Red Revolution For Bangladesh

Bangladesh seriously needs revolution. Thank God the Maoists have taken up arms there to overthrow the system. They have not done too well, they are completely insane, and the Islamists have united against them, but we must wish them well. After all, only the Maoists are fighting to get rid of the system, the system that kills so many.
Reasons.

Electricity is scarce and most do not have access to clean water. Roads are in terrible shape and agriculture is lagging far behind where it ought to be.

In other words, it is a total capitalist South Asian clusterfuck. Get rid of it.

Even more reasons.

⅓ of rural Bangladeshis are landless (for contrast, 50% of Central American rural ppl are landless). All land reforms since independence have failed.

Truth is, if you are landless in Bangladesh, I would wager that you are probably starving. The land question is clearly the heart of the matter here. If someone disagrees that giving these folks land will keep them from starving, please speak up in the comments.

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Pakistan Adimst the Ruins

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 April 23:

Pakistan amidst the ruins. Read those figures over and tell me that she does not need socialism, and socialism, now. If the word socialism gives you the shivers, how about at least the socialism of Sri Lanka, which has managed to produce spectacular figures in all areas that Pakistan has so lacked. How can anyone possibly look at these kind of figures and tell me that capitalism works at all in the 3rd World?

They are just starting? Hell, they have had 60 years to practice. Enough already. Capitalism in South Asia is killing at least 8 million people every year, year and year out, no exceptions. That right there is an excellent reasons for Maoists across the subcontinent to take up arms to overthrow the existing system and put in whatever they choose.

Anything that kills fewer than 8 million a year is better than the status quo, right? So why worry about killing a few here and there? Is it worth killing a few to save a million? Of course it is, always was, always will be. Let us see the red flag fly over South Asia, not just Nepal.

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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.

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Benazir Bhutto: Pakistan's Cleopatra

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 5, 2008:

Via Joachim Martillo, we offer CIA: Mehsud behind Benazir killing? There's a lot of pretty interesting stuff here. When I wrote my post Benazir Bhutto Killed in Pakistan three weeks ago, I said that I thought that Al Qaeda did it. We still do not have a whole lot of evidence that this is true. I have now changed my mind; I think that the Pakistani ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence Agency) killed Bhutto.

But that is sort of like saying that Al Qaeda did it, since AQ, the Taliban and the ISI are all sort of interlocking entities in some ways. More precisely, the are individuals and even powerful factions inside the ISI that have very close ties with the Taliban and Al Qaeda. I am certain that the ISI knows exactly where Osama bin Laden is most of the time and is just refusing to turn him in to the US.

The CIA blamed Baitullah Mehsud, a major Pakistani Taliban leader in South Waziristan, for the killing. But Mehsud himself is generally considered to be an ISI asset. The only evidence that the Pakistani government has against Mehsud is a phone call after she was killed. The call supposedly takes responsibility for the killing, but instead it is more congratulatory than anything else.

The Pakistani government says that at the time of the call, Mehsud could not have known about the killing, but that is ridiculous, since it was all over the TV screens of most of the nation by that time.

The Pakistani government called Scotland Yard in to determine the cause of death, but not, notably, to investigate who did it. The investigation proved that the Pakistani government lied after she was killed when they said she fell and hit her head on the shaft of her limousine cover.

Scotland Yard proved that she was killed by a gunshot, as was clear from some of the videos released later, which showed the gunman firing a gun and Bhutto's body jerking backwards right afterwards, whereupon she fell into the limo. That the Pakistani government deliberately lied about how she died is telling.

So is the fact that they immediately washed down the street afterwards, destroying all evidence, supposedly because it was a main street that got hit and it needed to be open for traffic immediately.

What garbage. I assure you that if Hilary Clinton of John McCain was hit by a closeup gunshot followed by a suicide bomber that killed 20 supporters on Madison Avenue in New York, that street would be shut down for a bit, possibly even days. The press would be dogging all over LE to not miss a thing as the conspiracy theories immediately sprouted all over the Internets.

So, she was shot several times by the shooter, apparently from only a 5-10 feet away. That right there suggests it in not Al Qaeda, since Al Qaeda usually does not use a single asset like that, or if they do, they have him blow himself up with a sui-bomb, destroying both evidence and the chance that he will be interrogated and spill.

A single shooter is more like the ISI - this is one of their favorite ways to kill people. Bhutto pretty much deserved to be killed anyway, but not by the ISI. She deserved to be killed by the supporters and relatives of her very own brother, whom Benazir had murdered because he was a threat to her feudal-like dictatorship at the head of her Pakistani People's Party.

Yes, in 1996 under Bhutto's reign, a shooter killed her own brother while he was surrounded by 200 Pakistani police and security forces in front to a home. By the way, all of the surrounding streets were sealed off by the same security guys, who of course had nothing to do with the killing.

Well, anyway, the shooter somehow penetrated the cordon blocks around the area, then mingled inconspicuously with army of 200 cops, then he shot Bhutto's brother and close range, and then, get this! He escaped! He escaped from a 200-cop crowd and made his getaway through the locked-down security cordon! I mean, these Pakistani killers are positive Houdinis.

Well, of course, Benazir, who hated her brother, denied having anything to do with the killing. Benazir is just as nasty as the Ptolemaic Greek dynasty that ruled Egypt, of which Cleopatra was a member. This glorious dynasty consisted of inbred and racially pure Macedonian Nazis.

The Afrocentric fools who say that Cleopatra was Blacks are silly - the Ptolemaic line guarded their Macedonianness better than Nazis guarded Germanness - and they hated all other races like good little Nazis too.

The Egyptian city Alexandria, of which the Macedonian Queen Cleopatra held sway as Queen of the Macedonian colony of Egypt, was a racially pure Macedonians-only city, and the despised Egyptian "niggers" were not allowed entry, or perhaps only as slaves.

So despised were the dark-skinned Egyptians that it was inconceivable that any Macedonian monarchical supremacist would father a child by one. It is true that in the declining days of the Egyptian Empire, say the last 100 years - imagine the collapse of Rome in the Lower Nile - Black, or actually Mulatto Nubians, ruled Egypt. But this is a far cry from the Black Egypt the Afrocentrists pitifully claim.

Cleopatra's Ptolemaics spent most of their time having wild incestuous sex with each other and then, Praying Mantis-like, killing their own brothers, sisters, Moms and Dads to grab the loot. This is who Cleopatra was! Nice person! an exhaustive review of the non-Blackness of Cleopatra via Black author Eugene Stovall, see here.

If you haven't noticed, this excursion was intended to obliquely compare these Ptolemaic animals with the various feudal clans (called politicians) that have ruled and poisoned Pakistan since its founding, and to compare Benazir to Cleopatra. Like the Ptolemaics they are addicted to offing the opposition - its positively a Pakistani pastime, like tea and cricket.

The only Ptolemaic thing I guess the Pakistani elite doesn't do is have tons of incestuous sex with each other, being good Muslims and all. Benazir has the equivalent of slaves in the debt peonage farmers on her feudal estate. And like Cleopatra, Benazir is being preposterously eulogized and virtually worshiped in her demise.

Immediately after the shots that killed Benazir, there was a suicide bombing to kill the shooter and destroy the evidence in the shooter and everything around him. This once again is more ISI style, as Al Qaeda usually doesn't do it this way.

Scotland Yard was only there to tell us that the Pakistani government lied about how she was killed, not to investigate who done it, because it's the Pakistani government that done it. Scotland Yard detectives, off the record of course, said that the Pakistani government, possibly the ISI, killed her. CIA guys are saying the same thing off the record.

The investigation of who done it will be done by Pakistan itself, which means they will never find the true authors of the crime. But it's kind of like asking OJ to find "the real killer" anyway.

Prior to this, the Pakistani government tried to kill her as soon as she got off the plane. Her welcome home rally on a major street in Karachi was hit by several simultaneous blasts, apparently suicide bombers and then multiple bomb cars or suicide bomb cars.

Once again the Houdinis and the most incompetent police on Earth were skillfully utilized by the would-be assassins. This attempt killed about 140 of Bhutto's supporters, a horrible crime, but I guess they deserved it for supporting her, right?

You think penetrating a mob of 200 cops takes skill? Forget it. In this attack the devious little assassins penetrated ~7000 security forces. These 7000 security forces were deliberately chosen from the dumbest classes of all, because all 7000 decided to go on dinner break simultaneously right before the killing!

Then someone screwed up and all of the lights "accidentally" went out. It was one darn thing after another. Then the bomb cars and sui-bomb dudes all went off one after the other.

Of course the government had absolutely nothing to do with this attempt either. These opposition candidates just have the darnedest luck! The Pakistani government first said it was those evil jihadi dudes that done it, then noted that there will be no investigation of the attempt. Why no investigation? Who knows, probably a practical joke of some sort. Wow, what a madcap bunch these Pakistani government guys are.

Right after the Bhutto killing, there was a serious attempt on the life of Nawaz Sharif, also running against Musharaff. The government had nothing to do with that either, of course.

What's clear is that the Pakistani government is trying to kill of lots of its most threatening opposition candidates, and with the article below showing how the CIA is outrageously supporting the Pakistani government in these nefarious deeds, the US is behind the project. Would anyone sell life insurance to any Pakistani opposition politician.

So, get this. The US is backing up the ISI-Al Qaeda-Taliban as they try to Final Solution all of the opposition candidates to Musharaff. Why? God knows. Probably another of those cases where the US just blindly supports an ally no matter what they do, because the alternative is considered to be so much worse.

It's said the US government supported Bhutto, but that is not really true. It's more like they wanted her to be some figurehead in Musharaff's dictatorship, but not to unseat him.

It's said that Bhutto is the champion of women's rights in Pakistan. Well, maybe today, but yesterday she was as bad as the Saudi monarchy. Under President Zia and Bhutto, there was an Islamization campaign, mostly to build up a fundamentalist guerrilla base to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan during the 1980's.

This had the effect of littering Pakistan with idiotic madrassas that now churn out fundamentalist cretins by the busfull, ready to go fight for Osama bin Laden. It also set off the Sunni-Shia wars in Pakistan, which had been relatively quiescent before.

This is because Saudi Wahhabi preachers were brought in to teach Saudi Islamo-Nazism to the gullible ignoramuses in the "schools", where religion only was taught, all else being the work of the Devil and all.

As the Saudis are the main force in back of the mass slaughter of Shiites around the world that has been going on for decades now since the Iranian revolution, Shia-hatred was spread in these schools, morphed into the usual Sunni Shia-killing death squads, and Shia Sunni-killing death squads formed in retaliation.

As is the case in most of the Muslim World, Shia bodies piled up more than the reverse. The Pakistani government, mostly Sunni, has more or less supported the mass slaughter of Shia due to the common Sunni Nazi-like hatred of Shia Muslims.

During the Islamization campaign, a set of laws called Hudood Laws were put into place, which were horribly anti-woman. Women were imprisoned after they had been raped, a sort of an honor killing reaction cultivated by the Arab woman-hating, male chauvinist values of family honor that marinated the Islamic stew in Pakistan for centuries.

This is part of a larger cultural area infected with the negative aspect of Arab cultural values, possibly extending to what Carroll Quigley called the Pakistani-Peruvian Axis. It's more sensible to see this area as a crucible of Arab culture than as one of Islamic culture, as the two are not the equivalent. Pakistani feminists protested these evil laws, but Bhutto refused to amend them during her term. Some feminist.

Although the PPP was formed as a socialist and secular party and is a member of the Socialist International, that was mostly campaign fodder to get elected. Once they got in, they didn't do much of anything to redistribute wealth in this semi-feudal land, Benazir being a feudal lordess herself and all.

She also helped form the Taliban that took over Afghanistan and horrified the world. Under Taliban reign, Pakistan was one of only three countries on Earth that recognized the Taliban.

After she returned to Pakistan this year, this histrionic political actress had morphed into a fighter for secularism and her former Taliban buddies were now her worst enemies. All the socialist talk had been dropped long as per US demands during her administration of the 1990's.

So why was she killed? Well, because she said that several high-ranking members of the Pakistani government wanted her dead, and she pledged to go after the ISI's "jihadi asset" option. More to the point, Pakistani Islamic nationalists saw her as bringing the US into Pakistan in the form of a large US land invasion, from Afghanistan, of the Pakistani tribal territories in the West.

Along with this was the fear that USreal (the US and Israel joined at the hip) would concomitantly conspire to neuter Pakistan's prize atomic weapon arsenal. A US invasion of the Territories, not necessarily such a bad idea in theory, is deadly in terms of Pakistani Islamic nationalism - the public will not support such an affront to their sovereignty.

The neutering of the nuke option is also deadly to Pakistani nationalists in the military, as it castrates their best defense against the Indian enemy - the principal enemy around which most Pakistani foreign and military policy revolves. So Bhutto was seen as an agent of the US neoconservatives and probably Israel at a more remote level. A good argument then is that the Pakistani military itself had her killed.

Robert Fisk and Juan Cole (here, here and here ) have both suggested that the Pakistani government killed Bhutto, and that's expert testimony enough for me. An essential website for inside dope about Pakistan, especially the Al Qaeda-infested Western Territories, is here.

On January 18, dozens of Islamists were killed in battles right inside Dera Ismail Khan, a major city which is outside of the FATA agencies where the problems are worse and into the much more civilized NWFP districts.

A recent NY Times article talked about how the Tehrik-e-Taliban (Mehsud's grouping of all of the Taliban, Al Qaeda and allied Islamists in the West) now controls some of the outer suburbs in Peshawar itself, and stages one attack a week in this major Peshawar District city.

Here is a very nice copy of the Northwest Frontier Provinces and the Federally Administered Tribal Agencies. In FATA, the Pak Taliban now control the North Waziristan, South Waziristan, Mohmand and Bajour Agencies. They have de facto control over the Tank, Bannu, Swat, Dir and Shangla Districts in the NWFP. The Kyber, Orakzai and Kurram Agencies are threatened in the FATA.

In the NWFP, the Dera Ismail Khan, Larki Marwat, Karak, Hangu, Kohat, Peshawar, Charsadda, Nowshera, Mardan, Malakand, Chitral and Kohistan Districts are all threatened.

Click on the map for better resolution.

That the Pakistani Taliban are deep into these two major cities is terrifying, and indicates there is a real insurgency in Pakistan, somewhat akin to the Sendero Luminoso insurgency in the 1980's in Peru in intensity. There's been some very heavy fighting in the NWFP and especially South Waziristan Agency lately, with ~120 jihadis being killed on January 19 alone. Great up-to-date details of this war are on Roggio's site, Long War Journal - no one does it better.

Martillo's title below suggests that the CIA killed Bhutto. It's always a blast to accuse the CIA of killing someone, but in this case it's a bad call. The CIA had absolutely no sane reason to eliminate Benazir Bhutto. Recent anti-Semitic claims that nefarious US Jews called Zionist neoconservatives had Bhutto killed are even more absurd. As Martillo's piece notes, Bhutto was the neocons' best hope for Pakistan.

CIA: Mehsud Behind Benazir Killing?
The CIA Had More Reason!

by Joachim Martillo

The January 19, 2008 issue of the Boston Globe published a CIA claim that South Waziristan tribal leader, Baitullah Mehsud, who maintains strong ties to al-Qaeda and an alliance with the Taliban, was behind the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. The article is entitled CIA Says Pakistan Tribal Head Behind Assassination.

Because Neocons want the CIA to have a free hand to operate in South Waziristan fingering Mehsud serves the interests of at least some US government officials even if there are many reasons why assassinating a possible opponent of Pervez Musharraf or Nawaz Sharif is not obviously in the interests of either al-Qaeda or the Taliban.

The politics of Pakistan and of the assassination of Benazir are no clearer today than they were when Who Killed Benazir Bhutto? appeared on Jan. 1, and the apparent attempt of Fatima Bhutto to reach out to other factions of her family (Fatima Bhutto: Farewell to Wadi Bua*) seems to have failed (Fatima Bhutto Breaks Her Silence, Questions Benazir's Will, Bilawal Being the PPP Chief).

Not only is the intra-family conflict deep and complex (The Other Bhutto), but there is also an Islamic sectarian aspect to the national politics of the Bhutto family, which has Shiite origins. (Zulfikar, which is Benazir's father's name, is the name of Ali's famous sword and is rarely found as a name among Sunni Muslims. Benazir was, in fact, half-Iranian through her mother.)

In majority Sunni Pakistan, the Bhutto's were almost forced into secularist politics, and naturally the Saudis favored Nawaz Sharif over Benazir.

In terms of her international politics, Benazir was directly involved with Neoliberals as Benazir and the Jews: A Love Story from The New York Jewish Week reports. She was also indirectly involved with Neoconservatives through Husain Haqqani, who served both as spokesman and also as top aide to her for over a decade.

Haqqani is an important figure at the Hudson Institute, which is a fanatic Neoconservative think-tank associated with racist ethnic Ashkenazi American ideologues and subversives like Norman "Bomb-Iran" Podhoretz. (See Poverty Fuels Extremism by Husain Haqqani [War on Terror in Pakistan].)

Notes

* Fatima was probably sincere. Sometimes it is hard to remember that the Bhutto clan are actually a real family.

From Daughter of Destiny, An Autobiography, by Benazir Bhutto, pp. 257-8.

The phone rings constantly from Los Angeles, London, Paris -- my mother's friends and relatives calling to congratulate her on my release [in 1984 from prison in Pakistan]. I wasn't ready to talk to anyone yet, and only spoke to Yasmin and Dr. Niazi in London. Ardeshir Zahedi, a friend of my parents and Iran's former ambassador to the United States, arrived with caviar.

My mother, Sunny, and I stayed up talking through the night. It all seemed so unbelievable. Yesterday I had been a prisoner. Today I was free, with my mother and sister. We were together. We were all alive.

Mir! A little brown-haired girl pulling at my coat! "Meet your niece, Fathi [Fatima]," Mir told me, standing in my mother's flat on my second day of freedom. Was my brother really standing in front of me? I saw his lips moving, heard my own voice responding. The noise of our reunion must have been deafening, but I can't remember a thing we said.

At twenty-nine, Mir looked so handsome, his dark eyes flashing one minute, gentling the next as he lifted his eighteen-month-old daughter to give me a kiss. "Wait till you see Shah," Mir laughed. Shah had been eighteen the last time I'd seen him, just a boy. Now he was twenty-five with a longed-for mustache.

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