Long-Dead Critters Resurrect Themselves

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.

Always great to report news of critters rising from the dead.

Debbie Martyr is a woman who has been working for some time in and around Kerinci-Seblat National Park in Sumatra, trying to come up with evidence for the Orang-Pendek, a new species of ape.

While doing this, she came across evidence of the Sumatran muntjac, last seen in 1930 and long since declared extinct. It was captured in a hunter's snare. Muntjacs are known as "barking deer" but I don't know much about them otherwise.

A Sumatran muntjac, thought extinct for 78 years, rediscovered in a national park in Sumatra. This one was caught in a snare, so they could capture it and study it. Too bad the Sumatran rainforest is being destroyed at an incredible pace.

A species of Harlequin frogs (actually called Andersson's Stubfoot Toad), thought extinct for over a decade, have been rediscovered in a small population near EcoMinga’s Rio Zuñaca Reserve in Ecuador. It was last seen in 1937 and was declared extinct long ago.

A photo of a dead Atelopus palmatus, recently rediscovered after 71 years in Ecuador.

The Desert Mouse from New South Wales, Australia, was last seen in 1857, 151 years ago, and was long declared extinct. It was recently rediscovered in Sturt National Park near Tibooburra.

The Desert Mouse, found in a drought-hammered part of a national park in New South Wales, thought extinct for 151 years.

And mountain lions are now officially documented in Louisiana after many reported sightings.

Photograph of a mountain lion in Allen Parish, Louisiana. My friends and relatives have seen these things, but I have never seen them. If you live in the woods in California, these animals are around all the time, but you just never see one. Amazing how they hide since they are so huge. There's not much reason to be afraid of these things, but I usually carry a large pointed hiking stick when I go hiking anyway.

They hardly ever attack people unless you are jogging or riding a bicycle. That is because when you do that, you look like a deer, an animal they are used to killing. They also attack little kids, because that is about the size of their usual prey too.

It seems to be a small population that is moving from East Texas into the state. There is a lot of controversy surrounding the Eastern Cougar, long thought to have gone extinct. But sightings have continued and have really stepped up in recent years. It's hard to come up with good, hard evidence though.

Many of those spotted are thought to be escaped pets, but some are probably real. We know for sure that there are cougars in Minnesota, Michigan and Wisconsin right now, and there is good documentation of them around the Chicago area. Yes, mountain lions somehow crossed the Mississippi River. How? Who knows?

Cryptomundo is a good site for all this sort of thing, plus lots of Bigfoot, Yeti, Tasmanian Tiger and other more dubious stuff.

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Multiculturalism and Socialism: The Odd Couple

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 2:

In the comments section, Scott, who is a White nationalist, discusses the disconnect between multiculturalism and socialism or social democracy.

Yes, we do allow White nationalists, even anti-Black ones, on the board, but every time a cute Black woman shows up on the board, we force them to kiss her. On the lips. On penalty of banning. None have left yet. Brown sugar, how come you taste so good?

Scott says:

Look at the countries that have the highest index of egalitarianism in the West: Iceland, Norway, Sweden (used to have more). The inhabitants are all pretty closely related to one another. I'll spot my sibling $100 cash.

It's basically the same thing but in a less dramatic way in such countries, but when other nationalities come in because of the aforementioned ethnostates' welfare system, as seek to take advantage of it, the whole system gets messed up. Find me an ethnically diverse country with a social democracy.

I respond:

Scott is right. Does the UK count as a multicultural country? If it does, it's growing a nasty White racist - fascist party of reaction to the diversity in the BNP.

Does Venezuela count? If Venezuela counts, I would say that Venezuela is a country riven with violence, tension and class war. There seems to be a racial angle, but in the upper class and upper middle class, it's really more about class than race. Nevertheless, it's clear that the oligarchy is much more light-skinned than the Underclass that supports Chavez.

Is multicultural Russia a social democracy? Maybe so, but it's riven from one end to the other with horrible racism.

Do Communist states like China and Cuba count? Maybe so, but those countries, probably due to the class warfare (in the case of both) and combined class/race warfare (in the case of Cuba) inherent in their societies, needed full, bloody Communist revolutions to institute any kind of socialist system.

Vietnam and Laos are multiethnic countries, but the Lao and the Vietnamese are the overwhelming majority. They also needed Communist revolutions to put in socialism.

I would say Sri Lanka. They have a pretty good social democracy there, and the ruling party is a member of the Socialist International. There's also a horribly vicious civil war going on, because that "socialist" party in power has never done much to help the Tamils.

Socialist parties in Chile, Argentina and Brazil haven't been able to get much done. In Chile and Argentina the problem is probably much more class than race. In Brazil, surely it's both race and class together. The socialists in Ecuador and Bolivia are trying to get something done, but Bolivia is riven with a horrific class/race division and it's almost civil war there.

I don't think that the socialist parties in Nicaragua and Guatemala will be able to get much done. Both nations had Leftist revolutions for decades, in the case of Nicaragua followed by a revolutionary government and more civil war, this time counterrevolutionary. Nicaragua was always more about class than race, but the oligarchy is light-skinned. In Guatemala, the situation is very much about both class and race riven together.

One thing becomes clear in this analysis.

The only way to peacefully vote in a socialist or social democratic government is to have a relatively homogeneous society. Typically a White society. As diversity and multiculturalism increases, even in White European countries, White racist/fascist groups rise up for various reasons and racial violence against minorities becomes common.

In multiethnic or deeply class-riven nations (Note how often the two are conflated!), socialism, social democracy or movements towards them is typically accompanied by either outright civil war, de facto civil war, tremendous open class war in terms of coups, attempted coups, lockout strikes, riots, imperialist interventions, class-based separatist movements, and much violence.

In other places, socialist governments are not able to get much done due to deep class and race-based conflicts and the threat of violence from dominant ethnics and/or classes.

In other places, long civil wars eventually installed Communist regimes in multiethnic countries and ethnic conflict subsided or stopped. Short of installing a Communist regime, multiethnic countries moving towards socialism are likely to experience a lot of internal violence and chaos.

If diversity is so bad for socialism, why do socialists in the West keep pushing it?

Good question.

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Manuel Marulanda

Great photo of Manuel Marulanda (seated) from the early days.


The more classic view that people are a lot more familiar with - the veteran revolutionary and guerrilla. In the background are uniformed FARC troops.

I've already been over on this blog why the Colombian revolutionaries really have no alternative but to fight. When they tried to lay down their weapons, they were slaughtered like flies. As long as there is no open space for peaceful dissent in Colombia, armed struggle will be a sensible option.

Via a couple of articles out of People's Movement Support Group, we now learn a lot more about Sure Shot - Manuel Marulanda. The essential moment in the Colombian struggle and the one that actually gave rise to the FARC 16 years later was the assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, the presidential candidate that the people had pinned their hopes on.

Colombia has always been ruled by two ruling class parties - the Liberals and the Conservatives. Although they hated each other, there was never much difference between the two. Gaitán was a new kind of Liberal - a leftwing populist that was actually going to work for the people and not the oligarchy for once.

Even his own Liberal party condemned him, and he was quickly assassinated by unknown parties. The killing set off La Violencia, a conflict between the Conservatives and Liberals that killed 200,000 people in a small country over the next 16 years. The peasants in the countryside split off to form militias to slaughter each other.

The Conservatives represented the older oligarchy, and the Liberals represented some nouveau riche up and coming members of the oligarchy who wanted in. However, the Liberals were joined by many peasants and Communists. The two parties finally signed a peace treaty in 1963 and decided to declare war on the Communists.

Pedro Antonio Marín Marín, later Manuel Marulanda, was born into a poor peasant family around 1930. At age 13, he was forced to leave home to find work. Great system! At some time after 1948, Marín was attacked in his home by a Conservative militia. This led him to join the Liberals. He took the name Manuel Marulanda after an Afro-Colombian union leader who was tortured to death in 1953.

In the late 1950's, he joined forces with Jacobo Arenas to form a Marxist guerrilla group modeled on the Fidelistas fighting in the mountains of Cuba. It was as a guerrilla that he earned the name Tiro Fijo or Sure Shot.

The Colombian ruling class and US imperialism are overjoyed that Marulanda died. He died at age 77 in the arms of his lover, surrounded by his guerrilla comrades. The imperialists and their lackeys have made up a lie that he was killed by a bomb from a Colombian jet. This is not true.

It is little known that there is a fierce guerrilla war raging in Colombia. You don't read about much in the news, but the FARC, while conducting an orderly retreat under a severe offensive, is counterattacking against the Colombian military, and there are many small battles taking place every week.

The FARC is quite popular in Colombia, especially amongst the rural poor. If you go out into some areas of the countryside, all adults that you see will be members of the FARC. The peasant farmer in the countryside with his cows will have a sidearm. The woman cooking in her kitchen cooks food for guerrillas.

This is the FARC's rural militia, and it numbers up to 200,000-300,000. This is much more than the 15-20,000 full-time soldiers of the FARC. These peasants have been part of the FARC's support base for decades. That's just the way it is in a lot of places. FARC has had a much harder time organizing in the cities, but they do have urban militias.

The kidnappings that the US media screams about all the time are usually just arrests for not paying revolutionary taxes. Every Colombian with an income of over $1 million/year (that's a lot of people) has to pay revolutionary taxes every year (usually 10%). Most wealthy Colombians just do it. They drive out 25-50 miles from the city they live and pay the guerrillas. Then they are free for another year.

Some wealthy Colombians have not been paying taxes lately, so they have been arrested by the FARC for tax evasion. They will be released when they pay their taxes. So it's not really the "kidnapping and ransom payments" scenario that the media wants you to believe.

The FARC is even very popular across the border in Ecuador, especially in the rural areas. The notion that this group has no support is a lie propagated by its enemies.

Another lie is that these guerrillas live in luxury because they are narco-traffickers. They do tax drug crops in their regions of control, including cocaine. However, all of the money goes towards the war. No FARC guerrillas or leaders live in luxury.

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Manuel Marulanda (Sure Shot), Presente!

One of my all-time heroes, and one of the Great Men of the Latin American revolution, is dead.

RIP Pedro Antonio Marin (Tiro Fijo).

New leader? Alfonso Cano, an anthropologist and the group's chief ideologist. There were many anthropologists among Sendero Luminoso's top ideologists too, as I pointed out in a previous post. Nothing like field work among the oppressed to turn one into a raving revolutionary.

And yes, I do support the FARC, of course. Unequivocally and 100%, and so should all of you.

This movement is grotesquely misunderstood. If it existed in any kind of real democracy instead of in a terrorist death squad state, they never would have had to fire a shot, or at least would have laid down their weapons long ago. As is, they'd be insane to give up the gun. For the time being in Colombia, there is no other way.

In the 1980's, a section of the FARC disarmed and formed a legal political party called the Patriotic Union. Despite unbelievable repression, they managed to gain a respectable showing in some elections.

They were slaughtered like flies by the Colombian state with US military and intelligence assistance until 5,000 UP activists lay dead. The movement disbanded and scattered and has not been heard from since. The FARC is not insane. They already tried to lay down their guns. Look at what happened. At this point, the FARC is not going to lay down their guns until they get a say in running the country.

There is hardly anyone on the Left running for any office anywhere in Colombia. Anyone who does can be and may well be targeted for death by US-Colombian military intelligence terror machine.

Any Left organizations, including environmental groups, labor unions, peasant organizations, Indian movements, neighborhood and citizens' groups or peace communities who have declared themselves neutral, can be and may well be routinely targeted with death by the US and Colombia.

If I were a Colombian, I would either not write this blog, or, if I did, I would arm myself and join the FARC. After a while, it doesn't make sense anymore to wait for the government to come out and kill you. If the US-Colombian military-intel death machine is going to come out and try to kill me anyway, I may as well be armed so I can fight back.

As you can see in the case of the Wayuu Indians, they got tired of the US-Colombian military coming out to kill them, so large numbers of them joined the FARC, and many others formed their own guerrilla organizations. Attacks on the group dropped way down after they took up arms to defend themselves.

Often, the US-Colombian military death squads will start to raid villages and stage killings and massacres of villagers. At some point, at least lately, a FARC unit will intervene and drive the attackers away, saving many lives. You can see that the FARC is the only thing keeping the US-Colombian military from staging vast massacres across the land.

It is said that the FARC adds to the violence in Colombia. Far be it. The FARC had an autonomous zone carved out for it a few years back. The main city in this jungle, a town of only 25,000, had an incredible homicide rate of 1 killing/day. After the FARC came in, that was reduced to 1 killing/year. Some murderous guerrillas!

The FARC has been an armed self-defense group from its origins in the peasant community of Marquetalia in 1964. The leftwing peasants of Marquetalia, tired of the mad violence that was sweeping the land in La Violencia, essentially seceded from the war and made their own private Idaho on some land they owned in Western Colombia.

It's true that they were Communists, but there were only a few hundred of them, and they were nonviolent. The US and Colombian governments became alarmed at these live Communists existing openly on Colombia's land, and plans were made to exterminate them. The US Ambassador and US military cooperated closely in these plans. The US recommended everything be thrown at the peasants, including chemical weapons.

The US-Colombian army (with US advisors on board) finally attacked the area, but the peasants of Marquetalia were not all killed. Some survived and armed themselves to fight back. This was the beginnings of the FARC, and this has been the story ever since.

There was a march a while back against the US-Colombian death squads that haunt the land. A huge number of persons showed up in cities all across Colombia. Very quickly afterwards, with only a couple of weeks, the US-Colombian military killed about a dozen marchers and leaders. Just like that. This is what happens to the unarmed opposition in Colombia.

If the FARC falls apart, nothing will change. Colombia will be as big of a shithole as ever, but now there will be no way for the people to fight back against the US-Colombian state and its killers.

I read this article in English a while back, but now it's disappeared into some memory hole somewhere. Here it is in Spanish if you can read Spanish. Upshot of the piece is that the FARC does not depend on dope. They tax all crops in the areas they control, which is normally about 40% of the country.

This includes drug crops like coca. People grow coca because the state has not provided them the wherewithal to make a decent living growing anything else, despite the fake US-Colombian crop substitution program of recent years. During Plan Colombia in Putumayo Province, much of the land was devastated with herbicide, including perfectly legal crops, and most of the residents became ill with chemical poisoning.

US-Colombian death squads quickly appeared in the area and started murdering peasants right and left. This was around 2002. After a couple years of that, about 8,000 Indians in Putumayo had signed up with the FARC.

This is why people join the FARC, my doubting readers. Not because they feel like turning terrorist and destroying some glorious democracy because they are evildoers, but because the army keeps coming out to try kill them and spray poison all over them and their crops.

This article (dead link) lays out what Colombia is really like. It portrays a rural region in Colombia. The US-Colombian state does not touch the coca plantations of the rich in this region. Here, the rich own all the land, and the poor live in wretched misery.

It was not always this way. There used to be vast numbers of small landowners scattered through this whole region. They're mostly gone now, part of a project by the US-Colombian military to steal the people's land for the rich and kill anyone who resisted.

Most of this area has gone over to vast cattle ranches in the hands of a few ultra-rich landowners. These landowners hire death squads to keep this sick state of affairs as it is. This is why the FARC is always kidnapping these wealthy landowner "innocent civilians". They are not so innocent! These are the people who run the death squads.

There are still peasant farmers in this region, but they are now crammed into miserable and tiny plots that are a shadow of the ones they farmed. It's barely enough to feed oneself. The many peasants who were run off the land altogether now live crammed in teeming urban slums that never existed before.

If you drive through the area, there seems to be open land everywhere - for cows. You see a few miserable peasants with tiny plots, and then you see vast and teeming slums. On the highway is a death squad and US-Colombian military checkpoint to keep the peons from rising up about this fucked-up bullshit. To accomplish the sickening state of affairs in this blighted region, the US-Colombian military killed 100's to 1000's of people.

Now let us go to a large city - Medellin. The FARC militias were all run out a few years back, and the death squads run the show now. The poor are crammed into horrid slums on hillsides with no paved roads, no water, no sewage, no electricity, no nothing. The shit runs down the gutters, people gather rain for water, and when it rains, the hills slide down on the makeshift shanties.

Down below, watching the Dickensian slums above with cold eyes, are the death squads. If any slum dweller raises a peep about their miserable situation, they may just get a bullet. The death squads are put there by the US and Colombia to make sure that that disgusting state of affairs stays just the way it is.

Westerners have the temerity to ask why there is a revolution in Colombia.

How could there not be one?

The FARC has definitely been hit hard lately in a lot of ways. The Colombian military has doubled in size since 2000 (mostly due to an infusion of US money) and the FARC has been experiencing, since 2005, the most concerted military offensive that any Latin American revolutionary army has ever faced.

They may conceivably not make it, but if they don't, the violence will not end. The state will continue to kill the people, and it will still be impossible for the Left to organize or run for office without getting killed. If the FARC goes, there will only be successors; there will be no justice.

Personally, dire as things are, I think that the FARC will pull through. One of the ways that they reacted to the offensive was to branch into other nations. The FARE is in Ecuador¹, the FARV, with 1000's of members, is in Venezuela², the FARP is in Peru and doing very well³, and the FARB is in the Dog's Head region of Brazil⁴. FARC is in Panama and Guyana, and they have activists in Bolivia helping Morales' party.

A previous post gives details on all of these FARC splinters.

Great blog on Colombia. Machetera is also great and so's People's Movement Support Group.

Notes

1. This report from 2000 describes how both the FARC and the ELN had a growing presence across the border in Ecuador and how the FARE had just formed to protest against Plan Colombia. On May 15, 2000, the Ecuadorian military intercepted a FARE patrol in Sucumbios Province on the Peruvian border.

Two FARE members were killed and five more were wounded or captured in the shootout. In early 2000, the FARE blew up an oil pipeline in Ecuador. On August 28, 2002, the FARE set off a leaflet bomb in a McDonald's in Guayaquil that caused serious damage to the property. As of 2000, it was still a small group in the country. Whether or not the FARE still exists in not known.


2. The FARV is nothing but the name of the FARC in its rear guard zone inside Venezuela. The FARC has such zones and forces in all of the countries bordering it.

3. The FARP is nothing but the FARC inside Peru. They have penetrated deep into Peru and has recruited many former members and supporters of Sendero Luminoso. Former commanders of the MRTA have also joined the FARC's army in Peru. For now, they are not doing much except laying down base areas, but they are very popular with rural Peruvians who got sick of Sendero's mad violence.


4. The FARB is very little known, but it probably just the name of the FARC in its rear-guard area inside Brazil (Dog's Head region) There is another FARB inside Brazil that has been threatening and even killing some PT mayors and officials. It is supposedly a far Left group of PT dissidents angry at some PT officials for selling out the people.

Others think that the group does not even exist and instead is merely a fake name for rightwing death squads that rampage all across Brazil.

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An Examination of the Frog Extinction Epidemic

Although many factors are involved in this epidemic, one of the worst is the Chytrid fungus epidemic. It is being spread by Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd), which causes chytridiomycosis. This fungal disease is devastating frog populations all over the world, but particularly in Australia, and North, Central and South America.

The devastation in Central America has been particularly acute, with many species simply vanishing from the face of the Earth. Bd is just now spreading here in the US, with serious devastation of Sierra Mountain Yellow-Legged Frog populations in the Sierra Nevada. However, some populations are apparently surviving the epidemic with some some survivors intact and thereupon rebuilding their populations.

A paper in Nature (Pounds 2006) made the case that the chytrid epidemic was being driven by global warming. They suggested that Bd had always been there but had only become pathogenic in the face of global warming.

A new paper (Lips 2008) in the journal PLoS Biology challenged that theory with some interesting data. I did not read the Pounds paper, but the Lips paper was quite convincing.

Their argument is rather simple. If Bd had always been there, it would not show a spread rate typical of a spreading disease epidemic. Instead, it would tend to erupt in all places at once.

Lips' team showed first of all that Bd had not always been in the environment, that is, it was not an endemic. It appears to have escaped from an Australian lab around 1970 and from there spread through Australia. From Australia, it made its way to the Americas.

We can see several places where it seems to have been introduced, and we can plot the years of introduction on a map. So Bd is acting like an invasive alien species.

Bd appears in Costa Rica in 1987 and then heads south to Panama. It seems to be following mountain ranges there too. The number of species lost in Costa Rica is very large.

Bd spread in South America following two introductions, one in 1977 and one in 1980. The 1980 Ecuadorian introduction heads both north and south along the Andes. The 1977 Venezuelan introduction heads south along the Andes. For some reason, Bd in South America is sticking to the Andes.

This is precisely how we would expect an epidemic following an introduction by an alien species to operate - a geographical spread from a point of introduction with a rate of spread in miles per year. Furthermore, the testing of many specimens in museums failed to find Bd in any of them prior to 1977. This suggests strongly that Bd is an invasive alien fungus that was not present in the environment before.

An alternative hypothesis was not tested but did occur to me: That even though Bd was an alien exotic invasive fungus spreading after accidental introduction, global warming had somehow made Bd much more lethal to frogs. I can't figure out a way to test that hypothesis, and I guess none of the researchers are considering it. The Pounds team is sticking to their guns on this one, but I think that they are wrong.

It's a good mind exercise to read academic science journal articles that test scientific hypotheses against competing hypotheses. It's hard to read that stuff, but if you can get through it somehow, personally I find these brain puzzles to be a lot of fun. If you see learning as virtually a sensual activity as I do, this kind of stuff is almost as fun as a vacation, sports, sex or any other other purely sensual activity.

Learning and thinking is actually a blast, to me anyway. Try it sometime!

References

Lips, Karen R., Diffendorfer, Jay, Mendelson III, Joseph R., Sears, Michael W. 2008. Riding the Wave: Reconciling the Roles of Disease and Climate Change in Amphibian Declines. PLoS Biology 6:3.

Pounds JA, Bustamante MR, Coloma LA, Consuegra JA, Fogden MPL, et al. 2006. Widespread amphibian extinctions from epidemic disease driven by global warming. Nature 39: 161–167.

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Great Commie Blogs

The latest death toll figures from Hurricane Katrina can be seen on this website here. The famous Russian neo-Nazi video is on this blog here.

Updated May 3:

Two totally great new Commie blogs - People's Movement Support Group and Machetera.

PMSG is out of India with an emphasis on support for the Maoist revolutionaries in India along with the separatists in the Northeast (India's armed Maoists tend to support the northeastern separatists), and it's almost all translated stuff from the world press, but there is a strong emphasis on armed Leftwing revolutionary movements.

Thankfully, he is not a fanatic - he supports Cuba, the Maoists in Nepal and especially in India, the FARC in Colombia, the EPR and EZLN in Mexico, the MRTA in Peru and the NPA Maoists in Philippines. In Palestine, he supports the PFLP! What is interesting about this is that in many cases orthodox Maoists do not support non-Maoists like the FARC or Cuba or surely the MRTA on grounds that they are not Commie enough.

Yay!

He also supports armed separatists in the Basque Country, Kurdistan, Ireland (IRA), Sri Lanka and in India's Northeast.

If there are leftwing maniacs anywhere on Earth with guns and bombs, he backs them up 100% (other than Sendero Luminoso). That's some real consistency and style.

Living here in the US, one thing you notice right away is that almost every single human being you meet (who has an opinion on the issue) absolutely hates all guerrillas anywhere on Earth. This is true even for almost all US liberals, and even, incredibly, for many US Leftists.

The line of the average American is clear: All guerrillas are evil. They are all terrorists. In particular, Americans seem to really hate any kind of armed separatists or separatists of any type. This is kind of odd in that we were birthed via revolution, and there is no reason to fear separatism here as there isn't any armed separatism in the US (or anywhere in the Americas) and probably never will be.

So Americans have turned into some of the biggest state-fetishists on Earth. Only the state can have guns. Only the state must have a monopoly on violence. All guerrillas are terrorists, terrorists are evil, and they all need to be killed to preserve the civilized world. All separatists are scum, states alone have the right to draw borders, and self-determination will never be allowed to anyone.

Death squads are fine and dandy, and every state is a democracy, no matter how murderous. The people never have the right to take up arms against any state anywhere, unless I guess it is Communist.

In other words, Americans have turned their backs completely on the noble spirit of the American revolution and have become the philosophical heirs to King George's colonists. We have also become Israelis. They are colonists too. See any connections yet?

Machetera is definitely a blog after my heart. I get called a Stalinist a lot on here, but that's not necessarily true. I do defend Stalin in some ways, mostly just to counteract the nonsense about "the biggest murderer that ever lived", by pointing out the many great, humanitarian and life-saving things he did. He also killed a lot of people, and I think it many cases that was just plain wrong or even flat out evil.

Honestly, I would really prefer that we Lefties stopped killing people once we got into power. Other than the obvious moral questions, it has given the Right a gigantic shot in the arm by portraying us a the biggest murderers that ever lived. This has been so successful that many people around the world are frightened to let the hard Left back into power due to fear that they may start killing people.

So it is that I am a big fan of Castro's Cuba, a place where the state has hardly killed a single political prisoner since 1970. They put a few in jail, but that's not the same thing. By the way, I think the Cubans should go out of their way to treat the jailed political prisoners well, if only to deprive the anti-Commies of their propaganda snacks.

On the Majority Rights (careful - very nasty WN blog) blog a while back I was called a Castroite. That's not a bad portrayal of me.

There is such a thing, and the Castroite philosophy, a Left, and sometimes an armed Left, that is particular to Latin America, is quite well portrayed on Machetera. So if you want to see what a Castroite looks like, head on over. They've actually long had conflicts with anarchists, Maoists and even some Trotskyites.

The Castroite philosophy could be best seen in the revolutionary movements that arose in Latin America in the 1970's and 1980's. Prior to that, there were a number of small bands in Peru, Bolivia and Venezuela that were wiped out. These were often influenced by Regis Debray's flawed foco philosophy of armed revolution. Che's fated project in Bolivia in 1966 is another example.

The ELN and the FARC in Colombia are very much Castroite (especially the ELN), with the ELN having a very strong Catholic liberation theology flavor. The FARC is probably a bit more rooted in an indigenous Colombian Left with roots in that nation's particular history.

There are now branches of the FARC in Ecuador (FARE), Brazil (FARB), Panama (FARC), Venezuela (FARV) and Peru (FARP). The FARC extend all the way to Guyana, where they tax the gold mines. In 1984, the MRTA Castroites arose in Peru, but were eventually eclipsed by the Shining Path.

The Sandinistas of Nicaragua, the FMLN of El Salvador and the URNG of El Salvador and various small guerrilla bands in Honduras in the 1980's were all Castroites, and the FMLN and the Sandinistas still have Castroite roots, though they have moved to the Right.

Chavez in Venezuela, Correa in Ecuador and Morales in Bolivia are very much in this special tradition.

There are many aspects to Castroism, and it is hard to put it down succinctly. Typically, many are Catholics and there is a lack of hostility to religion. They are less anti-Semitic than most Latin American Catholics (anti-Semitism is big in a continent with few Jews), in part because some of their leaders have been Jewish.

They tend to be much more pragmatic than Maoists, and are often prone to be called revisionists by the latter. There is a strong anti-Yankee and anti-US strain. The cult of Che Guevara is very important. The role of the peasants is very strong, but not in a Maoist sense.

The role of urban workers is somewhat important but not crucial, in part because the area is not well industrialized. But the industrial and professional unions are strongly supported.

There is a lacks of sexual puritanicalism that typified many existing Communist states. There is a significant de-emphasis on the Indian Question (while it is recognized nevertheless. This in contrast to Sendero, who raised the Indian Question to prime status. There is a very flexible ideology that often incorporates electoral democracy and mixed economies.

Class is much more important than race or sex, though the Woman Question is important. Female guerrillas often make up very large percentages of fighters, and in guerrilla ranks all aspects of Latin American machismo that oppresses women are banned.

Machetera is characterized by support for Cuba and the FARC of Colombia. Along the way, there are also shout-outs for Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Rafael Correa in Ecuador. She also supports Peace Palestine, Mary Rizzo's pro-Palestinian blog. The PFLP in Palestine have always had a fondness for Che Guevara and Cuba, and Cuba has long supported the PLO. Furthermore, she is a fine writer, witty and smart.

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