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aoawarfare · 1 year ago

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The Creation of the Central Asian Soviet Republics

During the last few episodes, we’ve discussed the Russian Revolution, the fall of the emirs, the Basmachi insurgency, the destruction of the Kokand Autonomy and the neutering of the Musburo. Unsurprisingly, all of this upheaval was horrible for everyone in the region and made governing almost impossible. Frunze, who was responsible for a lot of the upheaval, left in the fall of 1920, and did not see the outcomes of his explosive decisions.

Instead, it was up to the Communist officials and the Indigenous actors to create a new Central Asia. Unfortunately, they could not agree on the methods they should use, the ideological foundations of their new creation, or even what that new creation would look like. They didn’t trust each other; the Bolsheviks believed the indigenous actors weren’t proper Communists and the indigenous actors were annoyed that the Bolsheviks thought they knew best and purposely ignored all of their proposed solutions.

Things were worse for the people of the region. The Jadids were never popular even before the wars and this distrust grew as they sided with the Bolsheviks and tried to create a new world for the region. And so, as a farmer or merchant or just regular person in Central Asia, you had three choices: side with the Basmachi and risk death or losing everything to their raiding bands, side with the Jadids and Bolsheviks and support something that seems incompatible with one’s culture and religion, or try to survive on your own and at the mercy of all different factions and sides.

The core struggle can be best described by this quote from Lenin.

[Image Description: A colored gif of three men sitting together in a bowling alley. Two men are facing the camera and the third man is between the two men with his back to the camera. The man on the left has long hair and a long, scraggy beard. He is wearing a green shirt with a beeper hanging from the color. The man on the right is a bigger white man with short hair and beard and mustache. He is wearing light brown sunglasses and a short sleeve purple stripped shirt. The man in the middle has shoulder length hair and is wearing a green t-shirt. The bowling alley is pink and has blue star decorations on the walls.]

In 1921, he wrote:

“It is devilishly important to conquer the trust of the natives; to conquer it three or four times to show that we are not imperialists, that we will not tolerate deviations in that direction” - Adeeb Khalid, Making Uzbekistan, 165

Not sure if Lenin even noticed the stark contradiction between “conquering” someone’s trust and somehow proving you’re not an imperialist or conqueror. Maybe he meant well, but we’re already off to a rocky start.

Communist Paranoia

A big source of tension between the Bolsheviks and the indigenous actors of Central Asia was the difference in ideology and goals.

We’ve talked a lot about the Jadid’s ideology and their goals. The Jadids in Bukhara and Turkestan wanted to create a modern state built around the principles of nationalism. They wanted to create a state that enjoyed full sovereignty and membership amongst the world of nation-states. They wanted to develop their own economy but maintaining control over their own resources and they wanted to education their citizens to combat “ignorance” and “fanaticism.” They wanted to preserve Islam, but also modernize it by bringing Muslim institutions under control of the government.

The Communists, however, wanted to create a perfect Communist society which required loyal and ideologically pure cadre. The only way they could do this in Central Asia was to recruit the population into the party. They knew their best demographic were the youth, the women, and the landless and poor peasants. The children they recruited into their youth group known as Komsomol and the brought the women’s organization, Zhenotdel to Central Asia. They also created the Plowman union for the poor. They would use this union to implement the land and water reform of the 1927, but were disbanded after serving their purpose.

Political Cadre of Turkestan Front. Frunze is seated in second row, two from the left

[Image Description: A black and white photo of a large crowd of men and women sitting together outside. Behind them is a clear sky, a stone building, and trees. The people are wearing a combination of white shirts and dresses and grey shirts and dresses]

Yet, the Communists couldn’t see through their own racism and chauvinism when it came to accepting local actors to the Communist Party. The Communist Party was the key feature of public life. It was the center of all political activity and thus membership was highly coveted. However it required an impossible ideological purity requirement which made many Communists paranoid. Their inability to a pure Communist a hundred percent of the time, or even to define what that meant, made them reliant on frequent purges to ensure the party remained pure.

[Image Description: A colored gif of a bald, naked white man wearing nothing but white underwear, lying on the floor, and looking up at the camera, saying "I just want to be pure."]

One Communist official complained that he was dissatisfied after talking to a Turkmen member of the Merv Communist party in 1923. He wrote:

“We started asking [him] why he had entered the party, to which he answered that he himself did not know, and to the question whether he knew if a Communist is a good person or bad, he said that he knew nothing. And to the question of how he got into the party, he answered simply that a little while back a comrade came here who said, “You are a poor man, you need help, and you should join the party; for this will get you clothing and matches and kerosene.” - Adeeb Khalid, Making Uzbekistan, pg. 170

While the rank and file were often uneducated, the local leaders tended to be part of the modernizing elite who wanted to use Soviet institutions to bring about reforms, they often came from prosperous urban families, graduates of Russian-native schools, and had been active in Muslim politics in 1917. Some had been recruited by Risqulov before he was ousted, had caught the eye of various Russian Communist officials, or even fought against the Basmachi and earned the Soviet’s trust that way. By these leaders were hard to find and so from 1920-1927, the Soviets were forced to rely on “impure” and “nationalistic” local leaders while building a cadre of “pure” communists they would be able to rely on in the future.

Turar Risqulov

[Image Description: A black and white pciture of a man standing at an angle. He is looking at the camera. He has bushy black hair and a short mustache. He is wearing round, wire frame glasses. His hands are in his dark grey suit pants. he is wearing a white button down shirt, a grey tie, and a dark grey vest and suit jacket. A flag is pinned to his suit lapel.]

What made things worse was that the Soviets didn’t even treat the Central Asian as equals within the Communist framework. When the Bukharan Communist Party tried to join the Comintern, they were accepted as a “sympathetic organization” and then merged with the Russian Communist Party.

This desire for loyal cadre and the educational efforts pursued by the communists and local reformers, contributed to the creation of a group of men who called themselves “Young Communists.” They challenged the supremacy of the KPT, accusing them of compromise, patriarchy and careerism. The Young Communists claimed they were the most “Marxistically educated” of the Muslim Communists and demanded the “total emancipation of the party from the past [which] had not yet been accomplished and that KPT be cleansed of all members who were “factional-careerist” and “patriarchal-conservative.” In 1924, they launched a campaign to ban the heavy cloth and horsehair veil customarily worn by women. They were equally frustrated by the Russian Communists, claiming:

“Historically speaking, the last conquerors of Turkestan were the Slavs, and Turkestan was liberated from their oppression only after the great social revolution. But this liberation is only formal. Because the proletariat is from the ruling nation, the disease of colonialism has damaged its brain. This fact has had a great impact on the revolution in Turkestan” - Adeeb Khalid, Making Uzbekistan, pg. 175

The Soviets were wary of the Young Communists, but would recruit them into the governments of the different Central Asian States after they were created in 1924.

Crafting a Governing Body

In order to make the region more manageable, the Soviets broke the region into several different Soviet republics. The Bukharan Soviet People’s Republic managed the territory that once belonged to the Bukhara Emirate. Similarly, the Kazakh Steppe became the Kirghiz Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, the Khivan Emirate became the Khorezm Soviet People’s Republic and Turkestan became the Turkestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. These republics were governed by chairmen.

Map of Central Asian Republics in 1922

[Image Description: A colored and simplified map of the different Soviet Republics. Russia itself and the surround countries are pale peach. The Kirgizistan A.S.S.R. is a flesh color. The Aral and Caspian Sea and Lake Balkhash are bright blue The Bukharan P.S.R. is red. The Khorezm P.S.R. is light green. The Turkestan A. S. S. R. is a dark peach.]

For the rest of this episode, we’re going to discuss the many difficulties and opportunities facing the Bolsheviks and the local, indigenous actors in the Bukhara Soviet People’s Republic and the Turkestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. The reason we’re discussing those two republics specifically is because their development is unique while also being representative of the many issues faced by the local actors and Bolsheviks of the region.

Turkestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR)

While the indigenous actors were grabbing real power in Bukhara, the indigenous actors of Turkestan were recovering from the ouster of Risqulov and the dismantling of the Musburo. Instead, the Soviets purged the Turkestani Communist Party, transformed the Turkkomissiia into the Central Asian Bureau with an expanded authority over the Bukharan, Turkestan, and Khorezm republics. They also created the Central Asian Economic Council whose responsibility was to merge the economies of the three republics, leaving them open to control from the Central Committee in Russia.

The biggest challenge facing the Turkestani Republic was the tension between the Bolsheviks and the indigenous actors. Like their Bukharan counterparts, the indigenous leaders of the Turkestani Republic learned to speak the Communist language, but their goals were very different. However, they didn’t have the limited freedom that the leaders of Bukhara had, and this created deep tensions not only between the Communist leaders and indigenous leaders, but also between the Russian settlers and the Communists and the local people of Turkestan with the Jadids.

Bukharan Soviet People’s Republic (BNSR)

The Bukharan Soviet People’s Republic was a Muslim republic filled with Jadids who used it to champion their reforms with reluctant support from their Bolshevik counterparts -- and, sometimes, even without it. Unlike their Tashkent counterparts who never had a chance to gain equal power with their Russian counterparts, the Bukharans had placed themselves in the perfect position to be slotted into power by the Bolsheviks. This meant they actually had more power than indigenous actors in their neighboring republics. Even though this only lasted until 1923, the BNSR attempted a lot during its short lifetime.

When the Bolsheviks took over Bukhara, they created the Revolutionary Committee (Revkom) that included Russians, Young Bukharans, Communists from Bukhara and Tashkent. The committee assigned Mirzo Abduqodir Muhiddinov as head of state and Fayzulla Xo’jayev as the Chairman of the council. These ministers would send reports and negotiate with their Communist counterparts using Communist language and ideas, but internally they focused on their nationalistic, Islamic, and reformist ways.

While the Bolsheviks forced the Young Bukharans to merge with the Bukharan Communist Party and the Young Khivans to do likewise, this did little to actually bridge the gaps between the two approaches to governance. Instead, it gave the former Young Bukharans/Khivans/Jadids a chance to learn the Bolshevik language so they could placate their Communist counterparts while still pursuing their own goals.

One of the first things Revkom did was to create a regularized and centralized form of government. They divided the territory into provinces, then districts, and then towns and appointed a soviet apparatus at each level. They also created several ministries led by several “people’s ministers” (Abdurauf Fitrat would be a minister for several of these ministries). Revkom and later its successor, the Central Executive Committee, would regulate the workings of the Qazi courts, placed the maktabs and madrasas under the oversight of the Minister of Education, and placed mosques and their waqf property under the control of the Waqf Administration.

They also created a Ministry of Foreign Affairs and established consular representatives in neighboring countries. The representatives to Kabul and Moscow were ambassadors while the representatives to Petrograd, Tashkent, Baku, and Tbilisi were consuls. They also hoped they would enter the Comintern as an independent party instead of a satellite of the Russian Communist Party.

Creating different administrative centers and functions was one thing, but exercising that power was a different task. First, the Young Bukharans had to settle scores with several enemies while also denying them the ability to challenge their right to power. They forced those who sided against them in 1917 to clean toilets and sweep the streets for several days before having them executed. They took property from the ulama who resisted their efforts at modernization and restored property to supporters in exile. Those they didn’t kill or exile, they assimilated into their new government.

As we mentioned before, the Bukharan government took over the collection of waqf revenues and put it towards cultural and educational purposes. This gave them the ability to control the hiring and firing of instructors and the reformation of the curricula. However, they ran into a problem with trying to implement control over the property, because the bureaucracy of distributing the lands was handled by middlemen. Many who fled the violence of the civil war, so there were many pieces of property that slip through their fingers. In 1923, when the Soviets were reinforcing control over the region, the Waqf administration came under the most suspicion. The Soviets actually raided the Waqf offices and took all of their papers to review as they laid strict guidelines on how the collected funds could be used.

Internal Divisions

If trying to create a government in a region that had endured a civil war, the ouster of an emir, a famine, and an ongoing battle against an insurgency wasn’t enough, the Young Bukharans had to contend with internal divisions. There was the well-known divide between the ideologically corrupt Young Bukharans and the Bukharan Communists, but there was also a bitter rivalry between Fayzulla Xo’jayev, the chairman of the Bukharan Soviet People’s Republic, and a fellow minister, Abduqodir Muhiddinov. Their rivalry had more to do with personal grudges and a long history of economic competition between their families.

In April 1921, the Cheka found out that Muhiddinov’s brother Isomiddin held a secret meeting to plot against Xo’jaev and his supporters including assassinations and the planting of incriminating evidence. In August 1921, a pamphlet with the name of “Committee for Truth and Justice” proclaiming that the Bukharan Republic was being governed by “a company of thieves and traitors” who were addicted to prostitutes and alcohol. This culminated into a putsch attempted by people loyal to Muhiddinov that briefly placed members of Xo’jayev’s administration under arrest. Xo’jayev had to flee to Kagan and the Soviets sent in armored cars to crush the rebellion and the rebels fled to Samarkand.

Fayzulla Xo'jayev

[Image Description: A black and white photo of a man with thick black hair. He is wearing a black collared, button down shirt, a black tie, and a black suit coat]

People loyal to Xo’jayev wanted to oust Muhiddinov from the presidency of the Revkom, but the Soviets convinced them not to. The Soviets found Fayzulla more favorable because of his local support, his businesslike attitude, and he was a Russophile, while Muhiddinov was considered to be politically weak, more difficult to deal with, a nationalist, pan-Islamist, and Russophobe. It seems they kept him around so they could take advantage of the rivalry between Muhiddinov and Xo’jayev.

While Xo’jayev was reliant on the Soviets for power, he consistently tried to maximize his independence and the independence of his government. He argued in 1921 that

“while it is impossible, of course, to deny that the work of our organization has many defects, we should not be judged too harshly for them. Soviet Russia, having far greater forces at its command, is also not in a position to organize everything all at once…We know very well that any obstinacy on our part or coercive measures on yours [to force the pace of change in Bukhara] will be fraught with pernicious consequences.”

He threatened the revolution in the East and argued that the reason for the weakness of his government was because the people didn’t have their own sovereignty. He argues that

“In order to strengthen a sense among the masses of the independence and the complete liberation of Bukhara it is necessary for the Russian Government to broadly demonstrate its attitude in Bukhara, proclaiming publicly Bukhara’s complete independence and the inviolability of its sovereign rights.” - Adeeb Khalid, Making Uzbekistan, pg. 141

After Enver Pasha died and the Basmachi were broken, the Soviets turned their attention and ire on the Central Asian Republics. They were interested in bringing the republics to heel and integrating with the Soviet Union. They saw Bukhara’s need for independence as evidence of remaining bourgeois nationalism sentiments.

In 1923, the Soviets felt powerful enough in Central Asia, to purge the Bukharan government of several administrators such as Abdurauf Fitrat, Atovulla Xo’jayev, Sattor-xo’ja, Muinjon Aminov. Other Central Asians picked up the need to attack these leaders and expanded their attacks to include Fayzulla Xo’jayev “for having assimilated itself to nationalism” (Adeeb Khalid, Making Uzbekistan, pg. 156). The Soviets weren’t ready to get rid of Xo’jayev, but the purge threw ice water on the Bukharan desire for independence and taught them their place.

Economics

All of this social and political change was occurring during economic devastation. The war ruined cotton cultivation and destroyed the irrigation networks, and whole districts were now ghost towns. It didn’t help that Russia was also in the midst of its own economic devastation and famine and needed Central Asia’s resources to survive. This created a tension between the Communist’s ideals of redistribution and liberation and their need to exploit and extract as many resources as possible. Turkestan also had to deal with the tension between the settlers and the indigenous people. Again, Communist ideals of decolonization and anti-imperialism took a backseat to Russia’s need for resources and enforcing a communist mindset on the region.

BNSR Economic Interests

Economically, the Bukharan Soviet People’s Republic focused on the importance of collecting taxes properly and effectively. They argued that:

“The incorrect policies of the emir had left our state among the most backward in the world in terms of science and technology, industry, agriculture, or commerce. As a result, today two percent of our people can read and write, and the remaining 98 percent cannot, and as a result are completely ignorant of the world. Because our commerce was based on old principles, there is no real commerce in our state. Instead, our merchants have become middlemen between Russian merchants and our peasants, i.e., our commerce sells the wealth of the peasant to other countries…[and] all the profits from the commerce go to other countries…It is well known that a state that is unable to find the proper path of commerce cannot have industry either.” - Adeeb Khalid, Making Uzbekistan, pg. 130

The Young Bukharans were not interested in class warfare or redistributing wealth from the rich. The most they did was expropriate the property of the emir and those who went into exile with him and grab control over the waqf property, but that was all.

In 1923, the Sredazburo tried to harmonize the economies and currencies of the three republics, Xo’jaev resisted it. He believed that the unification of the economies of the three republics would rob the republics of their own sovereignty. He wrote

“We are against one principle — that of the unification of the Central Asian republics. If you take that off the table we will go along with your proposition” - Adeeb Khalid, Making Uzbekistan, pg. 142

He fought hard for Bukhara to retain its own currency and complained when Soviet officials who managed Bukhara’s border with Afghanistan arrested one of Bukhara’s customs officials. None of his efforts achieve much, but that didn’t stop him from trying.

Cotton Is King

One of the Soviets’ goals was to reinvigorate the cotton industry. As of 1920, the cotton industry had collapsed on itself because of war, famine, ruined irrigation, the disappearance of buyers, and the Tashkent Soviet’s decision to nationalize cotton. The Soviets used a labor tax to repair the irrigation system, replaced requisitioning with a cash tax, and implemented Lenin’s New Economic Plan in Central Asia. In 1921, the Soviets created the Main Cotton Committee which was charged with buying up the entire cotton harvest in the Ussr, supply it to textile mills (which were mostly in Russia), organize credits for growers, and maintain the irrigation system. It also got involved in the grain industry, since grain is how they paid the farmers to grow cotton. The Main Cotton Committee’s myopic focus on cotton angered many of the local leaders and even caused tension with the Central Asian Bureau who were trying to implement a policy of Korenizatsiia — providing that Soviet rule was different from Tzarist rule by bringing the people into the system. However, this was an expensive policy as it required educating the local population not only in Communist thought, but teaching them the basic skills they would need to work in different administrative capacities as well as teaching Non-Central Asian communists the local languages in order to communicate with their Central Asian counterparts. Additionally, there was already a skilled Russian minority living in Central Asia who felt they should be given these opportunities instead of the locals. In 1927, a group of unemployed Russians shouted at the Korenizatsiia commission:

“Russians fought and won freedom for you devils, and now you say Uzbeks are the masters in Uzbekistan. There will come a time when we will show you. We’ll beat the hell out of all of you.” - Adeeb Khalid, Making Uzbekistan, pg. 187

In 1925, the Central Asian Bureau was forced to create an economic plan that accounted for shipping grain into Central Asia so the people of Central Asia could focus on producing cotton. Additionally, the Main Cotton Committee indexed the price of cotton to the price of grain so that one pood of cotton bought 2.5 poods of grain, but Risqulov argued that it barely covered the costs of production. Instead, the Soviets should pay Central Asia world prices for its cotton.

Local leaders, like Fayzulla Xo’jayev, wanted to bring industry to the region. In 1925, he announced that

“our current policy…is we will establish new factories only in places that produce raw material for the industry i.e. we want to avoid the economic awkwardness of sending cotton thousands of miles away at great expense to have it processed in Moscow, and then to have the finished product brought back here” - Adeeb Khalid, Making Uzbekistan, pg. 160

This went against Soviet interests who wanted each region to have their specialties that could by brought together by the center and so Central Asia remained an agricultural focused economy, one the Soviets could exploit as they wished.

In the end, economic considerations and the ability to “trust” fellow Europeans versus Central Asians would always come first, exasperating existing tensions between the non-Central Asian Communists and the Local leaders. This led to great disenchantment with many Central Asian communists and local leaders.

Resistance

Secret Society Milliy Ittihod

Between the destruction of the city of Bukhara and Xo’jayev’s failed attempts to win some autonomy from the Soviets, several Young Bukharans began to search for another way to govern beyond the Soviet’s control. This discontentment with the overall situation turned into an explosive situation when Bashkir nationalist, Zeki Togan Velidi arrived in Bukhara and created his own secret society.

Bashkir Nationalist: Zeki Togan Velidi

[Image Description: A black and white photo of a man with a short hair cut and mustache. He is wearing round wire frame glasses and a grey military frock.]

Zeki spent most of his young academic life in Kazan and Ufa and during the revolution he became the president of the former Bashkir Republic. He sided first with the Whites and then switched sides but grew fed up with the Bolsheviks because of their controlling nature. He even sent a letter to Stalin and Lenin complaining about their “colonial” policy to the East and demanded that they stop persecuting national intellectuals, consider locals as candidates for Soviet positions, and allow greater local involvement in the organization of Soviet power and party in the Bukharan republic. Stalin and Lenin ignore the letter and Velidi broke from the Bolsheviks.

He traveled to Bukhara and, in April 1921, he and several members of the Bukharan government created the Union of National Popular Muslim Organizations of Central Asia also known as Milliy Ittihod. This secret society's goal was to secure the “independence” of Turkestan (which consisted of Turkestan, Bukhara, Khiva, the Kazakh Republic, and areas of Bashkir) and place its destiny in the hand of “Turkestanis” with freedom of religion and the separation of state and religion. They wanted Turkestan to have its own economy and army and direct access to European education without going through Russia.

There seems to have been another version of the goal crafted by the members who still believed in Communism, but still wanted greater autonomy. Their demands were similar, but the main difference was that they wanted full autonomy of the Eastern soviet republics united as a federation while remaining within the Communist framework. They wanted broad national rights, the withdrawal of all Russian troops except for the borders of the federation, their own national army, and a new government led by Milliy Ittihod.

This differences between goals illustrate that some people wanted to maximize their independence from Soviet control while others wanted to create a pan-Central Asian platform.

Milliy Ittihod was led by a Central Committee and held period congresses to tackle big questions. The Soviets feared this secret society and would later used its existence to send many Central Asians to their death during Stalin’s purge.

In terms of what Milliy Ittihod actually achieved, it doesn't seem to be much. However, the Cheka were able to intercept several letters to other governments asking for money and support against the Russians. But since the secret society wasn’t able to infiltrate the army and their reach into government was stifled, their usefulness was limited. They existed more as a nightmare in the imaginations of the Cheka then any real threat.

Usmon-xo’ja

Fayzulla's cousin, Usmon-xo’ja took a completely different approach.

He was elected head of the Central Executive Committee of the republic in September 1921, but he defected three months later and joined an assault on the Soviet garrison at Dushanbe. During the assault, several high-level Soviet commanders were taken hostage. He called for a general war against Russia and recruited people for his army. The Soviets broke the siege, but Usmon-xo’ja escaped, fought with Enver Pasha, and after Enver died, he fled to Afghanistan before permanently immigrating to Turkey and becoming center of the Central Asian émigré community.

Economic Resistance

When physical resistance was impossible or undesirable, people resisted through the marketplaces. Many Bukharan and Turkestan markets refused Russian currency and preferred trading with Afghanistan and India. The Soviets tried to disrupt these markets because they wanted access to Central Asian goods without having to pay world market prices or compete with other buyers.

The Soviet proposed Central Asia send grain and cotton to Russia either in payment for all the money the USSR was already funneling into Central Asia or through a barter system. This was potentially life or death for Russia, because in 1921, they were in the death grip of famine, and they desperately needed the food from Central Asia. Nevermind that Central Asia was also in the middle of a famine and the Soviets didn't seem to care.

For some fucking reason, the Soviets thought the republics would gladly subordinate its economic policies to the interest of the Soviet federation. Instead, Bukhara refused to put all of its supplies up for barter with the Soviets. A Soviet official wrote:

“During my stay in Bukhara I found a completely unexpected situation. I had expected that they will speak to me in a Communist manner, from the commonality of the interests of the two republics, but that there is not much in common is clear from the fact that the Bukharan republic has “declared private property sacred’" - Adeeb Khalid, Making Uzbekistan, pg. 152

Another Soviet official complained

“As before, [Bukharan leaders] continue to sabotage us with bread and to beg for money. The more one finds out about the political lines of the various ‘Communist’ groups here, the worse it gets. They try to outdo each other in their Russophobia. They make a very good use of their own position and godlessly swindle us both politically and economically.” - Adeeb Khalid, Making Uzbekistan, pg. 152

By 1923, the Basmachi were neutralized as a threat, the Soviets had been in Central Asian long enough to get a better sense of its needs and how to speak to its people, and they were seeing the sprouts of a loyal Communist cadre. They were feeling powerful enough to teach the region, especially troublesome Bukhara, it's place.

In 1923, the Soviets forced Fayzulla to purge his own government of four ministers, including the tireless Abdurauf Fitrat. Once they were ousted, other Central Asians realized the best way to earn Soviet favors and prove they could be trusted running their own government was to attack these "disgraced" ministers and soon expanded their attacks to include Fayzulla Xo’jayev for being a nationalist. The Soviets weren’t ready to get rid of Xo’jayev or the other "nationalist" chairmen of the republics, but the purge threw ice water on the Bukharan desire for independence and taught the rest of the region the limits of their power as Communist republics.

References

Making Uzbekistan: Nation, Empire, and Revolution in the Early USSR by Adeeb Khalid

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your-mom-friend · 4 years ago

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Some series I think people should read AKA Book Recs

Magonia - By Maria Dahvana Headley

Synopsis: Aza Ray is drowning in thin air.

Since she was a baby, Aza Ray Boyle has suffered from a mysterious lung disease that makes it ever harder for her to breathe, to speak—to live. So when Aza catches a glimpse of a ship in the sky, her family chalks it up to a cruel side effect of her medication. But Aza doesn’t think this is a hallucination. She can hear someone on the ship calling her name. Only her best friend, Jason, listens. Jason, who’s always been there. Jason, for whom she might have more-than-friendly feelings. But before Aza can consider that thrilling idea, something goes terribly wrong. Aza is lost to our world—and found by another. Magonia. Above the clouds, in a land of trading ships, Aza is not the weak and dying thing she was. In Magonia, she can breathe for the first time. Better, she has immense power—but as she navigates her new life, she discovers that war between Magonia and Earth is coming. In Aza’s hands lies the fate of the whole of humanity—including the boy who loves her. Where do her loyalties lie?

My experience: This book is ALL sorts of weird. It’s has a strange writing style and there’s weird formatting and quirks that just add to the experience. Definitely not something you could read aloud because there’s elements that you just can’t say. The book OPERATES on the vibes you get from reading it.

Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children - Ransom Riggs

Synopsis: A mysterious island. An abandoned orphanage. A strange collection of very curious photographs. It all waits to be discovered in Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, an unforgettable novel that mixes fiction and photography in a thrilling reading experience. As our story opens, a horrific family tragedy sets sixteen-year-old Jacob journeying to a remote island off the coast of Wales, where he discovers the crumbling ruins of Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children. As Jacob explores its abandoned bedrooms and hallways, it becomes clear that the children were more than just peculiar. They may have been dangerous. They may have been quarantined on a deserted island for good reason. And somehow-impossible though it seems-they may still be alive. A spine-tingling fantasy illustrated with haunting vintage photography, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children will delight adults, teens, and anyone who relishes an adventure in the shadows.

My experience: Definitely worth a read but definitely not for everyone. Uses semi-creepy images taken from auctions to illustrate a lot. More people have seen the movie than read the book. Please don’t trust the movie they couldn’t even get the names right. This fandom exists so don’t @ me it just deserves so much more love than it has.

Legend - Marie Lu

Synopsis: What was once the western United States is now home to the Republic, a nation perpetually at war with its neighbors. Born into an elite family in one of the Republic's wealthiest districts, fifteen-year-old June is a prodigy being groomed for success in the Republic's highest military circles. Born into the slums, fifteen-year-old Day is the country's most wanted criminal. But his motives may not be as malicious as they seem. From very different worlds, June and Day have no reason to cross paths—until the day June's brother, Metias, is murdered and Day becomes the prime suspect. Caught in the ultimate game of cat and mouse, Day is in a race for his family's survival, while June seeks to avenge Metias's death. But in a shocking turn of events, the two uncover the truth of what has really brought them together, and the sinister lengths their country will go to keep its secrets.

My experience: I’ll admit I didn’t want to read this. More out of stubbornness than anything else because my sister forced me to. Bu it’s a REALLY good book. As the first in a trilogy it’s amazing. Marie Lu is one of my favourite authors. Which brings me to my next book

The Young Elites - Marie Lu

Synopsis: I am tired of being used, hurt, and cast aside. Adelina Amouteru is a survivor of the blood fever. A decade ago, the deadly illness swept through her nation. Most of the infected perished, while many of the children who survived were left with strange markings. Adelina’s black hair turned silver, her lashes went pale, and now she has only a jagged scar where her left eye once was. Her cruel father believes she is a malfetto, an abomination, ruining their family’s good name and standing in the way of their fortune. But some of the fever’s survivors are rumored to possess more than just scars—they are believed to have mysterious and powerful gifts, and though their identities remain secret, they have come to be called the Young Elites. Teren Santoro works for the king. As Leader of the Inquisition Axis, it is his job to seek out the Young Elites, to destroy them before they destroy the nation. He believes the Young Elites to be dangerous and vengeful, but it’s Teren who may possess the darkest secret of all. Enzo Valenciano is a member of the Dagger Society. This secret sect of Young Elites seeks out others like them before the Inquisition Axis can. But when the Daggers find Adelina, they discover someone with powers like they’ve never seen. Adelina wants to believe Enzo is on her side, and that Teren is the true enemy. But the lives of these three will collide in unexpected ways, as each fights a very different and personal battle. But of one thing they are all certain: Adelina has abilities that shouldn’t belong in this world. A vengeful blackness in her heart. And a desire to destroy all who dare to cross her. It is my turn to use. My turn to hurt.

My experience: This series had me HOOKED. If you want moral endings and noble characters you may not like this one. Adelina has every reason to be angry and bitter and she makes it known. She has such a vague moral compass and even her powers are rooted in darkness and she succumbs to it, as much as she may try to run. The series is full of POC’s and amazing world building. If you want something outside of the usual story, I recommend this with no hesitation.

Rebel of the Sands - Alwyn Hamilton

Synopsis: Mortals rule the desert nation of Miraji, but mythical beasts still roam the wild and remote areas, and rumor has it that somewhere, djinn still perform their magic. For humans, it’s an unforgiving place, especially if you’re poor, orphaned, or female. Amani Al’Hiza is all three. She’s a gifted gunslinger with perfect aim, but she can’t shoot her way out of Dustwalk, the back-country town where she’s destined to wind up wed or dead. Then she meets Jin, a rakish foreigner, in a shooting contest, and sees him as the perfect escape route. But though she’s spent years dreaming of leaving Dustwalk, she never imagined she’d gallop away on mythical horse—or that it would take a foreign fugitive to show her the heart of the desert she thought she knew.

My experience: This series again is absolutely incredible. I love the use of language and the world building and the characters. A lot of the world building was really close to my heart because it’s rooted in Arabic and Islamic traditions. Amani is one of the best characters I’ve ever read about and I only WISH I could buy the rest of the books soon.

#rem rambles #book recs #book rec list #rebel of the sands #amani al hiza #the young elites #teren santoro #enzo valenciano #adelina amouteru #legend trilogy #miss peregrines home for peculiar children #mphfpc #magonia #ya dystopian #alwyn hamilton #ransom riggs #marie lu #maria dahvana headley

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rametarin · 7 months ago

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Nazis and communists have more in common with eachother than liberal democratic republics have with fascism, or ever will.

The only reason the crypto-communists settle into the ranks with liberals and other leftists is because they have policies that are either distinctions without differences or differences without distinctions when it comes to social safety nets, and why we have them, and for whom. Liberals do not get their morals or ethics from a mainstream religious culture rooted in deism, generally, and spply more secular oriented logics (which I acknowledge themselves may be dogmatic and arbitrary and subjective, not 'le truth and facts') And they find it easier to Platform liberal spaces, disguising and operating as liberals, while also manipulating the language and speech to just be their policies under big L liberal pretenses.

And the only reason more hardline interests like racists and militarist fascists may vote more right in the states, is because the majority of the population state-side are white, nativists will always tend to root for their people, and the indisputable fact that more left-leaning people have been of the opinion that the white majority itself is somehow detrimental to the society they want to create, which is one that marginalizes the white population on purpose in the interests of more equality. When you create policies that objectively spell out, directly, that it should be okay to offer less protections for white people in the workplace when it comes to deciding whom to fire, you are, whether you like it or not, creating protections for people and class based on the genetic heritage of the people under you- something that was introduced and adopted under the pretenses of getting rid of saying hiring or firing people on the basis of race was okay, now just being used against the majority population, in the hopes of making them the minority population.

No matter how little-C conservative and ideological socialists or communists may get when it comes to how sex is allowed to express itself in society, under what pretenses, how much trust and faith they allow society to have in the individual man (next to nill, as gun control is about punishing people for not following laws designed to punish them simply for inadherence to them) they will never consider themselves right wing, because they affiliate all bad things with conservatism, and they're "the good people," so clearly anything bad must be indicative of right-wingness.

And this is how we come to left-leaning ideologues that cannot put 2+2 together to understand that Palestine were colonized by a brown-person ethnosupremacist cult and society. Palestine was not originally Arabized, the Arabs went and converted them by the sword, the same way the white Europeans colonized other parts of the world. They just did it more violently and with even more deliberate ways to favor their society over others, and so, Arabization won out there. This same phenomenon repeated in Afghanistan.

Hamas, Hezbollah and such have more in common with the racist, gun totting white supremacists they so eagerly make fun of in comedies that poke fun at the KKK or the very concept of white supremacism, than they do some poor downtrodden oppressed minority being brutalized by white supremacist European colonizers. They chant about Arabs, not just the locals of Plaestine, ARAB BLOOD, inheriting the Holy Land. Because it's the centerpiece to Abrahamic religion, the most important place on earth for the narratives of those religions, that all want to be defined as THE one true, real way of interfacing with the sacred and almighty.

But at the end of the day, it is the Jews from whom this whole mythology sprung from, not Christianity, and especially not Islam. Islam has Mecca, that's their holy land. To say the Jews themselves are not indigenous to Israel, knowing full well they're a matrilineal ethnic group, would be like saying a Native American diaspora that maintains itself outside (while that tribe STILL exists in North America in the tribal homelands) stop being Native American, just because they left North America.

To say the Jews are just, "European colonizers," would be to say Native Americans living abroad stop being Native American, because their culture is no longer Native American. It's insanity. They share the language, the written word, the mythology, the genetics. They are not colonizers for Europe, they're just a distinct population. And whether the Arabs like it or not, the non-Arabs have a right to live there and a population and self-determination.

But Crypto-Communists, socialists and those pretending to be Liberal (political party "liberal", which can mean a gradient of left wing things, not necessarily liberalism) will happily repeat "from the river to the sea" and cheer on anti-Israelist slogans, donate money that gets slurped off from the top to be turned into rockets that they fire from inside the Gaza Strip into Israel, and then film the carnage that occurs as the Israelis return fire, crying about genocide.

The Crypto-communists have their own reasons to hate the Jews that mirror the Nazis, just less from a nativist racist reason and more for another school of leftist race science. Crypto-communists hate the very idea of hereditarism as a culture. That includes the biological family. To these kinds of leftists, even acknowledging the idea of the nuclear family as a valid construct is a form of fascism. That's why they try so hard to have a "diverse" definition of family, and insist, "there's MORE to family than just a mommy and daddy, YOU KNOW!" Not because they're fighting against some obsessive haters that believe family is only as defined by a man and wife married under a religious culture to sire children, but because they are repulsed by the very idea that's the default concept of a family unit in society, whatsoever.

They despise organized religion as a distraction from their more preferred faith; State Religion. Even though their state religion says that states themselves are abhorrent, and they seek a singular unitary culture and system of control and values centralizing and overriding all beneath it with total, uninterrupted authority and right of way, and they despise any religion that says it revolves around one particular culture of genetic heredity, making people divorce themselves from others based on their affiliation to this religion and heredity. They despise the Jews for many of the same reasons that the Nazis did, just not specifically because the Jews' existence threatens the future they wanted, which was Alpine Germans inheriting the planet and the definition of what a human is and looks like.

The Jews, to them, are recognized as embodiments of everything they hate from the leftist side of things. A culture based on faith and hereditary genetics that is not dictated by modern contemporary state rules, over said religion, and the culturenot subject to society's whims, just its own society existing inside of another. So, already, communists and socialists cannot abide by it, because neither of these systems abide by separate systems from the main authority nor ones based on faith or ethnicity. To them, the Jews are illegitimate colonizers in the name of an opposing ideology and a racist, eugenicist one at that. This is wrong, but this is why they see Israel as illegitimate.

They also feel that way about Islamic societies, cultures and the religion. However, this particular brand of Leftism is college educated, prudent and machivalian. It is willing to omit its feelings and opinions openly to get one powerful opponent to fight another in the name of its ideals, all while espousing why you should hate that opponent. Only after the biggest opponent in the room is neutralized or subjugated or dead, do they then bring up how these negative characteristics apply to the other group, and that's why the next biggest one in the room is bad, and apply that to them.

We see it in the same leftists that say whiteness is white supremacy and capitalism and how it oppresses everyone and everything, say the same stuff about Indians in India. It's very predictable in how clever they think they are operating in such bad faith and ulterior motives and how willing they are to try and handle people in cold blood to manipulate them into acting how they want on pretenses.

Blaming this leftist antisemitism on right wingness is wrong. It's homespun antisemitism from the left, not rightwingedness masquerading as leftism. Yall will just have to come to grips with it that just because something is left, does not mean it's liberal, or good, or enlightened, or educated, or unbiased, or without subjective and arbitrary (that means made up or on principle) interpretation of reality.

It’s maddening to find out that the scholar who first developed the idea that “Zionism is Settler Colonialism”, Fayez Sayegh, was a member of the Syrian Nazi Party during and immediately after the Holocaust, was an active participant in the Red Scare, using it to demonize Israel as a manifestation of a Global Communist Threat™️ through the height of the Cold War (true to his Nazi roots, accusing Israel of Judeo-Bolshevism) before switching to a Colonialism narrative when Post-Colonialism came in vogue in the 60s. And yet, the people I hear parroting the talking points of this anti-Communist, Ultranationalist Fascist-turned-scholar are the people who are constantly talking about how Liberal Progressives aren’t Communist enough and actually enemies because “Liberals will always side with Fascists”. Maddening.

If you’ve ever noticed how the “Zionism = Settler Colonialism” narrative eerily shares the core components of the far right’s Replacement Theory (that there are 1. Jews 2. conspiring to invade a given place and 3. replace the population with Jews), this is why; it’s because the idea that Zionism is Settler Colonialism came from a literal Nazi.

It is very literally Nazi propaganda.

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wisdomrays · 3 years ago

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TAFAKKUR: Part 435

OUTER SPACE: MANKIND'S NEW FRONTIER: Part 2

C) SPACE MANUFACTURE

Although satellite communications and remote sensing are already very profitable commercial enterprises, space manufacturing is thought to have even greater commercial potential. As space is a relatively dust-free, micro gravity environment, it offers a unique laboratory setting for the development and processing of some complicated chemicals, pharmaceuticals, semi-conductor crystals, glass and metal alloys-indeed, production under micro gravity conditions is estimated to be up to 500 hundred times that possible on earth and with a degree of purity unobtainable on earth (Jericho and McCracken, 1986, p.802).The potential market sales for such products is reckoned at around $20 billion annually.

Additionally the relatively uncontaminated space environment is an ideal place for growing crystals used in computers, optoelectronics and ultrasonic equipment; for developing floride glass used in laser and fibre optic applications; and for producing new metal alloys as well as metals of higher purity and structural uniformity (ibid., p.803). In sum, the horizons for potential use of space are immeasurable.

THE ISLAMIC COUNTRIES AND SPACE ACTIVITIES

Our concern is to find out what the Muslims are doing or not doing in the face of the continued progress of the space-faring Christians (NASA, ESA), the Jews (Israel), the Buddhists (People’s Republic of China, Japan), the Hindus (India). It was declared at the beginning of the ‘space age’ that space would be a province all mankind. However, it is apparent that it is only the technologically advanced non-Muslim states who are ploughing in huge sums of money into aerospace technology and enjoying the benefits of the outer space environment. Muslims in general seem unaware of the fact that it is enjoined upon them to keep abreast of the latest science and technology and to be as equipped as the non-Muslims. For example, in Sura al-Mulk, God directs our attention to the Heavens:

‘He who created the seven one above another: you will see no want of proportion in the creation of the Most Gracious, so turn your sight again: Do you see any flaw? Again turn your vision a second time; your sight will return to you dim and discomfited, in a state worn out’ (67.3-4. See also 7.54; 13.2; 21.33; 36.40;51.7; 81.15.)

In the light of this encouragement, the Arab Muslims, from very the beginning of Islamic civilization reached the highest degree in astronomy. While the pre-Renaissance Christians thought the world flat, Muslims realized that it must be round and that it rotates on its axis. The Muslims in the Abbasid period detected many stars and constellations and gave names to them which are still used (See, for more information, Sharh al-Mawaqif and Ma‘rifatname by Ibrahim Haqqi of Erzurum; also, al-Hayat by Nur al-Din Batruji,d.1185).

Until the decline of the Ottoman Empire, Islamic scholars had been for centuries at the leading edge of study in astronomy as well as other pure and applied sciences. Even as late as the last 19th century, astronomy was an essential subject in the curriculums of the Ottoman colleges. However, some narrow-minded Muslims decried the teaching of scientific knowledge in schools and prevented Muslims from education. Their efforts were one (though not the only) reason for the relative decline of the Oriental world. This attitude degenerated further into the sinister view that any non-Muslim knowledge or equipment makes a person an unbeliever.

Vestiges of this barbarism remain to this day. To give an anecdote: I know of an imam who was recently accused by some peasants of being an unbeliever simply for informing them during a sermon delivered in their village that human beings had landed on the moon.

On the other side, Western propaganda has persistently labelled Islam as ‘backward’ and ‘unenlightened’, and imposed a feeling of inferiority among many Muslims-so that they find themselves thinking-‘The non-Muslims have walked on the moon, while we still walk barefoot on the earth.’ For over a century and a half, Muslims have been deliberately kept behind Western achievements. But the trust (amana) that God has bestowed upon mankind is most particularly the responsibility of the believers, the Muslims. Are we ready to live up to it?

God declares in the Qur’an: Before this We wrote in the Psalms, after the Message (given to Moses ): My servants, the righteous, shall inherit the earth. No one should doubt that one day this truth guaranteed by God’s oath will come true. An eminent Islamic scholar has read this verse to mean that the human stewardship will not be confined to the earth. Rather, those who become the trustees and masters of the earth will also rule over the remotest parts of the skies (Sahin, 1993). Naturally, such rule depends upon qualifications and quality. It is essential therefore that Muslims acquire the qualities demanded by the only Owner of the heavens and the earth. Even, this promise will come true to the degree that Muslims do acquire the requisite qualities (ibid.).

Are the Muslims indeed striving to get the requisite qualities? To a certain degree, yes. After the emancipation from the years of colonization, Islamic countries (particularly Indonesia, Pakistan, Iraq and Iran) began to educate their own experts in sophisticated technology. But colonization has been followed by a brain drain. Thus, it is reported that there are considerable numbers of Turkish scientists working in NASA’s space programmes.

With regard to space technology, there are incipient attempts by the Islamic countries. One such attempt is the Arab Satellite Communication Organization (ARABSAT). The Charter of the Organization was signed by twenty one Arab States in 1976. ARABSAT is intended to fulfil the aspirations of the Arabs have their own satellite system as a tool for socio-economic development of the region and for bringing about the transfer of technology. The ARABSAT space segment is composed of two satellites launched in 1985 and 1992, and located on the GSO at 19’E and 26’E respectively. But the organization does not have its own launching pads. Hence, it is dependent upon either the European Ariane or the US Space Shuttle. In addition to this, two Turkish Satellites will soon be sent to the GSO. TURKSAT project will be an important milestone in the communication of Turkic and Islamic countries.

Surely, the achievements of ARABSAT and TURKSAT are not promising in terms of scope and infrastructure. Islamic countries need to pool their scientific, technological and, more importantly, financial resources to set up an Islamic aerospace organization. Arab petro-dollars are wasted in Western banks when they could be channelled into this potentially lucrative area. The break-up of the USSR is an extremely good opportunity for the fledging Turkic Republics to collaborate with other Islamic states. The launch pads of the former Soviet Union were set up in Kazakhstan. Today the Kazakhs are waiting for customers. In the CIS, as Mikhail Osin said: ‘the pay of those who build spaceships is lower than that of a floor sweeper’ (Lemonick, 1993). The petrol-rich Arab countries could and should attract the space-engineers of Muslim states to work in the establishment of Muslim space programmes...

In conclusion, unless Muslims are prepared to face up to the necessities of the post-industrial era and to the requirements of a new century by investing their wealth on intellectual property and technology, never will the present Muslims walk on the moon, while the Christians will be left free to exploit the resources of the Universe not for the benefit of all mankind, but their own benefit at the expense of others. But, when God’s promised time due, the Crescent will surely embrace the stars.

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robert-c · 4 years ago

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Forty Years In The (Un)Making

The de-evolution of the Republican Party into principally a bunch of blindly loyal sycophants didn’t happen overnight, and it didn’t happen just under Donald Trump’s watch. It actually began with Ronald Reagan in 1980 and has been on a steady trend in this direction ever since.

The political landscape of 1980 was complicated. President Jimmy Carter was widely regarded as having mishandled the Iran Hostage crisis, and Democrats were heavily split between him and other challengers like Ted Kennedy. It was one of those rare elections in which there was significant third party challenge. Pat Robertson, making noises on the religious right (which would ultimately result in his run for office in 1988), also threatened to weaken the Republican base at a time when the Democrats were vulnerable.

Reagan’s response was to invite the religious right into the upper ranks of the party. How much of this was his personal belief, and how much calculated strategy we’ll probably never know. Nevertheless, this gave a significant role to people who believe regardless of facts, and for whom personal steadfastness of belief is more important than anything else. Reagan also introduced the major fostering of falsehoods that satisfied the personal myths of his supporters. Most notable was the “welfare queen” story. He alleged that there was a woman in Chicago living the high life, driving a late model Cadillac, and doing it all on welfare. Good investigative reporting and persistent demands for facts ultimately exposed this as a fabrication. And yet even today, some right wing people believe this story as true because it matches all of their fears and prejudices about public assistance. [As someone who has known people on public assistance I can assure you it is difficult enough to get a minimum of what you need, let alone become ‘well off’.]

Since then it has been a fairly steady trend of presumptions, assumptions, myths and outright lies. All with the intent of fostering the following ideas:

people getting public assistance are liars and cheats,

regulation of businesses kills jobs or drives them out of the country,

businesses are ‘good guys’ and don’t need to be regulated because they never do anything wrong, and “profit above all else” is the American ideal

immigrants are criminals (if they are people of color),

a medical system that supports the profits of drug and insurance companies is the best way to ensure health care coverage choices,

despite the first amendment of the Constitution, this is a “Christian country”,

the second amendment of the Constitution guarantees unregulated access to any weapon a citizen may want, and somehow intends that citizens take up arms against the government when they think their rights are being violated, and

many more on a smaller scale, but all with the idea that anyone not stuck in the 1950’s is somehow an enemy.

LIES! All lies!

The truth is that people on public assistance don’t get what they need because rules supposedly to prevent fraud end up preventing them from finding and keeping most gainful employment by requiring visits during normal work hours, and other reviews of their situation. All of this while the largest potential for fraud exists in government defense contracts, just based on the amount of money that flows through the programs.

Businesses move jobs overseas because of low wages and lack of regulation. But let’s keep in mind what those regulations do. Most of them were initiated and designed to stop unsafe practices in the business; practices that endangered employees, consumers and/or the public at large. Evading such restrictions shouldn’t be praised as a great avoidance of “socialist” control, but should be seen as the callous disregard of the safety and security of others for the sake of a few dollars more profit.

Profit above all else could hardly be called a moral philosophy but that is exactly what this myth would have us believe. It rests on a couple of myths we all want to believe; that success in this country is because of “building a better mousetrap” and that gaining wealth is somehow proof of superior intellect or work ethic, while neither could be farther from the truth about how real wealth is acquired and kept.

Casting immigrants as criminals (if they are people of color) is right in line with centuries old racial prejudices. Little more should need to be said to explain their sick justification for these ideas. Anyone even tempted to believe it should be suspect. Any sweeping generalization based on something someone can’t control (like their ethnicity) is automatically racist.

Portraying “socialized medicine” as a situation where patient choices are limited and/or unavailable is, at best, a recollection of old, failed implementations OR the fears that the rich cannot use their wealth and influence to jump to the head of the line, past real life or death cases just to be sure that their headaches aren’t brain tumors. Oddly enough, the insurance companies, who are somehow cast as the “heroes” in these tales, would if they could limit choices even more. In their best profit interests people with pre-existing conditions (which is all of us, eventually) get no coverage at all, or if they do it is at a premium designed to cover all of their likely expenses in the year, which amounts to no insurance at all and just paying everything out of pocket. Ultimately, they would like to sell their coverage to people who will never use it, or use it sparingly if at all, while at the same time, if they must, charging others with a premium that will at least cover what they expect to payout in claims. This is a perfect example of where capitalistic, free market enterprise does NOT result in the best product or service at the best price. Attempts by competitive insurance companies who want to balance the premium and risk over the largest possible group, will have higher rates for the young who are less likely to use or need insurance and so will be uncompetitive in that group. The so called “free market” system is biased in favor of this ridiculous, anti-competitive arrangement.

Likewise, drug companies make more money selling treatments, than cures. There doesn’t have to be a cover up or secret directive; budget allocations for research and development will naturally favor the most likely profitable drug or approach and that will always be treatment. Cures are more likely the accidental byproduct of researching treatments. The scientists at work in the labs won’t even suspect, they will think they are working toward cures by learning how to develop treatments. Again, think about the idea that the “sacred” profit motive produces only good, and think it out for yourself as to which is the most profitable approach.

At the founding of this country, the mother country, England, had just been through several centuries of warfare and persecutions based on people’s religion. The new country of the United States of America wished to avoid such a situation, and so the first amendment to the Constitution establishes a separation of church and state. It doesn’t matter that most of the Founders could never have imagined how far this separation would have to go; great ideas usually far exceed their originators’ imaginations. Whether it is not lending support to one Christian sect over another, or Christianity versus Islam, or even total disbelief in religion, the concept of separation is the only way to ensure that everyone has the broadest freedom to believe as their conscience dictates. While things like the motto “In God We Trust” on the money are small issues, generally not worthy of a major effort to remove them at this time, they are part of the disinformation that portrays the USA as some sort of religious government or society.

By creating the impression that there has to be (or ought to be) some “general” religion of the US, they have already won half the battle, because the various Christian sects still make up a majority of the populace. BUT the principle of freedom and liberty of belief means that a person should have equal rights to believe as they wish even if they are the only one in the world who believes as they do. This is not abstract, but relates directly to people’s ability to choose abortion, end of life choices, how their remains are to be disposed of (did you know that cremation used to be illegal if anyone of your relatives objected? This was due to the religious notion that at the “end of days” people would be raised up from the cemeteries), and a host of other restrictions including what could be sold at stores on Sundays.

As for the second amendment, it begins with the phrase “well regulated” so any idea that it meant unrestricted access to weapons is stupidly at odds with the actual language of the amendment. There is also absolutely nothing in the Constitution, or its development, that suggests the point of this amendment was to provide a mechanism for people to overthrow the government. In addition to laws against taking up arms against the government (and the definition of treason in the Constitution itself), the Founders thought that the representational nature of the republic would prevent the need for such an uprising. To the extent that the second amendment had anything to do with the preservation of a free government it was that armed forces would be recruited from the citizenry. It NEVER was intended to ensure that criminals, and those with the intent to overthrow the government of the United States (if and when they think it has strayed from its proper role) had access to any and all weapons available.

The other issues are everything from abortion to Sunday closing laws, from consensual prostitution to adult book and movie stores. Once again, it doesn’t matter that you or I wouldn’t want to participate, it’s that as long as there is no coercion involved it is none of our business and if you think it is a sin against God, then God can take care of it – He/She/It doesn’t need our help.

BTW, this is where I should share an experience I had with one of these religious fanatics. Her belief was that the USA had never had a famine because of the “In God We Trust” motto on the money. I will spend no time dismantling the obvious idiocy of this idea. What was significant about her unhinged belief, was that she used the principles of “externalities” to justify her position. To refresh, the principle of externalities is why you cannot drive drunk or without insurance. Your actions that can affect others are rightly regulated under this principle. Her idea, clearly given to her by someone else as she was nowhere near smart enough to have thought this on her own, was that to avoid the retribution of God (as she understood Him) we all had to adhere to at least a minimum of His instructions (again conveniently interpreted for us by self-appointed ‘experts’ in these matters).

It is past time to reject these superficial and self-serving myths.

#Republican lies #conservative myths

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deniscollins · 5 years ago

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In Amazon’s Bookstore, No Second Chances for the Third Reich

In 1998, when Amazon was an ambitious start-up, its founder, Jeff Bezos, said, “We want to make every book available — the good, the bad and the ugly.” Customers reviews, he said, would “let truth loose.” David Duke has published several books advocating for the Ku Klux Klan, an American white supremacist hate group that argues for the purifying American society of African Americans, often based on distorted information. If you were an Amazon executive would you: (1) allow David Duke’s Klan books to be sold in honor of freedom of speech, or (2) ban Klan books by David Duke, as well as other KKK advocacy books? Why? What are the ethics underlying your decision?

Amazon is quietly canceling its Nazis.

Over the past 18 months, the retailer has removed two books by David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, as well as several titles by George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party. Amazon has also prohibited volumes like “The Ruling Elite: The Zionist Seizure of World Power” and “A History of Central Banking and the Enslavement of Mankind.”

While few may lament the disappearance of these hate-filled books, the increasing number of banished titles has set off concern among some of the third-party booksellers who stock Amazon’s vast virtual shelves. Amazon, they said, seems to operate under vague or nonexistent rules.

“Amazon reserves the right to determine whether content provides an acceptable experience,” said one recent removal notice that the company sent to a bookseller.

Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have been roiled in recent years by controversies that pit freedom of speech against offensive content. Amazon has largely escaped this debate. But with millions of third-party merchants supplying much of what Amazon sells to tens of millions of customers, that ability to maintain a low profile may be reaching its end.

Amazon began as a bookstore and, even as it has moved on to many more lucrative projects, now controls at least two-thirds of the market for new, used and digital volumes in the United States. With its profusion of reader reviews, ability to cut prices without worrying about profitability and its control of the electronic book landscape, to name only three advantages, Amazon has immense power to shape what information people are consuming.

Yet the retailer declines to provide a list of prohibited books, say how they were chosen or even discuss the topic. “Booksellers make decisions every day about what selection of books they choose to offer,” it said in a statement.

Gregory Delzer is a Tennessee bookseller whose Amazon listings account for about a third of his sales. “They don’t tell us the rules and don’t let us have a say,” he said. “But they squeeze us for every penny.”

Nazi-themed items regularly crop up on Amazon, where they are removed under its policy on “offensive and controversial materials.” Those rules pointedly do not apply to books. Amazon merely says that books for sale on its site “should provide a positive customer experience.”

Now Amazon is becoming increasingly proactive in removing Nazi material. It even allowed its own Nazi-themed show, “The Man in the High Castle,” to be cleaned up for a tribute book. The series, which began in 2015 and concluded in November, is set in a parallel United States where the Germans and the Japanese won World War II.

“High Castle” is lavish in its use of National Socialist symbols. “There’s nothing that there isn’t a swastika on,” the actor Rufus Sewell, who played the Nazi antihero, said in a promotional video. The series promoted its portrayal of “the controlling aesthetic of Hitler” in its nomination for a special effects Emmy.

But in “The Man in the High Castle: Creating the Alt World,” published in November by Titan Books, the swastikas and eagle-and-crosses were digitally erased from Mr. Sewell’s uniform, from Times Square and the Statue of Liberty, even from scenes set in Berlin. A note on the copyright page said, “We respect, in this book, the legal and ethical responsibility of not perpetuating the distribution of the symbols of oppression.”

An Amazon spokeswoman said, “We did not make editorial edits to the images.” Titan, which wanted to market the book in Germany, where laws on Nazi imagery are strict, said Amazon approved the changes.

Some fans of the series said they found reading the book as dystopian as the show itself. “If you can’t even have swastikas shown in a book about Nazis taking over America, please do not make books ever again,” wrote one reviewer.

When Amazon drops a book from its store, it is as if it never existed. A recent Google search for David Duke’s “My Awakening: A Path to Racial Understanding” on Amazon yielded a link to a picture of an Amazon employee’s dog. Amazon sellers call these dead ends “dog pages.”

Some booksellers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, said they had no problem with the retailer converting as many offensive books to dog pages as it wished.

Mr. Delzer, the proprietor of a secondhand store in Nashville called Defunct Books, has a different view. “If Amazon executives are so proud of their moral high ground, they should issue memos about which books they are banning instead of keeping sellers and readers in the dark,” he said.

The bookseller said he only knew Amazon was forbidding titles because he received an automated message from the retailer, saying two used books he sold seven years ago — “Conspiracy of the Six-Pointed Star: Eye-Opening Revelations and Forbidden Knowledge About Israel, the Jews, Zionism, and the Rothschilds” and “Toward the White Republic” — were now proscribed.

“This product was identified as one that is prohibited for sale,” Amazon told him. Failure to immediately delete listings for these books, the company said, “may result in the deactivation of your selling account” and possible confiscation of any money he was owed.

Amazon said it didn’t really mean any of that about “Toward the White Republic.” “We did not intend to imply the book itself could not be listed for sale,” it said in a statement.

As for “Conspiracy of the Six-Pointed Star,” which is widely available from other online booksellers, Amazon said the book did not comply with its “content guidelines.”

Mr. Delzer said the email, which he posted on an Amazon forum, was clear and Amazon was dissembling about “White Republic.”

A bookseller since 2001, Mr. Delzer said he does not condone white supremacist material but believes people should be free to read what they want. The biggest seller in his shop at the moment is by Greta Thunberg, the young climate activist.

“Amazon wants its customers to trust Amazon,” he said. “The place that sells books doesn’t want much critical thinking.”

That expansive philosophy narrowed over the years. In 2010, when the news media discovered the self-published “Pedophile’s Guide to Love and Pleasure” on the site, the retailer’s first reaction was to hang tough.

“Amazon believes it is censorship not to sell certain books simply because we or others believe their message is objectionable,” it said at the time.

That resolution wilted in the face of a barrage of hostility and boycott threats. Amazon pulled the book.

Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, said Amazon has the same First Amendment right as any retailer.

“Amazon has a First Amendment right to pick and choose the materials they offer,” she said. “Despite its size, it does not have to sponsor speech it finds unacceptable.”

Physical bookstores rarely stock supremacist literature, for no other reason than it would alienate many customers. The question is whether Amazon, because of its size and power, should behave differently.

“I��m not going to argue for the wider distribution of Nazi material,” said Danny Caine of the Raven Book Store in Lawrence, Kan., who is the author of a critical pamphlet, “How to Resist Amazon and Why.” “But I still don’t trust Amazon to be the arbiters of free speech. What if Amazon decided to pull books representing a less despicable political viewpoint? Or books critical of Amazon’s practices?”

Amazon’s newfound zeal to remove “the ugly” extends beyond the Nazis. The order page for the e-book of The Nation of Islam’s “The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews” stated last week, “This title not currently available for purchase.”

“The Man in the High Castle” was based on a 1962 novel of the same name by Philip K. Dick, whose stories are often about the slippery nature of reality and how it will be controlled in the future by governments and corporations. One character in the streaming series was Mr. Rockwell, the American Nazi Party founder.

In photos in “Creating the Alt World,” the tribute book, the swastika around Mr. Rockwell’s neck was removed. The real life Mr. Rockwell has been largely removed from Amazon’s bookstore as well.

After a complaint by a member of Congress in 2018, a children’s book that Mr. Rockwell wrote disappeared from Amazon. So did his book “White Power.” Other Rockwell material, like The Stormtrooper Magazine, is described as “currently unavailable.”

Some sellers circumvent the blocks by listing titles with a word or two changed, other booksellers said. One seller said he recently received a message from Amazon that several titles by Savitri Devi, also known as “Hitler’s Priestess,” were forbidden. But they are now on the site. And a copy of “Toward the White Republic” recently popped up on Amazon, for $973 plus postage.

There is still an abundance of other Nazi material available on Amazon, much of it with favorable reviews. There is the “SS Leadership Guide,” many editions of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” and Joseph Goebbels’s “Nature and Form of National Socialism,” to name just a few.

That only underlines how hard it can be to tell exactly what Amazon’s rules are. The confusion is reinforced by AbeBooks, the biggest secondhand book platform outside of Amazon itself.

Some of the books dropped from Amazon are available on Abe. Recently, there were 18 copies of Mr. Duke’s books on Abe, at prices up to $150. Amazon, which owns Abe, declined to comment.

#Amazon #Naziism

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hucowmilker · 6 years ago

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Ordinary Iranians on Trump Talks Offer: ‘Why Not Try the Americans?’

Iran’s leaders cannot stand the thought of talking to the United States and say President Trump cannot be trusted. But Jamshid Moniri, a 45-year-old building contractor sweating under the Tehran summer sun, summed up what many ordinary Iranians think. “Of course we should talk to Trump,” he said on Tuesday. “What is wrong with talks? We’d be nuts not to talk to him.” The day before, Mr. Trump, who withdrew the United States from the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran in May despite Iran’s documented compliance, said he was ready to sit down with Iran’s leaders “without preconditions.”

“I’ll meet with anybody,” Mr. Trump said in Washington. “If they want to meet, I’ll meet. Anytime they want.” On Tuesday, in Tehran, Mr. Trump’s open invitation seemed to be on everybody’s mind. Increasingly desperate, many say they would welcome any option that could ease Iran’s economic quagmire. The Iranian currency, the rial, has lost 80 percent of its value during the past year — and nearly 20 percent just in the past few days. Foreign investors have left to avoid new American sanctions that take effect starting in less than a week. And almost every week low-level protests over prices or wages erupt somewhere in the country that have the potential to spread if the economic free-fall worsens.

Mr. Moniri, the contractor, said he feared that what is considered bad now could get a lot worse. “So we should welcome talks,” he said. “Our leaders should welcome this opportunity.” But if anything, Iran’s leaders seem paralyzed by Mr. Trump’s offer. Direct talks with the United States go against their ideology. And in their minds, sitting down publicly with Mr. Trump, whom they have called particularly ignorant, capricious, arrogant and rude, would be an especially humiliating submission to imperialism and pressure.

When dealing with the United States over the past decades, Iranian leaders have often preferred to do it through secret talks, far from ordinary Iranians, who are bombarded daily with organized anti-Americanism from their schoolbooks to state television. “There can only be talks when Trump respects the signatures of the U.S. administration in the nuclear agreement,” said Hossein Sheikholeslam, a senior adviser to Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif. “Trump should reverse the pullout from the nuclear deal, or else there will be no talks.”

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, who has enshrined anti-Americanism as a tenet of his legacy, made clear after Mr. Trump renounced the nuclear agreement that he would never talk with the American leader. “Trump will wither away, perish, and his body will decompose, but, the Islamic Republic will still be thriving,” Mr. Khamenei proclaimed in a speech.

His view was reinforced on Tuesday by the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the powerful paramilitary force that is intensely loyal to Mr. Khamenei. “Mr. Trump! Iran is not North Korea to accept your offer for a meeting,” said the commander, Maj. Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari, in remarks quoted by Reuters. “Even U.S. presidents after you will not see that day.”

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dumbforcum · 6 years ago

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Ordinary Iranians on Trump Talks Offer: ‘Why Not Try the Americans?’

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luminalunii97 · 2 years ago

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It's been almost two months since the MURDER of Mahsa Amini, the Iranian kurd girl who's MURDER sparked a wave of protests against the regime. I insist on the word "murder" because I feel like some non Iranians are still dubious about the cause of her death. Which is understandable, the authorities in Iran denied the accusation and are still insisting that her death, plus every other murdered protesters, aren't the regime's doing!!! These denials are widely ignored by Iranians because it's a widespread known fact that islamic republic goons only lie. No one remember the last time this regime's figures and followers or IRIB, their monopoly media corporation, spoke the truth. They are the empire of lies, to the point that if we ever watch their news programs, it's to find the truth in reverse of what they say. If they deny something, then with no doubt it has happened. If they claim something, that's definitely a lie.

I won't be able to explain how this mistrust and this circus of fabricated lies happened, there's a history behind it, but I'll give you one very painful example to see why you should never trust what IR says.

Flight PS752, Iran - Ukraine

On January 8, 2020, a plane with 167 passengers and 9 crew members aboard took off from Tehran to the destination Kyiv. Shortly after takeoff, it was shut down by Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), shooting 2 missiles at it. All 176 occupants were killed within seconds.

Islamic Republic authorities immediately claimed the crash was because of a technical issue, that an engine was caught on fire, that it was the pilot's fault. Within the same day, the USA followed by Ukraine, Britain, and Canada claimed that the cause of the crash was most probably a missile strike.

At the time, there was tension between Iran's regime and the US because of the assassination of Ghasem Soleimani, the guy who was directly responsible for part of the destructions in the middle east, the guy whose family's life was full of contradictions, the guy Islamic Republic swore to take his revenge on the US, but instead, they took his revenge on innocent civilians.

For the next 72 hours, our regime lied and lied and lied and countered every accusation and proof with denial and slander. In response to every claim foreign intelligence agencies made, they said things like it's "a rumor", "lie", "American deception", "psychological war" and "false scenarios of the West" by "enemies", "adversaries" and "counter-revolutionaries" for "hostility", "marginalizing the attack on the Ain al-Assad barracks " or "Boeing's attempt to prevent the stock from falling and to cover up the technical problems of its plane"! For 72 mother fuckin hours they looked into the eye of the families of the victims and our nation and lied. Until they couldn't hide it anymore. So after 3 days they finally admitted that it was a missile strike, that they had mistaken the plane for an American cruise missile. A human error. And then they refused to give any more explanations.

There have been arguments around this "human error" excuse, doubt and speculations. But most important of all there has been public demand for prosecution. The families of the flight victims rightfully demanded a just trial for the responsible parties. Can you guess what did the regime do? They called it "a bitter accident", "a human error" and "an unforgivable incident". That's it. No one resigned, no one apologized and no one took responsibility. They didn't even want to pay compensation, saying "why should we pay when the plane had European insurance?!". Our beloved parliament, the parliament that's calling for the execution of protesters these days, praised IRGC for doing their duties so well! Hossein Salami, IRGC commander-in-chief, gave a speech in parliament about the incident that was salt in the wound. He lied "we were under pressure by our people to avenge Soleimani", "I wish I was in that plane", "we never wish to harm our own people" and the biggest lie of all "we were the first to announce this hypothesis of missiles hitting the plane causing the crash. If we were not the source of the formation of this hypothesis, no one could understand"!!!

It was only about 2 months after the 2019 protests in Iran in which the government shut down the internet for a week and mass murdered more than 1500 protesters in only 3 days. As was expected anger stirred up again and there was another wave of protests in the country where people chanted death to the dictator and demanded the overthrow of Khamenei. They tore Soleimani's pictures and put them on fire. Do you know any better way to say he wasn't popular among people and we didn't put anyone under pressure to avenge him?

To add a side note here, there have been protests after protests in the past couple of years. Here's a diagram of all mass protests in iran since Islamic revolution:

Protests got suppressed again. The families of the flight victims were offered bribery or threatened to keep their mouths shut. Some of them even got arrested and were put in jail temporarily. But the families didn't back down so The Association of Families of Flight PS752 Victims was formed. (Website, Instagram, YouTube)

Out of 176 lost lives, 147 of them were Iranian or Iranian-Canadian and the other 29 were Canadian, Ukrainian, Afghan, and Swedish. The association represents 140 of the victims. Through this association, we learned more about the lives of the victims as the association stated that it has been established to keep the memories of the passengers alive and seek justice.

Among the passengers, there were 15 children, one infant, and one pregnant woman. Many university students and professors were on board too. You can read some of their stories on the association's website or social media.

Hamed Esmaeilion, the spokesman of the association, has one of the most tragic stories. He lost his wife, Parisa Eghbalian, and 9-year-old daughter, Reera, in this incident.

The association has been active in every anti-regime movement since its establishment. In the uprising of Mahsa Amini's murder, Esmaeilion organized global rallies in more than 150 cities all over the world. Someone described that day as Iranian New Year's Eve, not because it was a merry occasion, but because Iranians around the globe came together, united, and rallied, like a wave, from the most eastern side of the earth to the most western side, like how clock strikes 12 in every country from east to west for waiting crowds. Esmaeilion, later on, organized another big rally in Berlin, where the Berlin victory column is located. The first picture is of the said rally.

The 2019 protests and massacre happened 3 years ago these days. There's going to be protests all over Iran on November 15, 16, and 17 (24, 25, and 26 of Aban). Outside of Iran in an act of solidarity, the association has called for another global demonstration on November 19 (28 of Aban). More informations about time and location in different countries are posted on the association social media. In case you're interested to participate and meet some Iranians, everyone's welcome to join.

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aloneafterdark · 6 years ago

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Ordinary Iranians on Trump Talks Offer: ‘Why Not Try the Americans?’

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wulfbayne5 · 6 years ago

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Ordinary Iranians on Trump Talks Offer: ‘Why Not Try the Americans?’

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eagle-eyez · 3 years ago

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Wednesday's news that senior Politburo official Nikolai Patrushev has conveyed to his Iranian counterpart Admiral Ali Shamkhani that is set to be admitted as a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) should give the Joe Biden administration pause.

Especially as this news comes in the backdrop of the United States’ drawdown exit from Afghanistan and an expectation that the grouping will play a greater role in the region in the absence of an American presence.

But first let’s look at what the SCO is, its members and its goals:

What is the SCO?

As per the grouping’s website: “The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation is a permanent intergovernmental international organisation, the creation of which was announced on 15 June, 2001, in Shanghai (China) by the Republic of Kazakhstan, the People's Republic of China, the Kyrgyz Republic, the Russian Federation, the Republic of Tajikistan, and the Republic of Uzbekistan. It was preceded by the Shanghai Five mechanism.”

Who are its members?

The grouping has eight permanent members: China, Russia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, and India. Of these eight, the two that joined most recently are India and Pakistan (in June 2017).

What are its goals?

Strengthening mutual trust and neighbourliness among the member states; promoting their effective cooperation in politics, trade, the economy, research, technology and culture, as well as in education, energy, transport, tourism, environmental protection, and other areas

Making joint efforts to maintain and ensure peace, security and stability in the region

Moving towards the establishment of a democratic, fair and rational new international political and economic order

What does that mean? In essence, the SCO is a Eurasian group that is seen as a counterbalance to NATO.

Why is this important? The SCO also currently has four observer states. Of these, two states are of particular interest to the Biden administration for quite different reasons: Iran and Afghanistan.

Iran takes it slow, China extends olive branch

As mentioned above, Iran is on its way to becoming a full member of the SCO. This even as the Biden administration is attempting, seemingly without much success, to pressure Iran to rejoin the JCPOA.

Iran, which shares a 900-kilometre border with Afghanistan, already seems keen to achieve peaceful coexistence with the Sunni Taliban, with its new President Ebrahim Rasi seemingly taking pleasure rubbing salt in the wound of the Americans by saying the US military "defeat" in Afghanistan was a chance to bring peace to the country.

Meanwhile, as events continue to unfold in Afghanistan at a rapid pace, the Chinese seem to be operating with two old maxims in mind: “You can choose your friends but not your neighbours” and “never let a good crisis go to waste”.

Continuing to make overtures to the Taliban while stopping short of openly recognising the government, Beijing on Wednesday said it will decide on extending diplomatic recognition to the Taliban in Afghanistan only after the formation of the government in the country, which it hoped would be "open, inclusive and broadly representative".

“China’s position on the Afghan issue is consistent and clear," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian told a media briefing here answering a question when will China accord diplomatic recognition to the Taliban insurgents, which has taken control of Afghanistan. “If we have to recognise a government, the first thing is that we will need to wait until the government is formed," he said. “We hope there will be an open, inclusive and broadly representative regime in Afghanistan. Only after that, we will come to the question of diplomatic recognition," he said.

To be fair, China, which itself shares a rugged 76-kilometre border with Afghanistan, made its position clear on Monday itself after the Taliban seized control of the country, saying it is “ready to deepen "friendly and cooperative" relations.

One big reason for Beijing to keep an eye on Afghanistan is its age-old worry that the country will become a hub for the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM), a separatist outfit aligned to Al Qaeda which is waging an insurgency in Xinjiang.

Beijing also has a trillion dollars worth of reasons to keep its eye on the ball: China has been eying large-scale investments in Afghanistan as the country has the world's largest unexploited reserves of copper, coal, iron, gas, cobalt, mercury, gold, lithium and thorium. In 2011, the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) won a $400 million bid to drill three oil fields for 25 years, containing roughly 87 million barrels of oil. Chinese firms have also gained rights to mine copper at Mes Aynak in Logar province.

The Chinese are aware that war is an expensive proposition. Given that turmoil in Afghanistan could be extremely bad for its business, Beijing could well be adopting the carrot and the stick approach with the Taliban.

India casts watchful eye

For India, the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan brings its own set of headaches.

A security analyst, who did not wish to be named, told New Indian Express that China would like assert its influence on West Asia through Afghanistan by bringing the war-torn country into the scheme of things in connection with the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which India remains adamantly opposed to.

Also in the forefront of New Delhi’s mind is the fate of its much-touted Chabahar Port project in eastern Iran – jointly built by India, Afghanistan and Iran, crucial to New Delhi’s interests for its vital geostrategic location and long seen as a counterweight to the Chinese-backed Gwadar port in Pakistan (the Kohinoor of its Belt and Road initiative) – which could be sidelined or simply made irrelevant by "changing circumstances".

Worse for India, China and Tehran also seem to be getting friendlier, what with Beijing’s planned $400 billion investment in Tehran over the next 25 years. The possibility of Chabahar Port being linked with Gwadar Port in Pakistan – the endpoint of CPEC – would be a possibility New Delhi would not like to contemplate given China’s avowed strategic encirclement strategy known as “String of Pearls.”

Russia takes pragmatic view

In the meantime, Russia, which has, shall we say, a colourful history with Afghanistan is looking to get on side with the Taliban as well. Despite the hardline Islamist group tracing its origins back to the war against the Soviets in the 1980s, Russia's view on the group now is pragmatic. Analysts say the Kremlin wants to protect its interests in Central Asia, where it has several military bases and is keen to avoid instability and potential terrorism spreading through a region on its doorstep.

A Russian foreign ministry statement Monday said the situation in Kabul "is stabilising" and claimed that the Taliban had started to "restore public order". Well, quite.

And ambassador Dmitry Zhirnov said the Taliban, who he was due to meet Tuesday, was already guarding his embassy and had given Moscow guarantees that the building would be safe. The militants had assured the Russians that "not a single hair will fall from the heads" of their diplomats, he said. This is a stark contrast to the last time hardliners came to power in Afghanistan in 1992, when Moscow struggled to evacuate its embassy under fire after a disastrous decade-long war.

Three decades later, the Kremlin has boosted the Taliban's international credibility by hosting it several times for talks in Moscow, despite the movement being a banned terrorist organisation in Russia. The aim of these talks, say analysts, is to stop the conflict from spilling into neighbouring countries and a terrorism spike in its Central Asian neighbours, where Russia maintains military bases.

"If we want there to be peace in Central Asia, we need to talk to the Taliban," said Nikolai Bordyuzha, the former secretary-general of the Moscow-led Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO). He commended the Russian embassy for staying open. The Taliban has moved to reassure its northern neighbours that it has no designs on them, despite several Central Asian countries having offered logistical support to Washington's war effort.

Ambassador Zhirnov suggested the Taliban had also given Moscow assurances. He said Russia wanted Afghanistan to have peaceful relations with "all the countries in the world" and that "the Taliban had already promised us" this.

Russia's dialogue with the Taliban is the fruit of several years of courting. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in July described the Taliban as a "powerful force", and blamed the Afghan government for faltering progress in talks. "It is not for nothing that we have been establishing contacts with the Taliban movement for the last seven years," the Kremlin's Afghanistan envoy, Zamir Kabulov, told the Ekho Moskvy radio station on Monday.

This relationship has raised many eyebrows, given that the Taliban has its roots in the anti-Soviet Mujahideen movement from the 1980s. But Alexander Baunov of the Carnegie Moscow Center said Russia now believed the Taliban have changed since the last time it was in power in the 1990s when it gave shelter to Al Qaeda.

"Moscow does not see this version of the Mujahideen as its enemy," he said.

But Russia isn’t taking any chances either. Its foreign ministry has suggested it will not rush into a close relationship with a Taliban government, saying it would monitor the group's conduct before deciding on recognition.

And as the Taliban advanced through Afghanistan this summer, Russia staged war games with allies Uzbekistan and Tajikistan on the Afghan border in a show of force. Central Asia expert Arkady Dubnov said Moscow would now look to strengthen its military presence in the region. "To different extents, these countries will be obliged to accept Moscow's help, but none will want to exchange their sovereignty for their security," he said.

What can the SCO do?

Russian International Affairs Council director-general Andrey Kortunov told China's Global Times, SCO is in a good position “to address simultaneously (the) security, economic and human development agendas of Afghanistan". As the country looks to rebuild and recover, the SCO members can provide “support for political stability, implementation of large-scale economic projects and assistance for social capital building".

He, however, mentioned fault lines among the SCO members saying that “select SCO states could form project-based coalitions to engage in initiatives of their choice without necessarily trying to involve all of SCO member states".

Russia, China and Iran have one more thing in common: none have shuttered their embassies and are in constant contact with the Taliban. The bottom line is that all these countries, for their own geopolitical reasons, could potentially recognise the Taliban in the days to come. Which could bring them in direct conflict with the United States, whose intelligence agencies are already expressing concern about terrorist groups potentially reforming in Afghanistan under the radar.

At least we live in interesting times.

With inputs from agencies

from Firstpost World Latest News https://ift.tt/3y0Yi5B

#World

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