Tag Archives: Cuba

Brexit, free speech, historical, historical revisionism, immigration, Jewish lobby in UK, London Forum, MPs, Party Politics, Reminiscences and Musings, Russia and Russian relations, society, The Great Replacement, Uncategorized

Disordered and Infantile People

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I am moved to write this by a couple of stimuli. First of all by a UK Labour Party National Executive Committee delegate (I think on the NEC as “youth” representative) to some recent conference in Cuba, and who said something like how wonderful it was to be in a country which showed how real socialism worked.

The second impetus came from an interview I heard on BBC World Service radio: an interview with an “artist” of whom I had never heard, called Tania Bruguera. Apparently, her father had been a Cuban diplomat and politician, and had actually handed her over aged 7 (or maybe I misheard and it was 17) to the security police with the statement that she had said anti-“Fidel” things and that the security police should do with her what they liked. She now says that that was a result of the Cuban system of selfish save-your-own-neck denunciation (rather than her own father being a complete shit, which is what she probably really thinks).

I looked up her “art” (“installations”, “performance art” etc). Unimpressed. To me, it looks like talentless rubbish. Having said that, she has the right to do it, which right is not accepted in Cuba. She is allowed to travel fairly freely. These days, she gets hassled and threatened, at times arrested, though not simply shot or chucked into a concentration camp or prison, which is what might have happened in the 1960s or 1970s.

There is the nagging feeling that Corbyn and many around him actually view states such as Cuba, 1980s Nicaragua, or even the Venezuela of recent years as success stories. I have previously blogged about Corbyn’s almost fossilized politics and policies, as well as his friendly or supportive attitude towards Cuba:

https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2016/11/27/castro-and-cuba/

As regular readers of this blog will know, I am not totally hostile to Corbyn and at least some of his supporters (vis a vis the misnamed “Conservatives”), inasmuch as the Corbynists want to create a more equitable society in the UK, want to control or remove the Jewish-Zionist influence which has been so pervasive since about 1989, want people to have decent health, housing, social security etc. The devil, however, is in the detail.

The intellectual inconsistency of many of the Corbynists is shown by the fact that while they oppose Jewish exploitation of and behaviour toward the Palestinian Arabs, they ignore the same pattern when Jews exploit British, German or French (or Russian!) people; they also often still unthinkingly parrot “holocaust” propaganda. Corbyn and John McDonnell are themselves prime examples.

Another example: Most people accept that, in any market economy, more labour available means lower unit labour cost. Many of the Corbyn-Labour people disagree. They say that mass immigration makes no real difference to pay, even at the lower levels. Employers are to blame for exploiting employees and government is to blame for not simply setting a high minimum pay level. Faced with that kind of economic illiteracy, one tends to shake head and refuse to argue. Those people, though, genuinely think that all that has to be done for paradise to descend is for the State to lay down and enforce pay levels and, indeed, price levels.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman said, many years ago, that one can have a welfare state, and one can have open borders (and consequent mass immigration), but one cannot have both. When will Labour MPs and members wake up to this?

While there is room for relatively minor tinkering with pay and prices (minimum pay, enforced cheap prices in targeted areas such as public transport etc, even Basic Income —which I favour—), for the State to overwhelm the economic sphere is to invite the economic paralysis that caused even Cuba (and, famously, 1980s China) to introduce quasi-free market reforms, as indeed did Lenin himself in the Soviet Union, via his New Economic Policy of the 1920s. Complete State control of the economy leads to shortages or even economic collapse, as we see in Venezuela. I do not see much understanding of these truths in Corbyn or McDonnell.

It is in relation to mass immigration that we see the madness most obviously. In a sense, this is unsurprising. Polls have shown for some years that Labour is mainly voted for by the “blacks and browns”, in the sense that the one demographic which is very pro-Labour is that of the ethnic minorities (except the Jews, who hate Corbyn’s anti-Zionist tendencies).

I should not let anyone reading this go away under the misapprehension that I “prefer” the Conservatives to Labour. I oppose both main System parties, and Labour is at least (in parts, in some senses) anti-Zionist now. I also despise what the Conservatives have done since 2010 to trash society. However, anyone who thinks that Labour is a real alternative need only look at the total deadheads around Corbyn. Look at Diane Abbott, Dawn Butler (both of whom might well be Cabinet ministers under a Corbyn prime ministership!), or the recently disgraced MPs Kate Osamor and Fiona Onasanya (the latter will almost certainly be in prison soon). Not only blacks, by the way: Angela Rayner, for example, would probably be a Cabinet minister under a Corbyn government. Words start to fail…

I favour Labour over Conservative not because I imagine that Labour’s idiots are actually able to operate a government, but because

  • Corbyn and many of his supporters are now fighting directly against Zionism here in the UK, not merely in the Middle East; and
  • a weak government under Corbyn can lay the ground for social nationalism.

Notes

The title of this blog post of course refers back to the 1920 Leninist pamphlet usually referred to as Left-Wing Communism, An Infantile Disorder [Детская болезнь “левизны” в коммунизме], perhaps more accurately translated as The Children’s Illness, “Leftism”, in Communism. However, in using the words “infantile” and “disordered” to refer to some aspects of “Corbynism”, or some people in Corbyn-Labour, I do so advisedly…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tania_Bruguera

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/sep/26/tania-bruguera-interview-cuba-tate-modern-turbine-hall

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/dec/06/cuba-artists-tania-bruguera-arrest-crackdown-decree-349

https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2018/12/02/troop-cartload-barrel-or-family/

https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2018/12/21/deadhead-mps-an-occasional-series-the-fiona-onasanya-story/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Economic_Policy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Economic_Policy#Disagreements_in_leadership

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Economic_Policy#Influence

Further Thought, 2 January 2019

I thought to include a few examples. Here’s one. Stupid enough to state on UK TV that she is “literally a Communist”! Hardy ha ha…but note that her absurd statement did not make her a pariah, despite the hugely bloodstained history of Communism/Socialism. Now what if she had said that she was “literally a National Socialist”? Hm…Ash Sarkar’s statement did not prevent her from continuing to write for major newspapers occasionally, and also to appear on TV from time to time. The Jewish influence over the mass media is right in front of us, and in the case of TV, “literally”!

Check out her Twitter profile!

“Ash Sarkar

@AyoCaesar

Senior Editor . Literature bore. Anarcho-fabulous. Muslim. THFC. Walks like a supermodel. Fucks like a champion. Luxury communism now!“

Here is her Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ash_Sarkar which, unbelievably, states that she “lectures in global politics at Anglia Ruskin University” [former Anglia Polytechnic].

Wikipedia adds that “Sarkar’s great-great-aunt, Pritilata Waddedar, was a Bengali nationalist and an active participant in armed struggle against the British Empire in 1930s Bengal. Her grandmother is a hospital carer…Her mother is a social worker who was an anti-racist and trade union activist in the 1970s and 1980s. Sarkar’s mother helped “organise marches…“

“The Times has described her as “Britain’s loudest Corbynista“…and Dazed magazine said she is one of “the voices resetting the political agenda in the UK”.” [Wikipedia]

Basically, an enemy of the British people.

and take a look, or rather listen, to one “Liz from Leeds”, whose incredibly naive and just plain wrong (inaccurate, ahistorical) idea of, inter alia, “why Soviet socialism failed” is actually unintentionally funny. “Novara Media” (the collective of Corbyn supporters Ash Sarkar, Aaron Bastani etc) tweeting that “Liz from Leeds” was correct! [the black woman shown is the TV show presenter]

Hey, “Liz from Leeds”! If you ever read this, I saw the cartoon below and thought of you!

dum4achxgaaxc6f

As for Ash Sarkar, she is not universally respected, even on Twitter! See below…

https://twitter.com/dbmarkets_/status/1080226423476875264

https://twitter.com/DogKenobi/status/1079884141750112257

https://twitter.com/zeireen/status/1079483335859150853

Update, 4 January 2019

More criticism via Twitter…

https://twitter.com/gloria_tuesday/status/1080930970784677888

and here is another idiot, Hevreziya-Something, attempting to sound like a real “Communist” (who thinks that he –sounds more like she, but apparently not– can be “Anarchist” and –a male–“Feminist”, and a “Populist” etc all at the same time!…oh, and an economist…once he has finished school, that is, though he claims to have been commenting for years; age does not preclude political infantilism, I suppose)

https://twitter.com/HRZ_MRZ/status/1080892069365907456

he offers political advice in the tweet below, which made me laugh out loud (the bit about a General Strike in UK and USA, but the first tweet is also amusingly naive):

https://twitter.com/HRZ_MRZ/status/1080563549276176384

More?

https://twitter.com/HRZ_MRZ/status/1078171449490399237

Well, I think that I shall draw a veil over that particular “Communist/Anarchist/Populist” now! He/she probably has to go and wash its hair or something…

The trouble is that there are literally thousands of people, maybe hundreds of thousands, quite as stupid. Most support Labour. Many, such as Ash Sarkar and the Hevreziya-someone tweeter, above, are of non-European origin, but there are many others, such as the Englishwoman tweeting below, calling herself “Countess Helen Nonny Nay” [since this blog post was written, altered to Cringing Peasant Helen Nonny Nay], who thinks that white British families who want a better life should just “fuck off” as the UK welcomes the dregs of Africa and Asia to our shores…

Actually, the sad thing is that some of these people have their hearts sort-of in the right place in some respects— animal welfare, a better society, anti-Jew-Zionism (though most are still brainwashed by the “holocaust” scam/myth). The white Northern European ones would support social-nationalism were they not so indoctrinated and silly.

Update, 6 January 2019

Another idiot, Laurie Penny, who was at one time on TV occasionally (like Owen Jones), until even msm people realized that (like Owen Jones) she is pretty much a one-trick pony…

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/20/robots-racist-sexist-people-machines-ai-language

and

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/11/discriminate-conservatives-james-damore-suing-google-intolerance

and

https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2017/dec/03/willy-wonka-to-wind-in-the-willows-how-childrens-books-reveal-inequality

Do these people, the Owen Jones’s, the Laurie Penny’s etc, realize that their intolerance (yes, their intolerance) might one day not only bring society (the Social Contract) crashing down, but bring down the skies on their own little worlds? I doubt it.

czbdrdvwgaa_rt3

but then, the resistance…

bq-5c190938a8a72.png

spetsnaz

Marxism-Leninism as a political force was destroyed or ebbed away to nothing by 1989 and a host of (other) devils have rushed in to fill the vacuum…

dfbzlnnwaaal3ei

In the end, a complete cleansing of UK (and world) society will have to take place.

Further Update, 6 January 2019

I happened to see the photo below, a kind of “family portrait”: Ash Sarkar and Aaron Bastani in what is perhaps a room designed with reference to either “luxury Communism” or tasteless tat. You decide…

dwkvd5wx4aievjf

Below, Andrew Neil nails Ken Livingstone on Venezuela…

Not that everything said by Ash Sarkar (or Aaron Bastani) is wrong. This, below, is right (because grounded in reality, not incorrect theory):

What Ash Sarkar and her ilk cannot accept, if only because it might imply that they themselves should clear out of the UK, is that mass immigration is, ultimately, “white genocide” by replacement of real British (i.e. white) people by blacks, browns and others.

Here we see some reaction to Ash Sarkar’s and Owen Jones’s doormatting for the Jewish lobby…

https://twitter.com/niall_east/status/1101541980117585921

More recently

Seems that “someone” sees a vacancy in the msm-approved “licensed Bolshevik” slot previously occupied by Owen Jones (usually by Owen Jones; sometimes Laurie Penny or others). That way, the msm can say, “look! We are open to all shades of opinion, even radical and revolutionary ones!”, while in fact only inviting the kind of people who are in reality completely harmless to the ZOG/NWO System. Non-white or Jewish faux-rebels. White social-nationalists are, of course, banned…

Update, 20 July 2019

A late entrant, a comedienne (for the brainwashed, that’s “comedian”, apparently…), of whom I have never heard but who I am sure is very proud to have 130K Twitter followers (and I am sure at least a few dozen regularly read her tweets…). She believes in “anti-fascist action” and intimidating anyone standing up for free speech.

https://twitter.com/JosieLong/status/1152280599274696710

and, quelle surprise, she has been contracted at various times for those present gravediggers of culture, Channel 4 (usually a gravedigger) and the BBC (sometimes a gravedigger).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josie_Long

Update, 21 September 2019

…from the Independent, reporting on beach patrols at Dover; all too typical of the sort of persons now prominent in “Labour” and what is left of the trade unions:

“Riccardo La Torre, firefighter and Eastern Region Secretary of the Fire Brigade Union, branded the coast patrol “despicable” and said: “These have-a-go, racist vigilantes have no place in any kind of enforcement or emergency activities and will only serve to make conditions and tensions worse.”

“These groups claim to be the voice of the working class, but now they want to act as an arm of the authorities by patrolling beaches to apprehend struggling working-class people desperately trying to get to safety.”
[https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/far-right-britain-first-beach-patrols-calais-dover-anti-migrant-a9113471.html]

So “Riccardo La Torre” (que?), a regional secretary of the Fire Brigade Union, thinks that migrant invaders from Africa and the Middle East are “working class people”, who are “trying to get to safety”?!

Safety from, er, France? There you have in a nutshell, the craziness that is much of “Labour” now. Alien migrant-invaders are “working class people”, who should be allowed to occupy the UK at will (and be subsidized too)!

Note particularly the fag-end “Marxism”, trying to shoehorn the facts into some 1980s polytechnic back-of-postcard Marxism-Leninism.

ethnostate, free speech, historical, historical revisionism, Reminiscences and Musings, Russia and Russian relations, society, Uncategorized

Taking the Whole Package

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This evening, I watched a show called something like “The Real Marigold Hotel”, in which four elderly once-“celebrities” went to a country (in this case, Cuba) in order to see what facilities might be available for retired people. As such, as a “documentary”, it was very superficial and lacking depth, though entertaining. What interested me was the society in general.

The Cuba –actually just Havana– shown (and I have never been there, though I am quite well acquainted with its history of the past century and, in the manner of Sarah Palin, have glimpsed it from the air and from the sea) was in fact largely the stereotype: old American cars in pastel pink and blue, decrepit but charming colonial mansions, palm trees etc.

The old people went to cultural classes and talked to Cubans in parks. It struck me anew that any society is a package: Cuba has some culture (both European and its own mixture incorporating the Caribbean and African, as well as that of the USA.

The Havana shown was one where the parks were (on the face of it) safe to visit, the people well-educated (one or two Cubans carefully making the point that their good education had been free, as were the classes available to the elderly).

Most people know that the Cuban healthcare system is also very good, both in relative and absolute terms. On the other hand, and as the TV programme noted, the Internet is tightly controlled, requires a card (no doubt traceable..) and is mostly only available in “wi-fi” areas such as certain parks; not so many have home Internet connection.

It is perhaps pointless to reiterate what most of us know in terms of the Cuban police state (which –in all the documentary films I have ever seen– is so pervasive that it is invisible: you never see the hand of the State in plain sight, though it is there all right).

So there you have the Cuban package: low crime rate (supposedly), no obvious disorder, at least some rather polite, cultured citizens, good education and healthcare etc (one Cuban did say that it was better before the supportive Soviet Union collapsed), as well as a certain charm.

As against that, a socialist state which controls the news and Internet tightly, imprisons dissidents for years (not to mention the large number who, in the late 1950s and 1960s, were just shot); a socialized economy which (leaving aside the effect of American embargo) was and largely is hopelessly inefficient at providing consumer goods. Travel restrictions, too.

Let us take a different case. The German Reich in the 1930s was intolerant of dissidents too, though it was far more tolerant than was the Soviet Union under Stalin or, indeed, Cuba under Fidel.

The National Socialist state imprisoned some dissidents or placed them in concentration camps such as Dachau (though few now know that many served short sentences, such as 3 months, there, and were not there indefinitely). Others were encouraged or more or less forced out of the country. There was a generally militarized ethos. How could a state both German and quasi-socialist be anything else?

In the Reich, there was state interference in culture (though, again, far less than, say, in the Soviet Union). Consumer production was given a lower priority than rearmament (“Guns Before Butter”), though large projects for the benefit of the people were also pushed into the foreground: the Autobahnen; the VW “people’s car”; the 1936 Olympics; a huge programme of educational and cultural events; the Kraft durch Freude [“Strength through Joy”] programme of Canary Islands cruises and Baltic beach holidays for the people (at a time when, in the UK, most people who had a holiday at all were corralled into poky Blackpool guest houses…); better nutrition for young people, too.

The National Socialist Reich was hugely beneficial for most Germans, certainly compared to what existed in the Weimar period. The Reich solved the inflation problem, the unemployment problem, the decadence problem and, yes, what it termed “the Jewish question”.

In the UK at the same time, there was greater ostensible “freedom”: elections every 5 years, the freedom to eat daily at the Ritz or at the Savoy Grill (if one had the funds..), no obvious book censorship (though, behind the scenes, there was much, not least via the Jewish element, even then). There was official theatre and cinema censorship (via the Lord Chamberlain’s office) and there was also, of course, grinding poverty (especially outside the South East), and a very repressive justice and prison system; not to mention the pervasive class system and its inequities.

No state, no political system is “perfect”. All have flaws, and all (most, at least) have benefits (though what might be the benefits of living in, say, North Korea or the Congo might be disputed). The aim can only be to do the best with what is available at the material time. We take everything as a package, as a whole.

free speech, historical, historical revisionism, Reminiscences and Musings, Uncategorized

Castro and Cuba

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I had no intention of writing about Cuba or Castro following the recent death of “Fidel”. However, the public and mass media reaction, much of it an outpouring of adulation and “me-too” faux-liberal compromise, has impelled me to write.

There is no doubt that Cuba before Castro was corrupt and, for many, poor. Before Castro there was Batista and before Batista, Prio (Carlos Prio Socarras), of whom the British historian Hugh Thomas wrote, memorably, in his mammoth history of the country, that he “fell like a rotten fruit, full of its own corruption.” Prío himself later said of his presidency: “They say that I was a terrible president of Cuba. That may be true. But I was the best president Cuba ever had.”[see Arthur M. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House. New York: Houghton Mifflin (2002) p 216].

Prio was in fact someone who tried to keep to constitutional proprieties and it was his decision not to act extra-judicially which allowed the harsher figure of Batista to seize power in 1952, Prio himself having been elected (by free and contested election) in 1948.

Cuba in the 1950s was sometimes described as somewhere between a Latin American country and a detached, poorer, part of the United States, the latter for long its effective suzerain.

It would be easier to make a quick judgment of Castro’s rule had the United States not (and typically) engaged in ham-fisted great-power and quasi-colonialist geopolitics over the island. Those American interventions continue to muddy the waters: attempts to assassinate Castro, the Bay of Pigs “invasion” of 1961; above all, the partial embargo (which Cuba called a “blockade”) imposed initially in 1960.

No-one can say for sure whether Cuba would be much different had it had the chance to trade freely with the USA, its neighbour and natural main trading partner. Probably not much. Venezuela is another and more recent example of the inability of a Latin American socialist economy to perform adequately for long.

The  bien-pensant “usual suspects” in the UK (the absurd Tariq Ali, Ken Livingstone, Jeremy Corbyn etc) are now saying that the Castro dictatorship was sort-of acceptable because Cuba had good education and good medical services. On that basis, they should be very kind indeed to German National Socialism, which provided the same and in fact far more (and with far less repression, in reality).

In fact, long before the Soviet subsidy disappeared, Havana was falling to pieces, as were the Cuban roads and railways. I myself had fleeting and peripheral contact with Cuba, otherwise seen by me only from the sea (between Cuba and the Bahamas) and the air (flying over Cuba between Tampa, Florida and Grand Cayman).

I was asked, when a practising barrister in London circa 1995, to help a scientific start-up based at Porton Down, Wiltshire, the high-security  biological warfare facility, then recently partly-privatized. A small company of scientists had a bacterium which turned biomass into fuel (unscientific me calling it the turning of straw into gold). I thought of Cuba with its sugar-cane detritus, lack of fuel and high technical-education levels. Unfortunately, the Cuban Embassy in London did not respond, unlike the Ukrainian: I visited Porton Down with the then Ukrainian Ambassador, Mr. Komisarenko [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serhiy_Komisarenko]. Nothing came of that in the end, but it seems that, in more recent years, a company called Havana Energy, headed by ex-Labour Party MP Brian Wilson, has been producing energy that way in Cuba. The Cuban Embassy’s unresponsiveness told me all I needed to know about the Cuban bureaucracy: unalert, lethargic, useless, bearing in mind the country’s crying need for fuel.

Since the early 1990s, Cuba has gradually been moving towards a capitalist economy. No doubt that process will continue. Eventually, some kind of greater rapprochement with the USA will happen.

In this blog post, I am more interested in the puerile reaction of the kind of people in the UK who are letting off Castro on human rights and economic efficiency because Cubans have a health service and a school system. Jeremy Corbyn has excelled himself in ignorant misunderstanding. He just digs himself deeper with every statement.

The mass media and in particular the BBC is, as one might expect, doing its bit to eulogize about Castro, saying that he “turned a small island into a major force in world affairs.” Where does one start in unpacking such nonsense?

The reaction to Castro’s death tells me something else: those in the UK who think themselves “socialist” are willing to turn a blind eye to historical, political and economic realities so long as the label is right.

Update, 5 January 2019

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6558991/Rich-kids-COMMUNISM-Fidel-Castros-model-grandson-flashes-wealth-European-vacations.html

Update, 14 February 2026

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/13/no-water-or-electricity-and-children-begging-in-streets-filled-with-rubbish-but-this-is-why-i-wont-leave-cuba