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| Credit: Shree Ganesh |
Something called the Nipah virus is spreading in South Asia. There is no known cure or antidote, and the lethality is 57%. Or perhaps between 40% and 75%. So if the virus spreads internationally, it could potentially kill over half of the world´s population.
Oh.
Thank god, there is no indication that this will happen. The international spread, that is. Until next time?
Is this the end of the labor wing of the CIA? The Social Democrats USA are rolling in their graves...
Some scary stuff from Scott Carney. His main point is that Ukraine wouldn´t have been invaded if they had kept their nuclear weapons. Without them, "security guarantees" are worthless. Even when given by the United States (note Carney´s pique to Marco Rubio). So the obvious conclusion is for every small nation in a geopolitically volatile region to get their own nuclear weapons.
Carney references a study arguing that even a "limited" nuclear war between India and Pakistan, involving hundreds of warheads, would affect the climate *all over the world*, trigger famine conditions, and so on.
I´m not entirely sure what the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War has to do with this, however, since the potential nuclear standoff was between the United States and the Soviet Union, not regional powers. (Carney has written an entire book, "The Vortex", about this situation.)
Still, a very...ahem...interesting video.
Sheikh Hasina claims in her first statement from the Indian exile that the United States orchestrated her overthrow. My impression is that her government tried to maintain good relations with both China and India, and that the pro-Chinese connection angered the Americans.
There are also various conspiracy theories floating around, such as Hasina´s claim that the United States wants to create a "Christian state" on territory poached from both Muslim Bangladesh and Buddhist Myanmar!
The article linked below also mention Indian claims that the protests against Hasina were organized by China to pull Bangladesh out of India´s orbit, but that seems very unlikely. The new figurehead leader, Muhammad Yunus, strikes me as the centrist-liberal-globalist type.
To be continued?
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| Muhammad Yunus Credit: University of Salford Press Office |
Micro-credit is usually promoted as some kind of miracle cure for poverty. It´s often associated with Muhammad Yunus, who even got the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts. The link below goes to a radical leftist critique of this phenomenon published in 2014 (yes, I know that WSWS is a *very* controversial site). Oh, and Yunus was appointed de facto Prime Minister of Bangladesh just the other day...
Micro-credit and the return of debt bondage for the world´s poor
You would think Breitbart News (pro-Trump/pro-GOP) would express support for the overthrow of Bangladesh´s Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who by their standards must have been an evil authoritarian socialist, but instead they have published several articles de facto *supporting* her. I assume it´s the anti-Chinese/anti-Islamist angle that made them interested.
It´s not clear to me whether this is true, or simply Indian propaganda, India being the nation to which Hasina fled after the Bangladeshi military forced her to resign. India, while trying to maintain good relations with Russia, has bad relations with China, complicating Asian geopolitics considerably since Russia and China are now allies!
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| Sheikh Hasina and PM Modi |
An article from "Jacobin" which may or may not give some insights into the recent crisis in Bangladesh.
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| Grand Alliance mama? |
This could simply be a conspiracy theory, but it´s still worth noting. According to Indian sources, Sheikh Hasina was overthrown by Islamists acting in cahoots with Pakistan and China. Note that Hasina is a "leftist" Muslim, while the Indian leader Modi is a "rightist" Hindu, but my enemy´s enemy and so on...
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| Credit: Andrew Jameson |
Liberals feel betrayed by Muslim immigrants, who apparently control a small American town with the peculiar name Hamtramck.
Note the source: The Guardian, a left-liberal newspaper in the UK.
Well, good luck, guys! Or rather gals, since the liberals seem to be White women. How long before the Muslim males ban feminist and leftist organizations? Or before the Alt Right starts supporting the Yemeni-Bangladeshi council?
"What the Spartacist League Really Stands For. A Self-Exposure by James Robertson (The Speech the SL Wouldn´t Print)" is a classic pamphlet by the otherwise mostly unknown Communist (T) Cadre (CTC). The pamphlet was probably published in 1977.
Yes, we are in the murky demimonde of intra-mural Trotskyist polemics. While the CTC must have been an extremely small group, the other groups mentioned in the pamphlet weren´t particularly large or influential either, although the Spartacist League was notorious on the American far left (and occasionally outside it). In January 1977, the leader of the Spartacists, James Robertson, gave a public presentation in New York City titled "Towards the Rebirth of the Fourth International". While most of the speech was frankly boring and very "political" (judging by the excerpts published in this pamphlet), Robertson did say things which raised the eyebrows of two other Trotskyist groups present at the show, the League for the Revolutionary Party (LRP) and the already mentioned CTC. When the Spartacist League refused to publish a transcript of Robertson´s speech, CTC decided to do so themselves (they had tape recorded the presentation and the debate following it). Or rather extended excerpts from it. The LRP had already published their own account of the fracas. For years afterwards, Robertson´s scandalous speech was notorious among small Trotskyist groups all over the world. I´ve heard from an ex-Spartacist in Sweden that Robertson was drunk as a skunk during his presentation, and that he hardly showed himself in public after the 1977 debacle!
What went wrong? Many things, but what most upset the non-Spartacist auditorium was Robertson´s blatant racism and chauvinism. This from a guy who claimed to be some kind of revolutionary internationalist Marxist. Most blatantly, Robertson referred to Albanians as "goat-fuckers" (strictly speaking, he claimed that Marx had done so) in order to poke fun at the Maoists who believed that Enver Hoxha´s Stalinist regime in Albania had something important to say.
However, other ethnicities didn´t fare much better. The Greeks survive by "exporting their sons and selling expensive wrist-watches to each other". (However, Robertson believes that Athens is nevertheless "a big step up" compared to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem!) North European workers aren´t revolutionary since "North Europe is dripping with fat". Immigrant guestworkers aren´t revolutionary either. "When they are deported, they scream for the popular front". The US defeat in Vietnam isn´t important, since "not many people live in Indochina" (!). Blacks in the United States (in 1977, the Spartacist leader still calls them "Negroes") are reverse racists and want to kill Jewish shopkeepers, and this attitude is common even among the Black supporters of the Spartacist League. Blacks are also stupid, since they burned down their own ghettoes and now wait for the Jews to come back and rebuild them!
But then, many White leftists also fall short of Robertson´s high standards. The official Fourth International mostly picks up hippies, and at one point, Robertson even implies that the membership of his own organization is "a big pile of shit". So they must have been, since the Spartacists in the audience laughed and clapped every time Robertson made a disparaging remark about non-Anglo ethnics, most of the roaring laughter coming during his remarks about Albanian bestiality.
As Communist Cadre points out, Robertson´s remarks weren´t some kind of personal idiosyncrasy, but connected to Spartacist League politics on a deep level. Perhaps uniquely on the left, Spartacist defended the right of national self-determination of *all* peoples, including groups usually considered colonial settlers, such as the Boer in South Africa. They also defended the national self-determination of Israelis and Northern Ireland Protestants (not entirely uniquely, but almost). The Spartacist feared the "genocidal" nationalism of the oppressed, in effect painting the Third World as a gigantic whirlpool of reactionary tribalism, with one ethnicity constantly replacing the other as "the oppressor". Thus, Greeks and Turks were fighting it out on Cyprus, Turks and Armenians in Anatolia, Bengalis and Biharis in East Pakistan, pretty much everyone in Lebanon, and so on. And perhaps Blacks and Jews in the New York City ghetto?
Rather than drawing the conclusion that *all* nationalism is therefore reactionary (the anarchist and ultraleft take), the Spartacist League de facto took the "right-wing" position that certain currently dominant groups have the right of self-determination already under capitalism, these dominant groups always being the most "Westernized" and "modern" ones. (Nominally, the Spartacist tendency does say that if two peoples are "interpenetrated", none of them can lay claim to national self-determination under capitalism, but their *actual* position is that some of them really can - the ones the Sparts deem rational enough not to go on a killing spree in the ghetto.)
This went hand in hand with a generally Anglo-centric view of the world and the revolutionary struggle, clearly visible in Robertson´s speech, where all the important action takes place either in the United States or in the United Kingdom (which apparently isn´t "dripping with fat" in the same way as Scandinavia and Germany). The sole exception to the rule is Japan, which Robertson analyzed extensively (in contrast to irrelevant little Indochina), obviously because it´s the most modern Asian nation. Perhaps there is another exception, too, but in the opposite direction: Anglophone Canada, which the Spartacist leader simply writes off as "the fringe of the surrey" (the irony is palpable). Bizarrely, Robertson even asserts that the United States is the only nation in the world with a continuous revolutionary Trotskyist tradition *thanks to stable US bourgeois democracy*! Funny Lenin made it under conditions of Czarist illegality...
On another point, the CTC analysis was soon proven wrong. The CTC identified with the Marcy-Copeland Tendency, something as peculiar as a pro-Stalinist Trotskyist current (you heard me). It´s main organizational expression in the United States was and is the Workers World Party (WWP), founded by Sam Marcy, a defector from the more properly Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Outside the WWP were a couple of small and ultra-obscure groups which tried to be "more Marcyite than Marcy", among them the CTC. Naturally, the CTC attack Robertson for not being pro-Stalinist, even calling him a "neo-Shachtmanite". Max Shachtman was another defector from the SWP, but in the exact opposite direction compared to Marcy, charging the Trotskyist movement for not being anti-Stalinist enough.
The litmus test for all these groups came in 1956 when the Hungarians rose in rebellion against the local Stalinist regime and the Soviet Union. Marcy supported the Soviets, arguing that the Hungarian uprising was counter-revolutionary. The SWP, Robertson and (unsurprisingly) Shachtman supported the Hungarian rebels. To the CTC, which upheld Marcy´s position, this was Robertson´s original political sin. The CTC thus predicted that Robertson would soon evolve in an even more anti-Stalinist direction. They weren´t *entirely* out of their league, since Robertson´s peculiar speech only mentioned two Communist regimes, Albania and Vietnam, and then only to disparage them. However, Robertson´s actual trajectory turned out to be the exact opposite: around 1980, the Spartacist League became almost as pro-Stalinist as the Marcyites. Still, it´s interesting to note that the object of their Stalinophile appetites was the modern White European-dominated Soviet Union, rather than China, Vietnam, North Korea or Albania (or even Cuba). The LRP, the other small group present at the meeting, believed that the Spartacists were really yearning for a Sovietized America, hence in some sense still being Anglo-chauvinists.
The Spartacist League and the LRP still exist, but their websites are seldom updated anymore. There is, however, a kind of neo-Spartacist League in the form of the Internationalist Group, led by Robertson´s lieutenant Jan Norden (who had a fall out with the líder maximo circa 1996). The SWP and WWP are still around, too. The CTC has long disappeared. I´ve heard from a reputable source that the "T" in their abbreviation stands for "Trotsky", but usually the group´s name is spelled out "Communist Cadre", although "Communist T Cadre" is actually used at the front page of this pamphlet. I found it intriguing that the CTC, despite their highly sectarian nature, don´t sound completely insane. In fact, they come across as more politically serious than Robertson, whose speech is frequently rambling or just plain weird.
With that observation, I close this admittedly somewhat esoteric discussion.
