Or at least a rivulet.
Abimael Guzman, imprisoned leader of the Shining Path guerrillas in Peru, famously said that for the revolution to succeed, "Peru would have to cross a river of blood". Much of the civilized world was horrified by this bloodthirsty statement, but was he onto something?
I would argue that the vast majority of social progress achieved in the past 150 rivers has unfortunately occurred only after rivers of blood were shed. Or at the very least trickles. To but it bluntly, people had to die. They had to get hurt and die.
It's sad that it has to be that way, but it seems that that is just the way it is. Powerful people do not give up stuff just because they wake up in a good mood one day or go to church, find God and start feeling guilty.
Here in the US, Blacks only gained their liberation in the context of a devastating Civil War in which 100,000's of Americans shed their blood and lost their lives. Haitians only got rid of slavery by rising up and killing every single one of 25,000 Frenchmen on the island. For Algeria to blast free of colonialism and to shock the French out of the colonial habit, 1 million people, including 25,000 Frenchmen, died.
Britain only chucked colonialism after British soldiers died in Malaysia, India, Palestine and other places. Does anyone think even a modicum of a Palestinian state would exist had Palestinians not taken up the gun? Without the armed struggle of the Iraqi guerrillas, US troops would have ovverun Syria and possibly Iran by now.
The Basque Country has the considerable autonomy it does today only after 800 Spaniards died in the ETA's armed struggle. Land reform was only instituted in South Korea, Japan and Taiwan after the war to ward off the threat of Communism from North Korea and China.
Apartheid is gone in South Africa and one man one vote democracy is in its place for the most part only due to an armed campaign by the ANC stretching over decades.
US workers only got rights after bloody strikes in which workers were killed by goon squads.
The social market that James Schipper praised in Europe in earlier comments is also the project of massive labor union mobilization in Europe.
I would also argue that it was created by devastating the European Right, first by killing 10 million of them (10 million dead fascists in WW2), next by making rightwing ideology toxic for many years after the war, and finally by revolutionary pressure from the Far Left before and after the war, which led the business sector to seek out a class compromise and a social contract, mostly to ward off revolution.
Even the Swedish model mostly came into play in the 1930's when the nation was wracked by violent, radical and revolutionary labor actions all up and down the land. This so rocked the business and ruling classes that the Swedish model was created as a lesser evil alternative to ward off revolution.
Most do not realize that Swedish society was not very liberal during the 1930's. People are misled by the fact of Sweden's neutrality in the war to think that Swedes themselves were neutral. Most of the middle classes and certainly the business classes were firm Nazi supporters. Furthermore, I understand that Swedish businesses continued to supply the Nazis well into the war.
In Costa Rica, radical pressure helped create Costa Rican social democracy, now deteriorating after Reagan ordered the Costa Ricans at gunpoint in the 1980's to get rid of it.
After WW2, Costa Rica outlawed the Communist Party, killed 6,000 Communists, instituted a social democracy to buy off social unrest and got rid of the military as a rather interesting way to top it off. Without revolutionary pressure in 1946 and the bodies of 6,000 Communists, Costa Rican social democracy may never have occurred.
Mexico today has some semblance of socialism and a land reform that enables to poor to own small plots and at least survive and eat if they cannot find work only because 20 million Mexicans died during Pancho Villa's revolution that put Mexican feudalism in the grave forever. Most do not realize that Mexico was actually a horrible and truly feudal society as late as 1910. Yet it was.
In the same way, in El Salvador now, one can at least farm a small plot, eat and survive, something often not possible before the Revolution started. For that meager reform, 70,000 people died and Salvadoran feudalism was crushed, possibly forever.
Lenin said power never gives up without a fight. And most social reforms in capitalism have come on the heels, tragically, of a river of blood. Or at least a small stream.
Without pressure from below by revolutionaries and radicals, it is uncertain how many of the progressive social contracts in place in the world would exist.
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Showing posts with label Algeria. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Algeria. Show all posts
Friday, July 25, 2008
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Muslims in France
Clearly, the North African, mostly-Caucasian Muslims in France (primarily Algerians) have been a disaster. They are the ones that are rioting all the time and tearing up the country. Contrary to popular rumor, the N African Muslim population in France is ~10%, not 20%,. The Black population is not known, but surely it is much smaller than the 10% North African population.
The North Africans are there primarily due to French colonialism and imperialism. Algeria was a former French colony, brutally ruled by France for 134 years, from 1830 to 1964.
The Algerians fought a horribly brutal war of independence, in which 25,000 French and 1 million Algerians were killed. Incredibly, the anti-Communist Right in the US still sings the praises of French colonialism in this war, and makes the revolutionaries out to be the bad guys.
It's true that the Algerian revolutionaries did not fight a very nice or pretty war. Yet they paid for it with 40 times the casualties of the French. To the dead person, I don't think it really matters how they got killed (an accusation against the revolutionaries is that they killed people in brutal ways such as beheadings).
It's true that you can go on the Internet, usually to Zionist sites, and see some horrible photos of those killed by the Algerian revolutionaries. A specialty was chopping the head off, chopping the genitals off, and stuffing the guy's dick in his severed head.
Anyway, colonialism is always wrong, period. The French were wrong, and they lost. After the war, Algerians started showing up in France in large numbers. White nationalists (who, by the way, never met a White imperialist or colonialist project they did not adore) claim that the Algerians are in France due to insane liberals bringing them there to diversify France and I guess to dilute the European Whites.
The French may be liberal, but they are not retarded like liberal Americans and liberal Scandinavians.
I would like to point out that none of this White nationalist bullshit is true.
First of all, the Algerian Muslim immigrants were not brought in as some loony liberal experiment in diversity, but instead as pro-French refugees fleeing soon before or after the FLN won the war. Think of the fall of Saigon.
The White nationalist line is that the French used to be hardcore and nasty and brutal (after all, the guillotine was still used until the 1970's) and the French Foreign Legion was brutal as Hell in the Algerian Civil War, but now the French have gone soft and wimpy, and they are letting Muslim punks run all over them.
That hardcore France the White nationalists love so much was rejected by none other than the French people themselves after the criminal colonial wars of Algeria and Vietnam. There was a big scandal about all the murdering and torturing the French Foreign Legion was doing in Algeria.
The US anti-Communist Hard Right, to this very day, sees this humanist sentiment, and its attendant rejection of colonialism, and even, to some extent, at least in popular culture, embrace of national liberation movements (see Régis Debray and Fritz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth) as a sign of weakness (see my prior post on the Straussian impulse driving the neocons).
Note that Fanon's seminal work appeared in 1961, the year of his death, in the midst of the Algerian revolution, and that Debray started pushing his foco theories right around this time (Revolution in the Revolution appeared in 1967).
The rebels were even worse than the Foreign Legion, but the French did not want to see themselves as brutal, colonialist maniacs.
This was also a period when France was supporting other imperialist and colonial powers in the Suez War in 1956, where British and French colonialism, with their colonial Jewish puppet state, attacked Egypt and tried to grab the Suez Canal back from Nasser, who had rightly and properly seized the canal as Egypt's property.
After that, the French turned their backs on colonialism (more or less - they still, to their discredit, hold colonies in the South Pacific), and to some extent on imperialism - but not totally - see the crucial French role in the armed coup that threw out President Aristide in Haiti - elected with the support of 92% of the population.
France as a colonial and imperial power was more or less finished by the late 1960's, Situationists and other crazies were rioting in Paris in the summer of 1968, and the torch of imperialism passed to the US after the British lost stomach for it after Suez.
Suez pretty much led to a "peasant revolt" in the UK against British imperialism due to the blatant and sickening imperialism of the Suez War. British imperialism, of course, continues today, even, outrageously, in the Labor Party, really the last place anyone would hope to find it. See British support for the imperialist invasion and colonial occupation of Iraq for more.
To the dismay of White nationalists, who assume any criminals rioting in the streets must be a bunch of niggers*, the problem kids are North African Caucasians, not Blacks. These Arabs don't act this way in North Africa. The whole mess is really because they are Muslims and refuse to assimilate. All other theories seem to fall flat on their faces.
White nationalists try to blame this mess on France being taken over by multiculturalist liberal idiots, but France has always been extremely assimilationist and anti-multiculturalist, so this isn't a failure of multiculturalism at all. In fact, France has been brutal and cruel towards the Bretons, the Basques and the Corsicans, all of whom have every right to take up arms against the French state.
The Algerians are just a problem immigrant group that flat out refuses to assimilate.
One problem here is that the French have always assumed that all immigrants would just lose it all and become Frenchmen. There was never much racism in France and everyone was French anyway, so there was no need for affirmative action.
There is good evidence that the Muslims experience widespread discrimination in employment. The French refuse to remedy this with the only working remedy for discrimination - affirmative action and enforcement of anti-discrimination laws.
White nationalists argue that the discrimination is to be expected based on the behavior of so many of the Algerians, but that misses the point. If amelioration of discrimination against Algerians makes them happier, would they not riot less?
The Muslim areas are not particularly dangerous, unless maybe if you're a cop. They give off instead the impression that Little Italys used to give off in this country, of a safe zone where the state does not rule and someone else does instead. In the Little Italys, it was the Mafia, and they did keep the crime rate down.
If one were not a resident, people knew that, and you were being watched, but everyone left you alone. The Islamists have, in a similar fashion, taken hold over Algerian zones. Therefore, the Islamist shadow state in the banlieus has a lot of responsibility for the insane rioting that goes on there just about every night.
There is not much to be done at this point except for France to quit importing Algerians. White nationalists like to scream that the French should deport all the Muslims. But I believe that most of these rioting idiots are citizens and hence un-deportable.
If I were running France, I am not sure what I would do.
The Muslims are yet only 10%, so it will be quite a while, if ever, before they have a majority.
*used sardonically.
The North Africans are there primarily due to French colonialism and imperialism. Algeria was a former French colony, brutally ruled by France for 134 years, from 1830 to 1964.
The Algerians fought a horribly brutal war of independence, in which 25,000 French and 1 million Algerians were killed. Incredibly, the anti-Communist Right in the US still sings the praises of French colonialism in this war, and makes the revolutionaries out to be the bad guys.
It's true that the Algerian revolutionaries did not fight a very nice or pretty war. Yet they paid for it with 40 times the casualties of the French. To the dead person, I don't think it really matters how they got killed (an accusation against the revolutionaries is that they killed people in brutal ways such as beheadings).
It's true that you can go on the Internet, usually to Zionist sites, and see some horrible photos of those killed by the Algerian revolutionaries. A specialty was chopping the head off, chopping the genitals off, and stuffing the guy's dick in his severed head.
Anyway, colonialism is always wrong, period. The French were wrong, and they lost. After the war, Algerians started showing up in France in large numbers. White nationalists (who, by the way, never met a White imperialist or colonialist project they did not adore) claim that the Algerians are in France due to insane liberals bringing them there to diversify France and I guess to dilute the European Whites.
The French may be liberal, but they are not retarded like liberal Americans and liberal Scandinavians.
I would like to point out that none of this White nationalist bullshit is true.
First of all, the Algerian Muslim immigrants were not brought in as some loony liberal experiment in diversity, but instead as pro-French refugees fleeing soon before or after the FLN won the war. Think of the fall of Saigon.
The White nationalist line is that the French used to be hardcore and nasty and brutal (after all, the guillotine was still used until the 1970's) and the French Foreign Legion was brutal as Hell in the Algerian Civil War, but now the French have gone soft and wimpy, and they are letting Muslim punks run all over them.
That hardcore France the White nationalists love so much was rejected by none other than the French people themselves after the criminal colonial wars of Algeria and Vietnam. There was a big scandal about all the murdering and torturing the French Foreign Legion was doing in Algeria.
The US anti-Communist Hard Right, to this very day, sees this humanist sentiment, and its attendant rejection of colonialism, and even, to some extent, at least in popular culture, embrace of national liberation movements (see Régis Debray and Fritz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth) as a sign of weakness (see my prior post on the Straussian impulse driving the neocons).
Note that Fanon's seminal work appeared in 1961, the year of his death, in the midst of the Algerian revolution, and that Debray started pushing his foco theories right around this time (Revolution in the Revolution appeared in 1967).
The rebels were even worse than the Foreign Legion, but the French did not want to see themselves as brutal, colonialist maniacs.
This was also a period when France was supporting other imperialist and colonial powers in the Suez War in 1956, where British and French colonialism, with their colonial Jewish puppet state, attacked Egypt and tried to grab the Suez Canal back from Nasser, who had rightly and properly seized the canal as Egypt's property.
After that, the French turned their backs on colonialism (more or less - they still, to their discredit, hold colonies in the South Pacific), and to some extent on imperialism - but not totally - see the crucial French role in the armed coup that threw out President Aristide in Haiti - elected with the support of 92% of the population.
France as a colonial and imperial power was more or less finished by the late 1960's, Situationists and other crazies were rioting in Paris in the summer of 1968, and the torch of imperialism passed to the US after the British lost stomach for it after Suez.
Suez pretty much led to a "peasant revolt" in the UK against British imperialism due to the blatant and sickening imperialism of the Suez War. British imperialism, of course, continues today, even, outrageously, in the Labor Party, really the last place anyone would hope to find it. See British support for the imperialist invasion and colonial occupation of Iraq for more.
To the dismay of White nationalists, who assume any criminals rioting in the streets must be a bunch of niggers*, the problem kids are North African Caucasians, not Blacks. These Arabs don't act this way in North Africa. The whole mess is really because they are Muslims and refuse to assimilate. All other theories seem to fall flat on their faces.
White nationalists try to blame this mess on France being taken over by multiculturalist liberal idiots, but France has always been extremely assimilationist and anti-multiculturalist, so this isn't a failure of multiculturalism at all. In fact, France has been brutal and cruel towards the Bretons, the Basques and the Corsicans, all of whom have every right to take up arms against the French state.
The Algerians are just a problem immigrant group that flat out refuses to assimilate.
One problem here is that the French have always assumed that all immigrants would just lose it all and become Frenchmen. There was never much racism in France and everyone was French anyway, so there was no need for affirmative action.
There is good evidence that the Muslims experience widespread discrimination in employment. The French refuse to remedy this with the only working remedy for discrimination - affirmative action and enforcement of anti-discrimination laws.
White nationalists argue that the discrimination is to be expected based on the behavior of so many of the Algerians, but that misses the point. If amelioration of discrimination against Algerians makes them happier, would they not riot less?
The Muslim areas are not particularly dangerous, unless maybe if you're a cop. They give off instead the impression that Little Italys used to give off in this country, of a safe zone where the state does not rule and someone else does instead. In the Little Italys, it was the Mafia, and they did keep the crime rate down.
If one were not a resident, people knew that, and you were being watched, but everyone left you alone. The Islamists have, in a similar fashion, taken hold over Algerian zones. Therefore, the Islamist shadow state in the banlieus has a lot of responsibility for the insane rioting that goes on there just about every night.
There is not much to be done at this point except for France to quit importing Algerians. White nationalists like to scream that the French should deport all the Muslims. But I believe that most of these rioting idiots are citizens and hence un-deportable.
If I were running France, I am not sure what I would do.
The Muslims are yet only 10%, so it will be quite a while, if ever, before they have a majority.
*used sardonically.
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