounded by CIA spies and an illegal blockade which only lawless colonialist allies with histories of genocide defend at the United Nations, and yet, through it all, it still is.
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2015/mtct-hiv-cuba/en/
You finally corrected me on something. They haven't eliminated them entirely. Just their transmission from mother-to-child as confirmed by that biased Communist medical establishment above known as the World Health Organization, based in the United States. They're just the lowest in the Western Hemisphere. According to the WHO website, I see Canada refuses to release its data on syphilis, let alone the United States. What they have posted continue to rise.
http://www.insidermonkey.com/blog/10-countries-with-the-highest-std-rates-in-the-developed-world-565721/
Cuba, despite a recent condom shortage (and an embargo I must insist) still has the lowest HIV rate in the hemisphere. I know the U.S. pays the military bills of spoiled underworked EU countries (and then some in the other hemisphere). What's Canada's excuse (whose military budget is even smaller because of the proximity of its benefactor that it doesn't deserve)?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_HIV/AIDS_adult_prevalence_rate
Jim, Avedis I concur. I know when I get into those I feel soiled afterwards. Its not a satisfying discussion.
When fruit flies have four times the gene pool and diversity as homo sapiens sapiens (apparently todays mankind is so specific genetically in species categorization all 7 billion people in all hues and colors are a subspecies of a subspecies) race is boring. Thats nowhere near the most important issues facing mankind and it needlessly complicates things more than they really are. I can see why CEOs push it. Keeps everyone divided and conquered. I see through their bullshit, too many many don't. That should be the point.
If we were as diverse as fruitflies not even nuclear war should bother us. Fruitflies have so many different mutations and diversity in their populations that individual fruitflies have better inherited protection from nuclear fallout than even cockroaches. More nuclear resistant traits disperse through their gene pool than even those underground critters. Humankind isn't as resistant. Eliminating the possibility of nuclear war (and environmental devastation) should be both be priority #1. The cynical and pampered shouldn't say there isn't a model out there that does so.
Sorry but I felt I should add just this.
If you want to appreciate Cuba's outsized accomplishments; accomplishments that countries with GDP like theirs, whatever their population or natural resources, simply do not light a candle to, living standards that countries in the same per capita GPD bracket are not supposed to have should read the essays of one of the men most responsible for creating them.
The intelligence and well-spokeness of Fidel Castro will always be a lot more succinct than me and his essays that have been translated into English can be found here
Just the conclusion of the most recent one says it all.
"Stop transferring to the Third World lifestyles and consumer habits that ruin the environment. Make human life more rational. Adopt a just international economic order. Use science to achieve sustainable development without pollution. Pay the ecological debt. Eradicate hunger and not humanity.
Now that the supposed threat of communism has disappeared and there is no more pretext to wage cold wars or continue the arms race and military spending, what then is preventing these resources from going immediately to promote Third World development and fight the ecological destruction threatening the planet?
Enough of selfishness. Enough of schemes of domination. Enough of insensitivity, irresponsibility and deceit.
Tomorrow will be too late to do what we should have done a long time ago."
They should have all the answers you need.
If I can tell that you read them and you have serious questions, than a fruitful discussion can be continued. Otherwise, I think I should leave it at that.
To all,
i am not stifling convo as i'm proud of the group that participates here.
it's just that i'm frustrated.
what i do /say/think has been fairly clearly discussed.
this has had no observable effect on any thing.
as i see it Marx is dead and we are slowly following suit.
i'm starting to believe that we as a society are suicidally doomed.
we can't pick or grow a leader that is 1/2 as astute as putin.
so what do we do? we make an enemy of him.
as for trump he was elected on false promises as have been all our potus leaders.all our wars have been foisted on us.
our military has lost touch with the citizenry and we fail to see this as a disaster.
but as i said= drive on.
at least we all are friendly and respectful in our discourses.
in todays make believe world that in itself is a real accomplishment.
jim
To all,
i'm clearly stating that if we could shoot down nokos missiles we would already have done so.
since we haven't it's logical to conclude that we do not have the ability to do so.
jim
avedis replied to Jim's request to stay on-topic, thusly:
RAW has attracted some interesting and diverse intelligent commenters. The urge to engage is strong, but must be resisted.
This will be an open comment to ranger Jim (no offense intended whatsoever):
Lisa feels that RAW is a wonderful open-forum for discussion among some very interesting people. I do not know that we need to rein anyone in. ISTM we should allow all reasonable commenters to use this as a meeting space.
What occurs in a space like this is sort of a holy thing, in my humble estimation. Today's commentariat is filled with much too much inanity; I see no inanity here ... just some knowing ribbing, on occasion, and we can all roll with that.
That said, if anyone reels horribly astray, we can note this.
Otherwise, Ranger, take it as a compliment that what you write spurs such far-ranging thought. You are under no obligation to reply to everything anyone wishes to discuss.
Jim,
I have always promoted the "jester theory" of Trump. I like his rhetoric better than all the disguised jesters and liars. That is all. It's obvious that if any of the other candidates were to be elected, we'd be facing at least as much drive to engage in foreign entanglements. IMO, Trump really did want improved relations w/ Russia. Covertly, he's been doing it Syria, where the jihadis and Ts are getting killed big time and the survivors are on the run and the new policy is that Assad can stay. However, the state apparatus shut down Trump's move to normalize more widely with Putin over the silly election meddling meme. Goofy, but clever enough to do the job. The demonization of Russia by establishment Dems and Reps is insanity to my mind. They want the US as global hegemon and Russia is seen as an obstacle. Madness.
Thx for clarifying the NoKo missile shoot down capability. I originally thought that you thought we could seriously shoot them down. I agree with what you say now. I think we could intercept some of them - perhaps most - but it only takes one or two to slip through the net to make the risk unacceptable.
I still think NoKo is China's responsibility and - to a lesser extent - Russia's. We will see if Trump can apply the art of the deal. There certainly are enough chips on the table that something could happen that is positive. OTOH, our own craven govt has short sighted selfish reasons to subvert. Time will tell.
avedis
Lisa,
I didn't take Jim's direction as a move to stifle discussion. I think we all did go too far off topic (most definitely including myself) in the last couple of posts/comments sections. You and Jim write some great pieces. Always thought provoking. Sometimes it is challenging to respond to other's thoughts without first attempting to lay down some foundational assumptions. Those, in turn get debated and sometimes the main points are lost in the ceaseless peeling on the onion.
Both of you get me thinking. Your style is closer to my own; albeit less emotional. Jim is laconic, very concise and often coming from ambush, fast, light, agile, aggressive - pure Ranger. I love it. I can appreciate that excessive wordiness is contrary to Jim's mind set.
avedis
Aye Jim.
We should focus on what we can change. Jon Schwarz of the Intercept compared the media heads of private television to dung beetles. Don't blame the corporate conglomerate media for shoveling shit, its just the way they are made and the only way they can function.
Getting back to military matters may be best, sometimes preaching to the converted and being an echo chamber is all we are really looking for and this is certainly true in topics where we all can converge. Although our views vary between reactionary, establishment liberal and post-Enlightenment dialectical materialism (as I would call myself if I were to use the fancy version), the consensus we have on the insanity of last-stage Capitalist war-mongering can keep a man (or woman) sane among the Lotus eaters that surround us (theres my right-wing English professor brainwashing me again, Avedis ) :-).
Speaking of which. While liberals moaned and howled, even cried, when Donald Trump condemned "both sides" after Charlottesville despite a Neo-Nazi blatantly plagiarizing an ISIS terror tactic and the LA Times reporting that Neo-Nazis where harassing city residents until Antifa intervened (who I don't support uncritically by the way especially when they themselves fuck up); I do believe that because Trump refuses to follow the script, he speaks with honesty about what rich scheming fucks like him think. This honesty, which the ruling class (Fed central bankers, "cool" tech CEOs like Steven Jobs, whatever captains of industry still kick around even) take pains to keep from being disseminated among the filthy unwashed masses is prevented from leaking by any Freudian slips by hiring functionaries to speak in their stead. These stand-ins are exemplified by the careers of people like the Bushes, the Nixons and the Clintons. Trump, by ending up as the PR officer he was supposed to hire (in the past it was Clinton, who went to his wedding) was vulnerable to these Freudian slips as any 1%er raised in decadent luxury would be (see the Amazon.com Seattle billionaire I quoted earlier in the thread). How beneficial for the working classes and how terrible for the ruling class that his slips are particularly shameless and boastful affairs as if there was a peace treaty between his Id and his Superego in the former's favor (on Putin, "Theres are a lot of killers. Do you think our country's so innocent?"). He sometimes looks like hes entirely missing the latter which makes him so dangerous to the ruling classes plans. Hes fucking up the Capitalist con game and thats not good for profits and thus this is why his class, including many who own the corporate media, now hate him.
"So this week it's Robert E. Lee," Trump told reporters. "I notice that Stonewall Jackson's coming down, I wonder: Is it George Washington next week, and is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you really do have to ask yourself — where does it stop?"
I'm glad he mentioned that. As white nationalists insist (and are right), American was built on the murder and enslavement (slaves were often thrown overboard by particularly remorseless slave ship owners so they can collect insurance) of millions of Africans, the genocide of millions more First Nations, and on white privilege. Specifically the establishment of white persons, and only white persons as acknowledged citizens of the United States by one of the first acts of Congress. The problem, as Thomas Paine saw it, was unlike the ancestors of their own Western Heritage, they did not separate the land to be planted, the treasures to be kept and the women to be raped equally among each other like Greek hero Odysseus demanded of his men upon his raid at Ismara. Although socialism evolved to be more dignified since then, Thomas Paine (and his Red Paineites as his farmer followers were called) railed rightly against what can be considered the unjust redistribution even of the land collectively conquered as the betrayal of their Western culture and even of conservatism despite being outshouted by his more privileged American revolutionaries.
The history aside, of course that Russian sanctions bill did in fact prevent Trump from stopping the destabilizing arming of Ukraine by making Congressional votes on that crisis veto-proof. Trump rightly called this unconstitutional. There may be at least some conscious effort by Trump to avoid WW3, but I feel his best asset is his exposure, perhaps inadvertently, of the powers that be. As long as billionaire's money is the only blood that runs through the veins of this electoral system, America's political system is a walking corpse trying to eat the brains of whatever denizens surrounds it. The zombie needs to be bled before it can be changed.
And with that cheerful note, its back to my studies-as explained in the other thread. Look forward to coming back.
P.S.- It seems you do get pissed off at me Avedis :-D, but keep in mind: like you; I'm a former liberal. After Bushit, Obombi Obamanation's betrayal after I cast my very first vote for him blew enough gaskets for me to abandon official politics forever. As Ronald Reagan said, "I never left the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party left me".
Sometimes people go far-right, sometimes people go radical left. We just happened to go both. Cheers.
Something that came to me just now.
As it were, if Thomas Jefferson successfully closed the West Point base and later academy (which he tried but failed to do during his presidency) and stopped the raising of a standing army, the violent rewriting of the Constitution he advocated every generation and the necessity of watering the tree of liberty from time to time, lest it wilt "with the blood of patriots and tyrants" would not be needed.
Alas, the usury central bankers; which he feared more than a centralized military would damn the nation early irregardless. These were the first capitalists which socialists opposed. And not just them.
But history is now history. When two-time Medal of Honor recipient Major General Smedley Butler was passed over in the Marines for his condemnation of Mussolini (then unofficial U.S. ally incidentally), he snapped out of what he called his military-imposed mindset and from his experience in war proposed a solution to the far-ranging Empire that would temper its aggressions. The severe taxing of the arms manufacturers and the changing of the mission of the Marine Corps to the defense of the United State's immediate national waterways, the Bill of Rights and nothing else. You could call me a Butlerist. Thats the best campaign promise that was ever made, by any Congressmen, for a century.
Niko,
I am not pissed off at you at all. I think you're spewing commie jibberish, but I separate you, as a person, from the ideas you are entertaining at this point in life.
I repeat that I am not far right, alt-right, or any other kind of right-wing. That is a label that ideologues want to slap on me. I am laissez-faire. I think we are all better off without busy bodies telling us how we must live (and taking our money in the process). I don't have all the answers. I admit it. They don't have the answers either, but refuse to admit it. I do know that I can take care of myself. I am certain that I don't want to be taken care off by thieves, liars and lunatics.
I will repeat that the world of men has always been a cruel exploitive place. It doesn't matter who's running things, commies, socialists, capitalists, African kings, native Americans, philosophers, scientists, religious people. Only a fool thinks he has the answers and only a con artist trying to sell you something would tell you that he does. All we can ever do is to make ourselves, as individuals, as good as we can and be kind to our neighbors that are kind to us back. And teach our children to be strong, smart and capable. That's it. To focus on the transgressions of a particular culture is mere bigotry used as a tactic to become the next boss.
All of that said, large groups of people do need leaders. The leader must emphasize the values that cohere the group. The leader must address critical issues successfully. Not all issues, even if some people think them to be critical. That is not possible. Just the key issues that reinforce cohesion and create an environment where the individual feels they have what they need, if not what they want.
The problem, as I see it, is that the country is utterly divided as to what those critical issues are. I do not understand the swath of the country that thinks gay rights (whatever that means) is paramount. Or that illegal aliens' rights are critical. I do not understand the minority oppression that they speak of. I have personally hired people of all colors and creeds into good paying jobs. I have said before that where I work, women are highly represented in excellent positions. I do not belief that police committing genocide against blacks is even near reality. I do not believe that statues of dead soldiers are truly offending anyone other than paranoid schizophrenics. I do not understand fools that take out student loans that will put them in debt for a lifetime, but study no marketable skills, who then demand free education. I do not understand obese slobs who experience the inevitable serious health consequences, saved no money, and then demand free healthcare. I do not understand people that have babies, often many of them, early in adulthood, with little education and no real career, who then complain that it's someone else's fault that they're poor.
I do understand the stranded workers - or former workers - of the rust belt. They look to me to have a legitimate beef. I understand the desire to reduce/eliminate foreign entanglements. I understand the desire to not support some of the dummies I mentioned above via our hard earned money. I understand the desire to maintain an effective education system. To regulate immigration and to maintain the integrity of the culture, to build the economy.
So there it is. Basically, I have no appreciation and little sympathy for cry babies, idiots, fools, starry eyed bleeding hearts and America bashers. There are many that think like me and there are many who think like those I do not understand. There appears to be an unbridgeable gulf between the two groups.
avedis
Now as for this slavers used to do this or that horrible thing....so America was founded on evil....talk.
This is merely more of that bigoted tactic to undermine and weaken then move in to become the new boss. It's straight out of rules for radicals.
First, it is very poor argumentation to suggest that EVERTHING in the country was built by slaves. That it was "founded" on slavery. That is ridiculous.
Second, who treats people like that? I have done things I'm not proud of. I would like to think that I learned to be better and grew past those things. Should I be condemned forever for having done these things. Should you be?
The country did some wrong things. It stopped doing them. It still isn't perfect. Neither are you are I or anyone else or any other system. I'd like to think that we will continue to become better. A lot of the disagreement in the country is what being better would like.
Third, I like Smedley too, but I don't totally agree with him. The USA and other western powers have done a lot of good for other countries. Lots. I think people that complain about western influence are romanticizing some pretty ugly cultures that contained (some still do) slavery, caste systems, primitive conditions of all kinds. Colonialism straightened a lot of that out.
You don't see native Americans living in teepees and dragging their belongings (foregoing the wheel which they did not invent), drinking from stream and hunting game for a living do you? You don't see people immigrating to Africa to live in dung constructed huts do you? I rest my case
avedis
You don't see native Americans living in teepees and dragging their belongings (foregoing the wheel which they did not invent.
Wow. Any idea who did invent the wheel? It wasn't invented in Europe btw.
As someone who grew up in the UKs first colony - Ulster. I don't share your love for the joys of ethnic cleansing, genocide and persecution.
I guess it depends on whos doing the colonising and who's getting colonised?
Brw, been reading this blog for about a decade now and it's one of my faves. I love all the PWOT posts.
Fergal.
Fergal,
I'm half Armenian. I grew up with actual genocide survivors, like my grandparents and their friends. I heard all the stories first hand. Saw the pain and sorrow on their faces. I don't anyone who grew up a slave or knew slaves in America.
None of what you say negates my point, which you have missed by a mile.
Everyone has committed genocide, slavery and various atrocities. Pointing fingers is a fool's errand- or a deliberate tactic to undermine a particular group.
The fact remains that everyone seeks the benefits of western culture and there are scant few that seek to live the primitive life. Even the jihadists enjoy the internet, cell phones, Toyotas, M16s when they can get them. It is also a fact that the remaining primitives maintain awful practices such as slavery, caste systems, women as property, crapping in the rivers they drink from. etc.
avedis
Avedis
You're also missing my point, which would be the fault of my poor writing skills.
I grew up in a colony, i lived and breathed it and I buried my friends and family members who were victims of occupying colonial forces. Not quite the same as your grandads stories.
I moved to Australia around the same time I started reading RAW. Funnily enough I hear the same bs line about wheel inventing used as an excuse or justification for the genocide and subjugation of the traditional landowners of Australia or 'primitives' as you would call them.
I always ask who invented the wheel when this well worn line is trotted out. Still waiting for a credible response.
You may not know anyone who was a slave but I know plenty of people who have suffered greatly under colonisation. Most of them are still alive as I write this.
Respectfully
Fergal
Jim
Of course, the flip side of that is, if you're pretty confident they'd work but not absolutely certain, maybe the fear of embarrassment is better than the hope of a propaganda victory.
Maybe what I'm trying to figure out has too many unknowns to be worth thinking about, which is fair enough.
Libertarian is pretty right of center Avedis. But I don't mind that at all. I stopped being shy about being called a Leninist a long time ago. I think if any Liberal had principle about what they believed in (I am careful in saying that because today's liberalism, like fascism, associates with identity politics) they'd be an unpopular radical leftist and Leninist as hard as that is in America today (unpopular only in the First World by the way and only after unconstitutional oppression and propaganda, as a Communist its still illegal to teach in a public school in many, many states.) Where does it say in the original Articles of Confederation that its illegal to be a communist? Or for that matter, the federalist document that illegally superseded it? The Constitution (if you like states rights you should consider, like other libertarians infact reading the former and advocating its reinstatement)?
When it really comes down to it, if Europeans stayed in their own continent and told people there how to live (although there still seemed to be disagreements between them, the fiercest wars were between cousin Germanic peoples: Franks (French), Anglicans (English), Saxons (Germans) all). I can see a European like us doing so (although the Bretons who the French ethnically cleansed and Picts and Irish cleansed by the Anglicans would rightly disagree). If after the Crusaders had their asses handed to them by the Mujahideen (and by Jewish warriors after they had time to slaughter the Jews in Jerusalem too) and all Christopher Columbus really found was a shorter trade route to India, I think the fate of the species would of turned out much better (you should know that the Crusaders were as responsible for the Turks for the destruction of Constantinople, after the serial killers Pope Urban promised heaven if they fought in the Crusades raped and pillaged the Orthodox capital, the same one Pope Urban claimed to be protecting from Muslims. Its, speak of the devil, lying, thieving, lunatics like these, this time in suits, that run Imperialist Western countries today). It was getting better even at that time. There were more Muslim mayors in the Renaissance Era Muslim scholars helped start than the more "civilized" times of today.
Who said anything about bosses? I don't need a boss Avedis, or a leader and neither have traditional groups. The !Kung I most know, but plenty of other egalitarian groups delegate "leadership" to those who have reached an age high enough to advise. If you didn't do anything to piss off the elders before you or the community it was a shoo-in, but the man or woman in charge didn't have a jail or a police force of questionable competence to enforce any laws. Still their word was respected and their advice sought, because they are the only ones old enough to pass wisdom, something you can't get from experience (or you often can't even with a lot of it).
Thanks for the input Fergal, BTW.
Ideally, people can choose which way of life they prefer and gravitate there, right? I don't think Mary Jemison (Dehgewänis) "The White Woman of the Genesee" was asked when the Scotch-Irishwoman was repeatedly kidnapped and told to renounce the Indian man she married and the children she had to repeatedly leave behind. The family of Cynthia Ann Parker (Narua) did not take no for an answer when they captured her in a raid and took her back to U.S. territory and would rather have her die of her hunger strike than to return her to her sons in Comanche territory as she wanted. Although Eunice Williams and Frances Slocum's desire to remain in Indian tribes was at least respected I admit. It should be noted that the British laws of "Divine, Moral, and Marital” were passed in response to such men as Jacob Young of Maryland marrying a woman of the Susquehanna Nation and "Puritan" Thomas Morton drinking and maypoling with Indian girls. The penalty was death. The Spanish upheld the same penalty for simply cavorting with Indians in South America, because losing settlers to live among the native people became a serious problem. Clearly, someone was imposing on someone else and taking what was not theirs all along and it wasn't the people who took a few women captives.
If this had ended when the West was conquered (in North America anyway). Great. Can taxation be voluntary if I don't want to belong to your particular tribe (country in this case)? Can you stop investing in the violent stealing of other peoples resources? At the very least, if co-ops could replace these tired corporations and even public sector services would that be possible? According to polls, it seems that of all the businesses that are around today, the ones where employees vote for their own management seems to have the most meaningful employment. Only Cuba (that I know of) is a pioneer in pursuing co-operative employment today.
My professor incidentally runs a company that advises corporate management on psychological health and the business apparently appears to be good. He certainly makes more doing that than his day job at a public university. It was an alternative to being a psychologist, his first dream, which he abandoned after insurance companies were not letting him do his job and see patients the amount of time his line of work had taught him he is supposed to (but what do you expect when America is the only industrialized country where medical bills are the #1 reason for bankruptcy by far). You should know he compares the insurance industry here unfavorably with the one in Scandinavia. He claims research hes privy to shows as many as 50% of CEOS suffer from alienation and depressive symptoms. If I won't be late to my next class I can ask him for sure and ask the source, but this appears legitimate. Not even the CEOs are that enamored with their jobs and I'll tell you something you may want to hear or you may not; for every woman or black guy your company hires to show that they hire anyone just like those dastardly communists, thats one white guy denied a job. And they're only hired because they cajole them into being paid less than that white guy. No wonder the fascists are a thing again. Many of their grievances make sense, but their solutions are idiotic. Communist Cuba looks like it does the multiculturalism needed for a modern economy today better. Just an observation.
Whatever the case, I guess Europe can enforce hard borders if they want. I don't care. Let China own their economies lock, stock and barrel a couple a decades in the future. China is fine with importing the African migrants they need to get the job done and has been doing so without much fanfare from the corporate press. Americans should realize that when they landed and built their culture over the ruins of the one they destroyed they sowed the seeds of, I'd call it, the mixing of European culture to something that is unrecognizable to what is traditionally "white". It's African-rooted Rock and Roll brought countless millions into the coffers of the country. It also means that eventually people will adopt different values than what older white males thought were taken for granted. Although, I'd argue that even frontiersmen became distinct culturally from Europe when they switched continents. Different environment, different way of being and survival.
Heres the thing. Elders have ruled these non-hierarchical societies in harmony with the Earth for 9/10ths of mankind's existence. Somehow post-Neolithic "civilized" industrialized civilization has managed to drain the vast majority of the planets resources already and fuck up the world so much so that it threatens the species very survival. And its based on an economic system that requires infinitely increasing growth on a planet with limited natural resources. This isn't even the growth rate of a parasite, its cancer. It makes me wonder whether scientists were right, and that the cancers that are supposed to plague all human bodies in old age simply not being found in Egyptian mummies means cancer is as karmic as the economic system that unleashed it.
"I'd like to think we will continue to better."
And yet suicide and depression is cited as the most frequent illness for disability, a deadly drug overdoes epidemic is spreading in the West as it has been around the globe and the London Guardian just reported that hunger is increasing for the first time this century. If this system can't even make life better for people anymore, let alone leave something for the next generation to live for, than its done IMHO. The Natives say, "Earth was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children. We do not inherit the Earth from our Ancestors,
we borrow it from our Children." And if I have the choice between sacrificing my childrens future by not leaving the world better than I found it and this cancer, the cancers going under the knife and its being cut out. I owe it to my kids. I would think you owe it to yours.
Fergal,
I had a partner and a good friend who was an African American when I worked for the Bureau of Land Management. Great guy. He had been in the Air Force security for 12 years. One night we were drinking and ribbing each other over white stuff versus black stuff. I brought up a boot camp admonition "there are light green Marines and dark green Marines, but you are all green Marines". He then recited the AF version of the same. Beer bottles clinked.
I have no idea who invented the wheel and don't care. All I know is that the wheel is a good thing and some people that didn't have it are happy to use it now. Bitching about how it came to them is wasted energy on top of being hypocritical if they're using it. As is bitchin about the past.
If I had a neighbor who is a Turk, but otherwise a good dude, and we had interests in common, I would be happy to collaborate with him to build a better life for both our families.
There is no justice as you might define it for the wrongs that are done in this world. Justice would mean perpetual war and perpetual injustice. Forever and ever.
Most cultural sized wrongs even have an upside. Examples abound if you have eyes to see them. I repeat that if you seek justice then we all need to kill each other and then ourselves. Otherwise, adapt and overcome. That is what you owe yourself and your loved ones. If colonialism takes away A and gives you B , then learn to embrace B. You're not the first and certainly not the last people to have change imposed upon them. It's there at the beginning of recorded history and I'm sure it was there before history was recorded.
And if you want to fight, then fight. But don't bitch when you get killed. If you're a fighter then accept that, if you lose, you were the inferior force. Surrender with dignity. Whining doesn't become a man.
avedis
The term Luddite is bandied around today as a joke. Its often used to describe someone who doesn't want to adapt to the newest smartphone or gadget. But they were a real and powerful guerilla group in England that were responsible for the sabotage and the destruction of much factory machinery. They (rightly) blamed the factories for manufacturing the farming equipment which the most richest (and connected) farmers used to sow and harvest crop faster than the fastest farmer can sow and harvest by hand. The era would also come to define the first 9-5 week which owners had trouble enforcing and which workers walked off from all the time. But Karl Marx advocated a better way. He thought the insurgency would be in vain, which it was. He thought it was more productive for the farmers and the factory wageslaves they were being forced into becoming seek to own what the produce, for if they toiled in the factories they should have the right to own them. Yesterday, it was simply a good idea. Today, it may the last hope for humanity.
Marx was more conservative than Lenin. He appreciated Capitalism and recognized that it made the production of material goods possible at a rate that it couldn't be before. But its contradictions would destroy it if it did not evolve into socialism. Marx believed this transition would be inevitable, almost natural. He didn't believe the bourgeoisie could be so self-deluding and the many masses so compliant in their misery for so long. Friedrich Engels and one of his disciples, Rosa Luxembourg knew otherwise. At the peak of capitalism, the only two paths it could follow was socialism or barbarism. Cuba chose socialism and has never had it better for it. Barbarism haunts most of the rest of the planet today.
War and the threat of war already shadows much of the world. If peoples of the Abrahamic faiths said these times make their faith stronger I wouldn't be surprised. The United Nations years ago reported that tribal peoples were fighting over water for the first time it has been monitoring it. Certainly growing war is in the immediate future. I know of the revolutionaries past and I know of the revolutionaries present. I know that mankind will never know the name of much of them and that most of them fail. But I cannot see myself as that absurd coward who self-defeatingly so cares for his life alone among billions that his greatest desire is be the last prepper to starve. So I take up this cup. Of course I'm ready to fight. I've been ready to fight all my life. And I'm ready to die. This is the fate of all great revolutionaries. But isn't the latter the fate of all men :)? Of course there are those that cite the Taliban as those who manage to fight against all odds and win against the combined NATO military force. I don't particularly like CIA golems even if they do lead to a humbling, even victory, against the monsters who created them at the expense of the regular peoples of both nations. I prefer the Soviet Union's fight against the most powerful conventional military force ever assembled and the bloodiest battles in recorded history that followed. They lost 3 men to 1 German in Stalingrad so they could kill two Germans for one Soviet at the battles of Belarus. For those who fight, not for some vaunted idea of country that turns out to be empire, but ideas; are those that fight outsized of their number. Just consult the survivability of Castro.
Progress against regression is a constant battle. And those most vile are not those who lord over their serfs but the bystanders, especially those who find better ways to find scraps to scavenge than on those willing to fight the monsters that will lead them all to destruction. Who wins then? Not even the monstrosity. Hell. Have you seen a movie where the coward and not the sword-wielding hero was the star of the movie? Edmund Burke, no communist he, said the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. Was he wrong?
Castro always said that revolution is the battle between the future and the past. Like life, it is a constant struggle. But what would mankind think of itself if nothing is sacred enough to be worth fighting for? Change is a coming indeed. It is the only constant. And its becoming time that the system in dominance today is no longer delivering the goods it has before. Its time to get with the times. Your right that there are more than me that think life this. I wonder if the actual number would surprise you. Gramsci predicted this moment in time and he said it best, ““The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Comrade Gramsci had no divine inspiration, but he had a sense of the future.
I know you want to encourage me (kidding). But I want to exhaust all possibilities that I can peacefully before I "fight". Dialogue is one of them. And a particular tale should be of interest to you.
http://anthropology.uwaterloo.ca/WNB/TooManyBananas.html
"The woman came all the way through the village, walking between the two rows of houses facing each other between the beach and the bush, to the very last house standing on a little spit of land at the mouth of the Kaini River. She was carrying a watermelon on her head, and the house she came to was the government "rest house," maintained by the villagers for the occasional use of visiting officials. Though my wife and I were graduate students, not officials, and had asked for permission to stay in the village for the coming year, we were living in the rest house while the debate went on about where a house would be built for us. When the woman offered to sell us the watermelon for two shillings, we happily agreed, and the kids were delighted at the prospect of watermelon after yet another meal of rice and bully beef. The money changed hands and the seller left to return to her village, a couple of miles along the coast to the east.
It seemed only seconds later that the woman was back, reluctantly accompanying Kolia, the man who had already made it clear to us that he was the leader of the village. Kolia had no English, and at that time, three or four days into our first stay in Kandoka Village on the island of New Britain in Papua New Guinea, we had very little Tok Pisin. Language difficulties notwithstanding, Kolia managed to make his message clear: The woman had been outrageously wrong to sell us the watermelon for two shillings and we were to return it to her and reclaim our money immediately When we tried to explain that we thought the price to be fair and were happy with the bargain, Kolia explained again and finally made it clear that we had missed the point. The problem wasn't that we had paid too much; it was that we had paid at all. Here he was, a leader, responsible for us while we were living in his village, and we had shamed him. How would it look if he let guests in his village buy food? If we wanted watermelons, or bananas, or anything else, all that was necessary was to let him know. He told us that it would be all right for us to give little gifts to people who brought food to us (and they surely would), but no one was to sell food to us. If anyone were to try -- like this woman from Lauvore --then we should refuse. There would be plenty of watermelons without us buying them. The woman left with her watermelon, disgruntled, and we were left with our two shillings. But we had learned the first lesson of many about living in Kandoka. We didn't pay money for food again that whole year, and we did get lots of food brought to us ... but we never got another watermelon. That one was the last of the season."
It should be read in full. Some things are more sacred than technology... and money. Don't pin all peoples as easily corruptible by Western goods as others. And as the change you speak of threatens both, preparing for a life without them might be more healthy to you than it is to me.
Marx always told material conditions create false consciousness. An illusion that the class realities that are so obvious to those on the outside in don't exist. Sometimes the only way it has been shaken is to fall from your current class position but I gather walking a mile in someone’s shoes, talking to an African-American who avoids a certain road because they know the policeman there kills blacks indiscriminately (as my Geography professor recounted), or speaking to a Native American on the Pine Ridge Reservation where the diabetes rate is the highest in the world and life expectancy is shorter than Haiti, the lowest in the Western Hemisphere. Castro, like Prince Kropotkin, (think the Buddha but without the creation of another religion where there were already many, how was he original then? /end rant) was one of those rare upper class men. The sons of landowners, or royalty in the latters case, who gave it all up because they grew up with and knew the poorest of the poor, realized the unearned privilege of their family’s wealth and decided that the stratified society that created and pooled it in this way is no conscionable way to live. Don’t startle. They were much richer than your family ever was, and could probably buy you and your uncle ten times over. But their stories are instructive. Revolutionaries haven’t relied on them and they are few. But one can’t walk away from their gilded beginnings and not learn a lot, which too many people don’t.
For now enjoy your six-figure salary and invest it wisely. With civilization going the way it is, it won't last. I believe one day you will know I was right.
Since you mentioned it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Masai
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1262574/My-Masai-Mr-Right-Why-middle-class-woman-giving-life-luxury-live-mud-hut-African-warrior.html
https://www.wired.com/2005/08/escape-to-east-africa/
All these Europeans who came to stay permanently with the Masai could afford to travel, afford PhDs, even mansions. I wonder, if they would even have the room to take more, what the number of applicants would be if more could afford to meet them too? Especially compared to the captive women (who decided to be voluntarily captive women) and gregarious squaw-loving Puritan men of yesteryear.
My favorite quotes from the mud hut smitten PhD student.
On returning to Britain to complete her PhD.
'For three weeks, I barely left my room. I felt like a stranger in my own culture - the sheer noise of city life gave me a splitting headache. I realised I now thought of Africa as my home, and I was determined to go back.'
On life as a Masai warrior's wife.
'It's a simple life, and one that would be anathema to most people in the West, but it makes me happy,' she says. 'I have no problem with giving up my western ways. When I'm there I feel so alive and free. Living with the tribe has taught me to live in the present. It taught me what matters.'
Yes Niko,
There will always be someone - usually an oddball - who wants to do Reusseau like tourism. Surely you're not going to suggest that Americans in the rust belt go back to living like Massai or cavemen. Not even the commie Bernie Sanders is stumping on that one. He wants free healthcare for all, free education. Maybe you should run. You could proclaim that modern healthcare is overrated as is an education. The solution is to simply dispense with it all. 5 cows and 20 acres for all! Don't need no stinkin' books or wheels. Why, you'll all be happier in the long run...just read the testimonial of some hippies that did it!
You first.
avedis
I'm back online after a week of no service, post-storm, so my reading here has been limited.
Per David's comment to Nikolay:
Agreed, "Second, Marx and Lenin were wrong, and their ideas won't work." Human beings are the glitch for which there is no fix.
But, disagree here:
"As for Cuba, virtually every industrialized democracy in the world has a higher life expectancy than Cuba." --
That would be most industrialized countries EXCEPT for the U.S.
avedis:
Semper fi. You are on the docket to present the opening salvo at the beer-latte
summit.
Per this: "I would be interested - at some point - in Ranger's opinion on scoped rifles in combat versus iron sights. Short barreled carbines versus full length barrels as well (CAR15/M4 versus M16/M14)" --
You are wickedly funny.
Nikolay, dear Nikolay,
You read The Guardian, a liberal propaganda mouthpiece if ever there was one, and The Daily Mail, right near our dear National Enquirer.
Of course, your exceedingly facile mind manages to create a brilliant gestalt of it all. (Not to worry --- I do the same thing, I just use different building materials, is all ;).)
Oh boy. If only this election process wasn't a parody of itself. The ACLU (the same one that sued on behalf of heavily armed Nazis marching in Charlottesville and then regretted it), Professor Mark Crispin Miller and lawyer professor Bob Fitakis has been suing Kris Kobach for years for voter disenfranchisement and blatant voter suppression and a judge even fined the SOB $1000 for lying to the court and refusing to produce documents proving that he infact did so (the kicking of mostly black voters specifically in urban eras off the voter rolls incidentally). His voter fraud "prevention" investigations have had the ironic effect of prosecuting mostly senile Republican voters who double voted and didn't know what the hell they were doing. They were never stopped by his voter IDs laws, which have never been proven at stopping any boogey man illegal immigrant from voting; just the low income people who can't afford to keep enough of the required IDs to vote current.
Trump appointed this perjurer Vice Chairman on the "Commission on Election Integrity" probably in part to save him from his legal troubles. His policies inspired governing Republicans all over the country to institute mass closures of polling places and even the DMV (the only place where poor people can register to vote) in North Carolina, Arizona, Texas and elsewhere.
"Arizona, the poster child for voting problems in the primary, closed the highest percentage of polling places in the study. “Almost every county in the state reduced polling places in advance of the 2016 election and almost every county closed polling places on a massive scale, resulting in 212 fewer polling places,” says the report (emphasis in original). Tucson’s Pima County—the second largest in the state, which is 35 percent Latino and leans Democratic—“is the nation’s biggest closer of polling places,” from 280 in 2012 to 218 in 2016."
Even though the roulette table is tilted, I guess I can try my hand at being Socialist Alternatives (Trostkyists though they are) candidate in the Northeast. The Northwest is more left (not liberal), and its much friendlier to radical left politics and gay (kinda rare) and honest (extremely rare) billionaires like Nick "The Pichforks are Coming" Hanauer. They would be if they elected the Trotskyist Kshame Sawant. The Northeast is much more liberal than leftwing and I would have to worry much more about the very, very powerful and crooked Democratic Party machine here than any Republican.
I could go on a spiel here on how Trump and the Republicans won the night in key part by making the worst and most corrupt late Soviet Union elections look like exercises in exemplary voting integrity (and not the Russians), but Hillary obviously rigged her own party's primaries including closing polling station early, corrupting the Nevada Democratic Convention where Bernie supporters "threw chairs" and even kicking Brooklyn voters off the rolls so NYC would vote Clinton. Except the last part, that was totally legal because the Democratic Party is a "private" organization and they get to make up their own voting rules as they go along. So I'm not sour that the Republicans rigged the election against Hillary because the Democrats used the same tactics: against their own registered voters. Paybacks a bitch Hillary. And if she and her corporate media friends keeps on plastering her mug on television screens she'll be one too, and voters would be understood in trying to steer clear.
There are anarchist (Anarcho-Primitivists) who do believe that mankind has so fucked up nature, throwing the baby out with the bathwater and going all Genghis Khan on civilization and returning back to the Pagan times is the only hope humanity has left. Incidentally, they’ve been headlining entire well-patronized metal concerts on just this message. But then heavy metal has always been about extreme things. I'm a Leninist. I want a middle ground. Whether you believe in global warming or not, someone must of pissed off Mother Nature something awful because it won’t stop getting worse. Riverbeds and freshwater that millions rely on to survive dry out faster and faster every year (Rio Grande, Ogalala Aquifer), forest fires and record heat waves kill more and more farmland and if that wasn't enough bigger and badder blizzards and hurricanes continue to strain the FEMA budgets. Even the Pentagon is now warning of an unprecedented refugee crisis within Americas own borders because of fast declining fresh water in just a couple decades. To any rational person, its too late for a free market. This point in the game? Many corporations need to be simply nationalized and strictly planned, usury needs to be banned from credit and people need to start rationing resources for whats coming. WWII-era FDR policies, here we come! Small businesses can stay, but even they have to realize their best days are gone. Thats without saying China surpassing the U.S. as the biggest economic powerhouse within the next decade, waving past America on the way up as America is sinking on the way down (they already have a bigger middle class… while America’s keeps shrinking). The people that lobbied and bribed Hillary (and Trump when he finally broke into the Republican nomination) don't care if they talk about dumping NAFTA, or if who became #AmnestyDon promises to build a silly wall and deport em' all as long as they betray the naive suckers who believed in them when the time is right (including Bernie). Merchants really have no loyalty. I don't think even you could disagree with Marx here. They used up America just to pull up stakes and leave the continent and they plan to do the same to China and just because they left their country to die doesn't mean they won't still buy out all the politicians they need to make sure no one tips over the golden applecart.
I like Trump where he is. At least the world can see the true rotting face of our ruling class. Just don't expect him to be any more honest with you than to his bankrupted shareholders, his scammed architects and his many jilted wives and mistresses.
Trump and his 1% buddies will allow global warming I’m pretty sure they escalated to turn the rust belt workers into cavemen, derelicts and Mad-Max cattle herders if they can get away with it. The guys I run with and people like them, will choose to preserve what we can save and go for a better path. That’s all. Nothing too complicated.
Lisa, you know better than anyone that Jews have massive data banks for brains. Although Google's "fake news" filters are out in force, that still didn't stop me from being able to Google and remember these kindred souls who had a successful life ahead of them in the civilization that handed them everything and still found it too disheartening to live with the so-called "success" and "prosperity" its supposed to offer. Even for the guy who long ago gave up on modern Capitalist civilization, I was surprised by how many people; who otherwise would be considered to have "made it" in life, gave it all up for a less materialist and more meaningful lifestyle.
I do wonder... if asked and shown in the increasingly debilitated parts of the West, why more people wouldn't infact vote for a life almost as humble (sanitation would be nice and the hospitals can stay) here and not have to bother an African tribe an ocean away to accept them? I think I know why. Does anyone else?
From my last link:
"James Woolsey, the former head of the CIA, wrote in a climate change report for the Pentagon titled “The Age of Consequences: The Foreign-Policy National Security Implications of Global Climate Change”:
'If Americans have difficulty reaching a reasonable compromise on immigration legislation today, consider what such a debate would be like if we were struggling to resettle millions of our own citizens—driven by high water from the Gulf of Mexico, South Florida, and much of the East Coast reaching nearly to New England—even as we witnessed the northward migration of large populations from Latin America and the Caribbean. Such migration will likely be one of the Western Hemisphere’s early social consequences of climate change and sea level rise of these orders of magnitude. Issues deriving from inundation of a large amount of our own territory, together with migration towards our borders by millions of our hungry and thirsty southern neighbors, are likely to dominate U.S. security and humanitarian concerns. Globally as well, populations will migrate from increasingly hot and dry climates to more temperate ones.'"
If civilization collapse is as soon as the worst case scenarios predicts, more Westerners might get a chance to decide before they even know it.
Niko,
Jim says that a man who never shat between combat boots shouldn't be qualified to be commander in chief. He's got a hell of a point. Let's now translate that thought to Marx. A man who never worked a day in his life has no business talking about workers and economies.
Just my opinion.
avedis
LOL. captcha asked me to identify all squares that contain the image of a wheel! So white centric. A massai or pre-columbian native would be unable to get past that to post here.
Jesus I don't want to make another post, but if you wanted to goad me, you succeeded.
For the last $#^&ing time Bernie in NOT. A. COMMIE. His policies about match to Eisenhower during his Republican administration and can probably be described as even more right-wing. He brags about bringing factories for the garbage fighter and flying brick, the F-35 to Vermont and approved their screaming "stealth" engines for takeoff at the Burlington civilian Airport. Wherever these things have been deployed in American airports in the past, local neighborhoods have been forced to move out and the only people who win are the death merchants and real estate developers.
If he was an actual Commie he'd take dismantling the corrupt pork-barrel, defense contractor welfare king and taxpayer-abusing Military-Industrial Complex seriously, as Eisenhower insisted Americans should do in his famous Farewell Speech. He has a portrait of the anti-war old Socialist Party candidate (one of the most popularly voted 3rd party candidates in American history) Eugene Debs in his office (which he should take down if he was an honest person and not a goddamn liar and fraud). The only politician in charge of a major party today in the West that comes close to Debbs is Jeremy Corbyn of Labour in Britain. But not nearly as close to Fidel, surprisingly or otherwise.
A little shortlist on what it actually means to be an actual socialist (and not even a Leninist) can be found here.
What It Means To Be a Socialist
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/what-it-means-to-be-a-socialist/
The 1 Percent’s Useful Idiots
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-1-percents-useful-idiots-2/
"PHILADELPHIA—The parade of useful idiots, the bankrupt liberal class that long ago sold its soul to corporate power, is now led by Sen. Bernie Sanders."
If your not in the mood for reading, there's always the speech format.
Chris Hedges: Wages of Rebellion Part 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGQoCS7ty1g
Chris Hedges: Wages of Rebellion Part 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nV9OtEdQjU
Well see, now you've made a new post. Now its reasonable to respond :D.
For some reason Blogger wants me to play whack-a-mole with pictures of cars whenever I want my comment approved.
He completed his PhD and was a professor of philosophy (or would have been if the administration of Germany's universities didn't find out his association with the Young Hegelians, named after the well-known and controversial German philosopher) and then a journalist... until he supported Germany's failed 1848 Revolution and the Kaisers secret police forced him to flee to France (which expelled him), to Brussels (which expelled him too) and then finally to England where he could at least find a place that could bury him when he died penniless. Friedrich Engels kept him from starvation later when the state repression of the press made his journalism (a profession not yet co-opted and still respectable but highly repressed) financially impossible. But then again, don't tell Milton Friedman (the architect of todays Neoliberal Capitalism) that.
Of course I always agreed with Jim here. If that was upheld, I don't think there'd be as many issues. Of course the bastards who think this country their fiefdom killed the last man who met that qualification (serving as an officer on the more vulnerable surface anyway and not simply a flyboy) and Americans normally divided by other things at least agree here (see my link on polls of the Kennedy assassination on either this thread or the past one).
Nikolay,
Per "Blogger wants me to play whack-a-mole with pictures of cars whenever I want my comment approved" ...
I believe they are taunting you for your whole pro-Maasai spiel ;).
("They", of course, being BMW, Mercedes Benz, etc.)
Niko.
Could we say that Bernie is a neo-commie?
Seems appropriate since we have neo-nazis who I would say are, like Bernie, just half-baked pretender revivalists to an ideology that was defeated long ago or - in fairness to your vociferous protestations that true communism was never really fully implemented due to interference by vision lacking dullards and all powerful robber barons - died on the vine.
I say if the guys in CVille are neo-nazis then Bernie is a neo-commie. That's the neat thing about the prefix "neo". You don't have to be the real deal to be lumped into some deplorable category. Even a pathetic superficial semblance will do.
Yes, I also usually have to play wack a mole with images of cars, roads or street signs. It was so unusual and synchronistic that for once was it was something different and that something was wheels. It's like the universe was sending me an agreement - an omen - that I'm right. That other karl - Jung - would understand. Now if you are asked to identify squares with real communists (Marx, Mao, Lennon, Castro?) I will pay notice to the power of the ideology.
Communists seem to prefer poor quality inaccurate carbine length rifles, the AK-47 being primary. I, like Jim, prefer a full length quality rifle with good sights and tight tolerances such that accuracy is maximized. I like aimed fire as opposed to spray and pray (obviously a western centric terminology since commies are atheists and don't pray when they wildly send a hail of lead down range). My white capitalist privilege reveals itself again. But that is one reason capitalism rules. It builds the best stuff, including weapons. I don't make the rules, I just observe them and have learned you do best to follow them. The Tao of life.
avedis
I'd say its the Jaguars and the Land Rovers that are after me. British settler politics still try to dominate Kenya and there are still many British major landowners who call Africa they're rightful home.
My spirit tribe is more the peaceful !Kung people (thats Kung with a click native to their tongue). I also appreciate the economic empire of Nir for proving you can dominate and aggressively convert people without spilling blood. Its an Imperialism I could at least tolerate. Not like the warband political relations of Europe and much of Asia that they consider cordial.
I can't say why they chose to marry into them specifically. Maybe the daughters (and sons) of white barbarians have a spiritual connection to warrior people like the Masai. Maybe it is the way of Germanic peoples and those of the Masai to be red in tooth and claw, long before time began.
That the origin mythology, values, and way of life of other peoples strongly disagree means its not such a small world after all. And that makes me happy.
I should say, thanks for separating the person and the politics Avedis. Just before you posted that last, I was rereading your previous post and had to vent on your mischaracterization. If you're going to separate the politics from the person, make sure its the right politics.
Bernie is an insult to democratic socialist everywhere, let alone Communists. He might have been a kinda socialist in college, but he ended up a good boy and left all that behind and now he fucks over and lies to people just like a successful Capitalist grown up does. My, what a little "wisdom" can do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Party_USA
If you're looking to tar and feather Democratic Socialists try those. Especially since they consider the Democratic Party capitalists who should be opposed with as much fury as the Republicans. This is in contrast to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSOC) which is just a cats paw of the Democratic Party and endorsed Bernie Boy and even Obomber. Both ironically separated from the Socialist Party of America (SPA) for being rightwing. Why DSCOC chose to be redundant and just become another rightwing socialist party is beyond me. This is why the Democratic Party is making it difficult for it to register candidates in all fifty states and why you will probably never see it on the ballot (at least not anytime soon).
As for me? I'm broadly a Maoist Third Worldist actually. I believe revolution will happen in the Third World before it so much sparks in the First. So everyone here will be fine when the fireworks start going. Now if the Trotskyist Socialist Alternative gets too many candidates elected despite voter suppression, vote rigging and registration skullduggery and media blackout. The Capitalist Class will be forced to destroy America's democracy with violence like they did with Batista in Cuba.
That;ll change the game. But we'll cross that bridge when we get there won't we?
Niko says,
"I can't say why they chose to marry into them specifically."
I 'spect it's the old, "Welcome to Jamaica have a nice day" joke.
(Sorry, fraternizing with Ranger brings some unfortunate knowledge benefits.)
avedis will probably appreciate this sad fact.
Well Lisa, case closed I guess. I had thought the Congolese to the West (hmmmm) had "outsized" the world. The Russians are supposed to have the biggest hooters according to a study by the German Bild, but until I'm sure that its not linked to Chernobyl, I'm skeptical.
And of course Avedis here we go again with you posting before I finish typing mine. Perhaps thats more of an ominous sign of the gods??... Its probably that I should I return to my school work more than likely.
Avedis, the Indian Communist Party has held court and has been elected into power in Kerala province for decades. China, despite its capitalist turn, still builds its economy through Leninist Five-Year Plans and the Philippines New Peoples Army has continued to fight the government in the northern islands for the better part of a century. Why until recently, a Leninist was Trumps Chief Strategist. At what point do you call an ongoing Communist insurgency neo? One things for sure. Unlike the fascists, we don't know how to surrender. The Philippine NPA didn't even throw in the towel when the pro-Chinese Duerete was elected. Their message to his peace negotiations went right over his head and directly to the Chinese Dengist leadership. "Read your Mao". Translation: The Dengists that succeeded Mao and betrayed Mao's vision after his death are as capitalist an enemy as your pro-Chinese Filipino president. You gotta respect them for principle like that.
Remind me when Americans figure out how to make their own rocket engines (I bet you didn't know that America has been needing to buy them from Russia for decades now because they prefer blowing their research money on boondoggle over-budget airplanes that can't even turn, can't climb and can't accelerate and blocky ships from a bad Nintendo 64 videogame that break down while standing still in a canal than a competent rocket system that can replace the Russian's), although I do like that the Kalashnikov is the samurai sword to the claymore. Its good in all conditions and doesn't get stuck in (and with) mud. Kalashnikov has since introduced the 74 and the 103 series that transitioned to the 5.45 round and telescopic sights, the Taliban and the Vietnamese still prefer the old AKM though (at least the Taliban like the Fascist-inspired M-240s they capture).
People who know weapons (and not just Marixsts) actually consider the M-16 series endemic to late capitalism. Besides its accuracy under fire, its a weapons system designed to be mass produced for profit first and a rifle second. The Kalashnikov has never had to go through so many derivatives (is it up to A5 now?). Colt had to update what was repeatedly an unreliable and fatally incompetent weapons system (jams galore) and only after soldiers were killed with it. The U.S taxpayer was on the hook for more money for Colts garbage product than Kalashnikov ever expected of Soviet taxpayers and Colt still filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last year. Thats top-class innovation coming from a country that was once the most backwards, feudal monarchy in Europe. Imagine what Leninism will do to a First World colonial nation like America? As the constant anti-Communist terrors proved, the Bourgeoisie Class will fight long and hard if they can keep America in the Dark Ages.
Although military capitalist innovation has been lacking as corruption puts it into a terminal phase, there are even Vietnam veterans that actually claimed that it played its small part in losing the war. I'd have to find the testimonials again, but except against small thrid-world countries, America really hasn't won a war while it was in service has it?
Whatever the case, now that you've finally come out to play. I still owe you a couple of coffees for those beers. Holiday seasons the time and place to pay you back. Consider it seasons greetings.
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