The latest death toll figures from Hurricane Katrina can be seen on this website here. The famous Russian neo-Nazi video is on this blog here.
Updated May 3:
Two totally great new Commie blogs - People's Movement Support Group and Machetera.
PMSG is out of India with an emphasis on support for the Maoist revolutionaries in India along with the separatists in the Northeast (India's armed Maoists tend to support the northeastern separatists), and it's almost all translated stuff from the world press, but there is a strong emphasis on armed Leftwing revolutionary movements.
Thankfully, he is not a fanatic - he supports Cuba, the Maoists in Nepal and especially in India, the FARC in Colombia, the EPR and EZLN in Mexico, the MRTA in Peru and the NPA Maoists in Philippines. In Palestine, he supports the PFLP! What is interesting about this is that in many cases orthodox Maoists do not support non-Maoists like the FARC or Cuba or surely the MRTA on grounds that they are not Commie enough.
Yay!
He also supports armed separatists in the Basque Country, Kurdistan, Ireland (IRA), Sri Lanka and in India's Northeast.
If there are leftwing maniacs anywhere on Earth with guns and bombs, he backs them up 100% (other than Sendero Luminoso). That's some real consistency and style.
Living here in the US, one thing you notice right away is that almost every single human being you meet (who has an opinion on the issue) absolutely hates all guerrillas anywhere on Earth. This is true even for almost all US liberals, and even, incredibly, for many US Leftists.
The line of the average American is clear: All guerrillas are evil. They are all terrorists. In particular, Americans seem to really hate any kind of armed separatists or separatists of any type. This is kind of odd in that we were birthed via revolution, and there is no reason to fear separatism here as there isn't any armed separatism in the US (or anywhere in the Americas) and probably never will be.
So Americans have turned into some of the biggest state-fetishists on Earth. Only the state can have guns. Only the state must have a monopoly on violence. All guerrillas are terrorists, terrorists are evil, and they all need to be killed to preserve the civilized world. All separatists are scum, states alone have the right to draw borders, and self-determination will never be allowed to anyone.
Death squads are fine and dandy, and every state is a democracy, no matter how murderous. The people never have the right to take up arms against any state anywhere, unless I guess it is Communist.
In other words, Americans have turned their backs completely on the noble spirit of the American revolution and have become the philosophical heirs to King George's colonists. We have also become Israelis. They are colonists too. See any connections yet?
Machetera is definitely a blog after my heart. I get called a Stalinist a lot on here, but that's not necessarily true. I do defend Stalin in some ways, mostly just to counteract the nonsense about "the biggest murderer that ever lived", by pointing out the many great, humanitarian and life-saving things he did. He also killed a lot of people, and I think it many cases that was just plain wrong or even flat out evil.
Honestly, I would really prefer that we Lefties stopped killing people once we got into power. Other than the obvious moral questions, it has given the Right a gigantic shot in the arm by portraying us a the biggest murderers that ever lived. This has been so successful that many people around the world are frightened to let the hard Left back into power due to fear that they may start killing people.
So it is that I am a big fan of Castro's Cuba, a place where the state has hardly killed a single political prisoner since 1970. They put a few in jail, but that's not the same thing. By the way, I think the Cubans should go out of their way to treat the jailed political prisoners well, if only to deprive the anti-Commies of their propaganda snacks.
On the Majority Rights (careful - very nasty WN blog) blog a while back I was called a Castroite. That's not a bad portrayal of me.
There is such a thing, and the Castroite philosophy, a Left, and sometimes an armed Left, that is particular to Latin America, is quite well portrayed on Machetera. So if you want to see what a Castroite looks like, head on over. They've actually long had conflicts with anarchists, Maoists and even some Trotskyites.
The Castroite philosophy could be best seen in the revolutionary movements that arose in Latin America in the 1970's and 1980's. Prior to that, there were a number of small bands in Peru, Bolivia and Venezuela that were wiped out. These were often influenced by Regis Debray's flawed foco philosophy of armed revolution. Che's fated project in Bolivia in 1966 is another example.
The ELN and the FARC in Colombia are very much Castroite (especially the ELN), with the ELN having a very strong Catholic liberation theology flavor. The FARC is probably a bit more rooted in an indigenous Colombian Left with roots in that nation's particular history.
There are now branches of the FARC in Ecuador (FARE), Brazil (FARB), Panama (FARC), Venezuela (FARV) and Peru (FARP). The FARC extend all the way to Guyana, where they tax the gold mines. In 1984, the MRTA Castroites arose in Peru, but were eventually eclipsed by the Shining Path.
The Sandinistas of Nicaragua, the FMLN of El Salvador and the URNG of El Salvador and various small guerrilla bands in Honduras in the 1980's were all Castroites, and the FMLN and the Sandinistas still have Castroite roots, though they have moved to the Right.
Chavez in Venezuela, Correa in Ecuador and Morales in Bolivia are very much in this special tradition.
There are many aspects to Castroism, and it is hard to put it down succinctly. Typically, many are Catholics and there is a lack of hostility to religion. They are less anti-Semitic than most Latin American Catholics (anti-Semitism is big in a continent with few Jews), in part because some of their leaders have been Jewish.
They tend to be much more pragmatic than Maoists, and are often prone to be called revisionists by the latter. There is a strong anti-Yankee and anti-US strain. The cult of Che Guevara is very important. The role of the peasants is very strong, but not in a Maoist sense.
The role of urban workers is somewhat important but not crucial, in part because the area is not well industrialized. But the industrial and professional unions are strongly supported.
There is a lacks of sexual puritanicalism that typified many existing Communist states. There is a significant de-emphasis on the Indian Question (while it is recognized nevertheless. This in contrast to Sendero, who raised the Indian Question to prime status. There is a very flexible ideology that often incorporates electoral democracy and mixed economies.
Class is much more important than race or sex, though the Woman Question is important. Female guerrillas often make up very large percentages of fighters, and in guerrilla ranks all aspects of Latin American machismo that oppresses women are banned.
Machetera is characterized by support for Cuba and the FARC of Colombia. Along the way, there are also shout-outs for Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Rafael Correa in Ecuador. She also supports Peace Palestine, Mary Rizzo's pro-Palestinian blog. The PFLP in Palestine have always had a fondness for Che Guevara and Cuba, and Cuba has long supported the PLO. Furthermore, she is a fine writer, witty and smart.
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
Showing posts with label PFLP. Show all posts
Showing posts with label PFLP. Show all posts
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Another View of Imad Mughniyeh
The latest death toll figures from Hurricane Katrina can be seen on this website here. The famous Russian neo-Nazi video is on this blog here.
Updated March 25:
We've heard quite a bit in the Western press lately about how Imad Mughniyeh (Hezbollah's top military tactician, killed by a car bomb in Damascus on February 13, apparently by the Mossad) was the most evil man that ever lived. Interestingly, he justified his crimes by saying he was just doing to the enemy what they were doing to his people.
US forces were supporting the Lebanese Christian Maronite state that, aligned with Israel, was committing massacres of, torturing and imprisoning thousands of Lebanese Shia in Southern Lebanon.
After Israel invaded Lebanon and the Shia started fighting back, Israel arrested thousands of Shia on vague charges of either joining the insurgency or supporting it. They were put in an Israeli prison in Lebanon and beaten there.
After the war got going, the Maronite regime was massacring Lebanese civilians in South Lebanon. The Maronites probably committed more massacres than any other faction in that war, despite Zionist and pro-US propaganda saying they were the good guys. These Maronites were also torturing Shia fighters. The US via its military advisors in Lebanon, was supporting the Maronites and Israelis who were doing this to his people.
Based on that, Mughniyeh saw his people in a state of war with Israel, the Lebanese state and the US. The first two are accepted by everyone, but the last for some reason is not. The US is painted as some kind of innocent bystander in that mess. That's a lie. We went there as peacekeepers, but pretty quickly took the side of Israel and our "peacekeepers" were regularly shelling Shia positions.
Our ships shelled civilian vehicles driving along the coast highway in Lebanon. I'm not cheering on the attacks on our Embassy or the Marines, but Mughniyeh seems to have a point that the US was acting in a de facto enemy role and was thus targeted as an enemy during wartime. Our Marines made themselves an enemy force to the Shia, and the Shia fought back against them and caused some casualties.
Calling Mughniyeh evil and a terrorist on the basis of his wartime actions is the same as calling the Viet Cong evil terrorists for fighting our guys in wartime. There are enemy sides in every war, and people with guns fighting US troops and targets are not de facto evil terrorists. Maybe sometimes they are just enemy forces in wartime.
The US said they had a debt with the guy, because he killed some Americans over 20 years ago. Why does this make him Dr. Evil? The Viet Cong and North Vietnamese killed way more Americans, and I don't see us running around settling accounts with them.
By the same token, Mughniyeh justified his kidnappings of mostly completely innocent Americans in Lebanon on the basis of what the Maronites and Israel was doing to his people. It was wrong to treat the prisoners they way Mughniyeh's men did, but the guys we were supporting were doing the same crap.
The hijacking of the plane in Greece in 1985 and killing of the US airman, Robert Dean Stethem, was pretty bad. So was the capture and killing of a US soldier in Lebanon. As Islamic Jihad (Mughniyeh's group) saw the US (rightly) as wartime enemies, it was acceptable to capture these two US soldiers as POW's, even on an airplane.
Robert Dean Stethem, US Navy diver, taken POW by Mughniyeh on a hijacked airplane and then executed in a war crime, not a terrorist act. It's impossible to commit terrorism against soldiers in wartime.
In killing them they killed 2 US POW's. That's a war crime. It's also one that our Lebanese were doing on a regular basis and one the Israelis have been known to do quite often. It was sort of terrorist versus terrorist over there in Lebanon.
Mughniyeh's group also captured the top CIA agent in Lebanon, and killed him. I don't think killing enemy spies in wartime is a war crime or a terrorist act.
The bombing of an Israeli Embassy in far off Argentina was morally dubious and the attack on the Jewish Community Center was simply a horrible terrorist and anti-Semitic act. These two acts took place in the early 1990's.
Mughniyeh was an anti-Semite, and Hezbollah is still an anti-Semitic organization, but anti-Semitism is rife and ubiquitous in the Arab and Muslim World anyway. Hezbollah seem to be moderating their line lately on the Jews, but I am still not happy with it. Hezbollah seems also to be going to much greater lengths to play by the rules of war lately.
This is a typical evolution for an armed group. They start out pretty terrorist a lot of times, but as they get more successful and maybe start playing a role in politics, they get more sensitive to public opinion and start playing by the rules of war more.
Even Hamas declared a unilateral ceasefire as soon as they won the elections in Palestine. They have also kept that captured Israeli soldier alive for months now, and I think he's probably being treated fairly well. That's not only humane; it's also smart, because they want to trade him for Palestinian POW's. 15 years ago, I am afraid Hamas would have killed him.
Mughniyeh's killing has set off some truly regrettable remarks from the Iranians.
President Ahmadinejad said, "World powers have created a black and dirty microbe named the Zionist regime and unleashed it like a savage animal on the nations of the region." Sunday, February 17, General Hassan Firouz-Abadi, commander-in-chief of the Iranian military, said at a ceremony honoring Imad Mughniyeh, “Many millions across the world will soon receive the joyous news of the Zionist entity’s destruction.”
On February 18, head of the Revolutionary Guards Mohammad Ali Jaafari called Israel a “cancerous microbe.”
This is nasty talk, and, let's get honest, it's the language of genocide. That doesn't mean that the Iranians are really going to kill all the Jews in Israel or even lots of them, but I don't like that kind of Hitlerian language. Jews, not to mention Israelis, are paranoid enough, with good reason. No reason to add to it.
Hezbollah are hardly maniacal Islamists out to impose Sharia on Lebanon. That's supposedly their goal, but in recent interviews Nasrallah has toned that down by saying that that's only possible if, say, 80% of the population supports it. As 80% of Lebanon will not support any kind of Sharia in my lifetime, that's a roundabout way of saying that it's not really something they are trying to implement.
Another reason Hezbollah is toning down its program is that it is trying to win support from the non-Shia in Lebanon and also from more secular Shia groups. In the areas Hezbollah controlled in the South, it was not very harsh. Many women went about without headscarves. I think they even allowed alcohol to be sold again in recent years.
The Lebanese state does allow the arrest of homosexuals. In practice, this means men only. Hezbollah arrests men having sex with men in the areas it controls and beats them before turning them over for arrest. That's obviously not ok, but in Palestine and Iraq they are often killed, and in Iran they are beaten. Shia everywhere are not too keen on homosexuality and Sunnis seem to allow a lot more of it. Go figure.
Fadlallah, Hezbollah's spiritual leader, has issued some interesting fatwas. One allowed unmarried women to masturbate to meet their sexual needs. Another told women being beaten by husbands to fight back against them as hard as they could. That seems like nothing to us in the West, but in the context of an Islamist group, that's pretty revolutionary. Hezbollah's fairly progressive Islamism should be applauded as steps in the right direction.
The Shia have always allowed reinterpretation of Islam to meet the changing needs of the times. This is one reason that Sunni hardliners despise them as heretics, preferring instead the notion that Islam was codified once and forever 1,150-1,350 years ago in the Salafist version.
The PFLP site carried a eulogy for Mughniyeh that surprised me. A PFLP delegation visited Hezbollah in Lebanon to pay their respects to Mughniyeh. Mughniyeh's hands were pretty dirty, but in this fight I guess our guys need all the fighters they can get.
This is a cool graphic of George Habash, head of the PFLP who died recently, from the PFLP English site. It's nice that they finally got the English site up and running. For a long time, only the Arabic site was working, and that leaves me out, except for the pics.
The article also carries a graphic that seems to make a hero out of him. As this graphic is exactly the opposite of his portrayal in the West, I'm going to run it, mostly just to make people mad.
Well folks, here it is. Another view of Imad Mughniyeh. Enjoy, or stamp your feet in rage, or whatever.
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
Updated March 25:
We've heard quite a bit in the Western press lately about how Imad Mughniyeh (Hezbollah's top military tactician, killed by a car bomb in Damascus on February 13, apparently by the Mossad) was the most evil man that ever lived. Interestingly, he justified his crimes by saying he was just doing to the enemy what they were doing to his people.
US forces were supporting the Lebanese Christian Maronite state that, aligned with Israel, was committing massacres of, torturing and imprisoning thousands of Lebanese Shia in Southern Lebanon.
After Israel invaded Lebanon and the Shia started fighting back, Israel arrested thousands of Shia on vague charges of either joining the insurgency or supporting it. They were put in an Israeli prison in Lebanon and beaten there.
After the war got going, the Maronite regime was massacring Lebanese civilians in South Lebanon. The Maronites probably committed more massacres than any other faction in that war, despite Zionist and pro-US propaganda saying they were the good guys. These Maronites were also torturing Shia fighters. The US via its military advisors in Lebanon, was supporting the Maronites and Israelis who were doing this to his people.
Based on that, Mughniyeh saw his people in a state of war with Israel, the Lebanese state and the US. The first two are accepted by everyone, but the last for some reason is not. The US is painted as some kind of innocent bystander in that mess. That's a lie. We went there as peacekeepers, but pretty quickly took the side of Israel and our "peacekeepers" were regularly shelling Shia positions.
Our ships shelled civilian vehicles driving along the coast highway in Lebanon. I'm not cheering on the attacks on our Embassy or the Marines, but Mughniyeh seems to have a point that the US was acting in a de facto enemy role and was thus targeted as an enemy during wartime. Our Marines made themselves an enemy force to the Shia, and the Shia fought back against them and caused some casualties.
Calling Mughniyeh evil and a terrorist on the basis of his wartime actions is the same as calling the Viet Cong evil terrorists for fighting our guys in wartime. There are enemy sides in every war, and people with guns fighting US troops and targets are not de facto evil terrorists. Maybe sometimes they are just enemy forces in wartime.
The US said they had a debt with the guy, because he killed some Americans over 20 years ago. Why does this make him Dr. Evil? The Viet Cong and North Vietnamese killed way more Americans, and I don't see us running around settling accounts with them.
By the same token, Mughniyeh justified his kidnappings of mostly completely innocent Americans in Lebanon on the basis of what the Maronites and Israel was doing to his people. It was wrong to treat the prisoners they way Mughniyeh's men did, but the guys we were supporting were doing the same crap.
The hijacking of the plane in Greece in 1985 and killing of the US airman, Robert Dean Stethem, was pretty bad. So was the capture and killing of a US soldier in Lebanon. As Islamic Jihad (Mughniyeh's group) saw the US (rightly) as wartime enemies, it was acceptable to capture these two US soldiers as POW's, even on an airplane.
Robert Dean Stethem, US Navy diver, taken POW by Mughniyeh on a hijacked airplane and then executed in a war crime, not a terrorist act. It's impossible to commit terrorism against soldiers in wartime.In killing them they killed 2 US POW's. That's a war crime. It's also one that our Lebanese were doing on a regular basis and one the Israelis have been known to do quite often. It was sort of terrorist versus terrorist over there in Lebanon.
Mughniyeh's group also captured the top CIA agent in Lebanon, and killed him. I don't think killing enemy spies in wartime is a war crime or a terrorist act.
The bombing of an Israeli Embassy in far off Argentina was morally dubious and the attack on the Jewish Community Center was simply a horrible terrorist and anti-Semitic act. These two acts took place in the early 1990's.
Mughniyeh was an anti-Semite, and Hezbollah is still an anti-Semitic organization, but anti-Semitism is rife and ubiquitous in the Arab and Muslim World anyway. Hezbollah seem to be moderating their line lately on the Jews, but I am still not happy with it. Hezbollah seems also to be going to much greater lengths to play by the rules of war lately.
This is a typical evolution for an armed group. They start out pretty terrorist a lot of times, but as they get more successful and maybe start playing a role in politics, they get more sensitive to public opinion and start playing by the rules of war more.
Even Hamas declared a unilateral ceasefire as soon as they won the elections in Palestine. They have also kept that captured Israeli soldier alive for months now, and I think he's probably being treated fairly well. That's not only humane; it's also smart, because they want to trade him for Palestinian POW's. 15 years ago, I am afraid Hamas would have killed him.
Mughniyeh's killing has set off some truly regrettable remarks from the Iranians.
President Ahmadinejad said, "World powers have created a black and dirty microbe named the Zionist regime and unleashed it like a savage animal on the nations of the region." Sunday, February 17, General Hassan Firouz-Abadi, commander-in-chief of the Iranian military, said at a ceremony honoring Imad Mughniyeh, “Many millions across the world will soon receive the joyous news of the Zionist entity’s destruction.”
On February 18, head of the Revolutionary Guards Mohammad Ali Jaafari called Israel a “cancerous microbe.”
This is nasty talk, and, let's get honest, it's the language of genocide. That doesn't mean that the Iranians are really going to kill all the Jews in Israel or even lots of them, but I don't like that kind of Hitlerian language. Jews, not to mention Israelis, are paranoid enough, with good reason. No reason to add to it.
Hezbollah are hardly maniacal Islamists out to impose Sharia on Lebanon. That's supposedly their goal, but in recent interviews Nasrallah has toned that down by saying that that's only possible if, say, 80% of the population supports it. As 80% of Lebanon will not support any kind of Sharia in my lifetime, that's a roundabout way of saying that it's not really something they are trying to implement.
Another reason Hezbollah is toning down its program is that it is trying to win support from the non-Shia in Lebanon and also from more secular Shia groups. In the areas Hezbollah controlled in the South, it was not very harsh. Many women went about without headscarves. I think they even allowed alcohol to be sold again in recent years.
The Lebanese state does allow the arrest of homosexuals. In practice, this means men only. Hezbollah arrests men having sex with men in the areas it controls and beats them before turning them over for arrest. That's obviously not ok, but in Palestine and Iraq they are often killed, and in Iran they are beaten. Shia everywhere are not too keen on homosexuality and Sunnis seem to allow a lot more of it. Go figure.
Fadlallah, Hezbollah's spiritual leader, has issued some interesting fatwas. One allowed unmarried women to masturbate to meet their sexual needs. Another told women being beaten by husbands to fight back against them as hard as they could. That seems like nothing to us in the West, but in the context of an Islamist group, that's pretty revolutionary. Hezbollah's fairly progressive Islamism should be applauded as steps in the right direction.
The Shia have always allowed reinterpretation of Islam to meet the changing needs of the times. This is one reason that Sunni hardliners despise them as heretics, preferring instead the notion that Islam was codified once and forever 1,150-1,350 years ago in the Salafist version.
The PFLP site carried a eulogy for Mughniyeh that surprised me. A PFLP delegation visited Hezbollah in Lebanon to pay their respects to Mughniyeh. Mughniyeh's hands were pretty dirty, but in this fight I guess our guys need all the fighters they can get.
This is a cool graphic of George Habash, head of the PFLP who died recently, from the PFLP English site. It's nice that they finally got the English site up and running. For a long time, only the Arabic site was working, and that leaves me out, except for the pics.The article also carries a graphic that seems to make a hero out of him. As this graphic is exactly the opposite of his portrayal in the West, I'm going to run it, mostly just to make people mad.
Well folks, here it is. Another view of Imad Mughniyeh. Enjoy, or stamp your feet in rage, or whatever.Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
Monday, February 18, 2008
George Habash, a Revolutionary Life
The latest death toll figures from Hurricane Katrina can be seen on this website here. The famous Russian neo-Nazi video is on this blog here.
Updated February 19, 2008:
The following tribute to George Habash, leader of the Palestinian Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) was delivered to a meeting organized by the CPGB-ML in Central London on Saturday 10 February 2008. The Communist Party Great Britain Marxist-Leninist, basically a hardline pro-Stalin group, last time I checked. This document is interesting for various reasons.
For one, it shows that hardline Communist rhetoric in the style of the former USSR is still popular. The PFLP are lauded for being a hardline Marxist-Leninist organization. It's hard to say whether they still are or not, as they seem to be downplaying this in recent years, and no one really knows what Communism even means anymore.
It is true that there was a Communist state in South Yemen, but I am not sure if they accomplished much down there.
One of the biggest heroes of the Arab Left is Gamel Nasser, leader of Egypt. One great thing that he did do was to initiate a land reform. Most Arab states probably do not have feudal or semi-feudal land relations in the countryside anymore, but Egypt did in the 1950's. 10% of landowners owned most land, and 25% of landowners owned almost all of the land.
The vast majority of the rural population was reduced to the status of landless laborers or sharecroppers in debt peonage on the land of the landlords.
Nasser was able to break up the large estates by buying them up via the government and giving the land to the sharecroppers. It was one of the great progressive events in modern Arab history. Back in the day in Yemen, you would go into the houses of the poor in South Yemen and see Nasser's picture on the wall - they knew he was a hero to the Arab poor, and mostly for the land reform.
Unfortunately, land reform was not enough. Population was exploding and Egypt desperately needed to put more farmland into production. Hence the Aswan Dam, a necessary evil.
But even this did not solve the problems, as the rural poor continued to pour into the cities to look for nonexistent work. The landowners were bought off by assuring them a place in industry, which was and is heavily corrupt and tied in with the state. But the Egyptian economy was so shaky that the rich didn't really feel like investing in it.
Socialism was and is a pretty easy sell across the Arab World, in part due to Islam. Islam is a pretty socialist religion, although fundamentalists will argue the point with you and point out that the Koran says that there are those who have more and those who have less and this is ok. Nevertheless, the Koran is hardly a raging individualist tract.
Nor are the deserts of the Arab World suited for individualism. In such an environment, the every man for himself libertarian is lost and probably dead quite quickly. One must form alliances or one will be destroyed. One must work cooperatively or the elements will take your life. In a world of perennial scarcity, mass hoarding by a few means death for many more.
Hence, in the past century, most independent Arab states have opted for some kind of socialism. Where the states could not do it, the religious or militant groups did. There is no hatred of welfare or government as we have it in the individualist US. Socialism is simply normal and free market libertarianism is seen as a bizarre and cruel aberration.
Nevertheless, in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and probably other places, the clergy did resist land reforms on the grounds that they were un-Islamic. Iraq, newly emerging from semi-feudal relations in the 1960's, saw the Iraqi Communist Party become one of the largest parties in the country. It was particularly popular with poor Shia who flooded in from the countryside and poured into what later became Sadr City.
At that time, the Shia clergy were widely regarded as corrupt. They were tied in with large landowners, often involved in money-making scams, and were noted for enticing women into sexual relationships with them.
One of the few great things that the Shah of Iran did was to institute a land reform to realign the semi-feudal relations in the Iranian countryside. It went off pretty well, but some ethnic groups opposed it and hence were persecuted.
The tone of the Communist Party Great Britain Marxist-Leninist in the statement below is what might be called Stalinist or anti-revisionist.
Anti-revisionists hold that the problems with Communist states came from them leaving the path of true Communism and diluting their economies with capitalist relations. I do not know how much there is to that, so I can't comment on revisionism. But even staunch Marxist sites nowadays post long pieces stating flat out that the Soviet model failed.
The North Star Compass is a pretty interesting site. It's run by former Communists from the East Bloc and the USSR, and it is dedicated to the reestablishing of the Soviet Union as a socialist state. For these folks, Gorbachev was enemy #1. There are quite a few interesting essays there, and for those who think that Putin is a Communist, these guys really hate Putin.
For those who think that Russian Communists are all racists and anti-Semites, note that the North Star Compass despises the newly emerging fascist threat in the USSR.
There are many Trotskyite sites on the Net. The Trotskyites used to be totally nuts on the question of "Stalinists". Can you believe that they supported the German attack on the USSR and opposed the Soviet army's war in Afghanistan?
Trotskyites seem to have calmed down a lot lately. Many of them are supporting the Nepalese Maoists and the Colombian FARC. They even support Cuba. Usually this is measured with a tone that these states and movements would be better off if they adopted Trotskyism. Truth is that it is possible that Trotskyism has hardly even be tried anywhere, except possibly in the USSR from 1917-1922.
Trotskyites have a reputation as the ultimate splitters, and in the Philippines they have, incredibly, taken up arms alongside the feudal and fascist state against the Maoist NPA. In Defense of Marxism is a good example of a Trotskyite site.
It seems that many Communists nowadays in the West are Trotskyites of some sort. No one really knows what to make of them, and many Stalinists just laugh about them and regard them as irrelevant. Western Trotskyites seem to have a lot of money for some reason, and often put up nice websites. Non-Trotskyite Communist sites often have mild critiques of Trotskyism as some sort of irrelevant hairsplitting movement.
Western Trotskyites were heavily Jewish in the West until 1967 or possibly earlier. World Trotskyism opposed Israel in the Six Day War and Jewish Trotskyites consequently defected en masse. Many seem to have made their way into the neoconservative movement.
There are a variety of reasons for the heavy Jewish presence in Trotskyism, and that Trotsky himself was Jewish cannot be ignored. Trots have tended to oppose both Stalinism and Maoism as horribly brutal ideologies that committed atrocious human rights violations. Trotskyism has been a serious movement only in the West and it has tended to flounder in the rest of the world.
One of the Trots' main points is that a rapid buildup of urban industry is essential for the development of a modern socialist state. Trots are almost the opposite of the Maoists and their emphasis on the peasantry.
There are sites that basically uphold the former USSR and even Stalin, but they are often angry at Maoists, whom they accuse of adventurism. In India, Maoists are killing traditional Communists in the state of Bengal, a state that has been run by pro-Soviet Communists for about 30 years now.
Marxism-Leninism Today is an example of a pro-USSR, pro-Cuba, anti-Maoist site. They support the CPI-M (Communist Party India-Marxist) in Bengal and are not too happy with the Indian Maoists for killing their comrades.
Here is a cool site by a Georgian artist who is the grandson of Joseph Stalin, showing the Stalin family tree among other things.
Stalinism.ru is a site run by Russian Stalinists, but if you can't read Russian, it's not for you.
The National Bolshevik Party is some sort of a bizarre marriage of Stalinism and racial nationalism (I don't want to say Nazism, but I fear that is what it is). It's Russian too, but check out the scary party image, complete with Nordic lettering, and the background on the homepage. Lots of related links at the bottom - looks like they have chapters all over the place.
Another great site, coming from a somewhat different point of view, a Maoist one, is the Single Spark. Although Maoists are often described as ultra-Stalinists, Maoists and Stalinists are not necessarily the same thing.
The Maoists have always been the real bomb-throwers on the Far Left.
Despite Cold War rhetoric, pro-Soviet Communists often did not take up armed struggle until all peaceful avenues for change were blocked, and the Left was up against a death squad state. Otherwise, the idea was to try to gain power through parliamentary means, despite Lenin's denouncements of "parliamentary cretinism".
If the state was reasonably democratic and not killing the Left, the pro-Soviets often argued that "an objectively revolutionary situation did not exist". On the other hand, Maoists tend to reject all bourgeois democracy as invalid, particularly in very backward societies with mass extreme poverty and accompanying disease, hunger and premature death.
Hence, Maoists have launched insurgencies against formally democratic states as Peru, Sri Lanka, Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, Philippines, Nepal and India in recent years. In most of these cases, the pro-Soviet Left decided to sit out armed struggle, and the Maoists were denounced as adventurists irresponsibly taking up arms in spite of a lack of an objectively revolutionary situation.
In Peru, the war launched by the Shining Path led to a state that was less and less democratic and soon became just another Death Squad State. Thus in 1984, the pro-Cuban Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) took a vote and decided that "an objectively revolutionary situation existed" and opted to take up arms.
Another difference is that despite Cold War rhetoric, Maoists are often a lot more vicious than the Castroites and pro-Soviet rebels. Maoists have no qualms about killing "class enemies" - anyone prominent advocating rightwing politics or abusive landowners - whereas the Castroites often try to take the high ground in guerrilla war.
Examples in Latin America are the Castroite ELN in Colombia, URNG in Guatemala, FSLN in Nicaragua, FMLN in El Salvador, the aforementioned MRTA, and the FARC in Colombia. Despite crap from anti-Communists and the US government, all these groups have tried pretty hard to abide by the rules of war. At any rate, the overwhelming majority of grotesque human rights violations in each of these conflicts were committed by the state.
On the other hand, the Maoist Sendero Luminoso was a profoundly savage and cruel guerrilla group, though they almost seized power.
Communism doesn't mean that much anymore. Cuba allows religious believers to join the party, and there are millions of liberation theology Leftist Catholics in Latin America and the Philippines. The Chinese and Vietnamese Communists have introduced major elements of capitalism into their economies, while retaining a great deal of socialism at the same time.
Over the course of a few years, from 2003 to 2005 and 2006, the Nepalese Maoists underwent a sea change in politics. They went from hardline Maoists railing against revisionists and opposing anything but the dictatorship of the proletariat, to an embrace of multiparty democracy and a mixed economy and measured critiques of Mao, Lenin and Stalin as outdated for the needs and realities of today.
I think this is fantastic. I care nothing about dogma. I just want results, and I don't really care how you get there - capitalism, socialism, communism or whatever. If Marxism is indeed an ever-evolving science (which, if it is a science, it must be) then there must be no treating its elementary texts as some sort of religious books.
The works of Marx, Lenin, Mao and others must be regarded as the works of men, not Gods, positing theories. These theories must be tested in praxis to see how well they test out, as in any empirical investigation. The theories of these mortals will either test out or they will not, and if not, we need to adjust them accordingly.
We know what our goals are; all that is at stake is how to get there.
Let us listen to top leader Prachanda and other Nepalese Maoist leaders, from the Single Spark site:
In his 1944 speech, "Serve the People", Comrade Mao Zedong said these famous words:
Nice memorial poster of PFLP leader George Habash. In all of the obits in the US news, few detailed the reason for the radicalization of Habash. At university in Lebanon, he was apolitical and preferred to play guitar. He raced home during the "Israeli War of Independence" to his home in Lydda. Jewish militias attacked the town and forced 95% of the city to flee.
Most were Palestinian Christians. His sister died of typhoid fever during the siege of the town and Habash buried her in the backyard. He blamed the Jews for blocking access to the hospital that could have saved her. There were some notorious massacres of Palestinians during the attack on Lydda, including the execution of many young men in a mosque.
The Jews forced Habash and others to line up and leave their homes and all of their possessions. One man asked if he could return to get the keys to his house and for making this request, he was shot dead in front of Habash's eyes. From that point on, the apolitical future doctor was transformed into a revolutionary.
Comrade George Habash, who has passed away at the age of 82, gave more than six decades of his life to the revolution. He was born into a prosperous Greek Orthodox family in the Palestinian city of Lydda.
At that time, the Palestinian people were under the rule of the British colonial mandate, which was systematically preparing the way for the creation of a Zionist settler colonial state, which, in the words of Sir Roland Storrs, the first British governor of Jerusalem in the 1920s, would form “for England a ‘little loyal Jewish Ulster’ in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism”.
In the summer of 1948, whilst studying medicine in Beirut, George went back home to help organise resistance to the Zionist catastrophe that was sweeping over the Palestinian people, driving them from their ancestral homes and lands into exile and dispossession.
At this time, he and his whole family, along with 95 percent of the inhabitants of his native city, were forced out at gunpoint by the Zionist terrorists and ethnic cleansers commanded by Yitzhak Rabin. Years later, Habash was to observe:
Graduating as the first in his class, Dr Habash eschewed the chance to pursue a lucrative career, opting instead to open a people’s clinic offering free treatment and a school for refugees in the Jordanian capital, Amman.
Around this same time, he and his comrades founded the Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM), the first pan-Arab movement to take up armed struggle against colonialism and to win back the lost lands.
The significance of the ANM should not be underestimated. Not only was it to be the root of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP); from its ranks also came revolutionary forces in many parts of the Arab homeland, including the National Liberation Front in Aden and South Yemen, which not only defeated British imperialism in a revolutionary armed struggle to win national liberation, but, later as the Yemen Socialist Party, leading the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, stood in the vanguard of to date the only real attempt to build an Arab socialist state on the basis of the scientific principles of Marxism-Leninism and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
In the 1960s, Comrade Habash, like many other anti-imperialist fighters then, before and since, came to accept that the liberation struggle of the oppressed people, if it was to be crowned with success and carried through to the end, needed to be based on Marxism-Leninism. Lamis Andoni, an analyst for al-Jazeera, who knew Comrade Habash well, expressed matters this way in his tribute to his friend:
In a 1969 interview, he declared:
Cuba and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea were also two countries close to his heart and with which he and the PFLP forged tight bonds of active solidarity. In the memorial hall for Comrade Kim Il Sung in Pyongyang, the Korean comrades proudly display the several awards and medals presented to their great leader by the PFLP over the years.
Under Habash’s leadership, the PFLP forged close and active ties of combat solidarity with national liberation movements in all parts of the world – the ANC in South Africa, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and the Irish Republican Movement, to name but a few, embracing training, material assistance, joint operations and moral encouragement.
In the September 1970 hijackings that gave the PFLP worldwide fame, Leila Khaled was joined by Patrick Arguello Ryan, a militant of the Sandinista National Liberation Front and the only martyr of those operations.
In 1983, after the Nicaraguan revolution, the Sandinistas commemorated Arguello by renaming the Geothermal Plant at Momotombo in his honour. A poster still available on the PFLP website describes Arguello as the “symbol of common Nicaraguan/Palestinian struggle”.
Comrade Habash sought to translate into reality, and himself embodied, these inspiring words of Che Guevara, which go to the very essence of proletarian internationalism:
But what shines out is the fact that he never lost sight of the importance of unity in the national liberation movement.
In their own tribute to their leader, the PFLP put matters this way:
Islamic Jihad described him as a “real leader” and other Palestinian organisations paying their tributes included the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Palestine Popular Struggle Front, who said that his path was and is one of liberation for the Palestinian and Arab people.
In its December 1967 Founding Statement, the PFLP declared:
• That the fundamental way to liberation lies through armed struggle and people’s war based on the masses.
• That for the struggle to be successful and carried through to the end it needs to be based on Marxism-Leninism, the scientific world outlook of the working class.
• That the oppressed peoples must uphold proletarian internationalism in their struggle for liberation, based on militant unity within and between the three major currents of the world revolutionary process, the socialist countries, the national liberation movements, and the working-class movement in the imperialist heartlands.
• That the liberation of the nation necessitated the principled and democratic unity of all the forces of the nation, even though major differences will also exist and must be struggled over.
Clearly, all these are not just lessons for the Palestinian people alone.
In June 2000, age and ill health led Comrade Habash to step back from the day-to-day leadership of the PFLP. Giving an inspiring speech on that occasion, in many respects he wrote his own epitaph. He told his comrades:
1. Ashok. (May 2006). Our Experiences of Ten Tumultuous Years of People’s War, The Worker#10, pp. 68-73. On Lenin and Mao, p. 71.
2. Basanta. (May 2006). International Dimension of Prachanda Path. The Worker #10, pp. 82-90.
3. Ibid. On Models: Page 87.
4. Kishor Nepal. (June 2006). Prachanda Interview. Maoist Revolution Digest.
5. Alessandro Gilioli. (Early November 2006). Prachanda: Our Revolution Won . L'espresso, Italy. Excerpts.
6. Prachanda. (November 18, 2006). Democracy: The Forbidden Fruit or Nectar for Progress? Speech at the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit in New Delhi.
7. MLM Revolutionary Study Group in the U.S. (Dec. 21, 2006). Assessing Recent Developments in Nepal: A Bibliography on the State, a Peaceful Transition to Socialism, Democracy and Dictatorship, Negotiations and Their Relevance to the International Communist Movement in the 21st Century.
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Updated February 19, 2008:
The following tribute to George Habash, leader of the Palestinian Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) was delivered to a meeting organized by the CPGB-ML in Central London on Saturday 10 February 2008. The Communist Party Great Britain Marxist-Leninist, basically a hardline pro-Stalin group, last time I checked. This document is interesting for various reasons.
For one, it shows that hardline Communist rhetoric in the style of the former USSR is still popular. The PFLP are lauded for being a hardline Marxist-Leninist organization. It's hard to say whether they still are or not, as they seem to be downplaying this in recent years, and no one really knows what Communism even means anymore.
It is true that there was a Communist state in South Yemen, but I am not sure if they accomplished much down there.
One of the biggest heroes of the Arab Left is Gamel Nasser, leader of Egypt. One great thing that he did do was to initiate a land reform. Most Arab states probably do not have feudal or semi-feudal land relations in the countryside anymore, but Egypt did in the 1950's. 10% of landowners owned most land, and 25% of landowners owned almost all of the land.
The vast majority of the rural population was reduced to the status of landless laborers or sharecroppers in debt peonage on the land of the landlords.
Nasser was able to break up the large estates by buying them up via the government and giving the land to the sharecroppers. It was one of the great progressive events in modern Arab history. Back in the day in Yemen, you would go into the houses of the poor in South Yemen and see Nasser's picture on the wall - they knew he was a hero to the Arab poor, and mostly for the land reform.
Unfortunately, land reform was not enough. Population was exploding and Egypt desperately needed to put more farmland into production. Hence the Aswan Dam, a necessary evil.
But even this did not solve the problems, as the rural poor continued to pour into the cities to look for nonexistent work. The landowners were bought off by assuring them a place in industry, which was and is heavily corrupt and tied in with the state. But the Egyptian economy was so shaky that the rich didn't really feel like investing in it.
Socialism was and is a pretty easy sell across the Arab World, in part due to Islam. Islam is a pretty socialist religion, although fundamentalists will argue the point with you and point out that the Koran says that there are those who have more and those who have less and this is ok. Nevertheless, the Koran is hardly a raging individualist tract.
Nor are the deserts of the Arab World suited for individualism. In such an environment, the every man for himself libertarian is lost and probably dead quite quickly. One must form alliances or one will be destroyed. One must work cooperatively or the elements will take your life. In a world of perennial scarcity, mass hoarding by a few means death for many more.
Hence, in the past century, most independent Arab states have opted for some kind of socialism. Where the states could not do it, the religious or militant groups did. There is no hatred of welfare or government as we have it in the individualist US. Socialism is simply normal and free market libertarianism is seen as a bizarre and cruel aberration.
Nevertheless, in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and probably other places, the clergy did resist land reforms on the grounds that they were un-Islamic. Iraq, newly emerging from semi-feudal relations in the 1960's, saw the Iraqi Communist Party become one of the largest parties in the country. It was particularly popular with poor Shia who flooded in from the countryside and poured into what later became Sadr City.
At that time, the Shia clergy were widely regarded as corrupt. They were tied in with large landowners, often involved in money-making scams, and were noted for enticing women into sexual relationships with them.
One of the few great things that the Shah of Iran did was to institute a land reform to realign the semi-feudal relations in the Iranian countryside. It went off pretty well, but some ethnic groups opposed it and hence were persecuted.
The tone of the Communist Party Great Britain Marxist-Leninist in the statement below is what might be called Stalinist or anti-revisionist.
Anti-revisionists hold that the problems with Communist states came from them leaving the path of true Communism and diluting their economies with capitalist relations. I do not know how much there is to that, so I can't comment on revisionism. But even staunch Marxist sites nowadays post long pieces stating flat out that the Soviet model failed.
The North Star Compass is a pretty interesting site. It's run by former Communists from the East Bloc and the USSR, and it is dedicated to the reestablishing of the Soviet Union as a socialist state. For these folks, Gorbachev was enemy #1. There are quite a few interesting essays there, and for those who think that Putin is a Communist, these guys really hate Putin.
For those who think that Russian Communists are all racists and anti-Semites, note that the North Star Compass despises the newly emerging fascist threat in the USSR.
There are many Trotskyite sites on the Net. The Trotskyites used to be totally nuts on the question of "Stalinists". Can you believe that they supported the German attack on the USSR and opposed the Soviet army's war in Afghanistan?
Trotskyites seem to have calmed down a lot lately. Many of them are supporting the Nepalese Maoists and the Colombian FARC. They even support Cuba. Usually this is measured with a tone that these states and movements would be better off if they adopted Trotskyism. Truth is that it is possible that Trotskyism has hardly even be tried anywhere, except possibly in the USSR from 1917-1922.
Trotskyites have a reputation as the ultimate splitters, and in the Philippines they have, incredibly, taken up arms alongside the feudal and fascist state against the Maoist NPA. In Defense of Marxism is a good example of a Trotskyite site.
It seems that many Communists nowadays in the West are Trotskyites of some sort. No one really knows what to make of them, and many Stalinists just laugh about them and regard them as irrelevant. Western Trotskyites seem to have a lot of money for some reason, and often put up nice websites. Non-Trotskyite Communist sites often have mild critiques of Trotskyism as some sort of irrelevant hairsplitting movement.
Western Trotskyites were heavily Jewish in the West until 1967 or possibly earlier. World Trotskyism opposed Israel in the Six Day War and Jewish Trotskyites consequently defected en masse. Many seem to have made their way into the neoconservative movement.
There are a variety of reasons for the heavy Jewish presence in Trotskyism, and that Trotsky himself was Jewish cannot be ignored. Trots have tended to oppose both Stalinism and Maoism as horribly brutal ideologies that committed atrocious human rights violations. Trotskyism has been a serious movement only in the West and it has tended to flounder in the rest of the world.
One of the Trots' main points is that a rapid buildup of urban industry is essential for the development of a modern socialist state. Trots are almost the opposite of the Maoists and their emphasis on the peasantry.
There are sites that basically uphold the former USSR and even Stalin, but they are often angry at Maoists, whom they accuse of adventurism. In India, Maoists are killing traditional Communists in the state of Bengal, a state that has been run by pro-Soviet Communists for about 30 years now.
Marxism-Leninism Today is an example of a pro-USSR, pro-Cuba, anti-Maoist site. They support the CPI-M (Communist Party India-Marxist) in Bengal and are not too happy with the Indian Maoists for killing their comrades.
Here is a cool site by a Georgian artist who is the grandson of Joseph Stalin, showing the Stalin family tree among other things.
Stalinism.ru is a site run by Russian Stalinists, but if you can't read Russian, it's not for you.
The National Bolshevik Party is some sort of a bizarre marriage of Stalinism and racial nationalism (I don't want to say Nazism, but I fear that is what it is). It's Russian too, but check out the scary party image, complete with Nordic lettering, and the background on the homepage. Lots of related links at the bottom - looks like they have chapters all over the place.
Another great site, coming from a somewhat different point of view, a Maoist one, is the Single Spark. Although Maoists are often described as ultra-Stalinists, Maoists and Stalinists are not necessarily the same thing.
The Maoists have always been the real bomb-throwers on the Far Left.
Despite Cold War rhetoric, pro-Soviet Communists often did not take up armed struggle until all peaceful avenues for change were blocked, and the Left was up against a death squad state. Otherwise, the idea was to try to gain power through parliamentary means, despite Lenin's denouncements of "parliamentary cretinism".
If the state was reasonably democratic and not killing the Left, the pro-Soviets often argued that "an objectively revolutionary situation did not exist". On the other hand, Maoists tend to reject all bourgeois democracy as invalid, particularly in very backward societies with mass extreme poverty and accompanying disease, hunger and premature death.
Hence, Maoists have launched insurgencies against formally democratic states as Peru, Sri Lanka, Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, Philippines, Nepal and India in recent years. In most of these cases, the pro-Soviet Left decided to sit out armed struggle, and the Maoists were denounced as adventurists irresponsibly taking up arms in spite of a lack of an objectively revolutionary situation.
In Peru, the war launched by the Shining Path led to a state that was less and less democratic and soon became just another Death Squad State. Thus in 1984, the pro-Cuban Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) took a vote and decided that "an objectively revolutionary situation existed" and opted to take up arms.
Another difference is that despite Cold War rhetoric, Maoists are often a lot more vicious than the Castroites and pro-Soviet rebels. Maoists have no qualms about killing "class enemies" - anyone prominent advocating rightwing politics or abusive landowners - whereas the Castroites often try to take the high ground in guerrilla war.
Examples in Latin America are the Castroite ELN in Colombia, URNG in Guatemala, FSLN in Nicaragua, FMLN in El Salvador, the aforementioned MRTA, and the FARC in Colombia. Despite crap from anti-Communists and the US government, all these groups have tried pretty hard to abide by the rules of war. At any rate, the overwhelming majority of grotesque human rights violations in each of these conflicts were committed by the state.
On the other hand, the Maoist Sendero Luminoso was a profoundly savage and cruel guerrilla group, though they almost seized power.
Communism doesn't mean that much anymore. Cuba allows religious believers to join the party, and there are millions of liberation theology Leftist Catholics in Latin America and the Philippines. The Chinese and Vietnamese Communists have introduced major elements of capitalism into their economies, while retaining a great deal of socialism at the same time.
Over the course of a few years, from 2003 to 2005 and 2006, the Nepalese Maoists underwent a sea change in politics. They went from hardline Maoists railing against revisionists and opposing anything but the dictatorship of the proletariat, to an embrace of multiparty democracy and a mixed economy and measured critiques of Mao, Lenin and Stalin as outdated for the needs and realities of today.
I think this is fantastic. I care nothing about dogma. I just want results, and I don't really care how you get there - capitalism, socialism, communism or whatever. If Marxism is indeed an ever-evolving science (which, if it is a science, it must be) then there must be no treating its elementary texts as some sort of religious books.
The works of Marx, Lenin, Mao and others must be regarded as the works of men, not Gods, positing theories. These theories must be tested in praxis to see how well they test out, as in any empirical investigation. The theories of these mortals will either test out or they will not, and if not, we need to adjust them accordingly.
We know what our goals are; all that is at stake is how to get there.
Let us listen to top leader Prachanda and other Nepalese Maoist leaders, from the Single Spark site:
Since MLM is a progressive science, the people’s war calls for ideology and leadership that is capable to complete a new People’s War in the 21st century. Our Party’s CC Extended Meeting last September held that the ideologies of Lenin and Mao have become old and inadequate to lead the present international revolution.
The political and organizational report passed by the meeting says, ‘The proletariat revolutionaries of the 21st century need to pay their serious attention towards that fact that in today’s ground reality, Lenin and Mao’s analysis of imperialism and various notions relation to proletariat strategies based on it have lagged behind.’
As Marxism was born in an age of competitive capitalism, the strategies and working policy formulated during the times of Marx had become old when they arrived at Lenin’s times of imperialism and proletariat revolution.
Similarly, the ideologies developed by Lenin and Mao at the initial phase of international imperialism and proletariat revolution have become inadequate and lagged behind at the present imperialistic phase. Therefore, ‘the main issue is to develop MLM in the 21st century and to determine a new proletariat strategy.1
The second [wrong trend] …is not to concentrate on how
revolutionary struggle can be developed in one’s country by developing correct strategy and tactics, but to talk more of world revolution, enjoy classical debate, eulogize strategy and tactic of the past successful revolutions, teach other fraternal parties as if they know everything about the concrete situation in that country and stick to what Lenin and Mao had said before. This trend represents dogmatism.2
What we think is that situation has undergone a considerable
change, so the communist revolutionaries must not stick to what Lenin had said about insurrection and what Mao had said on Protracted People’s War.3
Q. You have envisioned a people's republic, no?
Prachanda: Mao Zedong's People's Republic cannot fulfill the needs of today's world. It cannot address today's political awareness appropriately. Mao said cooperative party theory; we called it competitive party theory. We have said let's move ahead from the conventional People's Republic and develop it as per the specialties of the 21st century.
Q. You do not follow the old concept of communism?
Prachanda: Definitely not. What happened without competition? In the USSR, Stalin gave no place to competition and went ahead in a monolithic way. What was the result?4
Does Communism make sense today?
P: It's a big question, starting with Marx, Lenin and Mao Zedong, who wanted to apply the Marxist teachings in semi colonial countries. Now, we still need Marxism, but in accordance to the needs of the 21st century. We have to apply Marxist science in a very new context, understanding social, economic and also technological changes, without dogmatism and without sectarianism.
We are trying to develop a completely new concept, different from what happened in the past century. When we are in the government, our experiment will surprise everybody.
This will happen only if foreign investors trust a communist government…
P: Yes, I know. We cannot ignore the whole process of liberalization in the world. So, we will apply mixed economics to this country. Right now, we are not saying that we plan a total socialist economy, though we will not blindly follow western liberalism. We have some national priorities and we will welcome foreign investors, using capital from abroad for the well being of Nepal.5
Though Mao made some bold experiments to revive and develop socialist democracy, his efforts did not result in any qualitative advance. Why did socialist democracy ultimately fail? Why did it have to bear the stigma of ‘totalitarianism’ from its adversaries? If the revolutionary communists of the 21st century have ‘to win the battle for democracy’, as Marx and Engels had declared in the famous Communist Manifesto, we must dare to question the past practice in socialist democracy and take some bold initiatives.6.
All selections from this document7.
CPGB-ML Tribute to Habash
In his 1944 speech, "Serve the People", Comrade Mao Zedong said these famous words:
All men must die, but death can vary in its significance. The ancient Chinese writer Szuma Chien said: ‘Though death befalls all men alike, it may be weightier than Mount Tai or lighter than a feather.’ To die for the people is weightier than Mount Tai, but to work for the fascists and die for the exploiters and oppressors is lighter than a feather.Today, the heroic Palestinian people are continuing to resist, whether in the breaking of the barrier with Egypt to alleviate the genocidal siege of Gaza, or in the martyrdom operation at Dimona, the nuclear site where imperialism and its stooges do not demand inspections, to express a sense of grief at the loss of Al-Hakim, Dr George Habash, one of the greatest leaders of the Palestinian people, and, more importantly, to celebrate his glorious life and give real political vitality and clarity to the essential work of building solidarity with the Palestinian people in the British working class and in the anti-war and other progressive movements.
Nice memorial poster of PFLP leader George Habash. In all of the obits in the US news, few detailed the reason for the radicalization of Habash. At university in Lebanon, he was apolitical and preferred to play guitar. He raced home during the "Israeli War of Independence" to his home in Lydda. Jewish militias attacked the town and forced 95% of the city to flee.Most were Palestinian Christians. His sister died of typhoid fever during the siege of the town and Habash buried her in the backyard. He blamed the Jews for blocking access to the hospital that could have saved her. There were some notorious massacres of Palestinians during the attack on Lydda, including the execution of many young men in a mosque.
The Jews forced Habash and others to line up and leave their homes and all of their possessions. One man asked if he could return to get the keys to his house and for making this request, he was shot dead in front of Habash's eyes. From that point on, the apolitical future doctor was transformed into a revolutionary.
Comrade George Habash, who has passed away at the age of 82, gave more than six decades of his life to the revolution. He was born into a prosperous Greek Orthodox family in the Palestinian city of Lydda.
At that time, the Palestinian people were under the rule of the British colonial mandate, which was systematically preparing the way for the creation of a Zionist settler colonial state, which, in the words of Sir Roland Storrs, the first British governor of Jerusalem in the 1920s, would form “for England a ‘little loyal Jewish Ulster’ in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism”.
In the summer of 1948, whilst studying medicine in Beirut, George went back home to help organise resistance to the Zionist catastrophe that was sweeping over the Palestinian people, driving them from their ancestral homes and lands into exile and dispossession.
At this time, he and his whole family, along with 95 percent of the inhabitants of his native city, were forced out at gunpoint by the Zionist terrorists and ethnic cleansers commanded by Yitzhak Rabin. Years later, Habash was to observe:
It is a sight I shall never forget. Thousands of human beings expelled from their homes, running, crying, shouting in terror. After seeing such a thing, you cannot but become a revolutionary.During al-Nakba, the catastrophe, more than 700,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes and lands, made stateless and refugees.
Graduating as the first in his class, Dr Habash eschewed the chance to pursue a lucrative career, opting instead to open a people’s clinic offering free treatment and a school for refugees in the Jordanian capital, Amman.
Around this same time, he and his comrades founded the Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM), the first pan-Arab movement to take up armed struggle against colonialism and to win back the lost lands.
The significance of the ANM should not be underestimated. Not only was it to be the root of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP); from its ranks also came revolutionary forces in many parts of the Arab homeland, including the National Liberation Front in Aden and South Yemen, which not only defeated British imperialism in a revolutionary armed struggle to win national liberation, but, later as the Yemen Socialist Party, leading the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, stood in the vanguard of to date the only real attempt to build an Arab socialist state on the basis of the scientific principles of Marxism-Leninism and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
In the 1960s, Comrade Habash, like many other anti-imperialist fighters then, before and since, came to accept that the liberation struggle of the oppressed people, if it was to be crowned with success and carried through to the end, needed to be based on Marxism-Leninism. Lamis Andoni, an analyst for al-Jazeera, who knew Comrade Habash well, expressed matters this way in his tribute to his friend:
He belonged to a generation influenced by Franz Fanon, Mao Zedong, General Vo Nguyen Giap and later by Che Guevara. In their views, colonialism epitomised systematic, institutional violence and subjugation of people under its control …After the founding of the PFLP in December 1967, following the Arabs’ bitter defeat in the June 1967 war, Habash declared that the struggle was “not merely to free Palestine from the Zionists but also to free the Arab world from remnants” of Western colonial rule. All Arab revolutionaries, he said, “must be Marxist, because Marxism is the expression of the aspirations of the working class”.
In the early 1960s, George Habash, already a paediatrician in Amman known for treating the poor for free, endorsed Marxism as he grew convinced that the national struggle should not be separate from the struggle for social justice.
In a 1969 interview, he declared:
By 1967, we had understood the undeniable truth, that to liberate Palestine we have to follow the Chinese and Vietnamese examples.Indeed, Comrade Habash paid close attention not only to the Chinese and Vietnamese revolutions, but to the experience of all the socialist countries and the revolutionary movement in all parts of the world.
Cuba and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea were also two countries close to his heart and with which he and the PFLP forged tight bonds of active solidarity. In the memorial hall for Comrade Kim Il Sung in Pyongyang, the Korean comrades proudly display the several awards and medals presented to their great leader by the PFLP over the years.
Under Habash’s leadership, the PFLP forged close and active ties of combat solidarity with national liberation movements in all parts of the world – the ANC in South Africa, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and the Irish Republican Movement, to name but a few, embracing training, material assistance, joint operations and moral encouragement.
In the September 1970 hijackings that gave the PFLP worldwide fame, Leila Khaled was joined by Patrick Arguello Ryan, a militant of the Sandinista National Liberation Front and the only martyr of those operations.
In 1983, after the Nicaraguan revolution, the Sandinistas commemorated Arguello by renaming the Geothermal Plant at Momotombo in his honour. A poster still available on the PFLP website describes Arguello as the “symbol of common Nicaraguan/Palestinian struggle”.
Comrade Habash sought to translate into reality, and himself embodied, these inspiring words of Che Guevara, which go to the very essence of proletarian internationalism:
Let the flag under which we fight be the sacred cause of the liberation of humanity so that to die under the colours of Vietnam, Venezuela, Guatemala, Bolivia, Brazil will be equally glorious and desirable for a Latin American, an Asian, an African and even a European.Comrades, The Palestinian revolution is a complex and difficult one, throwing up many challenges and inevitably differences of view. Equally inevitably, Comrade Habash often found himself embroiled in internal controversy, particularly in terms of the sometimes painful compromises, concessions and retreats that have been forced on the Palestinian people at various times.
But what shines out is the fact that he never lost sight of the importance of unity in the national liberation movement.
In their own tribute to their leader, the PFLP put matters this way:
In 1987, with the outbreak of the great Intifada, Dr. Habash called for upholding Palestinian national unity, and convening the Palestinian National Congress in Algeria in 1988.Lamis Andoni, to whom we have already referred, wrote:
Comrade Al-Hakim always understood national unity as a necessary condition for the continuation of the struggle and the national liberation movement, whether in Beirut during internal fighting among Palestinians and after as well, recognising that the internal contradictions among Palestinians could not be solved through military mechanisms, but rather through the democratic processes of the liberation movement.
‘His message to the Palestinians was to restore our unity,’ Issam Al Taher, a senior aide, who saw him a day before his death said.Andoni notes of the relationship between George Habash and Yasser Arafat:
‘Unity, unity, unity — that was his only message,’ said Al Taher.
The two men never severed ties and continued a complex relationship of camaraderie and rivalry until the end.Andoni continued:
Tall and handsome, Habash exuded a certain charisma that disarmed his distracters who admired his persistence but criticised what they saw as rigidity. A stroke that partially paralysed half of his body changed his appearance later but did not affect his ardour for the cause.Of the final period of Habash’s life, Andoni notes:
It was that Habash that I saw and met for the first time in Tunis in 1983. The PLO was expelled from Beirut too and most its leaders moved to this northern Mediterranean capital of Tunisia. Habash moved to Damascus, Syria instead.
On that day the PLO was holding a meeting. Most of the leaders had arrived and then there was a stir and silence. Habash entered slowly on crutches, hampered and subdued by his physical disability.
The hall, filled with hardened fighters, stood on their feet while Arafat hugged Habash and escorted him to his seat.
He would get so distressed during conversations discussing the events in Palestine and most recently in Iraq, that his wife, and closest friend Hilda, would interfere to stop it.It is not surprising, therefore, that the mourning for Comrade Habash has transcended the differences in the Palestinian ranks. President Mahmoud Abbas declared three days of national mourning, noting that Habash had dedicated his life to struggling for his people. Hamas leader Ismail Haneya said, “Dr. George Habash spent all his life struggling for the cause of the Palestinian people.”
When Israel besieged Arafat in 2002 in his compound in Ramallah, Habash stood by his rival. When Arafat died, amid Palestinian suspicion that Israel may have been involved, Habash deeply mourned him.
The few times I was able to see him over the last three years, he never stopped monitoring and learning every detail about Palestinian life. His physical ailment deepened the sense of soulful pain he internalised.
Those who were with him during his last days recall how disturbed he was by the rift between Fatah and Hamas. He opposed the strategy of Mahmoud Abbas, the current Palestinian president, of accommodating US and Israeli demands but did not endorse Hamas’ military take over of Gaza.
His main concern was the damage brought upon the Palestinians by the most serious internal rift in their history.
Islamic Jihad described him as a “real leader” and other Palestinian organisations paying their tributes included the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Palestine Popular Struggle Front, who said that his path was and is one of liberation for the Palestinian and Arab people.
In its December 1967 Founding Statement, the PFLP declared:
The masses are the authority, the guide, and the resistance leadership from which victory will be achieved in the end. It is necessary to recruit the popular masses and mobilise them as active participants and leaders ...Much more can be said on the life, work and legacy of Comrade Habash, but in summary these are some of the things he advocated and taught:
The only language that the enemy understands is the language of revolutionary violence …
The slogan of our masses must be resistance until victory, rooted in the heart with our feet planted on the ground in deep commitment to our land. Today, the Popular Front is hailing our masses with this call. This is the appeal. We must repeat it every day, through every breakthrough bullet and the fall of each martyr, that the land of Palestine today belongs to all the masses.
Every area of our land belongs to our masses who have defended it against the presence of the usurper, every piece of land, every rock and stone, our masses will not abandon one inch of them because they belong to the legions of the poor and hungry and displaced persons …
The struggle of the Palestinian people is linked with the struggle of the forces of revolution and progress in the world, the format of the coalition that we face requires a corresponding … coalition including all the forces of anti-imperialism in every part of the world.
• That the fundamental way to liberation lies through armed struggle and people’s war based on the masses.
• That for the struggle to be successful and carried through to the end it needs to be based on Marxism-Leninism, the scientific world outlook of the working class.
• That the oppressed peoples must uphold proletarian internationalism in their struggle for liberation, based on militant unity within and between the three major currents of the world revolutionary process, the socialist countries, the national liberation movements, and the working-class movement in the imperialist heartlands.
• That the liberation of the nation necessitated the principled and democratic unity of all the forces of the nation, even though major differences will also exist and must be struggled over.
Clearly, all these are not just lessons for the Palestinian people alone.
In June 2000, age and ill health led Comrade Habash to step back from the day-to-day leadership of the PFLP. Giving an inspiring speech on that occasion, in many respects he wrote his own epitaph. He told his comrades:
What I have lived through over the course of these militant decades, and the rich experience I have acquired, is not a matter to be taken for granted. It is your right, and the right of coming generations to review the content and lessons of this experience with all of its many successes and failures.As befits a man who gave all of his own life and strength to the revolution, Comrade Habash said of the martyrs, the prisoners and his comrades, and it is with Comrade Habash’s own words, from his farewell address, Palestine Between Dreams and Reality, that we conclude this tribute:
I remember each of the martyrs, one by one, and without exception – those martyrs to whom we are indebted, for whom we must continue the struggle, holding fast to the dream and holding fast to hope, and protecting the rights of the people for whom they shed their blood. Their children and their families have a right to be honoured and cared for. This is the least we can do for those blazing stars in the skies of our homeland.
I also remember now the heroic prisoners in the jails of the occupation and the prisons of the Palestinian Authority - those militants who remind us morning and night of our patriotic duty by the fact that they are still there behind bars and by the fact that the occupation still squats on our chests. Each prisoner deserves the noblest signs of respect …
Now permit me to express my gratitude to all the comrades who have worked with me and helped me, whether in the Arab Nationalist Movement or in the Popular Front. They stood beside me during the hardest conditions and the darkest of times, and they were a great help and support for me. Without them I would not have been able to carry out my responsibilities.
They have been true comrades, in all that the word implies. Those comrades helped to create a congenial atmosphere, an environment of political, theoretical, and intellectual interaction that enabled me to do all that was required. Those comrades have a big place in my heart and mind.
I offer all my thanks and appreciation to each one of them by name. In addition, to the comrades who vigilantly guarded me, looking out for my safety, all these long years, I offer my gratitude …
As a last word, I feel it necessary to say that I know well that the goals for which I worked and struggled have not yet been attained. And I cannot say how or when they will be attained. But on the other hand, I know in light of my study of the march of history in general, and of Arab and Palestinian history in particular, that they will be attained.
In spite of this bitter truth, I leave my task as General Secretary of the Front with a contented mind and conscience. My conscience is content because I did my duty and worked with the greatest possible effort and with complete and deep sincerity. My mind is content because throughout my working years, I continually based myself on the practice of self-criticism.
It is important to say also that I will pay close attention to all your observations and assessments of the course taken by the Popular Front while I was its General Secretary. I must emphasise that with the same close attention, if not with greater attention, I will follow and take to heart the observations and assessments of the Palestinian and Arab people on this course and my role in it.
My aim in this closing speech has been to say to you – and not only to you, but to all the detainees, or those who experienced detention, to the families of the martyrs, to the children of the martyrs, to those who were wounded, to all who sacrificed and gave for the cause – that your sacrifice has not been in vain.
The just goals and legitimate rights which they have struggled and given their lives for will be attained, sooner or later. I say again that I don't know when, but they will be attained.
And my aim, again and again, is to emphasize the need for you to persist in the struggle to serve our people, for the good of all Palestinians and Arabs - the good that lies in a just and legitimate cause, as it does in the realization of the good for all those who are oppressed and wronged.
You must always be of calm mind, and of contented conscience, with a strong resolve and a steel will, for you have been and still are in the camp of justice and progress, the camp whose just goals will be attained and which will inevitably attain its legitimate rights. For these are the lessons of history and reality, and no right is lost as long as there is someone fighting for it.
Notes
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Monday, February 11, 2008
The Israeli Lobby and American Society
The latest death toll figures from Hurricane Katrina can be seen on this website here. The famous Russian neo-Nazi video is on this blog here.
Updated February 13, 2008:
Joachim Martillo has posted a lengthy and excellent opus, Judonia Rising: The Israeli Lobby and American Society, on one of his websites, an encyclopedic analysis of the US Israeli Lobby and its effects on US society. Noam Chomsky offered a critique (see the first comment at the end of the post for details), and afterwards, Joachim rewrote several pages. I have also been asked to offer a critique.
This is a very important work that ought to be read in full by anyone interested in the subject. It deserves to be widely disseminated and commented on, dissected and analyzed.
First of all, I agree with much of what he has written so there is no need to comment on what I agree on. If I don't mention it in what follows, that probably means I agree.
I do disagree with certain things.
Obviously, as a Commie, I have serious issues with the whole Bolshevik Jew killers thing. It's hard to argue that people who reduced the death rate by 70% in Russia were the worst killers to ever set foot in Russia. I'm so tired of debating the Bolshevik Jew killer thing that I don't even want to get into it anymore.
Now, for the rest.
It is incorrect to say that Jewish values include early age of sexual initiation and serial polygamy. Kevin MacDonald notes that US Jews have sex at the latest age of any ethnic group. They also have some of the most stable marriages last time I checked.
It's difficult to lump Abigail Thornton, a rightwing Jewish Republican opposed to civil rights, in with a US Jewish agenda that relentlessly promotes civil rights. Martillo fails to note that the Jewish neocons are actually opposed to civil rights law in the US, either by promoting Supreme Court justices sworn to dismantle it or by cheering on Republicans who have been refusing to enforce civil rights laws for almost 30 years now.
It's very hard to say that Friedmanite freemarketeer neoliberalism is part of the US Jewish agenda, as most US Jewish organizations are agnostic on economics and if anything, promote more state intervention, regulation of business, socialist redistribution programs, socialized medicine and education, etc.
Friedmanism is part of the agenda of the neocons, but the neocon agenda in whole is embraced by only at most 20% of US Jews who vote Republican. This is where the equation of Jewish neoconservatives with US Jews gets dangerous and wrong. US Jews vote up to 80% Dem in recent years.
Neocons are best seen as a rightwing split-off of Republican Jews whose views in whole are rejected by the overwhelming majority of US Jews. However, on Israel, many liberal US Jews are becoming neocons in whole or in part, but the average US Jew is still pretty diverse on Israel. It is better to say that the large US Jewish organizations have gone over to neoconservatism on Israel.
I am still not sure that the US media can be painted as 100% Jewish owned, as there are large media firms still run by old WASP money. Murdoch is apparently Jewish, but that goes way back. Here is a summary from the web on Murdoch's Jewish connection. It sounds reasonable:
Martillo fails to discuss the theory of the Jewified US Gentile, as Albert Lindemann coined the term in his book Esau's Tears, Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews. This is also a theme of Yuri Slezkine's Jewish Century, the theme of which is best described as "we are all Jews now". Many US Gentiles are Jewified via marriage to or deep friendship with ethnocentric Jews.
This aspect of US politics is overlooked in folks trying to "blame it all on the Jew". Americans support Jews and support Israel. We are Jewified. I believe Karl Marx said that in 100 years the US would be a Jewish country. He was correct.
How those Gentiles got Jewified is open to debate.Perhaps they became Judeophiles and Zionists by brainwashing. Well, so what? Most of our political views are due to propaganda of some sort. Any analysis of US Jewry, the Lobby, etc, that does not take into account all of the Gentile support for Israel is bound to fail.
US Jews have plenty of money, but it is mostly in certain parts of economy. They were run out of the banks long ago and the Holocaust finished off the rest of Jewish banking power. Banks are now run by international corporations out of Japan, Hong Kong, Europe and the US. The ones in the US are not noticeably Jewish-owned.
It is true that Jews are important in investment banking. They made serious gains in this area in 1910-1920 but the effort to take over the regular banks was resisted by Gentile ethnic warfare. Jews also tried to take over the stock market at that time but were rebuffed similarly.
All of this is documented extensively in Henry Ford's The International Jew, an excellent book that is often not really anti-Semitic in any way, and at any rate is essential reading for documentation of US Jewish ethnic warfare in the US from 1900-1920. It was during this period that the Jewish Hollywood and media dominances were created.
I do not believe that the US financial or high tech industries are run by Jews at all. US Jews are huge in retail department stores, especially clothing, and also in jewelry, furs and a few other things. They don't really dominate real estate at all.
I also disagree that a US Jewish or Zionist elite is set to take over a rather democratically diminished US. There will be some Jews in such a setup, mostly neoconservatives, but most will be White Gentiles like Bush, Rumsfeld, Rove and Cheney, with some Blacks like Condoleeza Rice and the Powells and some Latinos like Alberto Gonzales.
Increasingly, the US is becoming a caste society based on income alone, and members of any race may join these hard rightwingers in their elitist project. It's all about money, not race, religion or ethnicity.
This undemocratic, quasi-fascist project will be resisted by many, and I assure you that liberal US Jews will be leading the charge to oppose this nightmare. People see Jews leading contrary movements going head to head with each other and think it's all part of an exceptionally devious and convoluted Jewish plot.
The truth is so much more mundane: Jews simply lead movements, and are also disproportionately attracted to fanaticism and extremism in general, in part due to the nature of Judaism itself, as Kevin MacDonald points out.
In related news, Tom Lantos, longtime Congressman from San Mateo, is dead. A Hungarian Jew and a Holocaust survivor, he has been a longtime, very strong supporter of the Israeli government. He led the charge to invade Iraq and promised an Israeli legislator that the US would take out Saddam for the benefit of both countries in 2002.
He helped rally Congressional Democrats to go along with Bush's mad war. Lantos is a good example of some of the very liberal California Jews who represent us Californians. They are superb on most liberal issues and get high marks from most liberal organizations on their voting records.
But on Israel, they are often surprisingly hawkish. Barbara Boxer and Diane Feinstein are good examples, as is Brad Sherman. As a progressive, I would probably vote for them, as the Republican running against them would be just as pro-Israel, if not more, along with being wrong about all the domestic stuff. Politics is so complicated.
As'ad AbuKhalil of the Angry Arab blog has a great article up about George Habash of the PFLP in the Electronic Intifada, who we wrote about previously. The lead photo is really nice too; I would run it here but I'm unsure about rights issues. EI, run by Ali Abunimah, is a great publication with superb views on the conflict.
It's run by reasonable Palestinians, exemplified by Abunimah, and their supporters, and it's as far from Hamas and Islamic Jihad as it is from Zionism. Zionists, mostly Jews, have been running a vicious campaign against Abunimah for years calling him an anti-Semite (What else?) but there's nothing to it.
To what extent the views of EI represent those of the average Palestinian on the street is not known. My worry is that as this conflict festers idiots like Hamas and IJ and bigger idiots like Al Qaeda will gain increasing power in Palestine. They won't achieve their goals, and I would not want them to anyway, but a lot more people, mostly Palestinians, are going to die.
AbuKhalil is wrong about one thing in his piece - that the PFLP hardly exists anymore.
While dwarfed by Hamas and Fatah, it's still a large and powerful organization with at least 80,000 active supporters, plenty of money, a fully armed guerrilla force that carries out regular attacks, a busy propaganda faction with websites, a newspaper and magazines, and up to a dozen above-ground organizations for everything from youth to women to workers.
Islamic Jihad gets way more press, but they are not much bigger than the PFLP. As an example, the PFLP fired 7 missiles on February 5th and 2 rockets on February 6th, all from Gaza and aimed at Sderot and Ashkelon. I think shooting these rockets is idiotic, but it's kind of hard to understand how a nonexistent army can fire 7 rockets in 2 days. They also fought a battle with Israeli forces in Gaza on February 5th.
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
Updated February 13, 2008:
Joachim Martillo has posted a lengthy and excellent opus, Judonia Rising: The Israeli Lobby and American Society, on one of his websites, an encyclopedic analysis of the US Israeli Lobby and its effects on US society. Noam Chomsky offered a critique (see the first comment at the end of the post for details), and afterwards, Joachim rewrote several pages. I have also been asked to offer a critique.
This is a very important work that ought to be read in full by anyone interested in the subject. It deserves to be widely disseminated and commented on, dissected and analyzed.
First of all, I agree with much of what he has written so there is no need to comment on what I agree on. If I don't mention it in what follows, that probably means I agree.
I do disagree with certain things.
Obviously, as a Commie, I have serious issues with the whole Bolshevik Jew killers thing. It's hard to argue that people who reduced the death rate by 70% in Russia were the worst killers to ever set foot in Russia. I'm so tired of debating the Bolshevik Jew killer thing that I don't even want to get into it anymore.
Now, for the rest.
It is incorrect to say that Jewish values include early age of sexual initiation and serial polygamy. Kevin MacDonald notes that US Jews have sex at the latest age of any ethnic group. They also have some of the most stable marriages last time I checked.
It's difficult to lump Abigail Thornton, a rightwing Jewish Republican opposed to civil rights, in with a US Jewish agenda that relentlessly promotes civil rights. Martillo fails to note that the Jewish neocons are actually opposed to civil rights law in the US, either by promoting Supreme Court justices sworn to dismantle it or by cheering on Republicans who have been refusing to enforce civil rights laws for almost 30 years now.
It's very hard to say that Friedmanite freemarketeer neoliberalism is part of the US Jewish agenda, as most US Jewish organizations are agnostic on economics and if anything, promote more state intervention, regulation of business, socialist redistribution programs, socialized medicine and education, etc.
Friedmanism is part of the agenda of the neocons, but the neocon agenda in whole is embraced by only at most 20% of US Jews who vote Republican. This is where the equation of Jewish neoconservatives with US Jews gets dangerous and wrong. US Jews vote up to 80% Dem in recent years.
Neocons are best seen as a rightwing split-off of Republican Jews whose views in whole are rejected by the overwhelming majority of US Jews. However, on Israel, many liberal US Jews are becoming neocons in whole or in part, but the average US Jew is still pretty diverse on Israel. It is better to say that the large US Jewish organizations have gone over to neoconservatism on Israel.
I am still not sure that the US media can be painted as 100% Jewish owned, as there are large media firms still run by old WASP money. Murdoch is apparently Jewish, but that goes way back. Here is a summary from the web on Murdoch's Jewish connection. It sounds reasonable:
Rupert (actually Keith Rupert) Murdoch's father was Keith Murdoch (died 1952), his mother Elisabeth Joy (nee Greene) and yes her mother, Marie Grace de Lancey Forth was born from a Jewish mother.It's downright bizarre the way so many ethnocentric voraciously attack the notion that Murdoch is Jewish. You would think they want to claim him.
Rupert's paternal grandfather, Patrick John, was a reverend, the maternal grandmother was Marie Grace de Lancey Forth, who was born in Warnambool, Victoria (Australia), HER mother Caroline Jemima (nee Sherson) was born to a Jewish family, hence by "Jewish law", making Rupert Jewish.
Also for the record, it was not unheard of "way back then" for Protestants or Catholics to marry Jews, and I know this as my grandparents are prime example. My grandfather, born in Ireland in 1895 to a prominent protestant family, married a Jewish woman, making my father and all his siblings Jews.
The Jewish ancestry comes purely from the MATERNAL line and has squat to do with the paternal.
It should also be noted that many Jewish families settled in Australia post 1788.
Martillo fails to discuss the theory of the Jewified US Gentile, as Albert Lindemann coined the term in his book Esau's Tears, Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews. This is also a theme of Yuri Slezkine's Jewish Century, the theme of which is best described as "we are all Jews now". Many US Gentiles are Jewified via marriage to or deep friendship with ethnocentric Jews.
This aspect of US politics is overlooked in folks trying to "blame it all on the Jew". Americans support Jews and support Israel. We are Jewified. I believe Karl Marx said that in 100 years the US would be a Jewish country. He was correct.
How those Gentiles got Jewified is open to debate.Perhaps they became Judeophiles and Zionists by brainwashing. Well, so what? Most of our political views are due to propaganda of some sort. Any analysis of US Jewry, the Lobby, etc, that does not take into account all of the Gentile support for Israel is bound to fail.
US Jews have plenty of money, but it is mostly in certain parts of economy. They were run out of the banks long ago and the Holocaust finished off the rest of Jewish banking power. Banks are now run by international corporations out of Japan, Hong Kong, Europe and the US. The ones in the US are not noticeably Jewish-owned.
It is true that Jews are important in investment banking. They made serious gains in this area in 1910-1920 but the effort to take over the regular banks was resisted by Gentile ethnic warfare. Jews also tried to take over the stock market at that time but were rebuffed similarly.
All of this is documented extensively in Henry Ford's The International Jew, an excellent book that is often not really anti-Semitic in any way, and at any rate is essential reading for documentation of US Jewish ethnic warfare in the US from 1900-1920. It was during this period that the Jewish Hollywood and media dominances were created.
I do not believe that the US financial or high tech industries are run by Jews at all. US Jews are huge in retail department stores, especially clothing, and also in jewelry, furs and a few other things. They don't really dominate real estate at all.
I also disagree that a US Jewish or Zionist elite is set to take over a rather democratically diminished US. There will be some Jews in such a setup, mostly neoconservatives, but most will be White Gentiles like Bush, Rumsfeld, Rove and Cheney, with some Blacks like Condoleeza Rice and the Powells and some Latinos like Alberto Gonzales.
Increasingly, the US is becoming a caste society based on income alone, and members of any race may join these hard rightwingers in their elitist project. It's all about money, not race, religion or ethnicity.
This undemocratic, quasi-fascist project will be resisted by many, and I assure you that liberal US Jews will be leading the charge to oppose this nightmare. People see Jews leading contrary movements going head to head with each other and think it's all part of an exceptionally devious and convoluted Jewish plot.
The truth is so much more mundane: Jews simply lead movements, and are also disproportionately attracted to fanaticism and extremism in general, in part due to the nature of Judaism itself, as Kevin MacDonald points out.
In related news, Tom Lantos, longtime Congressman from San Mateo, is dead. A Hungarian Jew and a Holocaust survivor, he has been a longtime, very strong supporter of the Israeli government. He led the charge to invade Iraq and promised an Israeli legislator that the US would take out Saddam for the benefit of both countries in 2002.
He helped rally Congressional Democrats to go along with Bush's mad war. Lantos is a good example of some of the very liberal California Jews who represent us Californians. They are superb on most liberal issues and get high marks from most liberal organizations on their voting records.
But on Israel, they are often surprisingly hawkish. Barbara Boxer and Diane Feinstein are good examples, as is Brad Sherman. As a progressive, I would probably vote for them, as the Republican running against them would be just as pro-Israel, if not more, along with being wrong about all the domestic stuff. Politics is so complicated.
As'ad AbuKhalil of the Angry Arab blog has a great article up about George Habash of the PFLP in the Electronic Intifada, who we wrote about previously. The lead photo is really nice too; I would run it here but I'm unsure about rights issues. EI, run by Ali Abunimah, is a great publication with superb views on the conflict.
It's run by reasonable Palestinians, exemplified by Abunimah, and their supporters, and it's as far from Hamas and Islamic Jihad as it is from Zionism. Zionists, mostly Jews, have been running a vicious campaign against Abunimah for years calling him an anti-Semite (What else?) but there's nothing to it.
To what extent the views of EI represent those of the average Palestinian on the street is not known. My worry is that as this conflict festers idiots like Hamas and IJ and bigger idiots like Al Qaeda will gain increasing power in Palestine. They won't achieve their goals, and I would not want them to anyway, but a lot more people, mostly Palestinians, are going to die.
AbuKhalil is wrong about one thing in his piece - that the PFLP hardly exists anymore.
While dwarfed by Hamas and Fatah, it's still a large and powerful organization with at least 80,000 active supporters, plenty of money, a fully armed guerrilla force that carries out regular attacks, a busy propaganda faction with websites, a newspaper and magazines, and up to a dozen above-ground organizations for everything from youth to women to workers.
Islamic Jihad gets way more press, but they are not much bigger than the PFLP. As an example, the PFLP fired 7 missiles on February 5th and 2 rockets on February 6th, all from Gaza and aimed at Sderot and Ashkelon. I think shooting these rockets is idiotic, but it's kind of hard to understand how a nonexistent army can fire 7 rockets in 2 days. They also fought a battle with Israeli forces in Gaza on February 5th.
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
Sporadic Updates For a Bit
There has been no posting since June 29, 13 days ago, and posting may continue to be sporadic for a while now. I went on vacation to Yosemite National Park for a few days around the Fourth and then I have been recuperating.
My sinusitis is also still pretty bad from the Spring and I need to start irrigating my nose again. It's also blazing hot here and we only run the air conditioning 2 hours a day or so because it is so darned hot.
Anyway, just to give you some reading material to look over while I am not posting. Nell at A Lovely Promise, an interesting progressive blog I just ran across, has been doing some great work on the rape/murder of the 15-yr-old Iraqi girl in Mahmudiyah and the murder of her family to cover up the crime.
3 US soldiers have been charged with rape and murder in the case and another has been charged with dereliction of duty. Nell has been doing some great investigative and analytical reporting on the case, which is something we try to do here as well (What the heck, I do have a journalism degree).
Now, it's just fine that the vast majority of bloggers do little or no investigative reporting. At this point, even a progressive echo chamber sounds like a great idea. Let's all repeat each other's concepts and truths, and democratically (the blogosphere is nothing if not the ultimate in media democracy and punditry democracy) spread the word far and wide to masses who need to learn from us!
I'm also reading a lot of Steven Lendeman, a progressive Jewish blogger who is a fine writer and longtime activist. Lendeman's prose and research is so well-done that he is actually getting published in ZNet, one of my favorite publications. His knowledge is stunning, encyclopedic and sweeping and I love the way he "puts it all together". Like the journalistic equivalent of the epiphany we know from literature.
Steve's main theme is US imperialism, and unlike some authors (Chomsky and his acolytes at their worst) Lendeman's analysis of US imperialism is painstakingly researched and very well thought-out.
Let's say that it holds together and lights up the sky with his insight, whereas Chomsky and others overreach and try to explain far too many bad things to the US imperialist bogyman. I think he needs to work on that blog design a bit though!
If you can get your mind around it, try out Issues and Questions in the Historiography of Pre-State Zionism by Joachim Martillo, from a talk given by Martillo, a certifiable genius, to New Jersey Solidarity in October 2002, one of the most radical Palestinian solidarity organizations.
NJ Solidarity actually has a strong Leftist base, and openly supports the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). See my long post on the PFLP here for background on this interesting but very radical organization.
Regarding Martillo's piece, I do not know where to begin! It is definitely an intellectual challenge all right. For one thing, it is about 90 pages long, but it is well worth printing out. He offers a whole different take on Zionism than the standard treatment.
If you do some Internet research on Martillo, you find he is a bit of a kook, and politically he has been all over the place in the past 20 years. He has tendencies to alienate people due to his, well, fanaticism, general belligerence, and extremely opinionated nature.
Martillo is a Sephardic Jew with a deep resentment of Ashkenazi Jews that inflects much of his work. Most Gentiles don't know much about the Sephardic-Ashkenazi split amongst Jews, mostly because most US Jews (90%) are Ashkenazim.
He came from a privileged background amongst the East Coast super-elite (prep school) and then he went to Harvard as an undergrad, but apparently he dropped out. He has read more books on the subject of Zionism that the rest of us will in a lifetime, and he read many of them in their native languages!
10-15 years ago, Martillo was a belligerent neoconservative and open advocate for the recolonization by the superior West of the inferior failed states of the Third World.
Now he's gone full circle to a radical supporter of the anti-imperialist 3rd World movements. He has recently married an apparent Jewish convert to Islam, a woman who, according to the Internet, has gone off the deep end into hardline radical fundamentalist Islam.
This couple is causing titters in progressive circles in Cambridge, where he continues to be active in the Israeli divestment movement. However, after some discussions with her via email, it turns out, as far as I can tell, she is just an ordinary Muslim.
The bit about her being a fundamentalist Hamas supporter is apparently just the usual militant Jewish Zionist lies, slander and character assassination that anyone who takes these disturbed people on ends up facing.
I really don't give a damn if the guy is a fanatic. This work is fascinating (consider printing it out to read at your leisure) and is one of the most brilliant and wide-ranging attacks on Zionism I have ever read. It's not even available on the Net anymore, but I managed to snag a cached version that should be up for a while.
I spent much of my vacation dragging myself through a truly fantastic essay that has not received the publicity it should. What is Conservatism and What Is Wrong With It?, from August 2004, by Philip Agre, an Associate Professor in Information Studies (Whatever that is!) at UCLA in Los Angeles, California.
After reading this essay and thinking deeply about it, all I can say is, Wow! This essay needs to be shouted from the rooftops and run off in the 1000's of copies and distributed free all across America.
Hopefully, we will be discussing this seminal essay in future posts, but for now, let us just look a few earthshaking lines at the beginning:
In Agre's brilliant formulation, we can formulate a mass movement that cleaves into two factions, supporters of aristocratic rule (conservatives) and supporters of democratic rule (liberals or the rest of us).
In doing so, there is deep liberation and a lot of anxiety. Hopefully, in our pro-democratic rule faction we can include social conservatives of all stripes, the vast small business sector (which Agre perceptively calls "the democratization of entrepreneurship), and even the progressive Super-Rich like George Soros.
Like the odd coalitions of gun owners, the Christian Coalition, internet corporations and progressives uniting to fight to retain network neutrality and prevent the censorship of the Internet, we too can make an eclectic coalition including those who would in many cases not be on our side.
In fighting the many-headed hydra of modern-day industrial strength public relations-driven conservatism, it is reasonable to attack one head of the beast at a time.
Let's throw down the gauntlet to the entire nation and force folks to take sides: Who do you want to rule this nation? A tiny aristocracy on top of a rigid, stratified, hierarchical class-based system where each class defers to the one above it? You call that American? Sounds like Old Europe to me? Or, do you support the American Way, democratic rule by the people themselves?
Hopefully, I will have much more to say about this profound work in the future.
I also dipped into a fascinating essay by Dr. Kaveh Farrokh, an Iranian academic, Pan-Arabism's Legacy of Confrontation With Iran. Hopefully, I will discuss this excellent but obscure work - which to be honest, needs to be much more fleshed out and deeply researched - more later on. But as a start, it is very nice.
This subject seems obscure to most folks nowadays.
But with Sunnis and Shias slaughtering each other right and left, the US and Israel threatening to attack Iran over a nuclear program it is fully within its rights to have, with the specters of Al Qaeda, Salafism, Takfirism, the Taliban, and Zarqawi's ghost haunting our world, this essay helps to light up this murky region by explaining the roots of Sunni Arab, and Sunni Muslim, rage towards Shia Arabs and Shia Muslims.
It also helps explain such anomalous situations as Saddam's persecution of the Shia, the Iran-Iraq War, the fact that the Gulf Arab states are working with the US and Israel and promote military attack on Iran. This piece is mandatory for understanding the current Hellish chaos in Iran.
Those wanting to dip further into the arcana of intra-Islamic debate may wish to check out this difficult piece, The Poverty of Fanaticism, by Abdal Hakim-Murad. It's probable not that accessible unless you have some knowledge of Islam. The very well-written and beautiful piece is coming from a Sufi point of view and the author is not a liberal at all (he supports an Islamic state).
However, he brilliantly destroys the incoherent, insipid and ultimately un-Islamic philosophy of the Muslim Takfiri and Salafist terrorist pricks who are running around blowing up so much stuff nowadays.
Among other things, he shows how Sufism, one of the finest and most beautiful and worthwhile aspects of the problematic Muslim religion, has been a part of Islam from the very start, smashing the ignorant anti-Sufi nonsense of the Salafists and Wahhabis with a few deft strokes of the pen. It isn't necessarily a choice between Irshan Manji (whom many Muslims find too liberal) and Al Qaeda.
There is also the way of the purification of the heart, that being Sufism. On this page there are some other articles by Murshad, including Recapturing Islam From the Terrorists and Bin Laden's Violence is a Heresy Against Islam. Please note that this man is a conservative Muslim and a brilliant Muslim scholar with a vast knowledge of Muslim scholarship and history. I may discuss these 2 articles a bit more in later posts.
For the infectious pustule called variously Salafism, Wahhabism or Takfirism, this angry boil flaring in Dar al Islam, there is a lance for this pus-filled blight - a lance called Sufism. Does it stand a chance against the baying hounds and serial killers of the modern-day Islamic Kharajites? I have doubts, but it's nice to know that at least some Muslims are taking a strong stand alongside us in our fight against these Muslim barbarians.
My sinusitis is also still pretty bad from the Spring and I need to start irrigating my nose again. It's also blazing hot here and we only run the air conditioning 2 hours a day or so because it is so darned hot.
Anyway, just to give you some reading material to look over while I am not posting. Nell at A Lovely Promise, an interesting progressive blog I just ran across, has been doing some great work on the rape/murder of the 15-yr-old Iraqi girl in Mahmudiyah and the murder of her family to cover up the crime.
3 US soldiers have been charged with rape and murder in the case and another has been charged with dereliction of duty. Nell has been doing some great investigative and analytical reporting on the case, which is something we try to do here as well (What the heck, I do have a journalism degree).
Now, it's just fine that the vast majority of bloggers do little or no investigative reporting. At this point, even a progressive echo chamber sounds like a great idea. Let's all repeat each other's concepts and truths, and democratically (the blogosphere is nothing if not the ultimate in media democracy and punditry democracy) spread the word far and wide to masses who need to learn from us!
I'm also reading a lot of Steven Lendeman, a progressive Jewish blogger who is a fine writer and longtime activist. Lendeman's prose and research is so well-done that he is actually getting published in ZNet, one of my favorite publications. His knowledge is stunning, encyclopedic and sweeping and I love the way he "puts it all together". Like the journalistic equivalent of the epiphany we know from literature.
Steve's main theme is US imperialism, and unlike some authors (Chomsky and his acolytes at their worst) Lendeman's analysis of US imperialism is painstakingly researched and very well thought-out.
Let's say that it holds together and lights up the sky with his insight, whereas Chomsky and others overreach and try to explain far too many bad things to the US imperialist bogyman. I think he needs to work on that blog design a bit though!
If you can get your mind around it, try out Issues and Questions in the Historiography of Pre-State Zionism by Joachim Martillo, from a talk given by Martillo, a certifiable genius, to New Jersey Solidarity in October 2002, one of the most radical Palestinian solidarity organizations.
NJ Solidarity actually has a strong Leftist base, and openly supports the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). See my long post on the PFLP here for background on this interesting but very radical organization.
Regarding Martillo's piece, I do not know where to begin! It is definitely an intellectual challenge all right. For one thing, it is about 90 pages long, but it is well worth printing out. He offers a whole different take on Zionism than the standard treatment.
If you do some Internet research on Martillo, you find he is a bit of a kook, and politically he has been all over the place in the past 20 years. He has tendencies to alienate people due to his, well, fanaticism, general belligerence, and extremely opinionated nature.
Martillo is a Sephardic Jew with a deep resentment of Ashkenazi Jews that inflects much of his work. Most Gentiles don't know much about the Sephardic-Ashkenazi split amongst Jews, mostly because most US Jews (90%) are Ashkenazim.
He came from a privileged background amongst the East Coast super-elite (prep school) and then he went to Harvard as an undergrad, but apparently he dropped out. He has read more books on the subject of Zionism that the rest of us will in a lifetime, and he read many of them in their native languages!
10-15 years ago, Martillo was a belligerent neoconservative and open advocate for the recolonization by the superior West of the inferior failed states of the Third World.
Now he's gone full circle to a radical supporter of the anti-imperialist 3rd World movements. He has recently married an apparent Jewish convert to Islam, a woman who, according to the Internet, has gone off the deep end into hardline radical fundamentalist Islam.
This couple is causing titters in progressive circles in Cambridge, where he continues to be active in the Israeli divestment movement. However, after some discussions with her via email, it turns out, as far as I can tell, she is just an ordinary Muslim.
The bit about her being a fundamentalist Hamas supporter is apparently just the usual militant Jewish Zionist lies, slander and character assassination that anyone who takes these disturbed people on ends up facing.
I really don't give a damn if the guy is a fanatic. This work is fascinating (consider printing it out to read at your leisure) and is one of the most brilliant and wide-ranging attacks on Zionism I have ever read. It's not even available on the Net anymore, but I managed to snag a cached version that should be up for a while.
I spent much of my vacation dragging myself through a truly fantastic essay that has not received the publicity it should. What is Conservatism and What Is Wrong With It?, from August 2004, by Philip Agre, an Associate Professor in Information Studies (Whatever that is!) at UCLA in Los Angeles, California.
After reading this essay and thinking deeply about it, all I can say is, Wow! This essay needs to be shouted from the rooftops and run off in the 1000's of copies and distributed free all across America.
Hopefully, we will be discussing this seminal essay in future posts, but for now, let us just look a few earthshaking lines at the beginning:
Q: What is conservatism?This article completely, with deft and class and dignity, transcends the name-calling rage that so much of the Left Blogosphere degenerates into when confronting the conservatism, pseudo-fascism and outright fascism of George Bush and his supporters.
A: Conservatism is the domination of society by an aristocracy.
Q: What is wrong with conservatism?
A: Conservatism is incompatible with democracy, prosperity, and civilization in general. It is a destructive system of inequality and prejudice that is founded on deception and has no place in the modern world.
In Agre's brilliant formulation, we can formulate a mass movement that cleaves into two factions, supporters of aristocratic rule (conservatives) and supporters of democratic rule (liberals or the rest of us).
In doing so, there is deep liberation and a lot of anxiety. Hopefully, in our pro-democratic rule faction we can include social conservatives of all stripes, the vast small business sector (which Agre perceptively calls "the democratization of entrepreneurship), and even the progressive Super-Rich like George Soros.
Like the odd coalitions of gun owners, the Christian Coalition, internet corporations and progressives uniting to fight to retain network neutrality and prevent the censorship of the Internet, we too can make an eclectic coalition including those who would in many cases not be on our side.
In fighting the many-headed hydra of modern-day industrial strength public relations-driven conservatism, it is reasonable to attack one head of the beast at a time.
Let's throw down the gauntlet to the entire nation and force folks to take sides: Who do you want to rule this nation? A tiny aristocracy on top of a rigid, stratified, hierarchical class-based system where each class defers to the one above it? You call that American? Sounds like Old Europe to me? Or, do you support the American Way, democratic rule by the people themselves?
Hopefully, I will have much more to say about this profound work in the future.
I also dipped into a fascinating essay by Dr. Kaveh Farrokh, an Iranian academic, Pan-Arabism's Legacy of Confrontation With Iran. Hopefully, I will discuss this excellent but obscure work - which to be honest, needs to be much more fleshed out and deeply researched - more later on. But as a start, it is very nice.
This subject seems obscure to most folks nowadays.
But with Sunnis and Shias slaughtering each other right and left, the US and Israel threatening to attack Iran over a nuclear program it is fully within its rights to have, with the specters of Al Qaeda, Salafism, Takfirism, the Taliban, and Zarqawi's ghost haunting our world, this essay helps to light up this murky region by explaining the roots of Sunni Arab, and Sunni Muslim, rage towards Shia Arabs and Shia Muslims.
It also helps explain such anomalous situations as Saddam's persecution of the Shia, the Iran-Iraq War, the fact that the Gulf Arab states are working with the US and Israel and promote military attack on Iran. This piece is mandatory for understanding the current Hellish chaos in Iran.
Those wanting to dip further into the arcana of intra-Islamic debate may wish to check out this difficult piece, The Poverty of Fanaticism, by Abdal Hakim-Murad. It's probable not that accessible unless you have some knowledge of Islam. The very well-written and beautiful piece is coming from a Sufi point of view and the author is not a liberal at all (he supports an Islamic state).
However, he brilliantly destroys the incoherent, insipid and ultimately un-Islamic philosophy of the Muslim Takfiri and Salafist terrorist pricks who are running around blowing up so much stuff nowadays.
Among other things, he shows how Sufism, one of the finest and most beautiful and worthwhile aspects of the problematic Muslim religion, has been a part of Islam from the very start, smashing the ignorant anti-Sufi nonsense of the Salafists and Wahhabis with a few deft strokes of the pen. It isn't necessarily a choice between Irshan Manji (whom many Muslims find too liberal) and Al Qaeda.
There is also the way of the purification of the heart, that being Sufism. On this page there are some other articles by Murshad, including Recapturing Islam From the Terrorists and Bin Laden's Violence is a Heresy Against Islam. Please note that this man is a conservative Muslim and a brilliant Muslim scholar with a vast knowledge of Muslim scholarship and history. I may discuss these 2 articles a bit more in later posts.
For the infectious pustule called variously Salafism, Wahhabism or Takfirism, this angry boil flaring in Dar al Islam, there is a lance for this pus-filled blight - a lance called Sufism. Does it stand a chance against the baying hounds and serial killers of the modern-day Islamic Kharajites? I have doubts, but it's nice to know that at least some Muslims are taking a strong stand alongside us in our fight against these Muslim barbarians.
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