Great Article on Abkhazia

Unbelievable. The London Review of Books publishes an excellent piece by Neal Ascherson on Abkhazia advocating independence for that nation*.

The Abkhazians and South Ossetians followed the post-colonial model of separatism. A colony or de facto colony gains its independence (in this case, we are replacing the USSR's republics with colonies, which is problematic, but the model works the same way).

As soon as independence is declared, the new nation attempts a nation-building exercise and says that it is a coherent whole, typically without consulting the parts of its own body politic.

There are parts of the new nation that may have desired independence from the colony or larger whole (But maybe not; note that Abkhazians so feared Georgian ultranationalism that they voted to retain the USSR.).

Anyway, as soon as the new nation is declared, separatists emerge and announce that they are not part of this new nation, which has barely existed in history anyway, and hence has little to no legitimacy in terms of "territorial integrity".

The former ferocious independence fighters quickly transform into fascist-like ultranationalists safeguarding the fake sacrosanct borders of the new nation with no historical existence.

In most cases, we progressives need to side with those who chose to break away from the very start.

It is little known, but this is the typical model for separatism in the world today.

This is the model that is operative in multiple separatist conflicts in Burma, India, Pakistan, China, Sudan, Angola, Turkey, Morocco, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Ethiopia, Russia, Georgia, Moldova, and any number of other places. These movements never entered into a national compact upon decolonization. They were fighting from Day One.

The article notes that while the South Ossetians may well be comfortable joining Russia, the Abkhazians are not. The Abkhazians want an independent state and have had a de facto one for about 16 years now, but no one wants to give them one. Why not? Because Russia supports the Abkhazians. Russia opposed the Kosovars, so the West lunged to support the Albanians of Kosovo, the only reason being "screw Russia".

As Georgia is little more than a US (and partially, EU) vassal state, it figures that neo-imperialism in its EU and NATO form are backing up this state's fake claim to territorial integrity. The article makes clear that incorporating Abkhazia into Georgia at this late date is a lost cause.

Neither are South Ossetia and Abkhazia being colonized by Russia, which is how the idiot Western press puts it. Neither place wants any part of Georgia, and that's that.

For the moment, they have entered into a completely free marriage of sorts with Russia. Free associational agreements are never examples of colonialism, neo-colonialism or imperialism. They are simply alliances among free actors, states in this case.

This was the error in the ridiculous Cold War model that saw a free and independent Cuba as a colony of some imperialist (to US Cold Warriors) or social imperialist (to silly Maoists) USSR. Cuba was free to leave at any time, and if anyone was exploiting anyone, Cuba (the "colony") was making out a lot better than the "colonizer", the USSR.

Colonialism has always been all about the loot, putting the conceit of the British-inspired White man's burden self-serving model aside for the moment. When the colony is getting the meaty end of the deal, and there is no exploitation of the colony and no coercion by the colonizer, there can be no colonialism or imperialism. Real simple.

The article discusses a particularly idiotic instance of Cold War insanity. Poland grabbed quite a bit of Germany after WW2, to the approval of a vengeful West, who also donated bits of Germany to other states. Germany is lucky to have survived at all. Germans were ethnically cleansed from Poland, and many never lived to tell about it. All in all, it is pretty sordid stuff, but paybacks are a bitch, as they say on the street.

German revanchism would seem to be the rallying cry of the very Nazi sympathizers and German nationalists that had been smashed into discredit by the war. So who would think that as soon as Poland fell into the Warsaw Pact, the West would suddenly throw all its weight behind a German nationalist-revanchist movement with Nazi roots?

Yes, the same West that delightfully chopped up Germany and donated hunks to Poland and twiddled thumbs while 100,000's of German Poles died in the process, now suddenly decided that the evisceration of Germany and donor operation to Poland was an outrage verging on casus belli for war. Insane? Of course. Realpolitik? You got it.

For decades, the West de facto sided with German neo-Nazism and agitated for a return of Pomerania et al to Germany. Willy Brandt finally put an end to this nonsense once and for all in 1971.

The West's embrace of Georgian fascist-like ultranationalism falls into this same quicksand of folly.

Recognize Abkhazia.

*The article downplays the differences between the Mingrelian - Georgian languages and the Abkhazian language, describing them only as mutually unintelligible. Mingrelian and Georgian are related and are members of the same family, but they can't understand each other at all, as Mingrelian and Georgian split 3000 years ago. Beria, Stalin's famous assassin, was a Mingrelian speaker, while Stalin himself spoke Georgian.

The family is known as Kartvelian and has no known relatives. Abkhazian, on the other hand, is Northwest Caucasian. Northwest Caucasian also has no known relatives, but I suspect a relationship at least with Basque and Yeniseien, as I did quite a bit of research on that a while back.

Despite living in close proximity to each other for centuries, Abkhazian is as different from Georgian - Mingrelian as English is from Chinese. And Mingrelian - Georgian and Abkhazian are as different from Turkish, Russian and Arabic (three closely neighboring languages) as English is to Chinese.

Georgian and Mingrelian are written in the very strange Georgian script. Here is an example of it, in this case Mingrelian. Kudos to any reader who can actually read this stuff:

რუსეთ რე ქიანა ბჟადალ ევროპას დო ჩრდილოეთ აზიას. რუსეთ ფართობით მსოფლიოშ უდიდაშ ქიანა რე. ცხოურენს კოჩი. რუსეთც გეშართუნს დიდ გეოგრაფიულ რეგიონეფ: ბჟაიოლ ევროპაშ ხორგული, ბჟადალ ციმბირიშ რზენი, ცენტრალურ ციმბირიშ ნარაზენი. ტერიტორიაშ თია უკებუ გვალამი რეგიონემც: ალტაი, ჩრდილოეთ კავკაცია, კოლიმა, საინი, ურალი. უმაღალაშ კოკი რე იალბუზ

East Germans Getting Nostalgic For Socialism

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 October 24:

Although there were reportedly some serious problems with East German socialism (the Trabant, the ubiquitous vehicle, was a piece of junk), with the recent chaos in world capitalism, many East Germans are now saying that they would rather have socialism than capitalism. A recent survey found that 53% felt that the free market was "unsuitable" and 43% said that they wanted a socialist system rather than a capitalist one.

Sales of Marx's Das Kapital have tripled since last year and increased 100X since 1990, although sales as a whole remain low. The publisher expressed amazement and said that he never thought the book would sell well again. He said that even bankers and managers are reading it to try to figure out what's going in with the turmoil in capitalist economics.

The switch from socialism to capitalism has not worked out very well in the East. Unemployment and poverty are very high. The outskirts of Berlin, Leipzig and the Baltic shore and doing well, but the rest of the region is doing poorly. It's actually suffering depopulation.

One of the problems with East Germany was that the factories were really not competitive by Western standards. After reunification, they were bought by Western competitors and shut down. That seems devious. The Left Party, a genuine Leftist party, now has 30% support in the East and is the most popular party.

One serious problem with Communism has been that, although in general it got rid of poverty, it was unable to provide more than a low standard of living. Nowadays, for better or worse, people want stuff. They don't want empty stores, lines, shortages and crappy products. Social capital only goes so far with people. This is going to be a real challenge for modern socialists.

In addition, there was often great economic growth for decades, but then it all bogged down into bureaucracy. Another vexing problem to be dealt with.

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An Apologetics For Zionism

This comment was left on my site by a fellow who called himself "Apologist for Zionism". He makes some very interesting points on here. We have dealt with his notion that every ethnic group deserves a state on this blog previously. Non-territorial nations certainly do not deserve a state at all, unless someone wants to donate one to them.

These comments are interesting because in many ways they are straight of out of Theodor Herzl himself. Herzl has been accused by anti-Zionists of being a Jewish anti-Semite, and he was a serious critic of the Jews. He felt that Jews and Gentiles could not live together and he felt that the fault was equally divided between the two groups.

He originally favored Jewish assimilation, but after the Dreyfus Affair in France in the late 1800's (this shocked many people because they thought that anti-Semitism in France was history by this time) he changed his mind and figured that the only way forward was for Jews and Gentiles to live in permanent separation.

He noted that when Jews did well, they become very successful businessmen and aroused the envy and wrath of the Gentiles, and when they sank into poverty, they bred radicals like rabbits.

When we sink, we become a revolutionary proletariat, the subordinate officers of all revolutionary parties; and at the same time, when we rise, there rises also our terrible power of the purse. Herzl, Der Judenstaat, 1896, p.91.

The commenter points out that many early Zionists were socialists who felt that one of the problems of the Jew was that he had gotten out of touch with the land itself (however, Jews were forbidden to own land for most of their stay in Europe). To cure this defect, these socialist Zionists supported a sort of back to the land thing that would get Jews' hands dirty and make them into salt of the Earth again.

The question of whether or not nations have carrying capacities for Jews is most interesting, but I don't even want to go there. The author suggests that the US is presently reaching such a capacity.

Another very successful minority similar to Jews is the Overseas Chinese. There have been some pogroms against the Overseas Chinese, but it's nothing compared to what Jews have been through. Only about 3% of the population, they control about ~70% of the economies of, say, the Philippines and Indonesia.

Now, no group of people, no matter how kind-hearted or progressive, is going to put up with that kind of bullshit for long, and there is no way that the Overseas Chinese work 23 times harder or are 23 times smarter than Indonesians or Filipinos. At the outside, perhaps they are 3.5 times more intelligent than Indonesians or Filipinos. This would entitle them, with 3% of the population, to ~10% of the wealth, not an insane 70%.

The problem with capitalism is that in amasses such insane fortunes in the hands of small groups who frankly have not earned it due to either their genes or their harder work. In so doing, capitalism virtually guarantees endless racial conflict.

There are differences between Jews and Overseas Chinese. The Overseas Chinese tend to keep their heads down, keep out of politics, and are not endlessly meddling in the cultural and political affairs of the nation - they just focus on making money. Jews focus on making money too, but they can't seem to help trying to change society, a habit that arouses mountains of anti-Semitism.

This is an interesting comment:

In fact, some theorists and historians even believe that it was the general emancipation of the Jews in the early-to-mid 19th Century that led to the Industrial Revolution in The West and the consequent rise of modern industrial-capitalism, which Jews also played and still played a large part in.

The countries in Europe where Jews had the most political and economic freedom, especially England and Germany, were also the first to industrialize on a large scale...coincidence?

That paragraph is most interesting, and led another commenter to rebut that Jews were never a part of industrialization in Germany and Britain; instead they were associated in Britain anyway with finance capital. The commenter then said he was reading a book by a guy named William Engdahl, A Century of War.

Engdahl is no anti-Semite, but he felt that the predominance of finance capital in Britain led to colonial adventures instead of building up domestic industry, to the eventual detriment of Britain. He then noted that in the 1920's and 1930's, German products were said to be better than British products.

I don't know about Jewish emancipation leading to the Industrial Revolution in Britain and Germany, but I believe that Jews played an essential role in the development of capitalism itself.

I also don't agree with the "German socialist" viewpoint that Hitler later picked up - along with Israel Shamir - that the Jews are a virus-like people, a race of rootless cosmopolitans without ties to the blood and soil and without loyalty to the nation, as the German capitalists supposedly had.

It's my understanding that in the 1920's, many top German capitalists, including factory owners, were Jews. Jews are now heavily involved in industry here in the US. Jews do not limit themselves anymore to finance capital, and they are not very big players in it anymore anyway, as it all seems to be taken over by multinational banks in the US, Europe and Asia with few to no Jewish connections.

The role of the Jews in finance capital in the past was quite large (they almost controlled European banking from ~1850-1930 or so).

The big players in the UK 110 years ago were not Jews but a couple of cabals, one centered around a man named Cecil Rhodes. This cabal also had ties to top UK universities like Oxford and Cambridge.

They went to the top boys schools like Eaton. They were active in colonialism and in groups such as the Oriental Society. They actually formed secret societies. It's true that Lord Rothschild was a member (at the periphery) of one of these secret societies, but he seems to have been the only Jew.

I really doubt that the dominance of finance capital (=Jewish money) in the UK 110 years ago is what led to colonial adventures. This group centered around Rhodes was very much into colonialism, and Britain was a huge industrial power in those days, mostly due to her Navy and her colonies.

Britain ruled the world from 1588 (the defeat of the Spanish Armada - and also the first stirrings of English nationalism - one of the first manifestations of classic European nationalism) all the way up until about 1935, when air power, notably German, successfully challenged British sea and colonial power.

German products have always been better than British products, especially fine machinery. I doubt the superiority of German fine machined products over such British products has much to do with Jewish money. There was plenty of Jewish money floating around Germany around that time too.

This cabal around Rhodes, I believe, continues to run The London Times to this very day, or at least they did in the mid 1960's.

At this point, the Jews are in Israel and they are not leaving. Radical Palestinians want to throw out every Jew who came after 1916 (The Balfour Declaration was in 1917). As a settler-colonist myself whose ancestors were still stealing Indian land for our settler-colonial project as late as 1873 in California (see Modoc Wars), this sort of thing makes me really uneasy.

Any settlement to the conflict in the Holy Land must take into account the safety of the Jews already there. I would hate to see a situation similar to Iraq where maniacal insurgents are running around slaughtering Jews at will and setting off car bombs and killing 100-200 Jews at a time. Arabs are Arabs, and I don't think Palestinians and Iraqis are all that different, except one comes from the Levant and the other from Mesopotamia.

I'm also not sure that Jewish-led industrialization in Germany (assuming it is a fact) led to the alienation and impoverishment of the rural people and the rise of Nazi blood and soil German ethnic nationalism, but it's a complicated question to be sure. The followers of the Nazis were mostly petit bourgeois, lower middle class office workers and the like. Rural dwellers were not so supportive.

Zionist Apologist writes:

Every ethnic group has a right to a state. It's a shame that the Jews had to steal Israel, but at least they have a place to call home now. Imperialism is unfortunately a part of humanity's dark history -- and we now have to deal with the dark consequences.

A homeland for Jews (whether in Israel or wherever else) is the ONLY WAY to 'heal' the Jews, and it'll take many generations. I'm sure you've heard the oft-repeated phrase [paraphrasing]: "Diaspora is the disease, and Israel is the cure."

The Zionists were considering places like Uganda or Argentina early on, and places like those would have been a better choice than Israel in the long run since the Jews would have then been able to develop an agricultural base economy, which is the root of a settled and stable nation-state.

However, those places were very rural and undeveloped and hence probably wouldn't have been successful (as the Jews saw many of their 'agricultural colony' experiments in Argentina and Africa and the USA and Canada collapse in dismal failure).

I have noticed that Ashkenazi Jews have a definite inability to settle anywhere in any substantial numbers that hasn't already been fairly heavily settled or where they don't have access to a nearby network of fellow Jews.

It is telling as well that the early Zionist ideals of hard work, agricultural and manual labor, and other mainstays of key Zionist doctrines are now being filled by imported (!) labor (often Asian or Arab) since so many Israelis 'dislike' that kind of work and all want to be lawyers and doctors and professors and journalists and bankers (surprise, surprise) rather than just another cog in Israeli society.

Israel is even having problems with their military draft now. But, you see, THE WHOLE POINT of the Zionist experiment was for Jews to become cogs in a stable Jewish society instead of always being the perpetual Jewish 'Other' in the societies of foreign peoples.

The Zionists also noticed that sometimes Jews tended to take advantage of often-times gullible non-Jewish peoples because of their general intelligence and capacity to facilitate commerce, and they wanted to fix that too.

In fact, some theorists and historians even believe that it was the general emancipation of the Jews in the early-to-mid 19th Century that led to the Industrial Revolution in The West and the consequent rise of modern industrial-capitalism, which Jews also played and still played a large part in.

The countries in Europe where Jews had the most political and economic freedom, especially England and Germany, were also the first to industrialize on a large scale...coincidence?

The problem with this, though, is that this Jewish-inspired industrialization tended to slowly choke the lifestyle and economic systems of the rural/agrarian people of those countries who obviously weren't Jews, thus leading to resentment (antisemitism) - hence the Nazi doctrine of "blood and soil" and their desire to eventually resurrect the German peasantry in the Slavic lands of Eastern Europe.

I have also noticed that every nation has a sort of Jewish 'carrying capacity,' i.e. it is unable to manage, hold, or absorb Jews in very large numbers until antisemitism starts to break out (for instance, history shows that antisemitism in Germany grew very quickly as more and more Jews from Eastern Europe fled to Germany and Western Europe trying to escape poverty or antisemitism or whatever).

And in some ways I think that the saturation point may be close to being reached in North America.I must say that an island nation might actually be best for Jews, as long as it could be mostly self sufficient. As Ezra Pound once said in one of his infamous WWII radio broadcasts: "Sell 'em Australia."

References

Herzl, Theodore. 1896. The Jewish State. New York: Dover Publications reprint in 1988. Originally published, 1946, New York: American Zionist Emergency Council, edited, original translation by Slyvie d'Avigdor revised by Jacob M. Alkow.

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Another Page on Endangered Languages of Eurasia

Focus on Europe and Russian Asia. This one includes the Caucasus and many languages in Europe that were not dealt with on the other pages. Depressing reading, but I doubt if the situation is really quite as bad as Tapani Salinem thinks it is. Still, this page implies that for a lot of languages, things are not looking so good.

The main problem is that many are not being learned by kids, or kids learn them and then quit using them at some point in favor of a larger area language later on.

It's too bad that more of these languages are not used in schools. It would be quite simple to have classes in the minority tongue (possibly with majority tongue textbooks) and make the kids take the majority tongue as a subject every year. They did it for a long time in Russia - kids had classes in the local tongue but were required to take Russian as a course for all 12 years of school. Worked great.

Italy and France are quite hostile to many minority languages, and even Germany is closing down Sorbian schools, probably out of anti-minority sentiments.

Russia is pretty much of a catastrophe, and Putin is amplifying that with his anti-minority projects. The state most friendly to minority tongues appears to be Finland. As usual, the Scandinavians come out on top.

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