The ride never ends

 

This story just refuses to go away... 

Imane Khelif is male, new study shows

Trans-boxing

 

A pro-Imane Khelif article from World Socialist Web Site (WSWS). They believe that the Russian-dominated International Boxing Association (IBA) faked the gender test according to which Khelif is a male when she defeated an up-and-coming Russian boxer. The IOC and the IBA are in conflict with each other, so Khelif could compete (as a female) in the recent Olympic Games. 

I have no particular opinion either way, but the Russia-related political shenaningans are obvious. On a more "esoteric" note, the WSWS doesn´t strike me as particularly pro-LGBTQ. They *do* sometimes strike me as "pro-Russian", not because they actually support the Russian Federation, but because they see the US and NATO as the main enemy globally. So it´s intriguing that they suddenly take the anti-Russian/pro-LGBTQ side! 

The right-wing attack on Algerian boxer Imane Khelif

Rasifiering

 

Tobias Hübinette har gjort en intressant upptäckt...

Invandringskritiska partier har allt oftare ledare med invandrarbakgrund

"Hon har röstat på trotskister"

Inte trotskist, men väl ledamot
av Franska Akademien!

Jag vet att det inte är Svenska Akademien som arrangerar Nobelfesten, men visst är det *lite* roligt att SD är portade från den, med tanke på...ja, nedanstående kanske? Svenska Akademien trampar i klaveret igen, förmodligen fullt medvetet. Dekadenter och litteratööörer! 

Nobelpristagaren är en politisk galning

Kritiken efter Nobelpriset: "Vidrigt och upprörande"

Aktivismen går före literatturen för Ernaux

What means fascism? Some marginal notes

The classical definition of fascism is something like "a reactionary mass mobilization directed against the labor movement and democracy as such, headed by an authoritarian right-wing party with pseudo-socialist traits", one of these being a mixed economy under strict government supervision. 

But is that really the only way fascism can manifest? Why can´t there be a neo-liberal form of fascism, for instance? After all, Social Democrats or centrists can adopt neo-liberal policies, so why can´t fascists? 

In the United States, David Duke - if I understand him correctly - calls for a free market economy. However, it would be weird not to call him a fascist. He has, after all, an almost explicit Nazi ideology on all other points! Indeed, most American far right-wingers probably call for a free market (or a combination of free domestic markets and closed borders). 

Other examples inlcude the Islamic Salvation Front in Algeria, or the BJP in India (or at least the earlier and more militant incarnations of the Hindutva movement). 

Another interesting question is if fascism can also take a Communist form. Most people would think of Stalin, but for obvious reasons, Stalin and mass mobilizations (at least in his home town) didn´t exactly mix. More relevant examples would be the Russian Red-Brown Bloc of the 1990´s, Sendero Luminoso in Peru, and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. 

Of course, the term "fascism" doesn´t have an essentialist meaning, so strictly speaking, we can define it anyway we see fit. (Stalin notoriously called the Social Democrats "social fascists"!) However, if stormtroopers start stirring up "the masses" against your union hall in the name of the Nation, the Great Leader and the free market, it would seem strange not to see this as somewhat analogous to Hitler or Mussolini...  

Daily reminder

Your daily reminder that Éric Zemmour is an Algerian Jew. 

But is it good for the Jews?

 

Eric Zemmour is a Berber Jew from Algeria. Just a little reminder. Make of that what you wish...

Secrets of fractional-reserve banking

"Secrets of the Sahara" is a Dutch documentary series about various nations in or around the Sahara. In this episode, "Niger´s Rapid Growing Population" (the title used on YouTube), the team visits Agadez and some other places in the West African nation of Niger (not to be confused with its southern neighbor Nigeria). Niger is one of the poorest nations in Africa, perhaps the world, yet its population is projected to double within the next 15 years. Currently, it has 23 million inhabitants, so presumbly they will be 46 million by 2035! The average amount of children per woman is seven, and half of the population is under fifteen years of age. 

The team visits a village where the traditional Muslim leaders are actively encouraging an even higher birth rate, with the simple argument that it´s "the will of Allah", and that´s that. The marabout claims to have 13 children himself. Something doesn´t ad up, since the traditionalists also prohibit modern medicine. So how can the birth rate be so high? The village marabout actually says he fathered a total of 26 children, but that half of them died! Are the women in these villages doing *anything* else than breeding, I wonder? The villagers even proudly display a 12-year old child bride! Or maybe polygamy is the answer, since the reporter then visits a very extended family...

Most of the documentary is about Agadez, a town that became notorious during the migrant crisis as a major transit point for West African migrants from nations outside Niger trying to reach North Africa and then Europe. In fact, it seems the town experienced something of an economic boom during the migrant crisis, a boom which ended the moment migration north became more difficult. 

The reporter is explicitly on the side of the traffickers (he actually calls them "smugglers"!) and bemoans the fact that the EU somehow got Algeria and Libya to send many of the migrants back to Agadez. It seems EU even paid millions of euros to the Nigerien government, money ear-marked for the smugglers (!), in order to stop the migrant streams. Or so the smugglers claim. They also claim that corrupted local officials in Agadez confiscated most of the money for themselves, rather than giving it to the traffickers. The top bureaucrat in the town, in his turn, complains about high administration costs and what not. Apparently, *he* had to pay somebody to get the applications for EU money processed at all! 

The documentary ends with somebody almost bragglingly informing the film crew that the smuggling of migrants in the direction of Libya is still on-going. Indeed it is, and quite openly, in broad day-light and in front of the cameras... 

Personally, I can´t say I mind sending money to Niger, per se. I mean, just print the damn money and ship them off, it´s not like they will cause inflation in our back yard anyway. Or so I´ve been kindly informed by the Federal Reserve and US Congress, LOL. 

On the southern border of Europe

If I were to ask you "were is the southern border of Europe", you would probably answer somewhere around Gibraltar. You would be wrong.

The real (geopolitical) border of Europe - where European forces try to stop immigration or combat terrorism - turns out to be...the southern Sahara desert. 

Mauritania, to be exact. "Secrets of the Sahara: Mauritania´s Dark Side" tells the story. The Dutch reporter often comes across as a racist White boy asking the natives *really* silly questions ("can you keep track of time, do you know how a clock works", etc), but I think it´s obvious he´s just playing dumb in order to get access to places normally not shown to foreign correspondents. In actual fact, the "stupid" reporter is fluent in three languages (Dutch, French, English) and manages to escape his handlers in order to interview dissidents and opposition leaders! 

Mauritania comes across as the land God (or Allah) forsook. 90% is desert, there is only one railway line, and the capital Nouakchott was built by beduins forced to leave the desert after a drought. There are still dromedaries on the city streets to this very day. Otherwise, Mauritania is notorious for its human rights abuses. Slavery was abolished in 1981, Mauritania being the last nation in the world to do so. In reality, Blacks and other dark-skinned peoples are still being enslaved in the country by the Arabic-speaking "White Moors" (who are far from White by Western racial standards). 

The reporter meets Moorish families in both the desert and the capital who seem to have Black slaves. He also interviews a Black opposition leader, two freed Black slaves, and a lawyer who says that many freed slaves simply go back to their former masters, since they have nowhere else to go. Its strongly implied in the documentary that the Mauritanian government actively discourages Blacks from leaving the country for Europe. Interestingly, there are Black guest-workers in Mauritania, from Nigeria and perhaps other places. One of their churches have been attacked by Muslim thugs. (I assume the native Blacks in Mauritania are Muslims, just like the Moors.) 

At the moment, Mauritania is a democracy of sorts, perhaps explaining why this documentary could be made at all. The Western world has decided to support the Mauritanian governments and military. One reason is the war on terror. There are Islamist terrorists in at least two of Mauritania´s neighbors, Algeria and Mali. You would think the Sahara desert would stop them from entering Mauritania. You would be wrong. One military officer freely admits that the desert is like a gigantic political vacuum simply waiting to be filled by somebody, that somebody being terrorists moving freely across the poorly defended borders. 

Another reason is the migrant crisis. Still today, Spanish coast guards are aiding their Mauritanian colleagues to patrol the Mauritanian coast in case migrants from other parts of Africa try to use this particular route to reach the Canary Islands (which is Spanish territory). I assume this means there won´t be any Western pressure on Mauritania to end slavery any time soon. The problem, of course, goes even deeper: What is "slavery" anyway? Various forms of slavery also exist in the Western world, for instance sex-slavery, and very little is done to stop it here, right in our back yard...

With that little reflection, I end this review.  

Aurobindo among the occultists

Guess where Aurobindo got his ideas from?

Of course it's Western occultism. Or maybe even Jewish occultism!

Max Theon and the Cosmic Movement

The Turkosphere scrambles for Africa

The geopolitical struggle is heating up all over the world. As the United States is becoming less and less capable of holding its grand alliance together, the usual fault lines are coming back with a vengeance. For instance, the Turkish attempts to create a Neo-Ottoman sphere in the Middle East and Africa, creating tensions with the Arab nations. The link below is to an article which argues that the US should support the Turkish ambitions in West Africa...

Why Turkey is making friends in West Africa

Anarchism for teenagers

At least in Sweden, Daniel Guérin's book "Anarchism: From Theory to Practice" is *the* book everyone interested in anarchism reads. I know from personal experience than all teenagers who consider themselves anarchists read it, or at least used to read it when I was in high school. I also read it and found it interesting and well-written. I think it was the first political book I ever read!

Guérin was a French left-wing intellectual, and wrote several books that are relatively well-known in leftist circles, including "Fascism and Big Business" and "Negroes on the march". He belonged to the PSOP, a rather small socialist party in France, roughly similar to the Spanish POUM and the British ILP. Later, he became an anarchist of the "platformist" current, which emphasizes class struggle rather than alternative lifestyles, and calls for a centralized revolutionary organization, something many other anarchists consider anathema. (The founders of platformism were Peter Arshinov, Nestor Makhno and Ida Mett. See my review of Arshinov's book on the Makhnovists for a background.)

"Anarchism: From Theory to Practice" was first published in 1965. However, the anarchist political myths are still the same, and the book can therefore still be read by students of intellectual history (or budding anarchists, perhaps). Guérin describes the main anarchist thinkers of the 19th century: Proudhon, Bakunin, Stirner and Krapotkin. He attempts a kind of synthesis of their rather disparate ideas. Other anarchists mentioned include Malatesta and the perhaps lesser known Diego Abad de Santillan. The section on the history of anarchism concentrates on those anarchists that were active in the labour movement and called for class struggle, rather than on hippies, religious communes or terrorists. All the usual anarchist stories are included: the French CGT, the Spanish CNT and the Spanish revolution, Makhno, Kronstadt... There is also a chapter criticizing "workers self-management" in Algeria and Yugoslavia. Today, this part of the book looks curious, but back in 1965, many left-wingers probably saw these nations as some kind of libertarian alternatives to Soviet Communism. In Sweden, the more moderate wing of anarcho-syndicalism was certainly positive towards Tito's Yugoslavia.

While Guérin isn't entirely uncritical of the anarchist tradition, "Anarchism" is nevertheless a work of propaganda, and should be read with that in mind. I find it interesting for the reason I mentioned earlier: many people got their first positive exposure to anarchism from this book.

PS. Perhaps I must point out, that I'm not an anarchist...

Surprising reflections

"Reflections on the Middle East" is a book containing short reflections on various Mideast topics penned by the leader of socialist Albania, Enver Hoxha. The book covers the entire period from 1958 to 1983. Hoxha comments on the Algerian war, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, developments in Egypt, the Iranian revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. There is also an extended article in which Hoxha expresses his great admiration for Arab and Persian culture.

Enver Hoxha's Communist regime in Albania broke with the Soviet Union after the death of Stalin and instead allied itself with China. After the death of Mao Zedong, Albania fell out with China as well, and became relatively isolated on the international arena. Hoxha's hostility to both the United States, the Soviet Union and China explains his political positions, which are sometimes rather surprising.

Thus, he expresses support for both the PLO, Khomeini's Iran and the Afghan resistance against the Soviet Union. In the reflections, Hoxha becomes progressively more dissatisfied with Nasser, and strongly supports Sadat's move to expell all Soviet advisors from Egypt. Of course, Sadat's subsequent peace settlement with Israel came as something of a cold shower. The reflections on Iran are initially critical of Khomeini and supportive of the pro-Albanian group "Toufan", but eventually becomes pro-Khomeini, even supporting Iran against Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war. (Pro-Albanian Communist groups around the world were split on Iran. Some disagreed with Hoxha's change of line and supported Iraq instead!) Khomeini's stand against both the United States and the Soviet Union may have been what commended him to Hoxha.

More surprising still is Hoxha's (muted) support for a two-state settlement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, although it's possible that he later changed his mind and started to support "democratic secular Palestine". This is never clearly spelled out in the reflections, however.

Less surprising, perhaps, is Hoxha's almost hysterical condemnation of Ahmed Ben Bella and his strong approval of Boumedienne's coup. Ben Bella had close relations with both Tito and Khrushchev, and attempted to mimic the Yugoslav experiment with "socialist self-management". Hoxha virtually salivates over Ben Bella's downfall, although it's less clear what he subsequently thought of Boumedienne. Another outburst is reserved for Hua Guofeng, presumably because of his break with Albania and warm embrace of Tito (who else?).

On a lesser note, "Reflections on the Middle East" shows that Albania didn't want to completely isolate itself. The Communist regime had a merchant fleet which used the Suez Canal and sent trade delegations to both Turkey and Iraq. The book also shows that Hoxha was perennially worried about a possible Soviet attack on Albania.

Frankly, "Reflections on the Middle East" is a terribly boring book, unless you know what to look for and have a strong interest in the rather narrow subject of Albanian foreign policy.