[lbo-talk] Nepal

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On 4/26/06, Dennis Perrin <dperrin at comcast.net> wrote:
> Yosh --
>
> > In just three years since March 2003, more than 100,000 Iraqis,
> > Americans, and others have died due to the US invasion, the invasion
> > that just about destroyed modernity (from losses of women's rights to
> > emergence of sectarian battles) in Iraq.  Amnesty International says
> > that about 12,000 -- counting all who are killed, from Maoists to
> > villagers suspected of aiding Maoists to the King's police, military,
> > and civilian supporters -- have perished in Nepal in its decade-long
> > civil war.  Iraq's and Nepal's populations are about the same: Iraq,
> > 26,074,906; and Nepal, 27,676,547.  It seems to me that we are the
> > ones who are living in a country whose government unleashed messianic
> > brutality --
>
> [clip]
>
> Well, I was referring to Maoism in practice in Red Guard China and Pol Pot's
> Kampuchea. What will or won't happen in Nepal via the Maoists is anyone's
> guess, yours included, so switching the subject to Iraq kinda begs the
> original question -- indeed, avoids it altogether.

I compared Nepal and Iraq because their populations are about the
same, so one can easily see the quantitative difference in violence in
the two wars.  You can also see qualitative differences, too.  Just on
Monday, seven car bombs hit Baghdad, killing ten and wounding eighty. 
You don't see Maoists in Nepal resorting to such terrorist methods
(whose history Mike Davis discusses in "A History of the Car Bomb,"
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=76140> and
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=76824>) -- very popular in
today's world where insurgents are more likely to be Islamist
terrorists than Marxist guerrillas -- to retaliate, though there have
been "indiscriminate aerial bombardment by the army of civilian areas"
in Nepal (at <http://hrw.org/english/docs/2006/03/28/nepal13083.htm>),
paid for by Washington, et al. no doubt.  That's one of the reasons
that the Nepalese Maoist insurgency looks "retro."

As for "Maoism in practice in Red Guard China and Pol Pot's
Kampuchea," I don't think there is any straight line of causation from
pronouncements to practice.  In the West, including the USA, there
used to be many people who were inspired by China under Mao.  Did they
go on to send intellectuals to the countryside for reeducation?  No,
in the USA, many of them, "new Communists" that Max Elbaum (I like him
a lot!) wrote about, ended up supporting Jesse Jackson and other left
Democrats; in France, they went on to write postmodernist tracts.  :-0


> As for the US unleashing messianic brutality in Iraq, yes, we have, and have
> for quite some time in other parts of the world. Indeed, I'm on record here
> as saying that capitalism and "free markets" have killed far more people
> than has state socialism, Maoism included, but again, what that has to do
> with current events in Nepal, as far as what a revolution might bring, is
> beyond me.

Well, I don't think you support giving another dime to the King in
Nepal.  As for a revolution in Nepal, let's not get overexcited here. 
For the time being, the hard-won unity between Maoists and the
parliamentary parties is once again broken, and the thing is that no
kind of revolution -- even just the one that simply brings modernity
to Nepal -- is possible without either reestablishment of that unity
or Maoists winning over urban youths dissatisfied by the parliamentary
party leaders' yet another compromise.  The army is still under the
King's command, not the reinstated parliament's, and things can go bad
in Nepal again.

--
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>