The Gaming Den

If you think massacring natives in the US wasn't exploitation-Capitalism based, you're missing the point. Most of the natives lived with socialist or gift economies, which Capitalism abhors. Capitalism demands the resources be exploited and those standing in the way (natives, politics, etc) are enemies.

But Frank has a point, Indians (dot, not feather) are being killed now: The poorest indigenous residents of India are being labeled 'Maoist' and airstrikes are being used against them, their homes and crops are being burned - so that Capitalists can use the resources in their lands.

-Crissa

I'm sure that they're a bunch of pacifists and that there is no possible reason other than the Krazy Kapitalist Konspiracy as to why their revolution is both popularly despised and unsuccessful.

Quick thought experiment, Crissa: what legitimate actions do you see a government undertaking to stop an insurgency with lack of popular or even regional support that advocates violent overthrow of the government? That answer would interest me.

Rural India is allowed to feel left out and they're allowed to organize. They're allowed to do just about anything other than encourage violence, which is the point at which they get to be shot at. Honestly, the truly rural poor seem to be caught between zealots on both ends and to simply characterize the conflict as some kind of Dickensian crackdown against poor people simply for the crime of being poor and sitting on top of minerals is precisely the sort of simplistic reduction that encourages conflicts like this to degenerate so easily.

Well, stealing land from those who live there is a good start in not creating insurgencies.

It's strange that you're for some insurgencies and against others. But apparently for those which involve stuff being stolen and sold and against ones where stuff is used for the people who live there.

-Crissa

ML wrote:My point is that it generally takes an autocracy to get dramatic quality-of-life improvements in short periods, and that the Soviet revolution achieved results from its effective use of that autocratic power, not from its communism.

But autocracies don´t, as a rule, produce quality of life improvements. As a system, autocracy has a very poor track record. Chile, Indonesia, El Salvador, Saudi Arabia, blah blah blah. Portugal and Spain were in basic economic stagnation until their autocrats died.

-Username17

Frank, it was clear that my argument was not that autocracy automagically worked without reservation. My point was only that autocracy not only has the greatest potential to achieve these social miracles we're talking about, but it also has the strongest historical record of achieving them.

Of course on the whole autocracy has a poor track record. It's ability to affect change does not make those results good, it only makes change more manageable. Just about every type of government in existence or history stinks, since there is no Shangri-La, never was, and probably never will be. We're left with a handful of examples of some reign or rule where things worked out well for their citizens and those few examples will never equal the weight of the failed attempts that preceded and followed them.

What an incredibly pointless thing you have pointed out.

...

Crissa, you're not answering the question. Taking land and repatriation are wrong, but that's not the question.

What legitimate action does a government take against an unpopular revolutionary movement that vows non-peaceful resolution?

To decry the Indian government for their actions while extolling the Maoists for theirs betrays a lack of concern for the subject that everyone is fighting for, which is the people. They're getting chewed up by both sides and the war does none of them any good. It makes you appear that you're more concerned with unpopular ideals than the lives of people you claim to be so concerned with, which is a decent sign that your ideals are shit.

If the revolution was popular and supported, then you could declare it a manifestation of the people's will and the people's sacrifices are unfortunate collateral damage in the cause. But that's not the case here. It's an unpopular movement that hides in the forest and kills cops and sets bombs and bullies villages and ultimately is one-half of an apparently pointless cycle of ham-fisted and overblown reprisals.

I believe her entire point is that the governemt is doing something assholish.

You can make a big deal about popularity if you want, but if the reason this unpopular movement exists is because the government decided to steal from them first, it doesn't matter if the people benefitting from it like it.

We don't condemn slave revolutions for attempting to violently overthrow the government. They didn't have a peaceful way of getting what they want, and we agree that what they want is something they 'deserve'.

If a 70% majority thinks it's okay to kill people and take their land after you kill them it doesn't magically become right, and you can't justify it by saying "Well after we started killing them, they started trying to kill us back, so now we are justified in killing them."

Actually, her point is that the government is fabricating Maoists in order to execute land grabs:

Crissa wrote:...Indians (dot, not feather) are being killed now: The poorest indigenous residents of India are being labeled 'Maoist' and airstrikes are being used against them, their homes and crops are being burned - so that Capitalists can use the resources in their lands.

Notably absent is any perspective on why the Indian government is running a counterinsurgency and notably, what shape a counterinsurgency fighting a violent and unpopular revolutionary movement would take. It's just "Capitalism = bad", as if somehow Maoists only existed as some kind of fictional fig leaf.

Most important is the distinction that they don't have popular support. At best, given their tight regional control, they're a secessionist movement. I can understand the criticism of the 70% majority deciding to screw the 30%, but that 30% doesn't exist. It's more like 10% of the population decided that they were going to start shooting and the other 20% of the population that they were supposedly fighting for, who didn't care much for them and didn't want the trouble of being caught in the middle of a revolution and counterinsurgency, took it in the ass.

And then Crissa equates the suffering of that 20% solely to the government, as if the magical non-existent Maoists weren't EXPLICITLY trying to create a Maoist Revolution by prosecuting a WAR and hiding amongst the peasantry and trying to bleed and undercut the government by goading them into making attacks against those same hiding Maoists.

This is not Capitalism vs Rural Poor, its a by-the-book Maoist People's War with most of the Rural Poor just playing the part of unfortunate bystanders.

It's also worth noting that India has two nationally functional Communist parties participating in the government already. The Indian Maoists are, at best, supported by geographically-limited rural reactions to the sustaining of a stupidly feudal caste system in desperately poor areas, not by some heroic rural people's universal reaction to the iron hammer of capitalism being swung by an uncaring government against every poor person in India.

Except you keep assuming that she is totally wrong about the actual issue under contention.

If the counterinsurgency was created for the sole purpose of murdering people and taking their stuff, it doesn't matter what percentage the 'insurgency' is, because the insurgency wasn't an insurgency until after they started getting murdered.

I don't care if it's just one person. If the US government decides to Murder Donald Trump and confiscate his property, that's still wrong, and If they later claim that the Trump family are insurgents when they try to keep possession of the property, even by violence, they are wrong. The Trump family is merely resisting the fucked up bullshit their government is doing.

I mean, I hate to go Godwin here, but the Jews were a minority too, and if they had fought back, we wouldn't call them insurgents.

You can't boldly assume that the government is defending itself against violence when they are the ones who committed violence first, and everything else has been a reaction to that.

I'm assuming she's incorrect about the issue under contention because her base assumption is that Maoists don't represent a threat to the Indian government and they're only being used as a cover to justify eminent domain-style land grabs.

The conflict was sparked by the sense that the peaceful Indian communist parties were revisionists deluded in thinking that they could win a communist change peaceably and has since been fueled by illiteracy, poverty, and rich hicks holding centuries-old prejudices over poor hicks, not any sort of direct government action against the poor.

Counterinsurgencies are brutal things and the government is following that predictable destructive path, precisely the course of action that a People's War is supposed to goad the ruling government into doing so that they can generate popular support against that government.

My main complaint is Crissa's characterization of the Indian government as acting brutally without any reason other than illegal appropriation, when its clear that the situation is layers more complex than that.

If you want to talk about brutality and inappropriate asymmetrical counterinsurgency operations then you can do that and that's a discussion. But to just handwave away any nuance in favor of your own personal bias because it makes for a convenient, empty and utterly bullshit "CAPITALISM SUX" contention is offensive.

So you are assuming she's incorrect because you assume she's incorrect?

Fuck you, present some evidence for one of your many assumptions.

Crissa's explicit claim was that they were calling non-Maoists Maoists just to kill them.

You can't just assert they are Maoist scum who deserve to die and expect anyone to take you seriously.

I'm assuming she's incorrect because I know what the fuck I'm talking about. My assertion that they're Maoist is self-evidential, as is their tenets regarding People's War.

That's what Maoists are. Fuck, Kaelik, I'm not here to handhold you through a history lesson. Google "Naxalite", "Historic Eight Documents", "People's War" or even fucking "Maoist". There's a reason they're not calling themselves Marxists and that has to do with a book called On Guerilla War written by this guy named Mao.

Seriously, Crissa states that the government kills fake Maoists to take their land and I'm the one that has to back up the assertion that:

1. a Maoist People's War is explicitly intended to deligitimize the governing authority by provoking generally ineffective-yet-bloody reprisals

2. the Indian Maoist movement came out of a rejection of extant peaceful means

3. it's stupid to state that an insurgency that's been around for 40+ years is fake


Seriously, these things are basic shit. It's like saying, "democracies involve elections" and "the American Revolution was intended to establish autonomy free of British rule". These aren't heavy concepts I'm throwing around.

Most importantly I don't consider them "Maoist scum who deserve to die", I consider them violent Maoist revolutionaries. That's it. That's where the judgment stops.

You honestly have no fucking idea what the fuck you're talking about. You sound like PhoneLobster.

Once again,

What part of "fake Maoists" is so hard for you to grasp?

If the government is calling them Maoists when they aren't in order to be assholes, then they aren't Maoists.

If they weren't Maoists before the government started killing them, then maybe they aren't even Maoists now.

Look: Here is a motherfucking timeline:

Crissa's timeline, I assume:

1) The first thing that happened is the government saw people had land and started killing them. There are currently zero Maoists.

2) People who kept getting killed, and tried (ever so briefly) to change things by peaceful means.

3) The Government kept killing people.

4) The people started violently opposing the government.


Your response so far has been:

"NOWAYZORS!, Event 4 occurred before everything else, but I don't have to present any evidence for this, because it's so obvious! Also, I'm not avoiding the question!" After you spent 2 pages ignoring that point and talking about other shit under the assumption you were right about the actual point in contention.

So here's the solution. If the people started violently opposing the government before the government started killing them for land, why not present anything at all for evidence of that.

When you specifically avoid ever addressing the actual question being asked, it makes it look like you are, well, avoiding the question. The best explanation for which is because you are wrong.

There are very expansive bauxite deposits under the forests which have been awarded by the state to a company to exploit.

There are very poor people who lived in those forests. They don't take kindly to merely being pushed away; it's not like they're getting any jobs from it (like the Americans who live in the coal areas now). So they get their villages and crops burnt, and kicked out.

The government declared them Maoists and gave medals to people for killing these indigenous peoples.

That's your counter-insurgency. Some people trying to build their homes and plant crops.

I don't understand your argument, ML. Apparently you think might makes right, when it supports capitalism?

-Crissa

I'll back off from the hostility and show you some actual historical facts since you obviously skipped over my post and didn't bother to do any research. That's cool, this isn't an academic forum.

Fundamentally you're arguing from ignorance of the situation and I apparently haven't addressed that directly enough for you. Crissa's concerns were much more recent and I was referencing what I thought were universal understoods about the situation from four decades ago.

Kaelik wrote: ...So here's the solution. If the people started violently opposing the government before the government started killing them for land, why not present anything at all for evidence of that.

When you specifically avoid ever addressing the actual question being asked, it makes it look like you are, well, avoiding the question. The best explanation for which is because you are wrong.

It's somewhat difficult to be concise when I don't know what you don't know, but here are the highlights:

In 1967, the Communist Party of India and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) - two separate organizations split from one body in 1964 - ran in the national elections, scoring minor national points and in some areas significant regional parliamentary representation. At roughly the same time there was a peasant uprising in Naxalbari; radical members of the CPI(M) who were threatened by the idea of a peaceful communism (assuming that any peaceful communism would be intrinsically neutered and revisionist) seized on the uprising as the sign of the Indian Marxist revolution.

It just so happened that the CPI(M) was the dominant party in the area of the uprising and happened to interpret it not as a Marxist revolution but as a pain in the ass ended up splitting the party. Again.

The splinter group basically decided (with Chinese backing) that they needed to run a violent Maoist revolution in order to achieve the change in society they needed.

So.

They took the label Maoist themselves, had more than one public conference with Mao's big 'ol head on the wall, made public pronouncements that they were all about the People's War, and told the peaceful commies they had been associated with that their peace-mongering was only kowtowing and that only wuppin' ass was going to bring about the change the proletariat needed. Plus they had open Chinese Communist support.

And still claim terrorist actions as their own.

http://parisar.wordpress.com/2009/08/17 ... f-lalgarh/

http://indianmaoist.blogspot.com/2007/0 ... ntral.html

They're calling for armed insurrection. When that happens and they go out of their way to usurp government control in remote areas, the fact that the government shows up in force and begins throwing down martial law is not because of capitalism, it is because that is how you run a counterinsurgency.

This is why Crissa's point is so horribly lacking in a wider perspective and why she needs to explain her nonsense.

The question of, "was there enough violence against the poor conducted in a systemic fashion designed to enrich the wealthy to justify a Maoist insurrection" is best answered by looking where they Maoists are strongest:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Corridor
http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/countries ... ictmap.htm

Basically, it's rural areas with intense illiteracy and poverty. There are other impoverished areas with less stark examples of caste immobility where the Maoists have failed to gain a foothold; they're generally only successful in places where the old power has failed to urbanize or destratify.


Here are some more links of varying attitude towards the Maoists:

http://naxaliterage.com/
http://www.achrweb.org/ncm/ncm.htm
http://www.sangam.org/2009/08/Notes_Cor ... p?uid=3647

My only point, verbosely and hamhandedly delivered, is that the conflict is no longer about capitalism but about two parties that do not trust each other to negotiate that each feel can win a protracted conflict.

Saying that its all about capitalism is just reductionist bullshit. It's about a cycle of violence and the inability of either party to envision or attempt to engage a solution that doesn't involve killing.

Crissa wrote:There are very expansive bauxite deposits under the forests which have been awarded by the state to a company to exploit.

There are very poor people who lived in those forests. They don't take kindly to merely being pushed away; it's not like they're getting any jobs from it (like the Americans who live in the coal areas now). So they get their villages and crops burnt, and kicked out.

The government declared them Maoists and gave medals to people for killing these indigenous peoples.

That's your counter-insurgency. Some people trying to build their homes and plant crops.

Unless, of course, Maoists are active in the area and killing people.

http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/db9 ... 0&RSS20=FS

http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/countries ... line08.htm

You're going to have to actually put up specifics since the Maoists are all over the place, killing people and actively taking responsibility.

I don't understand your argument, ML. Apparently you think might makes right, when it supports capitalism?

Actually, I'm a pacifist that finds most applications of violence abhorrent.

I think the turnabout is:

"Apparently, you Crissa think that murdering some middle-income mine worker is a fine and heroic thing, especially if it results in a few unrelated villagers getting cacked and turned into martyrs for whatever ignorant left-wing crisis de jour absent context you feel like espousing."

Do you see how pointlessly reductive that is and how it degrades dialog and understanding? Because I don't think you do.

Middle-income mine workers just spring into existence, to be slaughtered mercilessly by indigenous peoples who just happen to have had their homes and crops burned to the ground.

-Crissa

Yes, and their status as "employed" immediately marks them as suitable for murder.

Hooray!

You win this round, you clever miscreant!