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.

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Evolution of a Pakistani Patriot

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 20, 2008:

There are a lot of problems on this blog involving confusion between nationalism and patriotism. Further, there is confusion over this blog's stated opposition to nationalism. Nationalism, as a progressive movement in the context of self-determination, is potentially a good thing. There is a chauvinist, jingoist, racist type of nationalism that heads towards what we can call the fascist continuum.

Fascism is not something that either exists or does not exist. It, like so many other things in life, is a continuum. Fascism is just an extreme form of rightwing nationalism, usually tinged with lots of racism or at least xenophobia and repression of minorities. Fascism smashes all minorities down and demands that they assimilate to the singular ethnic nation-state.

Communism, on the other hand, is internationalist. At the same time, Communists and progressives in general have acknowledged the right to self-determination of ethnic groups. This basic right is held in serious ill-repute in our world today - a world that worships the state. Let us be clear: the progressive and even Communist mindset allows for self-determination of legitimate nations, within reasons.

While asking for some basic assimilation, this trend offers education, publishing, and even administration in the native language. At they time they undertook their national autonomy project, was there any nation on Earth that did more to advance the cause of ethnic autonomy than the early USSR? I think not.

Although much of this noble project was tragically reversed by Stalin in a wave or paranoia in the 1930's, the language policy of the Bolsheviks set an example for the world that is today mirrored as a progressive litmus test for linguistic rights.

Linguists fanned out all over the land to create alphabets, often the first alphabets ever designed, for obscure and widely-spoken minority languages all over the USSR. The principle of education in the Mother Tongue, a scientifically proven principle to this day, was upheld. The results were often haphazard, but the effort was made.

At the same time, the right to succession was granted to all nationally recognized minorities. None exercised it until Gorbachev, but even then, Gorbachev allowed 15 republics to secede from the USSR. This was a model for civilized behavior that has not been matched anywhere.

Let us say for the moment that granting the right of succession to legitimate nations within a state is one of the ultimate expressions of civilized behavior in our time. Tellingly, only Euro-White nations are even considering allowing the breakup of the state. Czechoslovakia split amicably after 1989, and the UK and Canada have granted the right to secede to established nations.

By this metric, let us say that any nation that does not allow secession of legitimate nations is uncivilized. It is interesting that by this metric, the only civilized nations today are the former USSR, parts of Europe and Canada. No other nation anywhere on Earth has allowed the right to secession, no matter how rich or poor they are.

Successful secessionists have won only battles drenched in blood. At the same time, the world has upheld a statist fetish in which the fake right of states to territorial integrity (any student of history must fall down laughing at this one) trumps the ultimate human right of legitimate nations to self-determination.

In this context, let us note that Communists and the Left tend to support self-determination or at least national rights in the state, while all fascists have tried to aggressively force all minorities to assimilate, often in the context of massive crimes and death.

Once again we see an important distinction between fascism and Communism, two philosophies that are increasingly married in ignorant popular discourse.

There is good nationalism and there is bad nationalism. Bad nationalism I will call the nationalism of the Right and good nationalism I will call the nationalism of the Left.

Rightwing nationalism fetishes "preservation of our rights and customs". Nothing wrong with that, but these nationalists usually want to go backwards and preserve or reinstate the most regressive, reactionary, backwards and stupid aspects of culture. Rightwing nationalism, in a word, opposes all progressive change.

The failures of the modern state are glossed over and excused as inevitable. That Indian capitalism kills 4 million of its own citizens every year by not adapting a Chinese model, that 200 million Indians live on the streets, that 14 million starve every year, mostly in the capitalist states of South Asia, is all excused away. All failures of the model will be cured with time. The backwardsness of society will gradually wither away with time.

A reflexive opposition to the West upholds the most backwards, cruel and Medieval aspects of the culture on the basis that if the West hates them, then they are wonderful. Rightwing nationalism is chauvinist and jingoist. Colonialism is hated not only as a usurpation of rights, but as an outside force that tried to force progressive change on a nightmarishly backwards system.

In this context, let us introduce a species called progressive Pakistani nationalism. It tends to be secular and relatively free from jingoism and chauvinism. It opposes most, if not all of the backwards, stupid and evil aspects of Pakistani religion and culture.

At the same time, it upholds the existence of its state and history in the face of a cruel menace called India that denies Pakistan the very essential right of its existence, culture and history. In its self-affirmation in the face of Indian threats, it is de facto progressive.

The post below was written by a young Pakistani friend of mine. I think he is a fairly secular fellow and he may have even left Islam for all I know. At best, he is a cultural Muslim. He opposes everything backwards, cruel, murderous and stupid about his land.

The patriotic and progressive Pakistani nationalism of him and his friends, which can be found at their website, Pakhub, stands in stark contrast to the reactionary and chauvinist nationalism of the Hindutvas.

Despite the horrible problems of Pakistan, progressive Pakistani nationalists should be supported by progressives the world over. These people, like the ill-fated Communists of Afghanistan in the late 1970's, are the finest of their generation.

Evolution of a Pakistani Patriot

The problem is while in the West people are aware of Islamist terrorism, they are unaware of Hindutva terrorism. Most of the funds these Hindutva fascist groups come from from Hindu expatriots in the West and many of the founders of these groups are citizens of these countries.

For instance, the founder of Hindu Unity was an Indian-American. This group has a website and a hit list in which president Musharraf is also in.

When my friend Waq first started Pakhub and invited me and others to it, a Hindutva Wikipedian posted a request on Hindu Unity forums to spam the hell out of our site. My friend even had the screen shot of that post saved.

There is something that you should know about Hinduism that many people don't know. The concept of "Hinduism" being a religion was introduced by the British. Previously, this notion did not exist. The name comes from hind which came about form the word Sindhu (the Sindh province of Pakistan)

We have rare maps drawn by the Europeans on our site showing India known as hind while Pakistan was known as Sindh.

Anyway, the Indian subcontinent was filled with various cults throughout history, and never was there a concept of there being a common religion, much like pre-contact Africa and South America filled with various indigenous cults. I even have found a quote by Gandhi admitting that the Vedic people slaughtered cows, ate meat and buried their dead.

Declaring all the cults of South Asia as one "Hinduism" is the same as declaring the various cults in South America & Africa as one. This is the reason why "Hinduism" has so many "sects" and Gods. I learned this as recently as a month back.

The problem is Hindutvas have buried so much of actual history, while at the same time spending years creating their own pseudo-history and feeding western historians with false propaganda.

You'll notice many "ancient India" maps drawn by Indian "historians" are hand made and relatively new, while others are computer- generated graphic maps.

On our site we have copies of extremely rare maps drawn by European empires before the British prior to when the British declared the entire continent "India". Even the label "India" varied place to place on these maps.

Hindutvas also propagate the notion that Islam was "spread by the sword" in South Asia. That holds a lot of truth in it; there was a lot of conquest and killing done by the Muslims, but at the same time, it is not entirely true. For one thing, many lower-caste Hindus converted to Islam.

I became a Pakistani patriot when I noticed that Indians always associate everything about Pakistan to India. I was openly insulted by Indians only weeks after moving to Canada just because Pakistan chose not to join India.

I was also saddened that all countries could parade their culture as "Finnish dance" and "Finnish food" or "Chinese dance" and "Chinese food" but whenever it came to Pakistan it always had to be "Pakistani-Indian dance" or "Pakistani-Indian food".

When asked in front of an Indian where I'm from, the Indian would always have to butt in: "Same thing - Pakistani, Indian".

Even while living in the Middle East when Arabs would laugh at the Indian accent (particularly South Indian, Dravidian) they would always laugh at me cause they thought it's how Pakistanis talk. They would ask me about funny Indian songs they saw on TV, but no matter how I hard I tried to explain to them that it has nothing to do with me, I could not convince them.

A Sri Lankan Hindutva in my gym class in high school was spreading the same bullshit in the class that India is so "great" and "diverse" and is a powerful country like America which builds it's own weapons, whereas Pakistan buys from China, and Pakistan is always bothering India, and India is the friendly one, and so on an so fourth. I couldn't believe the ignorance of such an educated person.

An Indian friend asked me a stupid question "Why did Pakistan make nuclear weapons; it is copying India?" "Copycats?" I mean it's like him pulling a sword out on me and me pulling out my own sword and him accusing me of 'imitating' him.

When I lived in Pakistan I couldn't understand why people had an enmity towards India or Hindus. But after seeing the true face of these liars here in Canada, it all started to make sense to me.

I even found an Indian website with the Indian and Azerbaijani flag; a site claiming that India and Azerbaijan had the "same history" and "same identity" because a few ancient Hindu temples were found in Azerbaijan. I finally came closer to the realization that all this cultural imperialism by Indians is deliberate.

In Pakistani areas of Toronto where there are amazing restaurants with Pakistani flags on them. Indians move into the area and the first thing they do is place their banners right next to the Pakistani flags and imitate Pakistani cuisines, calling their restaurants "South Asian" cuisine.

Also, many things that constitute "ancient India" are really stolen Pakistani history, while everything about Pakistanis is portrayed negatively by the Indian propaganda machine. I finally decided I'd had enough. Every country on Earth is credited for it's contributions to humanity and is given the right to be proud of it's culture. All but Pakistan, a "terrorist country", while India is the "great", "shinning", "secular democracy".

I mean these people hate us and they are using our accomplishments. Our works. Our great history. Even the Jews don't try to steal Egypt's history, and Egypt is to this day given credit for it's works.

After I decided I'd had enough, I went on a quest to find other patriotic Pakistanis who were willing to work to reverse all the things Indians had twisted about us. I found Waq, Siddiqui and Szhaider on Wikipedia. Mr. Siddiqui was amongst the best contributors on Wikipedia; he'd gotten so many awards, but he got blocked so many times for edit warring with the Jews and the Hindutvas.

He was the most defiant of us all against the Hindutvas and the Zionists. But after all 4 of us got banned after the phony Wikipedia Arbcom case in which many Jews ganged up with the Hindutvas against us, he'd decided he's had enough and left for good.

Waq was on the same quest as me and he started PakHub forums which was dedicated to our cause. After we got banned, we found many other patriotic Pakistanis on Youtube such as Omer that we brought to our forums.

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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:

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 …

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.

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 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.

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.

Lamis Andoni, to whom we have already referred, wrote:

‘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.

‘Unity, unity, unity — that was his only message,’ said Al Taher.

Andoni notes of the relationship between George Habash and Yasser Arafat:

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.

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.

Of the final period of Habash’s life, Andoni notes:

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.

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.

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.”

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 ...

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.

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:

• 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

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.

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.

Imad Mughniyeh is Dead

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. This post has just been accused, as usual, of racism, in this case anti-Semitism. See here for my position statement on racism and anti-Semitism.

One of the only known photos of the super-elusive and ultra-mysterious Imad Mughniyeh, Hezbollah mastermind. He was so slippery he was dubbed Hezbollah's Carlos, after the famous terrorist Carlos from the 1970's. This is a great picture of him, suspicious, haunted, looking over his shoulder, as a man on the run should. And he was a man on the run for most of his life.


A more recent photo of Mughniyeh in military fatigues, against a camouflage background, issued by Iran after his death. Between the earlier photo and the later, it looks like he hasn't missed a meal. Some are also saying that the two plastic surgery operations did not alter his appearance much, but I am not at capable of judging that.

I can't stress the importance of this news.

Imad Mughniyeh, Supreme Commander of Hezbollah for the past 25 years, has been killed in a car bomb in Damascus last night, February 12, at 10:45 PM. He was on the CIA's Most Wanted List with a $25 million bounty on his head.

He was the only person killed when a silver Mitsubishi Pajero vehicle (apparently Mughniyeh's car) exploded in the upscale Kafar Soussa District in the vicinity of a Iranian school that teaches religion to Iranian pupils. Several other cars were damaged and windows of surrounding buildings were blown out. Residents gathered in their pajamas to look at the scene. A single body lay in the street, covered by a white sheet.

Kafar Soussa has many apartment buildings constructed in recent years, along with a large shopping center and the main offices of the formidable Syrian Intelligence Services.

Mughniyeh was wanted for a number of attacks during the US invasion of Lebanon in 1982, said to be to keep the peace, but actually ending up as usual, supporting the Israelis. Mughniyeh orchestrated the bombing of the US Marine Barracks and French Headquarters in Beirut in 1982 that killed 227 Marines and 58 French troops.

He also supervised the bombing of the US Embassy in Beirut in 1983 that killed 63 and wiped out the entire top tier of US CIA Middle East agents. He also pulled off the bombing of the Israeli command center in Tyre that killed scores of Israeli troops. He was involved in the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 and the execution of US Navy diver Robert Dean Stethem in 1985.

He was involved in the kidnappings of many Americans in Beirut during the 1980's, including Terry Anderson and CIA officer and US Army Colonel William Buckley, who Hezbollah executed. In 1988, the top US CIA agent in Lebanon, Colonel William Higgins, was kidnapped by Hezbollah and tortured to death.

He was also involved in the truck bomb attack on the US military residence facilities at the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, targeting US servicemen who were guarding Saudi oil fields. 19 Americans were killed in that blast and 200 more were wounded.

There are suggestions that he was involved along with Hezbollah and/or Iran in the dual bombings in Buenos Aires, one at the Israeli Embassy 1992 that killed 29 people, and another at the Jewish Cultural Center in 1994 that killed 95 people. Three Israeli soldiers, Benny Avraham, Adi Avitan and Omar Souad were captured along the Lebanon border in 1999, taken POW, and possibly later executed.

The border incident that set off the 2006 Lebanon War led to the capture of two more Israeli POW's, Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser. Mughniyeh was believed to be behind both of these abductions of Israeli soldiers.

Debka has long claimed that Mughniyeh was on very close terms with both bin Laden and Al Qaeda and the Iranian leadership. This seems bizarre. Al Qaeda's project is nothing less than Hitlerian extermination of every Shia Muslim on Earth.

Mughniyeh has been described as Hezbollah's Head of External Operations and it is believed that he stays in contact with cells that Hezbollah has all over the world. He is also described as a senior Hezbollah intelligence official, head of the group's security wing and the founder of the group. In the event of a US or Israeli attack on Iran, Mughniyeh would have been relied upon to be in charge of any response.

Angry Arab feels that Mughniyeh's role and feat were largely exaggerated, but I am not so sure about that; he also feels that Robert Fisk could not possibly have interviewed the actual Imad Mughniyeh in Lebanon in 1991, but I think he did.

The interview is worth reading: Fisk in yet another superb, incisive piece. When it comes to Middle East, few are better than Robert Fisk. I guess that is why International Zionism is on a crusade to crucify him.

Mughniyeh was Lebanese, born in Tyre in South Lebanon, not Palestinian as many people are saying. He joined Arafat's Force 17 elite bodyguard unit in Lebanon at a young age. He joined Amal, and then went to Iran for training, where he excelled. He then conducted daring behind enemy lines operations in the Iran-Iraq War.

Most of the operations in Lebanon that he is most famous for were actually conducted by a group called Islamic Jihad. This group later was folded into Hezbollah, which was not formed at any rate until 1988 anyway. Mughniyeh personally executed Stethem during the hijacking in 1985. In 1990, he had plastic surgery done in Iran to change his facial features.

Then he went back to Beirut, where he lived underground using a variety of fake passports. At some point, his cover got blown and he returned to Iran again for a second plastic surgery operation that completely changed his appearance. He was said to have been in Basra in early 2006 helping Mahdi Army fighters go to Iran for military training.

He then returned to Lebanon, where he took part in the Lebanon War. Lately, he was still living in Beirut, but traveling to the Damascus neighborhood where he was killed for meetings on a regular basis.

A top Israeli military official said, "He's the brains behind Hezbollah's military wing." Hezbollah's casualties in the 2006 War are not known. Israel claims that 1/3 of its fighters were killed, but that seems excessive. It seems clear that Hezbollah has now completely restocked its missile supplies and has tripled them from 15,000 in the 2006 War to 45,000 now. Further, it now has missiles that can reach Tel Aviv.

In recent days, Hezbollah teams disguised as reporters were said to be photographing the area on the Israel-Lebanon border.

Mughniyeh definitely committed some acts of terrorism - notably the bombing of the Jewish Cultural Center in Buenos Aires - but most of his so-called crimes were simply acts of war, legitimate acts of war I might add.

Guerrilla armies lack spy satellites, $500 billion/year defense budgets, smart bombs, cruise missiles, F-16's and all of the other expensive military hardware that enables advanced states to carry out precision states during war. Guerrilla groups have to make do with what they have. I do consider embassies, especially those swarming with espionage agents, to be legitimate targets for guerrillas in wartime.

Surely spies may be executed, but I don't think enemy troops should be. None of the attacks on US, French or Israeli bases in Lebanon were terrorist attacks. The killings of the three Israelis and the US servicemen were war crimes, but the US and Israel have certainly executed plenty of POW's and the Israelis continue to do so. The attack that set off the Lebanon War was hardly an act of terrorism.

Hence, Mughniyeh's mantle as the king of terrorism is largely nonsense. Most of his acts were simply very well planned and executed attacks on the enemy in wartime, and within what I consider to be the rules of war.

Mughniyeh was one of the most underground people on Earth and no one seemed to know where he was most of the time, and Hezbollah was not talking. He was probably one of the world's most highly protected and most secretive guerrilla fighters. Whoever killed him by penetrating his multiple circles of Syrian and Iranian intelligence officers and bodyguards surely pulled off a coup de etat.

All fingers are pointing to the Israeli Mossad, which is expert at these kind of attacks. However, the Israeli government is denying any role in killing Mughniyeh, for what it is worth. Would not Israel either admit it or refuse to comment? I originally felt that Israel did not carry out this attack, but on second thought, there does seem to be evidence pointing to their involvement.

For one thing, the MO of the operation matches closely the MO of the Mossad assassination of top Hamas operative Izz El-Deen Sheikh Khalil. In fact, a book written as fiction by a former Mossad agent, though set in the Shia suburbs of South Beirut, appears to describe the MO used in the killing of Mughniyeh closely.

If the book had been translated into Arabic and Mughniyeh had read it, perhaps he could have avoided this. Khalil was a founding member of Hamas and a senior member of the Hamas military wing. Actually, there are probably two Hamases. One is the Hamas that runs the Gaza government. The other Hamas is based out of Syria and could be called Hamas-Khaled Meshal.

This could be seen as an arm of Hamas run out of Syria, and probably a more militant one at that. Sheikh Khalil was close to Meshal. However, note that Israel "neither confirmed nor denied" that killing of Khalil. Has there ever been a case of an Israeli assassination that they did not take credit for, indeed that they even said explicitly that they did not do?

Also note that retired CIA officers are saying that Israel did it. Other theories suggest that either supporters of the pro-government faction in Lebanon, at odds with Hezbollah and Syria, or Iran themselves, killed Mughniyeh.

The Syria and Iran theories hinge on those countries giving up Mughniyeh to the US or Israel in order to get the heat off of them and deliver a wanted militant that had a $5 million US price tag on his head in return for an unspecified US quid pro quo.

This theory is called into question because Bush placed new sanctions on Syria the day after the bombing. If this was a quid pro quo to get the US to back off Syria, that would not have happened. Mughniyeh was also wanted by some of the Lebanese Christian factions and the Saudi, Lebanese, Jordanian, Iraqi and Kuwaiti governments.

Adding weight to the theory that Israel did it are reports from Palestinians in Fatah who have regular contact with Israeli intelligence. The Fatah sources indicate that Israeli intel is saying that they have settled their account with Mughniyeh. Further analysis of Israel's denial shows that it may not even be a denial at all - Israel rejects terrorist groups blaming Israel for the killing, but does not deny that Israel committed the act.

If Israel indeed killed Mughniyeh, which seems likely, that looks very bad for Syria. It means that Mossad has been able to penetrate into the heart of Hezbollah, and it means that the Mossad can operate apparently with impunity deep in the most secure parts of Damascus. Their next target is surely Nasrallah himself. It also implies that Israel has penetrated Syrian intelligence itself, a tough nut to crack.

Hezbollah will now probably undergo purges looking for the Israeli agents in Hezbollah. People will be arrested and executed.

Mughniyeh is said to have replaced Hassan Nasrallah as head of the Hezbollah after the 2006 war and he was rumored to have enemies in Lebanon, maybe even inside Hezbollah. Hezbollah TV is reporting his death and blaming Israel.

Nasrallah will speak at his funeral in Beirut, which will be very heavily guarded. This does not look good for Damascus. They were supposed to protect this guy, who is after all one of their main assets, but they failed.

His death is huge news in the roiling stew pot called the Middle East, and there will surely be counter-responses by Hezbollah, probably against Israel. Nasrallah is already thundering threats in the direction of Israel. The wild conspiracy stories are already spreading like vines. This is the Middle East, where intrigues are as normal as sand and hummus and anything that can happen, probably does happen.

We have not see the end of this.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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Update to Races of Man Post

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 September 15. Note: This post has just been accused, as usual, of racism. See here for my position statement on racism.

My earlier piece, The Major and Minor Races of Mankind, has been given a major update. The previous incarnation was:

3 Macro Races

Caucasian (Caucasoid)
Asian (Mongoloid)
African (Negroid)

I left the three macro races intact. I have debated whether or not to include new macro races but I haven't been able to come up with anything. The main problem is that all of the potential splits - Kalash, Pacific Islander, Papuan, Amerindian and Aborigine are all part of the macro races. The Kalash are part of the Caucasian race and the rest are all indisputably Asians (yes, even Aborigines).

Previous version:

6 Major Races

Northeast Asian
Southeast Asian
Papuan
Aborigine
Caucasian
African

Revised version:

9 Major Races

Northeast Asian
Southeast Asian
Papuan
Aborigine
Caucasian
African
Kalash
Pacific Islander
Amerindian

The result looks something like this:

African Macro Race

General African Major Race

15 minor African races


Caucasian Macro Race

General Caucasian Major Race
Kalash Major Race

19 minor Caucasian races


Asian Macro Race

Northeast Asian Major Race
Southeast Asian Major Race
Amerindian Major Race
Papuan Major Race
Aborigine Major Race
Oceanian Major Race

53 minor Asian races

The last three above, Kalash, Oceanian and Amerindian, were added, giving me a 9-race theory in addition to the standard 3-race theory. Genetically, the Kalash are extremely bizarre. On one chart, they form a separate major race with Caucasians proper, East Asians, Amerindians, Melanesians/Papuans and Africans (chart here).

They are probably some sort of ancient Caucasian race - in fact, they may be some of the most ancient Caucasians of them all.

As you can see, very European looking phenotypes are not rare at all in the Kalash. This 2 year old girl could well be German, except for the strange "elf-ears", which supposedly are very common among these people. The elf ears are probably a consequence of genetic drift. Drift occurs when a population is isolated for a long time without many outside inputs.

The Kalash, unlike all other peoples in the region, have little or no South Indian or Asian genes. More than anything else, this indicates a West Eurasian origin for the Kalash. West Eurasia is a term that is hard to define, and some say that the region does not even exist. There are some hazy definitions of West Eurasia out there, but in the way it is most used by population geneticists, it appears to mean the Near East and the Caucasus.

As West Eurasia is in the area of the purported homeland of the Caucasian race (Caucasus), we once again deal with the question of the Kalash being an ancient Caucasian tribe, perhaps one of the most ancient Caucasian stocks on Earth.

I saw one genetic map that had all proto-Caucasians (and all proto-NE Asians for that matter) coming out of the Borogil Pass on the border of northern Pakistan and the Wakhan Corridor of Afghanistan 35,000 years ago. Originally the group was something like pre-Caucasian - NE Asian. The group went north and one line went to proto-Caucasians and the other went northeast to proto-NE Asians.

We don't have the foggiest idea of what these people may have looked like, but skulls from India 24,000 years ago look more like Aborigines than anything else.

The Borogil Pass in the area of Pakistan, Afghanistan and China. As you can see, it is pretty tough going. This is the lowest pass leading out of South Asia and up into the steppes, so it is logical that early men may have migrated in this way.

Actually I think the genesis of NE Asians is more complex than that, but the article was interesting. The genesis of Caucasians is one of the least understood of all the major races. The homeland of the proto-Caucasians is either in the Caucasus or in Central Asia and the Middle East and North Africa seems to be a major staging ground. At this time, the most ancient Caucasians seem to be South Indians and Berbers.

South Indians go back about 15-20,000 years and have been evolving right there with few outside inputs for all that time. Before 20,000 years ago, the proto-South Indians are thought to have come from the Middle East. They probably bred in with or displaced an Australoid people resembling Aborigines who were the original people of India.

The Berbers may go back even further than that and there are suggestions that they may have had an origin in northeastern Africa near Ethiopia, Sudan and Eritrea. That area was the jumping off point for the human race to leave Africa 60-70,000 years ago, pointing once again to very ancient Berber origins. European-like skulls only go back 10,000 years or so and white skin only goes back 9,000 years.

All humans originally were dark-skinned. The people with the darkest skin evolved in the areas where the UV rays were the brightest. It was thought at first that dark skin was an adaptation to prevent sunburn and melanoma, but a there are problems with this analysis.

Sunburn does not usually kill you, and melanoma tends to hit older in life, after one has already produced offspring. A better explanation may be that intense UV rays cause destruction of folic acid stores in the body. Then pregnant women, with their folic acid destroyed, have a high potential of giving birth to deformed babies.

White skin was actually a depigmentation process to enable people to get more Vitamin D, which is scarcer at northern altitudes in Northern Europe due to weak UV rays. Lighter skin is necessary to grab all the Vitamin D that one can. An argument against this is that Vitamin D deficiency does not occur in areas of low UV radiation.

But this is not true. Even today, darker skinned people, such as South Indians, who immigrate to the UK are coming down with various Vitamin D deficiency syndromes, including rickets. It is probably necessary for darker-skinned people who live at high latitudes to take Vitamin D supplementation.

The proto-Caucasians may have split off as early as 35,000 years ago. Some NE Asians are quite close to Caucasians and vice versa. The groups straddling the Caucasian-Asian border form a sort of a line from Turkey to Korea and then up to the Chukchi Peninsula. Along the way we have Turks, Iranians, Jews, West Asians, Central Asians, Northern Turkics, Mongolians, Northern Chinese, Koreans and Chukchi.

West Asians include Punjabis and Pashtuns and live in Pakistan, NW India and Afghanistan. Central Asians include Kazakhs, Turkmen and Uzbeks. Northern Turkics include the Altai, the Yakut and other groups. Many of them live around where China, Mongolia and Russia all come together. Interestingly, this seems to be exactly where most Amerindians came from - the Altai Mountains.

The Chukchi are an Eskimo-like people who live on the Chukchi Peninsula on the far eastern end of Siberia where the Bering Straight separates Russia from Alaska.

What's curious about the Chukchi is that Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza's Principal Coordinates chart in his 1994 book The History and Geography of Human Genes (chart here) puts the Chukchi in with Caucasians. Yet by appearance and apparently also genetics, the Chukchi cluster with Asians.

So there are some groups that are really on the border. I had a hard time knowing what to do with Turkics, Northern Turkics and Central and West Asians, as the genetics was so hazy. I usually just dropped them in either NE Asians or Caucasians based on appearance.

The Kalash are a group of about 3,000 people living in Chitral Province in Pakistan on the border of Afghanistan.

The valleys of the Kalash. The villages are at about 6,000 feet and as the soil is very rich, they grow many crops. They also do a lot of herding, mostly of goats it seems. They do observe a menstruation taboo, where the women have to go off to special hut during that time, but this is a very old taboo in many human tribal groups. The Kalash bury their dead above ground in caskets. Burial of the dead above ground is a very ancient human tradition.

The Negritos of both Papua and the Andaman Islands, one of the most ancient human groups, bury their dead above ground in little tree houses. The Zoroastrians, one of the most ancient human religions, bury the dead on rooftops and let the vultures eat them. This is getting to be a problem in parts of India where they live as the neighbors are starting to complain!

They still retain an ancient pagan religion. The are remarkably egalitarian for that part of the world, and women work in the fields side by side with men. They have somehow managed to resist Islamacization for centuries, possibly due to the remote and multiethnic nature of the Chitral region.

Four Kalash students. The fellow on the right is a dead ringer for a European. He could be a German or an Englishman. The fellow on the right could easily be an Italian, a Greek, an Armenian, an Iranian or a Turk. The other two are awfully hard to classify. They almost look a little Amerindian.

There are some similar phenotypes across the border in Afghanistan in Nuristan amongst people called Nuristanis. They were converted to Islam at the point of a sword by a genocidal Pashtun maniac named Amir Abdur-Rahman during Afghanistan's nation-building process in the 1890's. His genocide of the Hazara was similar proportionally to the Jewish Holocaust.

A Kalash woman with some children, apparently her own. She and her kids do not look quite so Caucasian; they look more Asian. Actually the woman is hard to classify as belonging to any known race that we are familiar with. In California, you might think she was an Amerindian from Latin America.

The legend is that the Kalash and the Nuristanis were the remnants of Alexander the Great's army that invaded and conquered the region 2000 years ago. This was the reason for all the European phenotypes in the area. Recently, this was thought to be a legend with no basis in fact, but recent controversial genetic testing suggests that the Kalash may have up to 20% Greek DNA on the fathers' side.

Macedonian and Kalash female costumes compared - note the similarity in costumes. Also the Kalash continue to worship a creator God cognate with the Greek Zeus. I cannot help but think that some of those Macedonian phenotypes are also present in Kalash females. And the terrain looks rather similar too.

Maybe some of Alexander's men did stay here, thinking they were home away from home. This story is definitely widespread in that part of the world. I had an Afghan doctor from Nangarhar Province in Afghanistan who insisted it was true.

This has been challenged since although there is one Greek marker in the Kalash, the other major marker that ought to be there, since it is apparently present in all Greeks, is not there. One counter-suggestion is that the Kalash got the Greek marker by chance through genetic drift. This seems dubious. The question remains highly confused .

A Kalash man, possibly with his wife by his side. He could easily be an Italian, an Albanian, a Spaniard or a Portuguese. She's harder to classify, but could be an Italian.

The Kalash worship a God called Dezau, which is from the Indo-European sky God *Dyaos (reconstructed form), from which the Greeks derived Zeus and the Romans Jupiter . So the Kalash are the last practitioners of ancient Indo-European mythology.

A Kalash woman with Caucasian features and somewhat Asian eyes. It's hard to place her into a known ethnic group, but there are Kurds who look something like this. The Kalash probably originated in an area near Kurdistan, but no one really knows. The child looks more Asian. Love the costumes.

They have some odd customs.

One I particularly love is called the Festival of the Budulak. A strong teenage boy is sent up in the mountains for the summer with the goats. He practically lives on goat milk, which supposedly makes him even stronger.

When he comes back there is a festival and at the festival he gets to have sex with any woman he wants, even his own mother, a young virgin or another man's wife, but he only gets to rampage like this for 24 hours. Any child born of these encounters is considered to be blessed. They supposedly quit practicing this custom recently due to bad publicity, but many think that they still practice it in secret.

Definitely one of the world's greatest customs!

A beautiful Kalash woman who eloped with a man recently to get married. Although many times the couple who do this are single, in quite a few cases a married woman can elope with another man. The new husband just has to pay double the bride price. The cuckold just takes it all in stride, or at least he doesn't get homicidal. It's amazing the kind of rights women have in this group. Too bad so many of them convert out to Pakistani Islam where women are pretty much chattel.

This woman obviously resembles some European phenotype, but I don't know my European racial types a la Coon, etc, very well. I almost want to say Norwegian?

The Kalash are coming under pressure from radical Islamists recently and several villages have been converted by force (I thought Muslims never do this!) Also radical mullahs incite local Muslims to go into Kalash villages and smash their religious idols.

A Kalash shamaness or female shaman. It is amazing that in this misogynistic part of the world that women are granted such a high religious position. Druze women in Lebanon and Syria are also allowed to become high religious leaders. The costume is amazing. Shamans are one of the oldest aspects of human religions, characteristic of animist type religions.

As the world is full of spirits (or Gods in a polytheistic world) the shaman works via human psychology to manipulate the spirit world to the benefit of the patient. It is hard to say how much there is to it, but areas of the world where humans have been practicing this sort of thing for a long time can do some pretty amazing things.

There are reports out of the South Seas that whole villages would get together to cast evil spells on leaders of neighboring islands. In a number of cases, the leader died soon afterward. The cause of death was typically massive and multiple organ failure. It was as if he simply exploded inside. There are persistent reports that saying a prayer over water or a meal makes it taste better. There are many reports of dying people communicating over long distances with loved ones just before they die.

And there are also many reports of people sensing nearby tragedies as they are occurring. All of this needs to be investigated by science but there are good reasons to think that this sort of thing is compatible with modern science, especially particle physics where we are all part of each other. I am also convinced that clairvoyance and sharing of hallucinations are possible, having experienced both of these things. Of course, we were tripping on LSD-like woodrose seeds at the time, but still.

Pacific Islanders and Amerindians were also added, as there is good evidence that these two groups form valid major groupings. Cavalli-Sforza's eight-race theory listed Amerindians and a group he called Pacific Islanders that apparently also included Papuans.

Rosenberg et al's six-race grouping also included Amerindians and a group he called Melanesians, consisting of Papuans and Melanesians. Since other evidence indicates significant distance between Papuans and Melanesians and Papuans and Pacific Islanders in general, I decided to leave Papuans as a separate major group.

Yet a good case can be made to split off Polynesians, Micronesians and Melanesians in a compact grouping. The creation of the Polynesians is a result of the spread of the Lapita culture, one of the world's greatest sea journeys undertaken by Austronesian mariners, Taiwanese aborigines (Chinese people) who left Taiwan 1000's of years ago to settle Island SE Asia. First they went to the Philippines, then to Indonesia.

From Central Indonesia, they left and settled coastal New Guinea, bringing an advanced culture to New Guinea. They also may have settled as far east as the Solomons.

The Trobriand and Solomon Islands are said to be one of the centers for proto-Papuan culture in the region, and may have been settled as long ago as 35,000 years ago.

Later, a new wave of Austronesians came out of Central Indonesia (near the Wallace Line) and moved through Melanesia, picking up only a few Melanesian genes along the way. These mariners then went off to populate the entirety of Polynesia in the past 2000 years.

So, according to this theory, Polynesians are mostly Chinese (Taiwanese aborigines) with some Melanesian in them.

One interesting question is why the Polynesians got so huge. First of all, they are not all huge. I have taught a lot of these people in the LA schools and there are a variety of phenotypes, including one that is short and thin.

One theory is that the journey to populate Polynesia was so harsh that only the strongest survived and the weakest died. It may have been necessary to eat the dead for the survivors to go on. Perhaps they fought to the death for scarce resources. Anyway, on many Polynesian islands an extremely brutal culture of continuous, potentially genocidal warfare was the norm and this was probably the world center for cannibalism.

Finally, the last wave to move out was the Micronesians. This group consisted of Polynesians who moved out of Polynesia to populate Micronesia. According to the theory above, they are mostly Chinese (Taiwanese) with only a small amount of Melanesian in them.

The suggestion above was that both the Polynesians and the Melanesians are mostly-Chinese (Taiwanese) people. That conclusion is based on a recent paper that has not yet been widely distributed.

However, another paper that can be downloaded on this site here, suggests that the major Haplogroups in Polynesians - C and F - are indigenous to the region, meaning they are related to the original Melanesian and Papuan settlers.

That paper, and many others, suggests that Micronesians and Polynesians are about 50% Chinese and 50% Melanesian, with different percentages from each parent. This still seems the most reasonable solution to me.

Interestingly, the vast majority of the Chinese genes in Melanesians and Polynesians seem to have come from one group of Taiwanese aborigines - the Ami.

A group called the Alor in far eastern Indonesia clusters with Melanesians and a group called the Toba Batak of northern Sumatra in Indonesia clusters with Micronesians.

Alor of far Eastern Indonesia after a major disaster. They are Melanesians who speak Papuan languages. The languages are endangered and very poorly documented. There is a major undertaking underway right now to at least document these languages.


Some very interesting looking Alor women. Although they are Melanesians, they look a bit different from many other Melanesians. The woman on the left has some pretty Asian looking eyes. This may be because they speak an Austronesian language. Melanesians who speak an Austronesian language have some Chinese (Taiwanese) genes, but never more than 20%. The Alor have about 12% Taiwanese genes from the Ami, a group of Taiwanese aborigines, seen in Haplogroup L.

Both White Nationalist and Afrocentrist varieties of ethnic nationalist idiots keep trying to insist that these folks are either Black or closely related to Blacks.

These people are some of the furthest away from Africans on the planet. You can't go by phenotype or appearance or even behavior. None of that means much. You have to go by genes. As these people were some of the first to split off from Africans, they have been evolving away from them for the longest. Whites are much closer to Blacks than these Melanesians.


An Alor man who is working with a linguistic team that is documenting Alor languages. Alor is a major diving site for commercial recreational diving crews. The water is still nice and clear here and the coral reefs are still intact. The fish population is good too as there are not a lot of people living in this part of Indonesia. The famous Komodo Dragon lives near here on Komodo Island in far eastern Indonesia.

The reason these people, who are much less related to Black people than I am, are always called Black, is due to the color of their skin! But that has nothing to do with anything. A bobcat and coyote are similarly colored too. Truth is that if you evolved in the areas of the Earth with the highest UV radiation, you often ended up with very dark skin, which does resemble that of Africans.

But this is just convergent evolution and has nothing to do with relatedness. This guy is a lot more closely related to Chinese than to Black people. The Alor do seem to have about 25% Papuan genes via Haplogroup E.


The Toba Batak of Northern Sumatra. The guys in this photo actually do look Micronesian - I have seen photos of Micronesians. How these Micronesians ended up on the north coast of Sumatra is news to me. The Toba Batak live west of Medan in the area around Lake Toba, especially on Samosir Island. Their elaborately carved wooden houses are a popular tourist attraction.


A photo of a Toba Batak family. I had a hard time finding quality pics of the Toba Batak. You can see that they are extremely dark - much darker than most people living in this area. Also I think that some Micronesians may have wavy hair like that. The Toba Batak are Micronesians who somehow ended up in northern Sumatra.

This shows that Indonesians are not any particular race, although most are more general SE Asian types fairly close to Filipinos.

Classification of races is a tricky business. In my post, I went by genetic distance alone and not phenotype, culture, behavior, etc. I also treated very gingerly all contributions by ethnic nationalists, who are known to be profoundly dishonest about this stuff. Despite PC nonsense, there clearly are races of mankind. In fact, my classification scheme posits 87 minor races, and it is still undergoing revision.

References

Cavalli-Sforza, L. L., P. Menozzi, A. Piazza. 1994. The History and Geography of Human Genes. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Jablonski, N. and Chaplin, G. (2000) The Evolution of Human Skin Coloration. Journal of Human Evolution. Available on this blog here.

Capelli, C. Wilson, J.F., Richards, M., Stumpf, M.P.H., Gratrix, F., Oppenheimer, S., Underhill, P., Pascali, V.L., Ko, T.M., and Goldstein, D.B. (2001). A Predominantly Indigenous Paternal Heritage for the Austronesian-Speaking Peoples of Insular Southeast Asia and Oceania. American Journal of Human Genetics 68:432–443.

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