Indrajit Samarajiva

1. How 'Israel' Is Used To Divide And Conquer The Middle East

Divide and conquer was how a few thousand white guys conquered 150 million Indians. They used the bloody Indians to do it. As Ian Barrow wrote in his East India Company history, "It is one of the great ironies of the Company's history that its Indian empire was effectively won by its Indian troops." Rich men on elephants sold out poor men to the colonizers, for peanuts. It's not that the Brits were superior fighters, they were superior liars. They were not so much conquerors as divide and conquerors.

Today, in the same way, America (their heirs) uses a few million Jews to conquer half a billion Arabs. They used the bloody Semites to do it. As the late, great Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said, "it ['Israel'] was established for the express purpose of dividing and partitioning the Muslim world." Rich men on oil sold out poor men to the colonizers, for football teams and DRM-locked weapons. For peanuts. Brits, Americans, same shit, different day, it's all one White Empire. These are not superior fighters, they're just superior liars, and they're still dividing and conquering to this day.

The East India Cuntery

In the years of company rule of India (remember that we were, and are, colonized by corporations), the East India Company (EIC) raised private, corporate armies that grew to be larger than the British Army by the 1850s. This STD ridden (at least 30% of them), marauding (called "prize money"), and deeply corrupt force (officers were allowed to 'profit' from supplies) was manned by mostly Indians and mastered by a few British. As Barrow wrote, "almost all officers were British and none was Indian. Many British men also served as enlisted soldiers. Although officers were British the army recruited Indians, known as sepoys, a corruption of the Persian sipahi. Recruitment was so successful that for most of the eighteenth and all of the nineteenth centuries sepoys far outnumbered Europeans. It is one of the great ironies of the Company's history that its Indian empire was effectively won by its Indian troops."

I mention this at length because this is how divide and conquer works. Colonialism is like a thick layer cake where most of the structure is chocolate, with just a thin layer of white frosting on top. Each layer is stacked according to petty advantages, each bringing its weight to bear on those below. The soldiers don't even have to be that good, the division itself does that work.

The EIC armies were initially small and were never very good. As Barrow said, "The Company did not have significantly better troops, training, or weapons, especially when factoring in the distance between Britain and India." For much of its existence, the EIC armies had no cavalry, was divided both internally and territorially, and officers were promoted based on seniority, meaning it was largely led by morons. What the EIC did have, however, was the strategy of divide and conquer, which can overcome all sorts of tactical foibles.

As Barrow said, "What tipped the balance was a combination of a diplomatic strategy that divided Indians, financial resources with which Indians could not compete, and control of the sea. By using treaties and threats, the Company was able to isolate neighboring states so that it rarely had to fight a combined force." Divide and conquer is a hell of a drug and, if that doesn't work, you can always ram opium down their throats like China.

The men on elephants were divided against each other, enabling relative mice to conquer them. As Barrow said about the alliance that betrayed Tipu Sultan, "Had a similar alliance been formed against the Company, the Madras presidency may have been imperiled. Each conquest gave the Company additional land revenue that, in conjunction with the sale of cotton and opium to China, provided the Company with the money to pay for an enormous standing army." China, of course, tried to stop the opium, and was attacked by the British drug-pushers. Divide and conquer was the imperial strategy writ large, and they could play people against each other that barely knew each other at all.

Within India, 0.001% of the population (the comprador class) were tied in 'treaties' while 0.01% of the population (the peasant soldiers) tied the rest up. That's all it took. This is basic divide and conquer, and it's still happening. As I've said, colonizers merely changed words and kept colonizing. It behooves us to remember that the strength of colonizers is not actually fighting. It's lying. Like about World War II.

WWII

Unlike Americans at the time, Americans today believe they won World War II (the Soviets did), liberated the death camps (the Soviets did, for the most part), and that it ended (the 'Cold' War killed millions more, just not white people). This is because Americans (and the rest of White Empire, and everyone in general) has been relentless propagandized after World War II, leading to the creation myth of 'Israel'. We have to unravel this to understand the entity (and that it is, in fact, a non-entity). The truth is that America never gave a shit about the Jews and merely used them as pawns for their own cynical ends.

Remember that America pushed away boatloads of Jews into the concentration camps and didn't want them after the war either. European Jews were not allowed to go back to their homes or given refuge in America. No, American Senators were as Hitler as Adolf, and followed his same twisted logic of anti-communism.

To Hitler, Marxists and Jews were synonymous, he called it "the Jewish doctrine of Marxism." This was echoed in the United States after the war, because they didn't want the Jews either. As Senator James Eastland—the segregationist, slave-owning Senator from Mississippi—said (via David Nasaw's The Last Million),

"I say that we are getting away from American ideals when we admit to this country from eastern Europe people with an Oriental philosophy, a philosophy not compatible with that of the people of the United States. Let us not increase the power of those forces already making a dangerous onslaught against the foundations of American institutions. Let us not admit even 200,000 as an opening wedge."

That 'Oriental philosophy' was not Confucianism, they were talking about Jews, codedly in public and openly in private. Americans had learned not to say 'Jew' after the Holocaust, but they still hated them. Where I lived (in Upper Arlington, Ohio), Jews couldn't really buy homes until the 1970s. Remember that colonizers just changed words and kept colonizing. Senator Eastland, for example, technically employed 'sharecroppers' on his plantations but this (and the America prison system) were just slavery rebranded. Also remember that when reading Empire, every accusation is a confession. The Americans viewed Jews as a 'wedge' and that's precisely how they used them.

When that historical turd Eastland accused Jews of being "an opening wedge" into America, it was a confession. That's precisely how America used Jewish refugees, as a 'wedge' slammed into the Middle East. The also racist Senator Robert F. Rich said, "I am not going to throw the doors wide open and permit America to be the dumping place for all humanity." They, of course, had no problem 'dumping' this problem on Palestine, because who gave a shit about a bit of Semite on Semite violence? Jews, of course, are people, not a problem and should have been given much of Germany and France for their troubles. But America was in a hurry to assimilate Nazis, and made Jewish children their stormtroopers, at the Palestinian peoples expense. This was never a refuge. It was, instead, a ticket to war for generations. Many Jews, leaving a war zone for a war zone, were like, 'WTF is this?' As David Nasaw wrote,

For many of the Jewish displaced persons who immigrated to Israel, the exhilaration of leaving Germany and arriving in their new homes was followed rather quickly by disappointment, approaching desperation. They had miraculously survived one war in Europe. They were now entering another war zone. The young adjusted more quickly, the adults more slowly; some would never feel secure or at peace in their new homes. They tried to forget their past—were told over and over again that they were Israelis now, not Europeans, that they must learn and speak Hebrew, not Yiddish or Polish or German or Russian.

Since then, the children and grandchildren of these refugees (plus those of regional Jews) have been conscripted into serving on the most dangerous frontline of western imperialism. 'Israel' itself is the deeply antisemitic idea that European Jews should 'go back where they came from,' taken to its most illogical conclusion. 'Israel' is now 'allied' with historical antisemites like America and Germany, but America has no allies, only interests. Even Germany gets its pipelines bombed and deindustrialized if America feels like. 'Israelis' are just pawns, and for all the deranged cutting they do, their fate is not in their hands. Now the Jews are trapped in a permanent war zone, among a hostile population, completely dependent on their colonial masters, just as intended. This is classic divide and conquer, using a transported Jewish population as a 'wedge' right in the heart of the Middle East. It is a 'wedge issue' as American politicos say.

In American politics, a 'wedge issue' is something (like abortion or transsexuality) used to divide and conquer their own population. The hordes scream and fight in the Cable-TV Colosseum, thinking that their thumbs mean something. They might as well sit on them. It's divide and conquer waged upon their own population.

Classic British divide and conquer, on the other hand, uses entire human populations as a 'wedge', appointing minorities to rule over a majority, which is what happened in occupied Palestine. The Jewish minority gets petty privilege, but they're always dependent on colonial support against the majority, making them a reliable overseer class. Historically, this comprador minority can be recruited from the local population or even imported wholesale from somewhere else. Indians, for example, being especially eager toadies, were shipped all over the place. Indians were sent to administer Africa, which is where vile specimens like Rishi Sunak and Priti Patel come from. No one is harsher to a poor man at the door than a rich man's servant. Indians have long been colonialism's middle managers, and still are. But I digress.

In 'Israel', Empire imported (and dramatically enlarged) a Jewish minority to rule over the majority of the Middle East. 'Israel' can rape and kill the natives as much as they want, but if they defy their colonial masters they'll be dead. Under this 'rules-based order' (just 'rule' rebranded) only 'Israel' is allowed to have nuclear weapons, and only 'Israel' is allowed to bomb and assassinate anywhere across the whole Middle East. This 'Israel' is not a real country, it's just the colonial constabulary. 'Israel' is just Empire's colonial police state which would collapse in an instant without American insistence. Thus, if 'Israel' doesn't exist without America it logically exists within America. White Empire is one phenomenon, and the Jews are just quasi-white pawns on the much larger chessboard of White Empire.

Thus Ze Americans executed Hitler's penultimate solution, deporting as many Jews as possible out of Europe, to better focus on Hitler's ultimate goal, killing commies. The Americans are just Nazis that won. Hitler's totalitarian race state only lasted 12 years, while the Americans have been going for centuries. Their convenient deportation of the Jews from Europe had the added, cynical, benefit of dividing and conquering the Middle East. And it's still divided. Just look.

A Clear Enough Picture

I have gone through thousands of words, but this picture will do. This is 'Israel's' Prime Monster Benjamin Netanyahu (née Mileikowsky) showing a map of the Middle East, quite visibly divided. He actually drew a line down the middle in red marker at the UN. Does it get any clearer? This is the point and purpose of 'Israel'. Divide and conquer.

Luckily the Resistance knows it, and they know their enemy. Whereas the second General Secretary of Hezbollah, Sayyed Abbas al-Musawi said, "You Jews, leave our land, you have no home among us, go back from where you came," his successor Sayyed Nasrallah developed a more accurate philosophy as early as 1998. He said,

Most assuredly our attitude towards Israel is not an attitude towards Jews or Judaism. Since the West doesn't want to understand that Hezbollah is anything other than an exact copy of Iran, let us consider Iran's attitude towards the Jews. They enjoy there all their political, social, and economic rights, for they are citizens, and have representatives in the legislative authority. Thus our war is not against Judaism or Jews but against Zionism, which created its racial state in Israel.

Let us [be clear] that Islamic intellectualism and religion have throughout Islamic history never laid the foundation for a hostile attitude against Judaism and Jews. The war between ourselves and Israel is a war against Zionism and its plans, and not against Judaism as a religion or against those who believe in that religion.

This was not a mere changing of nomenclature but a more specific knowing of one's enemy, which is essential in order to fight them. Explaining what the Resistance was fighting for Nasrallah said, in 1996,

We would like to allay the fears of those who think that Hezbollah intends to impose Islamic rule by force, and to tell them that we shall not impose Islam; for us, this is a matter of general principle. We are now intent on removing colonialism from this region, doing away with colonial means of information and culture, and making the people understand Islam as it should be understood; a lot of Muslim political terminology has been distorted by colonial interpretations.

We do not believe in multiple Islamic republics; we do believe, however, in a single Islamic world governed by a central government, because we consider all borders throughout the Muslim world as fake and colonialist, and therefore doomed to disappear.

We do not believe in a nation whose borders are 10,452 square kilometers in Lebanon; our project foresees Lebanon as part of the political map of an Islamic world in which specificities would cease to exist, but in which the rights, freedom, and dignity of minorities within it are guaranteed.

Therefore, in order for this project to be realized, priority should be given to removing Israel from the scene, because it was established for the express purpose of dividing and partitioning the Muslim world. We are not only against the partition of Lebanon, but also against the partition of the Muslim world; this explains why we see no alternative to fighting Israel, with all means at our disposal, until it ceases to exist. Then we will attend to following [certain] steps.

This idea of a unified Muslim world is supposed to scare the shit out of people because racism, but there's nothing wrong with the Muslim world being Muslim, and Islam is a perfectly valid governing philosophy (as I've discussed in The Hermeneutics Of Hamas). It's just undividing and unconquering. Muslim rule has, historically, led to flourishing among the Jewish community, but too many of them have taken the word of the Europeans who genocided and deported them. And, as the colonized should know by now, these words are worthless.

In his map, Netanyahu showed a line connecting Europe to India, the original point of all colonization, to the east or west. Today, it is really the same colonial project, using the same methods. 'Israel' is a literal colony of nearly 7 million Jews plunged into the heart of the 500 million strong Muslim World to keep it permanently divided and spurting blood, to better 'frack' the oil out.

Divide and conquer is why 'Israel' exists and persists in the Middle East at all. It is why, as Joe Biden said, "Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region." As much as America talks about 'peace in the Middle East', this is not in her interest at all. A united Middle East scared the living shit out of America in the 1970s oil 'crisis' and they keep the region divided and conquered to 'frack' it for energy.

Crusaders or carbon crusaders, British colonizers or Americans, it is, as my historical thesis goes, same shit, different day. America's Middle East strategy is the same as the British. Go extremely force light and make entire regions frack themselves. Whether it's rocks or Iraq, petroleum or Palestine, ecocide or genocide, it's the same old divide and conquer.

Bibliography

• The East India Company, 1600-1858; Barrow, Ian.
• The Last Million, David Nasaw
• Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler
• The Quran, Goodword edition
• Voice of Hezbollah: The Statements of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, Nicholas Noe

If, like me, you don't leave near a large library, you can find these books at LibGen or Anna's Archive.

2. Iran And The Escalation Ladder

Iran has to proceed very carefully up the escalation ladder because there's nukes at the top of it. 'Israel' has completely illegal nukes and a complete disregard for international law, so it won't hesitate to nuke Tehran. America doesn't give a shit, they've been singing 'Bomb Iran' since the 80s. 'Israel' has already dropped four Hiroshimas worth of American bombs on Gaza, what's one more?

This is the strategic calculus Iran has to balance. They have to deter the entity without detonating a nuke, which is delicate work indeed.

The Escalation Ladder

Iran's non-nuclear deterrence involves scaling something called an escalation ladder, which I will let Ibn Riad explain at length:

The Resistance Axis have been very gradually escalating operations in the region. But even gradual escalation builds up over time, and this is central to the doctrine of the Escalation Ladder by which they are pressuring the US-Zionist aggression. As discussed prior, this pressure takes away the one element that the US-Zionist aggression was banking on for their war against Gaza's resistance: time. They will not be allowed a gradual, risk-free operation more akin to a medieval siege than an assault.

Another purpose of the Escalation Ladder is to avoid forcing the US-Zionist enemy into immediate deadly retaliation that leads straight into all-out war. If the nations & factions of the Resistance Axis had conducted attacks from day one at the same level and scale that they are conducting them at today, there is a high chance it would have sparked an immediate regional war. By gradually building up, this has thus far been avoided.

This also means the US-Zionist faction have an ongoing chance to back down at any point. For us, this means avoiding the widespread regional (maybe even global) bloodbath that all-out war will result in. For them, it is a chance to avoid a war that they surely know can end them. But this is not an indefinite offer—the longer their assault goes on, the higher the price they pay (whether through Iraqi fire against US bases in the region or Lebanese and Yemeni strikes against the Zionist army), and the closer an all-out confrontation becomes. The Resistance Axis is not afraid of total war, but want to take every chance to avoid the devastation the US-Zionist faction would cause across West Asia.

Unlike the colonizer and their conscript colony, the natives actually care about the land and do not want to rule over a ruin. Iran has very different strategic goals to 'Israel,' which is just wild-eyed violence at this point. 'Israel' needs its enemies to leave the earth. Iran just needs the Americans to leave 'Israel'.

'Israel' The Non-Entity

It's important to know your enemy, and 'Israel' is a non-entity. 'Israel' would cease to exist in an instant without American insistence, making America the proper point of contention. As Nasrallah said in November 2023,

From the very first days, Israel demanded new weapons, new missiles from the United States. From the first day, Israel demanded ten billion dollars. Is it a strong state, an invincible army, as claimed? A state that requires this amount of US and Western support? Heads of state, heads of government, top brass generals flocking from all over the world to provide moral support. This is what Al-Aqsa [Flood] has caused, this frail entity.

The fact is that 'Israel', even with America, loses to non-state actors. As Iran's leader Ayatollah Khamenei said, "The army that claimed to be among the strongest in the world has been defeated; by whom? By a powerful state? No! By resistance movements, by Hamas and Hezbollah." You might say the leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah were assassinated, but every leader of Hamas and Hezbollah has been assassinated, it's in the JD. The organizations only grow stronger as commanders get promoted to martyrdom, their names inscribed on the next generation of weapons, wielded by the next generation of resistance.

Because the Resistance has been slowly scaling the escalation ladder, 'Israel' has gone from not getting bombed at all before October 7th, to getting bombed in the north and south, to getting bombed in Tel Aviv. Any one of these acts would have triggered regional war before, but because they've been scaled up, one step at a time, they just become the new normal for 'Israel'. The non-entity increasingly does not exist. 'Israel' first lost land in occupied Lebanon in 2006, now it's lost land in occupied Palestine, and now it has to be on daily life support from America or it will cease to exist entirely.

America The Empire

Nasrallah's greatest insight was knowing your enemy. He wasn't distracted by 'Israel', hiding behind Jewishness. He named the Great Satan, which was America. As Nasrallah said,

We all must establish this fact. The United States is totally responsible for the war raging in Gaza against unarmed, defenceless people. It is the United States that vetoes condemnation of Israel in the security council, the United States that stands in the way of a ceasefire in Gaza. It is the United States proving once again as described by Khomeini - it is the greatest Satan, the great devil, from Hiroshima to Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine. The United States must be held liable and then penalised for all what has been perpetrating against our people and the people of the region.

Thus Nasrallah named the true manipulator behind his martyrdom. 'Israel' is merely the weapon, America is the one wielding it. Israel is just another proxy army of America, which has had (and discarded) many historically. Take America out of the equation and there is no 'Israel'. The tail does not wag the dog, and you'd be a fool to take the dog's word for it.

Defeating 'Israel' thus means defeating America and—as daunting as this seems—America has lost every war for decades. The last 50 years have been America's long retreat from the world, covered up in a big smokescreen. Ask (North) Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, et cetera. America kills, tortures, and scatters a lot of people, but eventually leaves in ignominy. As the Taliban said, "You have the watches, but we have the time." In yesterday's (1 October 2024) missile attack on 'Israel', for example, the US fired 12 SM-3 interceptor missiles, of which they only produce 12 a year. When you're throwing Rolexes at Casios, eventually you run out of both time and money.

The lesson every freedom fighter has learned is that you don't have to knock America out, you just have to wear them out. The guerrilla army wins by not losing. As the late, great Palestinian pharmacist and philosopher of war Basil Al-Araj said, "Our direct human and material losses will be much greater than the enemy's, which is natural in guerrilla wars that rely on willpower, the human element, and the extent of patience and endurance." He continued, before he was cut short, "Today's wars are no longer just wars and clashes between armies but rather are struggles between societies. Let us be like a solid structure and play a game of biting fingers with the enemy, our society against their society."

The Quranic Clock

The idea of a 'solid structure' is, I think a Quranic reference. Whenever I pray at English Mosque in Colombo, I'm not that good at it. They always tell me to 'straighten the rows'. Worshipers are supposed to pray as one body, like bricks in one edifice. As current Ayatollah Khamenei said in a sermon in 1979,

'Indeed, those who have believed and migrated and struggled with their possessions and their persons'—and against their possessions and their persons—'and those who gave them shelter'—when they were refugees without a home—'and helped, they are guardians of one another'—they are bound together on the same side. They are of a single substance. They are the bricks and mortar of a single structure. 'The likeness of the faithful is like an edifice; they support one another.' Have you seen how these bricks go together in these ornate ceilings? Each brick is a single believer. Each believer is a single brick. They fit together and support one another. Together they form a structure that takes great effort to demolish. Tens of bricks side-by-side. This one brick helps to protect the whole, and the whole all help to protect this one brick. 'They are the guardians of one another.' Held together by strong bonds. United.

Or as the recently ascended martyr Khaled Al-Najjar said, while being tortured by IOF Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz,

Khaled said, "You don't have any positive points. When we attacked your military positions, we sought death and martyrdom, while your soldiers sought life. And when your soldiers seek death, they will find life." Mofaz responded, "Forget the philosophy. We will demolish your house, and your children will be displaced." Khaled replied, "I don't advise you. It's just two rooms of brick, not worth it. And when you demolish them, the kids in the neighborhood will grow up to be fiercer than me."

Indeed, the children were fiercer.

Philosophy matters, and those that don't learn from history are condemned to repeat it, in a death spiral. Any study of the Resistance shows that they only got stronger through assassination. Hezbollah could barely hit a hundred yards away when the first General Secretary was assassinated. Now they can hit hundreds of kilometers. Hamas was one in-fighting faction when 'Israel' assassinated Sheikh Ahmed Al-Yassin in his wheelchair. Now they've created the mythical Unity of the Fields, unifying the Resistance across multiple fronts.

'Israel' repeating targeted assassinations when it always blows up in their face is one definition of insanity. They don't have a real strategy, only terror tactics. On the other hand, the Resistance has a clear strategy, executed slowly over decades, coming to a slow boil abouts now. The strategy is slow escalation along the escalation ladder, turning up the heat but never quite boiling over. As Nasrallah said in 1992, "It is impossible for us to fight the Israeli enemy through traditional and classical methods, but rather [we must fight] through a war of attrition, whereby we drain its energy, weaken it, then one day force it to withdraw." Indeed, 'Israel' was forced to withdraw from Lebanon in 2006, and is now being forced to withdraw settlers from more and more of occupied Palestine. The Resistance had a plan and—though it seems slow if you view it through the news cycle—they're actually right on time.

As the assassinated leader of Hamas Sheikh Ahmed Al-Yassin said, "To be precise, I say that by 2027, there will be no Israel. The Quran tells us that the generations change every 40 years. During the first 40 years, we had the Nakba, in the second 40 years, the Intifada started, with confrontations the fighting, and the bombs, and the third [group of] 40 years, will see [Israel's] end, inshallah."

Within 'Israel' this is what they call the "curse of the eighth decade," (starting the clock from 1948). Every Jewish state, once constituted, has collapsed within eight decades. David's in 81 years. The Hasmonean in 77. The 'Israeli' state is 76 now, and looks like shit. They've covering up their military losses, which are significant and require a constant spigot of munitions from America, which has also sprung a leak in Ukraine. 'Israel' also requires a constant influx of funds, and their credit rating keeps dropping. They also require a constant influx of migrants and migrant labor, which has all dried up cause it's a war zone. 'Israel' is far less wounded than the Resistance but they're also far more sensitive. The Resistance will live and die in tunnels but 'Israelis' are pampered white people and can't take it. The breaking points of the two combatants are quite different. 'Israel' looks quite unlikely to defeat the 80-year curse, which is a blessing to the region. Unless they go crazy and nuke the earth, which they will, which is why Iran has to be careful.

This is why, most unfortunately, Iran can't just stop the genocide the only way genocides stop. As Gregory Stanton said in the Ten Stage Of Genocide, we are now at the penultimate one, extermination. As he said, "At this stage, only rapid and overwhelming armed intervention can stop genocide." Of fully functional states, only Iran is answering this call in earnest (shout out Yemen, Syria, and Lebanon), but Iran can only do so much without getting their own people killed. If they ascend too quickly up the escalation ladder, they'll fall and take millions of souls with them. It's a delicate balance, getting nuclear crusaders out, without getting nuked in the process. These are deeply dangerous times for all of us, if you enjoy being unradiated. Godspeed (whatever speed that is) to the Resistance.

3. Football: A New Opiate Of The Masses

I watched the 2022 World Cup when I was in pain, and football helped opiate it. Our uncle had just been murdered back home in Sri Lanka, my children had scarlet fever, and I was stuck in godless England. Football is the closest thing they have to a religion in Europe and is the most widely available opiate for the masses. So I took it.

When Karl Marx called religion the 'opiate of the masses' it was this effect that he was talking about. Relief from a world of suffering. Marx said,"Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."

This language of suffering pervades all religion as, indeed, suffering pervades life itself. The Buddha's said the life is suffering, and offered a path out. Jesus Christ bore unbearable suffering upon his own body, and people still worship the cross he bore it on. The language of suffering also permeates football, as you can hear from the post-modern messiah, Lionel Messi.

Messi as Messiah

In his first interview after the World Cup, Lionel Messi said,

There was so much suffering, because there were times when I suffered a lot with the national team, the finals we lost, being so close without it finally happening. I had so much criticism in every way possible. And my family suffered just like me, or even worse. And we closed that circle by winning the America Cup, the World Cup, and that's it, there's nothing left to win.

Messi, suffered and overcame, like a messiah of the meaningless. As a final trial, Messi had to experience the passion of the penalty kicks, while the spirits of a billion people hovered around him and watched. Messi explicitly thanked God and the unholy ghosts of a global television audience, saying, "all that energy, and everyone wanting this, that's what made this happen." If that wasn't a religious experience, what is?

To understand what a religious experience is, however, we'll turn to another source. Robert Bellah and his book Religion and Human Evolution. I have yet to finish the tome, but I've started it many times, and the book talks about football.

Religion And Human Evolution

In Religion and Human Evolution, Bellah offers a few definitions of religion. Paraphrasing Clifford Geertz, he said, "religion is a system of symbols that, when enacted by human beings, establishes powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations that make sense in terms of an idea of a general order of existence." Bringing in Émile Durkheim, he said, "Religion is a system of beliefs and practices relative to the sacred that unite those who adhere to them in a moral community."

To use a modern metaphor, religion is a program which 'computes' across many human brains to produce results. In this sense, asking whether Jesus really rose from the dead or if the Buddha really had past lives is missing the point. The point is not the symbols but symbol manipulation to produce a result. For example, if you watch a video, it's actually a bunch of photographs and those photographs are a bunch of numbers (or chemicals). Nothing about the movie experience is true, but it feels true to life, truer than life even. A bunch of symbols which aren't 'true' (ceci n'est pas un pipe!) can produce an experience that is. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, as the holy emerges from its supplicants. This is the nature of the religious experience, and having experiences in general.

The fact is that we have no direct access to facts at all. Our entire perceptual system is a sampling device as crude as the movie camera when faced with the great infinity in front of us. Our eyes sample a fraction of available light, encode it as a crude, wet map on the back of our retinas, then flip it right side up and process it at the back of our brains. This produces a simulation of reality that's out of date as soon as we perceive it. Other creatures can see different things than us, or perceive at different speeds, we have no particular access to truth on any metaphysical level. It's all a simulation, at the very base level of perception. We are all just wet sacks of temperature controlled ocean, moving towards or away from the light, not much different from the first life forms. Indeed, there's a convincing argument that we're just spaceships for microbes to walk about on land, with consciousness as a crude navigation system.

Out of this unreal individual experiences we build an even more complex realm of unreality we call daily life. The illusion of daily life starts from the 'photograph' of individual experience but it becomes a 'movie' through many shared experiences across a society. Humans are deeply social animals, and our cognition is deeply social. For proof of this, have someone die. We feel pain in other bodies.

In the artificial world we've created, stop signs, legal notices, and warnings are all social signs which are more life and death than any cues from the natural world. What humans casually call 'the real world' (get a job, pay your bills) is actually completely artificial. As Bellah said,

If we follow the analysis of Alfred Schutz, the notion that the world of daily life is uniquely real is itself a fiction that is maintained only with effort. The world of daily life, like all the other multiple realities, is socially constructed. Each culture, each era, constructs its own world of daily life, never entirely identical with any other. Even the meaning of "standard" time and space differs subtly between cultures, and fundamental conceptions of person, family, and nation are all culturally variable.

Now that we've deconstructed everything, we can return to Bellah's definition of religion (and connect it to football). He described religion as a set of symbols which gives rise to a powerful sense of general order. He also described religion as related to 'the sacred', but then said, "Even this simple definition raises immediately a second definitional issue: What is the sacred?"

Is Nothing Sacred?

To me, you can understand what's sacred to a place by simply looking up. In ye olde days, the highest building would be a religious one. Today it's full banks and empty apartments. Today we obviously worship money, just look up. When I was in England, for example, I saw churches into bars and my friends went to silent discos in cathedrals. The critique of religion is complete in Europe, where it's viewed as an increasingly atavistic curiosity, or dangerous. Marx called it long ago when he said, "For Germany, the criticism of religion has been essentially completed, and the criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism… The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man."

Our pride at discovering that religion is 'made up,' however, merely goeth before the fall. Everything is made up! The Buddha said everything is illusion, but he still used a name and told stories, because some illusions are useful. Science and secularism are not actually higher truths, they're just higher fidelity illusions. It's like bragging that you've built an 8K cinema and then screening a horrorshow where you kill 99% of life on Earth. The point of a movie is how it moves you, not how it moves pixels. People were better off in a flickering cave worshiping animals and trees, because then at least they had some motivation to not genocide them.

Even if the devil isn't 'real', such an idea can keep you from worshiping money and worldly things, which society now does as a matter of both interest and principal. They say the love of money is the root of all evil, and this is the square root of capitalism! Usury was forbidden in Christianity, but now whole economies are based on such exploitation. Nothing is sacred in western civilization, so that's where such civilization leads, nowhere. The planetary Ponzi called capitalism is crashing, and taking the whole planet with it. All people really have left is distractions. Nothing is sacred.

One of the few sacralized spaces in modern life is the football stadium. On the football pitch, rules are followed, workers are paid well, managers are fired, and everything isn't monopolized, it's a perfect simulation of capitalism not how it is, but how it's imagined. This simulation is one of the few places that make sense in a world gone mad, and is thus an escape for the masses. As Diego Maradona—the John the Baptist to Messi's messiah—said, "football isn't a game, nor a sport; it's a religion." The man was touched by the hand of God, and he had a point.

The Post-Modern Religion

Now, finally, we can get to Bellah's direct comments on football. Bellah said,

Games such as football artificially create a separate reality. Football operates not with standard time and space but with the bounded time and space of the game. Football events occur only on the football field. If, for example, a pass is caught out of bounds, it doesn't count as a catch, for it did not occur in game space. Game time is one hour, but it is suspended for a variety of reasons and usually lasts about three hours of standard time. Most centrally, football plays with the anxieties of the world of working, the striving for pragmatic advantage. Unlike the world of daily life, one hour of game time produces a clear result: someone wins and someone loses, or occasionally there is a tie.

Bellah, of course, was talking about American football, but I'm going to lump them together because American football is just football inverted, where the fouls are rules. In American football you're supposed to use your hands and tackle people to the point of brain damage, and this is somehow still called football because Americans insist on being difficult. American football is the fentanyl to the opium of football football.

Football football is a completely artificial reality where men run around like demented penguins, tormenting an egg. In that bounded space, men do not have hands at all, except for the goalie. Football also operates outside of normal spacetime, with 'injury time' being added back to the self-contained universe at the end. It operates, as Bellah described, "not with standard time and space but with the bounded time and space of the game." And it plays with the "anxieties of the world of working," squeezing and releasing them in the simulated spacetime of 90 minutes.

In one way or another, billions of people escape the 'real' world of daily life into this artificial reality they call football. As Bellah said, "one of the first things to be noticed about the world of daily life is that nobody can stand to live in it all the time." Or as the Buddha says, life is suffering and this (the dhamma) is a way out. As Messi showed, football is a simulated suffering which has the possibility of satisfaction in this life. Whereas following the dhamma takes multiple lifetimes, football lets you check out immediately (though, like the Hotel California, you can never leave). You can only check out for 90 minutes at a time, give or take. Even more than religion, this opiate wears off quite quickly. Luckily there's such demand that men run around basically all year, sacrificing their hamstrings to relieve other men's suffering.

Inverted Consciousness

I don't share Marx's antipathy with religion, but I agree with his point that religion co-evolves with humanity. That ideas and reality are connecting, and shape each other in turns (material dialectics, as dimly as I understand it). Marx said, "Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But, man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man—state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world."

Marx might as well be describing the inverted football that Americans play. American football depicts the state of the place, a bunch of debt slaves (in college) playing gladiatorial games that lead to brain damage, with a tiny amount of obscenely wealthy people serving as proof of concept. European football also describes European states, completely dependent on foreign capital and foreign labor to produce anything interesting. If you look closely, sport is really all that's left of Roman civilization after they ditched the Catholicism. As my old Roman World Atlas tells me about those, frankly, better times, "The plebs also received cash donations from time to time, and were kept entertained by games and shows. Their enthusiasm for the new regime was unbounded." Today it's just circuses without the bread.

Thus, in godforsaken Europe, enough people gather to overthrow their comically corrupt governments every weekend. Instead, they watch billionaires play with their millionaire toys, while gambling and drinking themselves into more poverty. Every football match is a deep display of class unconsciousness. People that earn £30,000 a year gamble on passport slaves earning £300,000 a week while billionaires lose millions on the whole thing and laugh. In states that consciously separate themselves from religion, football is something of a state religion. The secular distractions of the Roman Empire are all that's left among its godless descendants.

Football and Capitalism

In these ways, these states (really just one White Empire) produce a form of religion that matches them. As Marx said, "an inverted consciousness of the world." Football is capitalism where managers are actually held accountable, where workers are paid exorbitantly, and which produces consistent results. It's a simulation of capitalism where capitalism isn't completely broken.

In football, unlike in the 'real' world, Black people and immigrants can get ahead on pure talent. If anything, they're over-represented. In football, nobody decides to fire half the team and replace them with chatbots and call centers. And, in football, the masses don't have to just take it. They can get the manager and sometimes the owners 'fired' if they yell enough. It's a deeply satisfying illusion that keeps men trapped in a deeply unsatisfying situation. As Marx said, "To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions."

Football is not necessarily a capitalist expression anymore than Christianity is necessarily Roman, but it has been co-opted this way just as Christianity was into Roman society. As Marx said, describing football as well as European Christianity, "Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d'honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification."

Football has thus become the living logic of capitalism. Where competition actually A) exists and B) leads to workers getting rewarded. It is also its spiritual point of honor, in that fair play and hard work are measured and compensated. Any given match day—whether their team wins or loses—spectators can receive both consolation and justification. Whatever the result, people agree on the general rules, and in that they find communion. Everybody can walk away believing (most of the time) that the system is fair and makes sense, and deceived that this system is a reflection of the world they live in, and not, in fact, a perverse inversion.

Football is the hopiate of the masses. You can always hope that your team will win. Football is the dopiate of the masses, especially if you mix it with drinking and gambling. Football is the copiate of the working classes, it's the one place a working man can catch a break.

For godless nations, football is a religion. For suffering people, football is a drug. Marx thought some higher class consciousness would replace religion in Europe, but it obviously hasn't. People are just looking at their feet, while the world crashes down around them. Especially when you mix football with what they advertise—betting and drinking—it's quite a powerful opiate, distributed on a massive scale. Football, not religion, is the opiate of the masses. And, I must say, having tried it, the gear is good.

4. What Nasrallah Said About His Own Death

Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah gave his own eulogy 32 years ago. It was an elegy to the last Secretary General of Hezbollah, Sayyed Abbas Mussawi. Nasrallah said,

His Eminence, al-Sayyed, symbolizes all the martyred men, Um Yasser all the martyred women, and little Hussein all the martyred children, and all of them together symbolize every family that suffers from oppression and prejudice in our Islamic world. We blame Israel for this blood-soaked carnage, and blame its protector, the United States of America, which is responsible for all Israel's massacres and all the destruction, murder, and displacement it wreaks. Everybody knows that Israel would not have been able to stand on its own in the region had it not been for Western and American support."

As we bid farewell to our great martyr and to his wife and child, we pledge ourselves to his pure soul and to our oppressed people, that we shall continue to walk in his footsteps."

America will remain the nation's chief enemy and the greatest Satan of all. Israel will always be for us a cancerous growth that needs to be eradicated, and an artificial entity that should be removed, even if all the rulers [of the world] recognize it."

Finally, as we stand in front of your torn body and pure soul, we pledge ourselves always to echo your words:

You Jews, leave our land, you have no home among us, go back from where you came, for there will never be peace or reconciliation between us, only war, resistance, and the language of war and bullets. You are leaving and we are staying; dawn is upon us, the sun will shine and the entire nation will rise to greet its God. This era will witness the victory of the dispossessed over the oppressor; it is the era of our beloved Islam and of the Great Khomeini, in spite of the hatred that the Godless and tyrants harbor towards us.

May God's peace be with you.

Nasrallah has since modified his language to wisely differentiate between Jews and Zionists, and to not miss the controlling White Empire for the Jews. Don't get it confused. Mussawi sounded antisemitic because who could blame him, they were getting massacred and tortured by Jews. Nasrallah conducted a deeper analysis and, in the end, was the least antisemitic guy I knew. As he said later in life,

There is a misconception prevalent in the Arab world regarding 'Israel'-US relations. We keep repeating this lie about the Zionist lobby - that the Jews rule America and are the real decision makers, and so on. No. America itself is the decision maker. In America, you have the major corporations, you have a trinity of the oil companies, the weapons industry, and the so-called "Christian-Zionism." The decision-making is in the hands of this alliance. 'Israel' used to be a tool at the hands of the British, and now it is a tool in the hands of America.

Nasrallah knew his enemy. He knew that the tail does not wag the dog, and he knew not to take the dog's word on anything at all. America acts like it can't control 'Israel' while supplying the bombs. They're just hiding behind another proxy, for plausible deniability. America hides its most vicious policies behind its colonies, and Nasrallah was fighting the whole White Empire with a bunch of farm boys and rifles at the start. It's a wonder he survived this long. As an aside, because I miss him,

Allah, pray take Sayyed Nasrallah to the ranks right next to you,
he was always hastening to your side.
He never flinched from the great injustice in the world,
like I flinch now, and cry.
Nasrallah hastened to jihad.
Nasrallah was always ready to die.

Get Free Or Die Trying

Sayyed Nasrallah became General Secretary after the last General Secretary's funeral, in 1992. Hezbollah became even stronger under his leadership. The fact is that every high-ranking member of Hezbollah gets martyred, it's in the job description. You don't fight the most vicious Empire on earth and survive. But they survive. The Party of God regenerations with every generation. The Resistance is a people's movement, and the people are still resisting. And their faith is a big part of the reason.

The Quran says those that hasten to jihad are promised a place in the highest ranks of heaven, right next to the Prophet (pbuh) and his family. And God knows these men deserve it. They're fighting great evil at an impossible disadvantage, and winning. White Empire, under America, is losing power all over the world. They've lost naval control in Yemen, ground control in Ukraine, and mind control in Palestine. And Nasrallah did his part. He hastened to jihad and he fought brilliantly. Now Samson is dead but, inshallah, it's all coming down around him.

As the Resistance has written in blood, assassinations have never stopped the Resistance and never will. The parts are interchangeable, the Resistance springs from the body of the people. The Sayyed talked about 'policy continuity' in 1992 and nothing's changed. He said,

The path pursued by the martyred Sayyed was not his own personal policy, but that of Hezbollah's leadership. This path does not shift or change, neither before nor after one secretary-general goes and the new one comes.

We, of course, believe that the Israeli enemy has not achieved any of its objectives through this assassination except for one—namely, the removal from the scene of a personality of the caliber of Sayyed Abbas Mussawi. What they have done, in fact, is awaken that very scene, put it on the alert, sharpened its awareness, increased its determination, unified it even further, caused it to rally round the resistance, and increased its enmity towards Israel in a manner that Abbas Mussawi himself could not have done during his lifetime."

Change the names and it's true. All the 'Israelis' have accomplished today is 'the removal from the scene of a personality of the caliber of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah.' What a caliber of man he was, and 'Nasrallah' will be inscribed on the highest caliber of missile. Fuck the arc of history, these guys have hypersonic now. And look at where they came from. As Nasrallah said, "In 1983 the resistance started with 200 mujahidin, and now, in 1992, there are thousands of them." Now Hezbollah is an unconventional army of tens of thousands. Yet the strategy is the same, the policy continues. What Nasrallah said in 1992 still holds true. He said,

The long-term strategy of the Islamic Resistance is clear and does not require additional explanation. It involves fighting against Israel and liberating Jerusalem, as well as Imam Khomeini's proposal—namely, ending Israel as a state. The fact that we are engaged in an existentialist battle with Israel is an honor for us, as is the fact that the Israeli enemy deals with Hezbollah on that basis.

We are not unrealistic. We do not pretend that our military capabilities and the numbers of our mujahidin would be enough to regain Jerusalem; none of us have ever made that claim. We do, however, believe that the resistance has to finish the job it started. It is impossible for us to fight the Israeli enemy through traditional and classical methods, but rather [we must fight] through a war of attrition, whereby we drain its energy, weaken it, then one day force it to withdraw.

The difference between then and now is that today the Resistance can regain Jerusalem. The entire region is wounded, and 'Israel' is wounded too. The arc of history is long, but it bends towards hypersonics. For clues, Hamas calls the battle joined on October 7th the Al Aqsa Flood, and Hezbollah ends most messages saying 'on the road to Al Quds.' Al Quds is Jerusalem and Al Aqsa is its holy mosque. Father than you can bear and sooner than you think, they're coming home. As Sheikh Ahmed Al-Yassin, founder of Hamas, said:

Ahmed Mansour: "As someone who witnessed the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, and now that this state has existed for 50 years – how do you see its future?"
Ahmed Yassin: "I say Israel was founded upon injustice and plunder. Any entity founded on injustice and plunder is destined to be destroyed."
Mansour: "Even if it has power that allows it to survive?"
Yassin: "The power of no one in the world lasts forever. You start as a child, then you become a teenager, and a young man, and then you become an aged man, an elderly man, and then it's over. The same is true of countries. They progress little by little until they become extinct. This cannot be helped."
Mansour: "At what stage is Israel now?"
Yassin: "I say that Israel will be gone in the first quarter of the next [21st] century, inshallah. To be precise, I say that by 2027, there will be no Israel."
Mansour: "Why that [specific] date?"
Yassin: "Because I believe in the noble Quran. The Quran tells us that the generations change every 40 years. During the first 40 years, we had the Nakba, in the second 40 years, the Intifada started, with confrontations the fighting, and the bombs, and the third [group of] 40 years, will see [Israel's] end, inshallah."
Mansour: "So this estimate..."
Yassin: "This is a Quranic conclusion."

Why must so many good people die? As Hamas's Khaled Mashal said, "Dear sister, nations are not easily liberated. The Russians sacrificed 30 million people in World War II, in order to liberate it from Hitler's attack. The Vietnamese sacrificed 3.5 million people until they defeated the Americans. Afghanistan sacrificed millions of martyrs to defeat the USSR and then the US. The Algerian people sacrificed six million martyrs over 130 years. The Palestinian people are just like any other nation. No nation is liberated without sacrifices." I wish it wasn't true, but it is. The ancients had it right. Everything requires sacrifice.

I do think the blessed Sheikh was right about the timing. 'Israel' is killing but 'Israel' is dead. Al-Yassin was blown out of his wheelchair 20 years ago, and now Yassin-105's are blowing through 'Israeli' tanks. Martyrs fill the ranks of the Resistance, they don't deplete them. 'Israel's' martyrdom of Sayyed Nasrallah changes little on the ground, though it changes a lot in heaven.

I must admit, however, that I am personally shattered. I read him and I consider him a 'friend in history'. As Machiavelli said, "there I make bold to speak to them and ask the motives of their actions, and they, in their humanity, reply to me." I feel Nasrallah's humanity and I can feel his death on a human level. And it's painful. I prayed for the whole month of Ramadan, to understand Islamic philosophy, and I prayed again when I heard about Nasrallah's death. It hurt so bad, I turned back to the Quran, like the prodigal bum I am. I flipped to a page at random, and read,

This Quran is an exposition for the people and a guidance and admonition for those who fear God.

And do not become faint of heart, nor grieve—you will have the upper hand, if you are believers—if you have suffered a wound, they too have suffered a similar wound. We bring these days to men by turns, so that God may know those who believe, and choose witnesses from among you; and God does not love the unjust, so that God may purge those who believe and wipe out those who deny the truth.

Do you suppose that you would enter the Garden, without God knowing those among you who would strive hard for His cause and endure with fortitude

You were longing for death, before you met it. Now you have seen it with your own eyes.

I believe that Nasrallah believed this, and I believe his right action sets him free. I don't know if I believe in God, but I definitely fear Them. And Nasrallah lived like God was watching, he will surely be rewarded on the Day of Judgement. Nasrallah hastened to jihad, as God quite clearly commanded. You know in your heart that you should do everything you can to stop this genocide, which is just one of many genocides these mass murderers are perpetrating. But just as Jesus called everyone to drop everything and follow him, many hear but few listen.

As the Quran says, "Among the believers there are men." Hezbollah includes this line in every epitaph for every martyr. It is their sign-off, and the same goes for Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah. His blood is no more precious than the blood of every man, woman, and child killed in this long genocide, which is to say it's very precious indeed. Goodbye their preacher, my teacher, our friend in history. God be with you Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah. God knows, you were always with Them.

Voice of Hezbollah The Statements of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah.epub Voice of Hezbollah The Statements of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah.epub.zip 1 MB

5. The Disrespectful Americans

The Communist Party of China is called the CPC but America insists on calling them the CCP. It's petty and downright disrespectful. The Ansar Allah movement in Yemen is called Ansar Allah, but ze Americans insist on calling them the Houthis. This is all like meeting someone named Sikhander and insisting on calling him Steve all night. You're just being a dick, and embarrassing yourself. Americans are rude, intrude, and are in for a rude awakening. The rectification of names is coming.

As much as America tries to tease China and Yemen about their names, this isn't grade school. China and Yemen are grown up now, and they both have superior and more plentiful firepower. America's ships are publicly prolapsing and they have to fire million dollar missiles against $5,000 drones to just stay afloat. Yemen defeated the US Navy in the Red Sea, historically speaking, they're done. Yemen isn't even industrialized, America has no chance against the industrial capital of the world in China.

America still struts around like a schoolyard bully, but it's 30 years later and everyone has grown up. The nerds they used to push into lockers have got rich and the Muslims they teased have got hypersonic missiles. In the past decade, America lost to Afghanistan, Yemen, and now they want to take on Russia and China. It's preposterous posturing. Teddy Roosevelt said, "speak softly and carry a big stick" but his moron heirs are doing the opposite. They're screaming bloody murder and slaughtering women and children, but are hopeless against men in the field.

America's mouth is writing checks its ass can't cash. America's currency is sanctioned into a corner (by them!), their industry has been exported to other countries (by them!), and their weapons are only good for civilians (peace be upon them). Meanwhile Russia has natural resources to back their currency, China has both resources and massive industry, and Yemen has superior weapons, in both quality and quantity (and quantity is its own quality). America, through sheer cussedness, has thrown all of Asia into an alliance against them. The one rule of land war in Asia is don't start a land war in Asia, and America has started three of them. They're hopelessly over-extended, and they've thrown their enemies together out of sheer diplomatic dementia. You're supposed to divide and conquer your enemies, not unite them. As the great sage of Newark said, "it's on page four of the boss manual."

The bully has not, in fact, done well after high school. As the state poet of New Jersey said, "time slips away and leaves you with nothing, mister, But boring stories of Glory days." Or as the moron of Manhattan said, "Make America Great Again." And as Tony Soprano said, presciently, 'I got a feeling I came in at the end.' Tony Soprano was a bully but he understood diplomacy, at least as a tactic. He said, "those that want respect, give respect." Which is correct. This is basic human courtesy, not even high diplomacy. Even if you hate someone, don't show it. Never play your hand is the first ruling of the great game. It's not just that America disrespect is disrespectful, it's self-destructive.

Getting someone's name wrong is frankly deranged diplomacy. Why would you piss someone off every time you talked to them? It's the opposite of strategic. As the Godfather said, "keep your friends close, and your enemies closer." He also said, "never tell anybody outside the family what you're thinking." But everyone always knows what Americans are thinking. The Americans are thinking "fuck the world" and the world knows it. They can't even get our names right. A bunch of disrespectful cretins.

Thus, the person that pays for America's disrespect is ultimately America. Normal countries try to get along, because they're trying to get along. However, America's been used to being a superpower for so long that they've become supercilious. And their arrogance always, always blows up in their face. The last 80 years has just been different invasions blowing up in America's face. None of this had to happen if they had even a dim concept of diplomacy. But they don't, the entire history of American diplomacy is built on them violating every treaty with the Native Americans, and still violating them. Americans have no native concept of diplomacy. It's literally a foreign concept.

The rest of the world, however, actually does practice diplomacy, out of self-interest. The point of diplomacy is to secure your best interest without war, whereas American policy is to wage war despite their best interests. America is, as the survey said, "a dying empire led by bad people." In normal countries, "the focus remains on cooperation, mutual benefit, and responding to the unique dynamics of each country," as Dr. S. Jaishankar of India said. Every country in the world attempts this level of basic diplomacy, or at least pretends. But America goes around making fun of people's names, like this is third grade. The ultimate loser is them. They look like fucking losers, and they're visibly losing.

It's not just the paucity of sticks America has to offer, it's an absolute poverty of carrots. America has nothing to offer anybody but weapons. China builds infrastructure and America bombs it. Who do they think everyone will want to be friends with? As Akende M'memb said, "The Vice President of the US came to Zambia, landed at a Chinese-built airport in Zambia, moved on a Chinese-built road in Zambia. The venue of this summit was actually a gift to Zambia by the Chinese government. And the key agenda of the summit, was to curb Africa's cooperation with China, in a gift to the African continent." It beggars belief. Kamala Harris literally sat inside a Chinese building, saying don't build with China, while committing a genocide, and while American cities like San Francisco look positively apocalyptic. The Americans think they're hot shit but their own roads and bridges are falling apart. They're just shit. America today can't build anything, least of all a reputation. Only bluster and bullying is left. And people, increasingly, just aren't buying it.

It's a brave new world, and the chinks [sic] and sand niggers [sic] aren't taking their shit, and the Rooskies ain't either. Across the world, the natives are restless and rebellions are spreading. China does not give a shit about America's shenanigans, they are living the meme, "do nothing. win." Or as Napoleon said, 'when your opponent is fucking themselves, don't interrupt.' Russia, also, does not give a shit about NATO. They know NATO is just a band of bitches, running dogs like Estonia and Finland, all bark and no teeth. And the brave people of Yemen do not give a flying fuck about America. They've defeated them in the Red Sea. The question is not how does America end. It's death by a thousand cuts, most of them self-harm. The only question is when.

So the final incarnation of White Empire goes not by regicide—though it's justified—but through suicide most reckless. And the rest of the world will say good riddance. Nobody's going to miss American hegemony, those motherfuckers wore their shoes in the house (on the furniture!), had bad hygiene (don't wash their butts), and called people nonsensicle names, like 'minorities'. We're the global majority, it's the CPC, it's Ansar Allah, and it's Palestine, not 'Israel'. Americans can't even get names right. They're downright disrespectful and it leads, inshallah directly to their downfall.

6. The Lack Of Depth In The News

Whenever I find a news article about a report, they never link to the report. Whenever I read a quote, they leave out the rest. And when they talk about an issue, they give you a conclusion and not context. The reading at hand rarely gives you further reading. They never recommend any books, but just another shallow article. I think the news makes you actively stupider. I avoid it like the plague.

The plague, unfortunately, is catching. And it's unavoidable. Whenever I search for research, I find news reports clogging up the results, making them completely useless. Knowledge is buried in a shallow grave. For example, I was trying to find a Castro quote and the results were all US news outlets (and NGOs) slandering him in not even relevant ways. It was the worst people on earth, telling me someone else is bad, over and over again. But what about the guy's words? Nevermind, let some idiot from Vox explain him. It's like this for anything I search, I get a lot of paper thin news articles repeating the same propaganda, literally burying any actual information underneath. I realize now, the news isn't there to cover the world. It's there to cover it up. As Trump's adviser Steve Bannon honestly said, they're flooding the zone with shit.

If I do manage to dig through the shit and find a kernel of knowledge, I still have to cross-reference it to explain anything. And they don't make it easy! Sometimes they'll talk about a report, but all you get is a few quotes and barely a name. Then I have to find that name, and find the document on their janky website, but where? I have to site:search or manually go through non-helpful menus, or sometimes even hack the URL to just guess. But why am I doing this? Didn't the journalist read the report, couldn't they just link a brother up? Unless—as I increasingly suspect—they haven't read the report at all. I increasingly think these journalists just copy a press release or copy each other, former a perfect ouroboros of ignorance. These people should be worried about AI replacing their jobs, cause they're not doing much thinking either.

Let's say they're talking about a country in the western media. They'll have a bunch of quotes from 'international' (re: White) organizations that 'cover' the place, if you remember what 'cover' actually means. If you dig you find that half these people are actually paid by the military industrial complex to market new places to bomb, but aren't journalists supposed to do the digging? How are ordinary people supposed to do this?

There's this deep idea in White media that you need a White person explaining anything, so you end up with panels of people discussing a country, with very few people from that country, as if we don't have Internet and the ability to translate. It's amazing how many stories about a country include no voices from that country, except as a bit of local color, literally. The 'experts' are people that that spout the same propaganda, and the people they talk about rarely, if ever, get to speak for themselves. If they do cover a foreign leader or group, it's very thinly and dismissively, always through the lens of their own propaganda, never trying to understand people on their own terms, in their own words.

For example, Westerners constantly speculate about what Xi Xinping is thinking, but the man has literally published volumes called Xi Xinping Thought. They're always speculating about what the Communist Party of China is doing, when the party publishes five-year plans. You never see this covered, instead you get mendacious morons imagining what is happening in China, and other morons nodding sagaciously. They start every story from their own ignorant assumptions, with no context or conscience. Thus you get constant stories that China is simultaneously taking over the world and imploding, like 1984 in Technicolor. What Orwell got wrong (among many things) was that you didn't need to memory-hole information, you could just bury people in even more information until they couldn't remember anything. Beneath all the repeated lies is one constant truth. China (Russia/Iran/whoever) bad, us good!

America journalists don't have a style guide, they have a propaganda guide. They're told not to use the word Palestinian, or genocide, or apartheid, and twist themselves into stylistic abominations to make the propaganda work. They even insist on getting the CPC's acronym wrong (calling it CCP and confusing me endlessly), as if being ignorant and disrespectful is some sort of moral victory. Or they call Yemen's AnsarAllah movement 'the Houthis', what is the point of this petty pedantry? To anyone with any knowledge, it's obvious that they're lying, cause they even make their own names up.

There's just a lot of dumb shit western audiences believe because they get answers without even understanding the question. People are immediately told to bomb X, Y, and Z without knowing anything about them. Just a few cherry-picked facts (or lies, doesn't matter) that confirm a really broad thesis, usually that these people should be deceased and western corporations should take their stuff. And the journalists are paid off, they get the advertising rights to the latest atrocities. The West doesn't have a free press, they just privatized propaganda. 'Journalists' fail upwards in this system by being the most shameless, it's a meritocracy of morons.

Once I was sitting with a writer from the Jon Stewart Show and he told me Winnie The Pooh is banned in China. But there's Winnie The Pooh rides in Shanghai Disney World! I was shocked that this guy, who gets paid infinitely more than me, has never looked this up. Do they just sit around repeating lies to each other and nodding and laughing at the various countries they're attacking? I think they do. The writers are as dumb as the readers/viewers. They eat their own dog food, which is actually dog shit. These people actually believe their own propaganda, ignoring the first rule of propaganda. Deceive your enemy, not yourself!

The biggest media trick is purely Pavlovian, repeating a name over and over again until the dogs of war salivate for blood. First Al-Qaeda was evil incarnate, then they seamlessly transferred the association, to Iraq, to Syria, to ISIS, to Hamas, and now Hezbollah. These are all very different things if you read anything, but if you don't, then it's just a code word for 'scary Muslims.' It's a cunning confabulation, they can free-associate and daisy-chain destruction for decades, making trillions in filthy lucre. At no point do their supposed journalists interrogate whether these things are the same, or whether some of them are created by the American state. No, it's all just scary Muslims and they simply repeat lies until millions of people are lying in their graves, uncounted. Then they do it again. Why wouldn't you? It's the perfect war crime. They just keep rebranding the enemy and selling more bombs.

My issue here is not the evil, which is evil, but the lack of depth. After 25 years of getting non-stop coverage of the Muslim world, western audiences know nothing about the Muslim world. They don't understand anything about the people they hate, they only understand the funhouse mirror of bad assumptions that they're trapped in. The carnival barkers they call a Congress loot their own treasury, then retire as board directors at arms dealerships. And Americans themselves are stuck with a military that's a lemon and only good for killing civilians.

And yet, at the same time, all the information is somewhere in the system. Just covered up with a thin layer of newsprint, but not especially well-hidden. Hence, if you can dig through their strange websites, US military reports will tell you how they're falling apart. Or you can get the actual words of Hamas and Hezbollah through imperial university or journalist translations. The key to western censorship is not disappearing information but flooding the zone with it. Rather than controlling 100% of the information space, they just fill it with 99% bullshit, and that works a charm.

The imperial information control is a mile wide and an inch deep. You can find seeds of truth in the shit they publish, and great reading recommendations in the people they condemn. But by God it's exhausting. Sometimes I wish I could just search for an answer and not get assaulted by propaganda. And sometimes I wish news would make even the most meagre attempt to connect to history, so I could learn something.

7. The Ruling Left In Sri Lanka: Who Are AKD And The JVP?

For the past few years, decades really, the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka was our deadname. Democracy died in 2022 when the unelected usurper (Ranil) schemed his way into the Presidency, and his family tortured and killed socialists for decades. In 2024, however, we voted him out for the third time and democratically elected a socialist President. Now the country's name makes sense for the first time since the 1970s, at least nominally.

That President is Anura Kumara Dissanayake (AKD). AKD, as he's known on the street, is a member of a party called the JVP. The JVP were a brutally suppressed Marxist-Leninist party that has basically suppressed its Marxist-Leninism. They reemerged as a somewhat anodyne center-left coalition called the NPP. As my compatriot Pasan Jayasinghe says, "In substance, even a cursory glance at the NPP's [their election coalition] manifesto reveals not a plan to usher in full-throated communism but a milquetoast, deliberately vague social democratic program."

I'll break down what these words and acronyms mean slowly and out of order, quoting directly as much as possible. But first some completely inadequate history.

Marxism-Leninism-Wijeweerism

First lets address Marxist-Leninism, and it's local incarnation, Wijeweerism if you will.

If you ask Marx (and Engels), their Communist Manifesto says nothing about elections at all. Instead, it says, "The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat." The point of revolution is to revolt the bougie classes (I cannot keep spelling bourgeoisie), not to play house with them via elections.

The famous conclusion of the Manifesto goes. "The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win."

If you ask Marx's hyphen homie, Lenin, he says elections are for morons. In The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, Lenin said,

The traitors, blockheads and pedants of the Second International could never understand such dialectics; the proletariat cannot achieve victory if it does not win the majority of the population to its side. But to limit that winning to polling a majority of votes in an election under the rule of the bourgeoisie, or to make it the condition for it, is crass stupidity, or else sheer deception of the workers.

In order to win the majority of the population to its side the proletariat must, in the first place, overthrow the bourgeoisie and seize state power; secondly, it must introduce Soviet power and completely smash the old state apparatus, whereby it immediately undermines the rule, prestige and influence of the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeois compromisers over the non-proletarian working people. Thirdly, it must entirely destroy the influence of the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeois compromisers over the majority of the non-proletarian masses by satisfying their economic needs in a revolutionary way at the expense of the exploiters.

This was, indeed, the position of the proto JVP, led by Rohan Wijeewera. In 1973, Wijeweera said, "I am a Marxist-Leninist. I am a modern Bolshevik. I am a proletarian revolutionary. Marxism-Leninism is a clear doctrine. In no way is a Marxist-Leninist a conspirator. I, a Bolshevik, am in no way a terrorist. As a proletarian revolutionary, however, I must emphatically state that I am committed to the overthrow of the prevailing capitalist system and its replacement by a socialist system."

Rohan Wijeweera, Speech before the Ceylon Criminal Justice Commission, NLR I 84, March April 1974 Rohan Wijeweera, Speech before the Ceylon Criminal Justice Commission, NLR I 84, March April 1974.pdf 87 KB

As Marx said, Wijeweera 'disdained to conceal his views and aims,' even though it would eventually get him killed. Wijeweera said, "We thought that the Ceylon Communist Party was degenerating into a social-democratic party" and for that reason, he formed the JVP as actual revolutionaries. They tried actual revolution in both 1971 and 1988/89, and lost bloodily.

Wijeweera and 41 of 42 JVP Central Committee members were executed and the JVP was quite literally dead in the water. In the south, 'Jeppas' bodies were burned at junctions and were found floating downstream. The JVP was violent but the government was ultra-violent. The Sri Lankan genocide (destruction of people in whole or in part) of Tamils is well-documented, but the ideological genocide of communists has been memory-holed completely.

Ideological Genocide

The Cold War is only called 'Cold' because that describes white people's hearts. Millions of people were killed in this 'Cold' War, which they ignore because it didn't affect Europe. America took up the mantle and military bases of the European powers, assimilated the Nazis into NATO, and began pursing Hitler's #1 goal in global earnest. They eliminated communists in what can only be called an ideological genocide, killing millions on every inhabited continent.

I'll repeat because it went on and on. The American-led red scare was an ideological genocide waged that killed, tortured, and disappeared millions of people, from Chile to Congo to Sri Lanka to Indonesia. America's only ideology is money, and communists seizing the means of production fucks with their money, which is why that ideology had to be smothered in the crib. That's why the Americans, who I just call White Empire cause it's the same shit, unleashed an anti-commie genocide that made Hitler proud.

Every liberation movement was socialisty. You never saw the Capitalist Peoples Front anywhere. Hence America's anti-communist crusade was an anti-liberation crusade in general. They smothered or ended decolonization across much of the world. Any nation that wanted to plan their economy didn't fit into America's plans, and for that reason, young people were tortured, shot, and killed all over the world. They asked why communists resorted to violence but, as Fidel Castro said "Revolutionaries didn't choose armed struggle as the best path, it's the path the oppressors imposed on the people. And so the people only have two choices: to suffer, or to fight."

Especially after the ruling UNP government cancelled elections and blocked all other paths to people protesting in both the north and south, both sides took up arms, and the state went ultra-violent on everyone. In the south, Sri Lanka joined wholeheartedly in the bloody anti-communist crusade, championed by Ranil the Usurper's uncle, JR Jayawardene, known as Yankee Dickee because he was pro-American (and a dick).

JR was an arch-capitalist and the architect of Sri Lanka's ruin. As Wijeweera said (presciently), "the administration of this country was handed over to the local capitalist class, as part of a neo-colonialist strategem, and the country continued along the same bankrupt path of capitalist development." JR sold off Sri Lankan industrial capacity, broke trade unions, and waged two wars against revolutionary socialists in both the north and south. He was our comprador king, coming from the colonial-era United National Party, colloquially known as the Uncle Nephew Party. Sure enough, his sociopathic nephew Ranil presided over our actual bankruptcy in 2022.

Sinhala Jathiyism

The ideological genocide both worked and didn't work. One of the most popular trishaw stickers in Sri Lanka is still 'Che Guevara Want You To Rebel.' As AKD said (quoting), "they buried us, but they didn't know we were seeds." After the ideological genocide, the JVP grew into a mainstream political party from just one surviving Committee member (Somawansa Amarasinghe).

Sectarian Socialism: RAJESH VENUGOPAL The Politics of Sri Lanka's Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) JVP-Post-1994.pdf 608 KB

As Rajesh Venugopal said in a 2010 publication, "The Janatha Vimukti Peramuna (JVP) is perhaps the most resilient, dynamic and deeply-rooted political force in contemporary Sri Lanka." To be honest, I would have said this was crazy in 2010, when the two major parties still existed. Since then, however, they have both self-destructed and the JVP was, in fact, the oldest political party running in the 2024 election.

As Venugopal continues, "In the course of this reorientation as an electoral party, the JVP reacted skilfully to fashion a fluid ideo-political agenda that could be rapidly calibrated along the continuum from populist Marxism to populist nationalism as circumstances demanded." Populist nationalism in the Sri Lankan context, of course, means Sinhala nationalism, that of the majority jathiya. In his paper, Venugopal talks about "four features of the JVP's Marxist-Sinhala nationalist ideological mix."

A Bit Of Racial Context

It is important to understand the Sinhala/Tamil divide in Sri Lanka, at least superficially. Before (total) colonization, 'Sri Lanka's' last 'Sinhala' kings were actually Telegu (South Indian) and Tamil was a court language in Kandy. Race was not the dividing line in society as much as class. The last Sinhalese kings were literally not Sinhalese, and before that they were often halfsies.

Race does not really translate. In Sinhala we say jathiya for race, but jathiya can also mean 'what type of dog is that?' to 'what kind of shoes are you looking for?' to 'I will love you in my next rebirth.' As you can see, the western concept of race doesn't really fit here, but it was foisted upon us anyways. Like cricket, this is now just the game we play.

The British strategically used race to divide and conquer Sri Lanka, as they did globally. They elevated mixed race Burghers and the Tamil minority to the highest posts in colonial administration, sowing the seeds of massive tension with the majority Sinhalese. For the Sinhalese (I'm Sinhala) the proximate face oppressing us was more often Tamil than White. This tension snapped after Independence in a way that still benefited the reconstituted White Empire (under America now).

For most of its independent history, Sri Lanka remained divided and conquered by racial war instead of the class war that both Tamil and Sinhalese revolutionaries broadly agreed on. Hence you get the (Tamil) LTTE leader Vellupillai Prabhakaran saying,

Revolutionary socialism is my political philosophy. By socialism I mean the construction of an egalitarian society where there is no class contradiction and exploitation of man by man; a free, rational society where human freedom and rights are protected and progress enhanced. Che Guevara is the guerrilla leader who inspires me the most.

And his Sinhala counterpart Wijeweera broadly agreed. As Wijeweera said, "After the publication of Che's Guerrilla Warfare certain of our sympathizers, as well as members of other groups, thought of seeking solutions to the prevailing economic crisis by similar methods." Thus you had multiple socialists rebelling against the same government, but divided along race lines, as the British intended. Tamil/Sinhala, Shia/Sunni, 'Israeli'/Palestinian, White/Black, divide and conquer is the grift that keeps on giving.

If we, thus, brutally simplify Sri Lankan (et al) politics to a continuum with Class War on the Y-Axis and Race War on X, you can see the political space that the JVP played in. I'll repeat Venugopal who said, "the JVP reacted skilfully to fashion a fluid ideo-political agenda that could be rapidly calibrated along the continuum from populist Marxism to populist nationalism as circumstances demanded."

Pivoting To Sinhala Jathiyism

From 1997, the circumstances were such that both of the duopoly parties broadly agreed on racial and class (economic) issues, leaving wide open political space for the JVP. As Venugopal said,

For the first time since the rise of the two-party system in the mid-1950s, both the main parties were in broad consensus on the necessity for state reform regarding the two core issues that had animated Sri Lankan politics: economic policy and ethnic conflict. Both parties advocated market reforms, and both agreed on the necessity for constitutional reforms to address the ethnic conflict. The remaining differences between them on these issues were largely a matter of emphasis, tactics, and personality, rather than principle and direction. But, as a direct consequence of this emerging consensus, there was now an increasingly open and viable space on the populist left for opposition to the market reforms, and on the Sinhala nationalist right for mobilisation directed at preserving the unitary state and opposing the devolution of powers along ethnic lines.

As Vengugopal continued, "At an ideological and practical level, the JVP's success lay in their ability to fold these often spontaneous sources of predominantly economic opposition into component elements of an over-arching and coherent Sinhala nationalist framework."

I must add here that somethings are being lost in translation. Sinhala nationalism is not necessarily a bad thing. As Robert Kearney said after interviews with leftists in the 60s and 70s, "The movement expressed deeply felt popular aspirations and contained 'progressive' features, particularly as it represented the class revolt of the Sinhalese-educated rural masses against the English-educated classes."

Much is lost in translation and Sinhala nationalism is regarded as pure racism in English. But it isn't. As Rohana Wasala said, "we can talk about a 'Sri Lankan nation' in English, but cannot translate the term into Sinhalese as 'Sri Lanka jathiya' for then it will mean 'Sri Lanka race' which is non-existent." It's hard to explain, but most Sri Lankans don't identify as Sri Lankan except at cricket games. It is (or was) almost impossible to organize around Sri Lankan nationalism. Such an identity did not exist (yet), except for what Wasala called the "nationalised colonialism" of the corrupt 'Ceylonese' elites.

Electoral democracy was, honestly a Trojan Horse left by the British. Parliamentary democracy creates racism because it rewards identity politics, whatever gets you to 51%. As Kumara Jayawardena said, "In terms of parliamentary politics this often meant the adoption of policies and strategies that would evoke a positive response from the general mass of the people; in effect, of the Sinhala majority." A king or a Lee Quan Yew or a one-party state can clamp down on such jockeying for power, but a party within a Parliamentary democracy has to just ride it. Which the JVP, more than other contradictory leftist parties did.

The JVP took a clear position in the early 2000s arguing that "that the peace process and market reforms were part of a coherent assault by a constellation of foreign forces and domestic quislings to destabilise, fragment and re-conquer the island" (Venugopal). As JVP General Secretary Tilvin Silva said, "On the one side, the country is being sold to transnational corporations through the Regaining Sri Lanka programme while on the other, a separate state is being given to the LTTE." This was actually true, and describes the fraught nature of the country's decolonization. Sri Lanka was still divided and conquered and prone to being consumed by both White Empire and India for parts.

Divide and conquer had been historically used to strip the country of resources and labor, and things were honestly going the same way. That's the threat the JVP was able to articulate and organize around. And this was a popular perspective in the south. There was, in fact, wide opposition to dividing and selling off the country, and tens of thousands of people came out to protest, every month for a year. This was not just racism.

The JVP was able to organize thousands of people to come out to protest both privatization and the peace talks. This helped topple Ranil's government (under Chandrika) and, later, they helped install Mahinda's warlike one. Thus, "Between 2001 and 2004, the JVP became the leading Sinhala nationalist political organisation in Sri Lanka, and also the leading political force that opposed the peace process. Incredibly, it achieved this position without being an explicit advocate of Sinhala nationalism, (and having frequently denounced it)."

While the JVP certainly played to the Sinhala jathiya, I think it's unfair to call them racist (but I'm Sinhala, so take it with chili and salt). As Venugopal said, "The JVP angrily and vociferously denies the charge that it is chauvinistic, and there is very little in the official literature or statements of the JVP that can be described as arousing overt anti-Tamil sentiment. The JVP advocates equal rights for all communities in Sri Lanka and recognises that Tamils have historically suffered discrimination and even violence."

The JVP, of course, wouldn't say that the Tamils have suffered genocide, but—if we define genocide as the destruction of a people in whole or in part—they unfortunately have been genocided, in part. Genocide is really much more common than we think, though it has been effectively trademarked by 'Israelis'.

The fact is that the JVP actually has the least blood on its hands compared to the duopoly parties. The JVP did not organize the 1983 pogroms of Tamils in Colombo, that was Ranil's UNP. They did not burn down the Jaffna Library. Again, Ranil's UNP. While Ranil and the UNP posed as the protectors of Tamils, they were really the same old comprador elites, doing the same old looting for the same old colonial countries, using the same old tricks. They never gave a shit about the Tamils or anybody else, except as a way to divide and conquer elections.

What I must add from the Tamil perspective is that whatever the JVP said, "in operational terms, this effectively translated into an agenda and tactical programme that was little different to that which successive generations of Sinhala chauvinists have deployed since the mid-1950s… On the basis of these actions, the JVP is viewed by large sections of Sri Lankan society, and particularly by the Tamil community, as a Sinhala chauvinist organization."

In the end, the JVP was part of Mahinda's government which restarted and ended the war. That last, violent push eliminated the LTTE and tens of thousands of civilians in the process. This was the result most of the population (except those being killed and militarized, of course) wanted. As Venugopal said, ""Sinhala nationalists... long opposed devolution, foreign intervention, and any solution to the ethnic conflict short of outright military victory." Again, I'm not using nationalist as a bad word here, these people wanted the war to end. This is obviously not satisfactory to Tamil nationalists, for whom the JVP only has the following weak sauce to offer:

[question by audience member]: 'Can you succinctly describe your solution to the ethnic conflict in this country?' 'Socialism', answered one of the JVP leaders unequivocally and crisply. 'What should the Tamil people do until socialist rule is established in the country?' asked another person in the seminar crowd. 'The Tamils also have to struggle for socialism until then' replied the JVP.

The war ended in 2009 and this, politically, ended serious discussion of 'the Tamil question' in the now dominant south. It's not that anyone came up with a good answer, the Tamils were just beaten until they shut up. For the moment, this left only the struggle for socialism, whatever that meant.

The Liberation Movement Of The Moment

Many liberal democracies have two parties and, for whatever reason, those parties seem to be collapsing into one uniparty. Whether it's Republicans and Democrats, Conservatives and Labor, or the UNP and SLFP, "the remaining differences between [the two parties] on these issues were largely a matter of emphasis, tactics, and personality, rather than principle and direction," as Venugopal said.

Sri Lanka's parties mainly differed on how much to beat the minorities, and with the Tamils beaten they were running out of reasons to exist. Mahinda Rajapaksa tried to introduce beating Muslims, but that didn't catch on for more than one election cycle. By this time, the privatization and cannibalization of the state they both indulged in ended where Rohan Wijeweera predicted. Bankruptcy. The country's economy collapsed under predatory loans from foreign capitalists in 2022 and, politically, only the JVP was ready for it. In fact, the JVP was the only major party that even existed.

As Venugopal wrote in 2010,

The JVP's Leninist party structure and its strict norms of discipline and collective decision-making provided an unparalleled organisational strength. The JVP has a dedicated cadre- base who remain active and perform constant house-to-house visits and acts of public service, such as tsunami relief, even when there are no elections looming. The JVP remains one of the few parties that has a constant supply of idealistic young 'full-timers' willing to sacrifice their own careers for a life as a party organiser. In these respects, the JVP ranks very favourably against the corruption, indiscipline, clientelism, petty rivalries and factionalism displayed within the other parties.

The JVP was the only party that managed to transfer power internally without falling apart. The other major parties were treated as private fiefdoms, seats to die in or pass on to your idiot sons. So the UNP became a one-man party under Ranil and the SLFP completely fell apart. The JVP, however, peacefully handed power from the old guard (Somawansa) to the new Anura Kumara Dissanayake in 2014.

Who Is AKD?

Let's introduce him a bit, in his own words. As AKD said in 2015,

I was born in Thambuthegama, Anuradhapura district. My father was a labourer. My mother was a housewife. As a child, I faced the same problems that many people in our country continue to face today... As a man who was born in a distant village, who went to a normal school and who came from a normal family, the opportunities I have today did not arise because of my skills and talents but because of my party. The JVP has been a constant source of strength and a pillar of support in my life.

Unlike the old communist parties, whose "leadership has consisted mostly of radicalised urban middle-class intellectuals," the JVP cadres arrested in 1971 "were were the children of farmers, labourers, plantation workers, or the low grades of government service, and 86 per cent had attended rural secondary schools." This is well before AKD joined the party (he was three years old), but it tells you where the party comes from, and why that matters.

JVP cadres believe a strong, socialist state not for abstract, theoretical reason but because, otherwise, they would be prey to the strong capitalists. As Venugopal said, "By providing education and welfare, protecting and promoting domestic entrepreneurs, and generating direct employment opportunities, the social democratic state became the vehicle by which the lives of the rural poor could be completely and permanently transformed." That's where AKD was from, in contrast to the other candidates in 2024, who were either nephews or son of Presidents.

Is He Marxist?

Both the international press says that AKD is a Marxist and World Socialist says that he's not, scaring both their respective audiences. I don't know, AKD has at least read Marx. He said,

There are many books that changed my life. I was deeply inspired by the literature of Soviet Russia – War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, The Mother by Maxim Gorky and a number of short stories. The literature of that period had a great impact on our lives. I have read Senkottan by Mahinda Prasad Masimbula. Quite recently, I read 'Adaraneeya Victoria' by Mohan Raj Madawala. I've read Professor Abraham Kovoor's work while at school. I enjoy reading autobiographies and biographies. I've read about the life of Marx, Engels, Mandela, Castro, Gandhi, Lenin and Clinton. I also enjoyed reading the story of Yugoslavia's Marshal Tito.

AKD also said his heroes were "Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Friedrich Engels, Rohana Wijeweera, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara." However, AKD doesn't talk in a Marxist-Leninist way at all.

When asked what message he had for the country, AKD said, "We need to change our society. For 67 years, we have endured one system. It hasn't benefitted our country. If there is anyone who thinks we haven't suffered, he/she makes up only 1% of the country. The other 99% are suffering. We need to think about the other 99%. We need to build a society that allows everyone to prosper. This is what the JVP stands for today and what it hopes to accomplish in the future. It doesn't matter who you are and what you do, we need to work together."

This certainly doesn't sound like Marxism-Leninism, it sounds more like David Graeber's 'we are the 99%.' Whereas revolutionary socialism is about smashing bougie institutions, the JVP under AKD has been one of the most assiduous defenders of Parliamentary privilege. In 2018, AKD even defended Ranil the arch capitalist because the then President had sacked him (from the Prime Minister's post) improperly. The JVP under AKD won't smash anything. As AKD said,

The JVP totally rejects violence. We assure the people that the only way we will come into power is by winning the trust of the people. We assure the people of Sri Lanka that we will never ever take to arms again. During the last 25 years, the JVP was subjected to violence on numerous occasions, however we never resorted to violence and I assure the public that they need not have any fear, the JVP has rejected violence forever! Since 88/89, the JVP has conducted themselves without resorting to violence of any form and we assure the people of Sri Lanka that we never will resort to violence again.

In fact, the JVP has evolved so much that if you read AKD's 2024 Presidential Manifesto, Marx, communism, and even the JVP are not mentioned at all.

Who Is The National People's Power?

What is mentioned, instead, is the National Peoples Power (the NPP). The NPP is nominally a coalition with 21 members, but the JVP is the only serious political party therein. Coalitions are common in Sri Lankan politics, but the NPP is more like a rebranding of the JVP itself. AKD calls the NPP a national liberation movement. He said, "Our party is the JVP, and our national movement is the NPP. We have not only built a party, but also built a massive national liberation movement... When we look at countries that have developed well over time, we see that it [the development] is very much aligned to a national liberation struggle."

The NPP is not just a rebranding. Their Prime Minister, Dr. Harini Amarasuriya, is not from the JVP itself. Speaking for the NPP, she has said, "We're not a Marxist-Leninist party like the JVP because a Marxist-Leninist party has a much more formal structure. There are full-time cadres in that party, for example, we don't have that system. We are left wing. We're progressive. And Marxist philosophy obviously has an influence on our ideological thinking, but not only Marx."

As Amarasuriya continued, discussing the Aragalaya, an abortive protest movement that toppled one political family to have another take his seat,

Had we come into power immediately after the Aragalaya, our entire approach would have been one that not only addresses the crisis but also tackles its underlying causes. This requires a much more systemic overhaul, focusing not just on managing the economy but also on addressing the political failures that contribute to such crises. For us, this means revisiting the social contract between citizens and the government. We believe that in our country, this contract has failed; there is a significant lack of trust between the citizens and the government.

AKD himself echoes this, saying, "What our country needs is not a mere government or a regime change, but a real social transformation. So, we are ready to work with groups and parties who are ready for that social transformation. We don't see those in government or the opposition, who have ruled this country, as being eligible for such an alliance."

How Does This Change Politics?

What AKD and Dr. Amarasuriya are talking about here is important. For my entire adult life, Sri Lanka has been ruled by three families. The Wickremesinghe/Jayawardenas, the Premadasas, and the Rajapaksas. Beneath them are a coterie of politicians who scurry back and forth to whichever Raja prospers. Their main business is stealing and dealing and taking out loans on the peoples credit for cold hard commission. The election of AKD is the first time in my life this hasn't happened. Nobody is scurrying over to the NPP, and the NPP is not taking them. I don't know if this will change with the General Election, but it hasn't happened yet. This is already a big change in the political culture.

As I quoted earlier, Pasan Jayasinghe called the NPP's Manifesto "a milquetoast, deliberately vague social democratic program." Which it is. But political manifestos are bullshit, the real policy is personnel. As AKD said, "We must liberate the country from this corrupt political culture. That is the first thing we must do —liberate this country from this corrupt elite political leadership which has been ruining the country for the last 75 years." And the NPP and JVP definitely provide completely different leadership. And whatever AKD is doing, he does not have the same people as we've been burdened by for generations. It's only been two days, but we haven't seen the usual rats scurrying from ship to ship that we usually see. So the ship may actually go in a different direction. Somewhat fitting since the NPP's electoral symbol is a compass. As Dr. Amarsuriya said when asked about the NPP's experience, "We don't have experience in bankrupting the country, but we will gain experience in building it."

Ergo sum

Will this work? Hell if I know. The country still has ethnic issues that are not solved by 'just add socialism', plus all the trauma from the anti-communist killings, plus the western debt trap we're still in, all while America trying to turn us into an aircraft carrier to bomb China in World War III. Oh, and the climate is also falling down and it's hot all the time, and our children are hungry.

Personally, I wish the JVP would go Marxist-Leninist, but I realize now that it's not them. The JVP evolved through bitter experience into a certain historical form, 'socialism with Sri Lankan characteristics' if you will. Lenin and Marx said that stuff about overthrowing and conquering not for lols or bloodlust but because if you don't smash the bougies, they'll smash you most genteelly, but the JVP knows this better than anybody. They evolved a different way out of both self-preservation and for national concern, so who am I to say. I fear that they'll get devoured by the many sharks circling this island, but, as a Sri Lankan, I really hope they make it through.

8. How I Was Colonized

I've been reading Frantz Fanon and I feel both seen and condemned. Fanon describes a type of colonized intellectual, which was me once upon a time. He also describes a trajectory for their awakening, which I seem to be following. It's a bit annoying cause I could have just read this instead of making a fool of myself in public for decades.

The Colonized Intellectual

When I was 21, I returned to sender. I finished my education in Canada/America and moved 'back' to Sri Lanka. I put 'back' in quotes because I hadn't lived there since I was four. As a young man, I thought I knew it all, but I had no idea. I had an education but I didn't realize how much I had to unlearn, and how much sources I trusted were actively lying to me. It's only now, as an adult, finally reading Fanon at my wife's insistence, that I understand who I was. I was a certain sort of colonized man, and quite unconsciously. As Fanon said,

During decolonization, certain colonized intellectuals have established a dialogue with the bourgeoisie of the colonizing country. During this period the indigenous population is seen as a blurred mass. The few "native" personalities whom the colonialist bourgeois have chanced to encounter have had insufficient impact to alter their current perception and nuance their thinking. During the period of liberation, however, the colonialist bourgeoisie frantically seeks contact with the colonized "elite." It is with this elite that the famous dialogue on values is established.

This is the position I found myself in, in 'dialogue' with western embassies and foreign correspondents, going to cocktails and dinner parties, because I spoke the language of English and the dialect of human rights, democracy, and free markets fluently. I thought myself highly original, despite repeating paper-thin insights from The Economist from the same hymn book as everyone else. As Fanon said, "The colonized intellectual accepted the cogency of these ideas and there in the back of his mind stood a sentinel on duty guarding the Greco-Roman pedestal."

But I hadn't even read the classics, I just got those 'values' photocopied 10,000 times through the mass media, until they were a meaningless paste. This is what Fanon called "the famous dialogue on values." It was really a monologue repeated between people at cocktail parties. I wish I'd read more widely back then, because I would have read my own story and perhaps skipped a few chapters. Back then, I was just a certain type of colonized man, the embarrassing one.

Fanon said, "When the colonialist bourgeoisie realizes it is impossible to maintain its domination over the colonies it decides to wage a rearguard campaign in the fields of culture, values, and technology, etc," and I have seen all this in action. Those were precisely the points that I interfaced with the west. The US Embassy's cultural attaché invited me to do a photo exhibition (I declined because I couldn't afford printing anything), I did journalism training through the German Embassy, and I met people from Facebook, even after they'd killed people in my own country. This makes me cringe today, but at the time I was oblivious. I thought these were the good guys, because I still believed what they said and not what they did. Thus I feel both seen and condemned by Fanon when he says,

In its narcissistic monologue the colonialist bourgeoisie, by way of its academics, had implanted in the minds of the colonized that the essential values—meaning Western values —remain eternal despite all errors attributable to man.

That really was the monologue implanted in my head. I remember having the shower thought, 'well, America doesn't live up to its values, but it has them as a sort of map for the future.' Like lying was important because it was at least aspirational. But I was being too clever by half. They were just lying, and I was lying to myself about it. I'd blame myself if I wasn't so utterly predictable.

The Color Revolutionary

Fanon said, "The intellectual who, for his part, has adopted the abstract, universal values of the colonizer is prepared to fight so that colonist and colonized can live in peace in a new world." And, indeed, I unwittingly underwent training to be a color revolutionary.

One day, I was idly looking through some noticeboard for opportunities because journalists don't have many. I saw a free training trip to Spain, to study non-violent resistance. This was just after the Arab Spring and it was all very exciting. I applied, got in, and they paid my flight and hotel to Madrid, Spain. I could have never afforded this on my own and I felt quite lucky. In hindsight, I was just a mark.

That event was totally CIA, in hindsight. It was run by a guy from the US military and government, who was funded by some dodgy financier. As a journalist, did I look any of this up at the time? Uh, no, I was more interested in going to the Prado (which was excellent). At that training I met some cool people from Egypt and Yemen and Mexico (shout-out George Clooney), but in hindsight, holy shit! They were training sleeper cells for regime change, and they trained me! Writing all of this stuff is honestly quite implicating and embarrassing and my only excuse is that I wasn't thinking. All I really thought was a free trip to Madrid.

That's how they get you, they literally wine and dine you, and you think nothing's happening and then you're working for the CIA. Or they get you through your sins, through petty corruption, pedophilia, or other sinister proclivities. The carrot of flattery and the stick of blackmail, that's what the US calls this public diplomacy. Colonization has always been a resource light enterprise. They want the colonized to the colonizing.

The Colonial History

In 20/20 hindsight that's how it always was. We always colonized ourselves. As Ian Barrow says in his history of the East India Company, "It is one of the great ironies of the Company's history that its Indian empire was effectively won by its Indian troops." The corporate army's officers were all British and the grunts were Indian. We've been cucking ourselves since day one. India's population was nearly 200 million but it was oppressed by less than 45,000 Britishers. As Barrow said, "In 1830, for example, the Company garrisoned 36,409 British soldiers but employed only 3,500 civil servants and permitted just 2,149 businessmen and other Europeans to live in India."

The colonizers of the Raj played political Jenga, corrupting local elites with imported goods, education for their children, and filthy lucre from the enslavement of their own people. Splinter colonization is still the policy of the day, divide and conquer the masses using local elites. It goes back to the great grand pappy of White Empire. As Cornell and Matthews write about the Romans, "The political organization of the developing provinces was achieved through the existing upper classes." It is, as my historical thesis goes, same shit, different day.

That's how it worked in Sri Lanka. The noble families collaborated with the colonizers. They invited foreign guns in to settle petty scores against teach other and sold out the whole country. Those same ruling families are still ruling the country, and still ruining it. The British called this divide and conquer, and the Americans do the same thing with better marketing. They call the process democratizing, encouraging free speech, human rights, but it's really just divide and conquer. And colonized individuals like me were used to divide. I feel sick to be part of that history, but that was me.

Decolonization

But Fanon wrote about an arc for the colonized man, as the world decolonized around him. Fanon describes my own intellectual evolution when he says,

All the Mediterranean values, the triumph of the individual, of enlightenment and Beauty turn into pale, lifeless trinkets. All those discourses appear a jumble of dead words. Those values which seemed to ennoble the soul prove worthless because they have nothing in common with the real-life struggle in which the people are engaged.

Indeed, I have struggled with the western values I imbibed because they're so flagrantly violated now. As Assata Shakur said, "When times get hard and money gets tight, they pull off that liberal mask and you think you're talking to Adolf Hitler." As times get hard and money gets tight, western liberals are literally committing genocide. They piously look down on Trump as the 'greater evil', while not looking in a mirror while they commit genocide. What are you going to tell me about lesser evil while I see kids with their heads and eyes blown off every day? When Democrats just continue Republican policies with more pious banalities? Just a jumble of words atop a mountain of dead bodies.

Fanon said, "The colonized intellectual accepted the cogency of these ideas and there in the back of his mind stood a sentinel on duty guarding the Greco-Roman pedestal. But during the struggle for liberation, when the colonized intellectual touches base again with his people, this artificial sentinel is smashed to smithereens." I have truly felt this smashing in my mind. We have arrived at a point where the conmen of history no longer even pretend to believe in any values, but the colonized men actually do.

Asides

Today, as James Baldwin says, "All the Western nations are caught in a lie, the lie of their pretended humanism: this means that their history has no moral justification, and that the West has no moral authority." It cheers me to see such clarity but depresses me that Baldwin said this decades ago. How much time have we lost, how many lives, to see what was already seen?

Decolonization is not merely a political process, it's psychological. I don't even know if I'm better yet, the mind virus runs deep. When I read Fanon I feel both abominable and absolved. Abominable because I was a colonized intellectual for so long, and absolved because I can feel decolonization also coursing through me. I like to think I arrived at my own conclusions, but I increasingly think conclusions arrived at me.

9. Why I'm Voting AKD 🧭

Sri Lanka is finally having a Presidential election, after overthrowing our President and getting some unelected rogue to rob us for two years now. The stability the purchased with more loans has so impoverished the people that, for the first time in history, the 'commies' have a chance at electoral victory. I dunno if I'd put my money on it, but that's where I'll put my vote. My only worry is that they're not communist enough. This is an FAQ as to why I'm voting for the National People's Power alliance, led by Anura Kumara Dissanayake of the JVP.

Who is the NPP?

The NPP is a coalition of leftist parties in Sri Lanka, led by the JVP. Their Presidential candidate is Anura Kumara Dissanayake (commonly called AKD).

Hasn't the JVP killed a lot of people?

The JVP started as a revolutionary party which tried to seize power by force. They have killed a lot of people. However, the JVP has actually killed less people than the other parties, by a factor of 10 at least.

Both parties in the old two-party system united around killing commies and Tamil nationalists and they killed much, much more. The UNP and SLFP killed tens of thousands in both the south and north, both Sinhalese and Tamils. The JVP's anti-state violence pales in comparison to the state violence unleashed by the ruling class in response. It's a morbid metric, but if you're voting based on who's killed the least people, that's actually the JVP.

Isn't communism bad?

The JVP is no longer communist enough for me, but let's address the communism in the room. Communism is, historically, the fastest way to develop and delivers the best health, education, and other vital outcomes for the most people.

China is a communist country and they're the richest nation in the world now (PPP FTW). As Uncle Deng said in 1987, "Poverty is not socialism. We must support socialism, but we must move ahead in building a socialism which is truly superior to capitalism." They've actually done it, ahead of schedule. Just look at any Chinese metro/car/train compared to the absolutely crumbling and stagnant western models. Capitalism tries to take credit for China's rise, but I invite you to read anything.

As Michael Hudson says, the main difference between communism and capitalism is that in communism the state controls capital and in capitalism capital controls the state. In China the Communist Party is quite in control and while they're not dictatorial, they do dictate. They call their model 'socialism with Chinese characteristics,' and Sri Lanka's official name is the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka. We shouldn't shy from declaring economic independence ourselves.

Historically, communism actually enabled countries to seize control of their resources and labor and to industrialize within one generation. Communism was a way to economic independence, not the illusion of political independence while still being debt slaves to the same people that colonized us. Communism has delivered better health, education, and housing to its people and many of the ills ascribed to communism are because of capitalists attacking and sanctioning them. Communism is not a bad word, it's just bad-mouthed by the worst people. The IMF, for example, is always headed by a European and has not actually developed anyone, they're just colonialism administrators under a new name. Communism of one sort or another is the surest way to decolonize your economy, and that's a step Sri Lanka has yet to take.

Is the JVP communist?

The JVP (the main part of the NPP), unfortunately, is not a very communist party. The JVP started as a revolutionary party which tried to violently overthrow the government, but they were killed pretty comprehensively and reformed as a regular political party. I'd describe them as more center-left than anything. The hardcore Marxists left for the FSP long ago, unfortunately. I guess you could call the JVP commies, I don't consider it an insult, but not enough for my taste.

What would the NPP do?

The NPP has said "Developing a production-based economy is our singular aim and guiding principle." This addresses what plagues Sri Lanka, not debt per se but lack of productivity. As the NPP says, "due to the misappropriation of borrowed funds and the failure to invest them in economically productive projects, the economy did not grow in corresponding to the increase in debt." Successive governments have taken out loans to fund bad infrastructure ideas (Mahinda Rajapaksa) or just new debt to pay off old debt (Ranil Wickremesinghe) without developing the productive capacity of the country at all. It was this unproductive regime that collapsed the country in 2022, and only the NPP identifies production as the core problem.

The unelected President (Ranil) currently running the place wants credit for stabilizing the country, but what has he done? He's stabilized the rich on the backs of the poor, while serving foreign moneylenders above all. Ranil took out most of the ruinous debt in the first place (rolling over the Rajapaksa loans) and he has not changed any real aspect of the economy at all. All he's done is rob 200x more than he did the first time, without even concrete to show for it.

Describing this sham stability, the NPP said, "it was mainly an outcome of unpaid interest, debt instalments in arrears, import restrictions, remittances from overseas Sri Lankans, and receipt of IMF extended fund facility, rather than a result of proactive and sustainable measures of the government." And they continue, "Despite continued rhetoric about controlling inflation, the reality is that the prices of goods and services have risen to unaffordable levels. The ultimate result is that people's real income has gone down so low that basic human needs cannot be fulfilled. As a result of destructive politics, about 26% of the population has been dragged below the poverty line."

I find little to disagree with here. There is no productive economy without children that eat enough and most of our children are going hungry under this regime. There's no forward planning here, just more procrastinating. In order for things to change you have to actually change things. The state has to get involved with industry, that's the only way industrialization has ever happened! Not just in communist countries, but in the capitalist countries as well. Only the NPP even has a basic idea of this. Everyone else just says leave it up to the economists, as if there's some magic monetary settings we can change. But nothing works like that. To do something, you have to actually do some things.

This is the vital difference between political democracy and economic democracy. Countries can have political independence without economic independence, and right now, our economic policy is literally run by foreign bureaucrats from the IMF, with a comprador elite focused on their own corruption. They talk about state-owned enterprise or state planning being corrupt, but who's doing the corrupting! They're breaking the system and then saying the system needs to be sold off for parts because it's not working. This is why people protested for system change, which only the NPP comes close to delivering.

As their manifesto says, "The NPP's economic policy framework focuses on economic democracy." I know it takes a lot to deprogram neoliberal propaganda that people are too stupid to run economies and must leave everything to the capitalists, but just look at the capitalists countries today. America is desperately (and badly) trying state-led industrial policy themselves (in semiconductors, energy, and manufacturing), complete with tariffs and heavy subsidies. They tell us not to print money while printing the most money in their history! We have to, after decades of foolishly believing our former colonizers had changed, declare economic independence. We have to get the state deeply involved in the economy, that's the meaning of economic democracy. Taking control of the state, and using it to control our own destiny.

Especially with climate collapse and the need to marshal scarce resources towards what matters (health and education). To execute any big change of course you need a planned economy. Otherwise you're just planning to fail. I don't think the JVP goes far enough in this regard, but they at least have a concept of the general direction.

What else would the NPP do?

The country has many more issues, but you can read the manifesto yourself on those. I'll just highlight a few points that resonated with me. The bullet points are all theirs:

• NPP regards education, health, and transportation as essential public services and plans to increase resource allocation in all these fields.
• Strengthening the state share in public transport and creating an efficient public transport system in the country.

These points are important because, far from being costs to a government as foreign capitalists would have you believe, health and education are investments. If you don't invest in your people you have nothing, you're just selling off your country for parts and waiting to die. You have to invest your way out of a crisis, something western economists have known since the Great Depression, but they keep prescribing austerity to us colonies. It doesn't work. You have to invest your way out of crisis, and the base of all productivity is the health and education of your people.

If the NPP may continue,

• We will move away from anthropocentric thinking that places man as the sole owner of the earth.

I have never heard this anywhere in mainstream Sri Lankan politics and it's vitally important, that it's not just about people. We are not the owners of this island but mere custodians.

• For the first time in Sri Lanka's post-independence history, governance will shift from the control of a few corrupt elite families to a people's government. From the presidency to every representative body and operational mechanism in the country, all positions will be free from elite family connections and will be filled by the children of ordinary citizens produced through free education.
• Renegotiate with the IMF on the content of a more palatable and strengthened programme and how it is implemented for salvaging the poor and deprived people from that painful condition.
• State support for the local production of all possible food items within the country.

The JVP, as a party, is from the poor. Their candidate, Anura Kumara Dissanayake grew up poor whereas the other political leaders are from old feudal families and/or are literally the children/nephews of former Presidents. Only the JVP has any concept of how poor people live and suffer, and it is these masses that actually have to be mobilized to have a productive economy at all. One thing I must note is that the time for industrialization has probably passed, we are headed into a future where food and water will be the important resources, and the NPP at least has a sense that we need to, at a minimum, be able to feed ourselves. As they continue,

• We consider Sri Lanka must enhance local production and transition to an export-driven economy to navigate the current economic crisis successfully. This requires a comprehensive short and long-term industrial development plan.
• A rapid national program will be launched to add 2,000 MW of solar PV capacity within the next five (5) years, as a strategic measure to avert the impending energy crisis in the near future.
• Customers, including low income households and small and medium enterprises, whose electricity supply remains disconnected due to non-payment of exorbitant bills unjustly imposed over 2022-2024 will be reconnected, with remaining dues charged on a fair instalment plan.
• The contribution of the railway service has dropped to 5% in the transport sector. The portion of the SLTB in bus passenger service has dropped to 14%. Around 55% of the citizens opt to use private vehicles to fulfil their transport needs due to the decline in public transport, and they have to spend a large amount of their income on transport as a result. Hence the goal is to provide 70% of the public's transport needs through public transportation within 5 years.

Sri Lanka's 2022 collapse meant, primarily, that we lost access to imported (dollar-denominated) energy. The current government has done nothing about the source of that problem, which is that we don't produce enough of our own energy and waste much of what we import on inefficient things cars. To avoid further crashes we can't just do financial jiggery-pokery like declaring meaningless accounting surpluses. We have to actually change the structure of the economy—specifically energy and transport—which the NPP is proposing.

In terms of rights and wrongs, the NPP says,

• The inefficiency of public service and the associated bribery, corruption, fraud, and misappropriation of public property are the inevitable results of the ruling class and the system. They are not tragedies brought by public servants on their own accord.
• Promptly completing investigations into political killings and abductions of journalists, sportspersons and others that have not been solved for a long time and implementing the law against the criminals
• Ensuring the quality of the food given to prisoners
• Investigating and serving justice to the political assassinations, disappearances and assaults that happened in the past in all areas including the North and East.
• Releasing all political prisoners and ensure their free socialisation.
• Abolition of all oppressive acts including the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) and ensuring civil rights of people in all parts of the country

For decades Sri Lanka has been ruled by a rapacious class which has now handed power off to their children and grandchildren. All the ruling parties have stolen and killed and then blamed it on the inefficient government sector which they themselves have corrupted. This ruling class has become so greedy that they have even destroyed their own political parties and are running as independents. Now all the old rats are running between different ships while the country sinks. They can't even hold their own parties together and have no greater ideas for the country than more of the same. Why would you trust someone to hold a country together that can't even hold their own party? Which gets me to my next point.

Isn't the JVP too inexperienced?

The JVP is actually the oldest political party running in this election! The UNP, the feudal founding party, has splintered, and the SLFP doesn't exist anymore. The JVP are actually the most established political party, and they have the strongest grassroots network, the most active women's wing, and are by far the most organized around something other than personality and corruption.

How would they do it? Aren't we broke?

China developed from their lowest point. They started out poorer than us. The UK developed its (now decayed) social programs after World War II, when it was the most broke. Development is fundamentally a matter of will, and you absolutely can and should print your own currency to employ your own people. This does not have to cause inflation if you invest it in productive assets. People say government programs caused Sri Lanka's collapse but they did not, it was foreign borrowing from the same old colonizers. Economic independence is the way out, not how we got in at all. Remember that our crisis was denominated in dollars, not rupees. Internationally, we can hitch onto rising Asia instead of going down with the falling west. What the Sri Lanka lacks most urgently is leadership, which is why we need to fundamentally change leadership this election.

Will they take my second house/business/money?

Unfortunately, no. The JVP has become thoroughly domesticated and is no longer a revolutionary party at all. If they were a revolutionary party they would have taken power during the protests, not waited over two years for elections.

Personally, I think they JVP should be much more ruthless than they are, but they're not. I think that foreign forces will try to destabilize/overthrow any leftist government and you can't trust elections. But the JVP simply isn't that party anymore, and haven't been for decades now. They will, unfortunately, govern like a center-left party within our existing constitution and laws. They're not going to tax or seize anyone's wealth away or smash the landed classes, though I wish they would. Sri Lanka's rich are deeply corrupt, blow away most of the country's foreign exchange, and I think they (we) deserve a slap. The NPP, unfortunately, won't deliver it.

Why are you voting NPP, in conclusion?

To me, the election breaks clearly along class lines. The rich (like me) will vote for Ranil or Sajith and the poor will vote for AKD. Both of the rich candidates will follow the same basic neoliberal policies of the past 40 years that caused the collapse in the first place. Borrowing, neglecting our own productive capacity, and kicking the can down the road. But this is the end of the road. It may be too late to turn, we may not turn hard enough, but the NPP are the only people that will even try a different direction. The reason they're even a possibility now is because so many more people have been made poor. The poor don't need to read this or anything else. They hear the truth from their children's rumbling tummies clear enough.

The stability that Ranil has given is on the backs of the poor. The poverty rate has doubled, most children do not eat enough, and many parents have not eaten an egg in years (any protein is given to the youngest child). Meanwhile, rich people like me are partying and consuming foreign exchange more than ever, and it makes me sick. I'm a class traitor and I'm with the poor. That's the big reason I'm voting NPP. They're from the poor, they're for the poor, and we're a poor country. We can't keep using the credit card so a few people can pretend to be rich on the backs of our children, we actually have to change leadership, change our economy, and change direction to achieve common prosperity for all. Call it communism if you want, the communists are rich now.

I don't want to be rich while Sri Lankan children are passing out in school cause they don't eat enough. That's no way to build a future, and the children, as James Baldwin said, belong to all of us. The NPP has a hard road ahead of them, but at least they have a compass. That's why I'm voting X 🧭. If you don't feel it in your own stomach, then check your heart.

10. The Long Intestine Of Life

There's an old joke about sausages. If a sausage is just meat stuffed into an intestine, what do you call the man stuffing his face? When you eat a sausage, you become the sausage. You're just putting it right back into a different intestine. It's one big recursive intestine, going back to the dawn of life.

Intestines and anuses are the plumbing of life, which we don't plumb too deeply, beyond laughing at the sounds they make. The intestinal ecosystem is, in fact, a world unto itself. If you truly spilled your guts, you'd find enough surface area to play a racquet sport; some sources say a full tennis lawn, others half a badminton court. There is, indeed, a flurry of activity in your intestines, trillions of beings dwell inside. We truly do contain multitudes, not just voices in our heads but gurgling microbes in our midsections.

The human body preserves an aquatic and anaerobic ecosystem like the ancient oceans, before photosynths caused runaway climate change the first time. Every human avatar reproduces an atavistic 'safe space' for ancient gods, as you could reasonably call effectively immortal bacteria. We are each a refuge for the anaerobes genocided in the Great Oxygen Holocaust of 3.5 bya (never forget). They live on in our guts and butts, which create their own climate. It's entirely plausible that all human culture is just a container for bacterial culture, that we are just spaceships for microbes to walk about on land. Indeed, if you measure the DNA and RNA inside and outside your body, human being is a rank minority. All of your hopes, dreams, and fears are really just engineering tricks to keep the spaceship walking, eating, pooping, and reproducing; ie to keep the gravy train running. When you die the passengers just board a new one, through insects and other intestines. If you look closely and unsentimentally, that's how the sentient sausage is made.

If you look at the internal anatomy of most animals—from sea urchins to spiders to rats to cats to you and me—it's mostly the same packaging. I have been looking at this because the neighbors were throwing out an old kids Visual Dictionary and I've been reading it (shout out மிமி பாடி). This old Dorling Kindersly book has internal diagrams of innumerable creatures that all, after a while, look the same. It's interesting for a while and then boring, because it's all the same picture. The same intestines wound in different ways. We're obviously made in the same sausage factory, for the same reason.

Almost every visible lifeform takes the same form, a long tube containing and protecting a controlled environment, either just a sac or a more ingenious sac called an intestine. I was looking at a huge variety of animals, and there's not much internal variety. It's like looking at different types of cars, with different internal combustion engines, all indiscernible to an outsider. Indeed, in Sinhala the word for hunger is fire in the belly, as in internal combustion. We say bada gini, meaning fire god (Agni) in the stomach. The sacred and the profane, the truth really speaks to us from both ends if we listen.

This mortal life we consider so precious and special, we're really just a ride for immortal microbes to hitch and move on. Every form we consider life are really just cars for microbes, and we don't consider the microbes at all. But does a car consider its humans? To any alien looking down on our world, it certainly looks like cars run the place. Roads occupy most of the real estate and they literally run over humans. Appearances can be deceiving, and human superiority is really just self-deception. Human arrogance isn't a sign of actual superiority, it's just a superiority complex borne of ignorance. Human arrogance is a feature not a bug, it is—in fact—a feature for bugs. Our vain belief in our solitary existence in fact preserves an entire ecosystem in our guts and butts. Our deep motivation to not die keeps trillions of higher beings living comfortably in the deep of us. Bacteria even gets us to take them into space, thinking we're the serious species while pooping into a vacuum cleaner. We are not a serious species at all.

All of human culture is just a fart in the wind compared to the bacterial culture which makes us human fart uncontrollably. Every fart is a deep sign that we are not in control and never have been. We can't even control our bowels, what are we even talking about, controlling the world? God tells us the truth with trumpets and we just laugh at it. Joke's on us.

Humans are just pedestrians to bacteria like horses are equestrians to humans. Both man and horse are used by other creatures to walk about on land, we are all beasts of burden. If you look at both horse and human, they're just different adaptations of the same intestinal architecture. There's no greater difference between the two than between Ferrari and BYD. Just because we "Build Your Dreams" we think we're special, but how do we know the dreams aren't building us? As the reluctant sage Zhuangzi said, in the third person,

Once Zhuang Zhou dreamt he was a butterfly, fluttering about joyfully just as a butterfly would. He followed his whims exactly as he liked and knew nothing about Zhuang Zhou. Suddenly he awoke, and there he was, the startled Zhuang Zhou in the flesh. He did not know if Zhou had been dreaming he was a butterfly, or if a butterfly was now dreaming it was Zhou. Surely, Zhou and a butterfly count as two distinct identities! Such is what we call the transformation of one thing into another. (2:49)

Humans are just a bunch of sausages thinking we're sages. But he who eats the sausage becomes the sausage, this is the eternal law. Creation is just one big sausage factory, with different casings for different use cases, that's all. We think we're superior cause we eat and beat our kin, but we share the same design and ultimate destiny, Allah shows us enough signs before we reach the destination. Pleasing life reminds us of disgusting death every day, providing both memento mori and memento lavatory. We soil ourselves every day before turning into soil permanently. Everybody shits but only humans think we are the shit. I could go on, the signs are everywhere, I am but a humble messenger of the sacred within the profane, a philosopher of farts. We should know humility from our daily humiliation in the toilet, but we laugh at the idea. But he who laughs last laughs hardest, and the bacteria eventually devour us all.

As the sage of rage Logan Roy said, "You bust in here, guns in hand, and now you find they've turned to fucking sausages. You talk about love?" Indeed, all talk about love, all sublimated expressions of love as art, what does it mean? You go out for dinner, you date, you mate, you get married into one flesh, farting into the same sofa cushions. Then you reproduce another sausage link in the chain and become part of its digestive process for decades. It's all just a long line of spaceships stretching out from the primordial ocean, preserving the exact conditions for anaerobes to walk about on land. If you look at internal anatomies in a random kids book, it's all just variations on a theme. If you see how the sausage is made, we obviously come from one sausage factory, from one creator if you will. It's quite ingenious, really. Djinns and Agni speak of the same phenomenon. Billions of species live and die, but trillions of microbes keep living through every mass extinction. They find some temperature controlled vehicle that delivers nutrients automatically and hitch a ride on it. As the king said in King Learjet (Succession), "Why? Because it works… Oh go on, go on, fuck off, you nosy fucking pedestrians."