Back on May 26/05, Dr. Jack Wheeler of To The Point News did a time-delayed Guest Blog called Bye-Bye Bolivia. Our maps of Bolivia, he said, may be about to become obsolete:
It looks like Dr. Wheeler was right on the money with this one:
- Bart Hall adds some additional background from personal experience in Bolivia as an agricultural development worker.
- Austin Bay has UPDATED: Bolivia in a dangerous spiral - including news reports and even an email from a friend on the scene.
- Publius Pundit has his Bolivia archive, including one roundup entitled, simply, "Rumours of War".
- As The Top Of The World Turns has a translation of Augusto Nunes' account in Rio de Janeiro's Jornal do Brasil, one of Brasil's major papers. It adds some additional history and some local regional perspective - the signs do not look good for Bolivia.
- Kim du Toit offers a fascinating glimpse in an unlikely place: Miss Bolivia. Go read to get a feel for how different Santa Cruz considers itself to be - oh, and he has pictures...
Thanks for directing me to Dr. Wheeler's site. There I learned:
"The next insanity to come in the homosexual assault on the American Family will be PHM: Polygamous Homosexual Marriage. Pathologically promiscuous homosexuals will consider their "marriage" a legalism that will in no way prevent them from adultery en masse. To maintain the pretense of "marriage" however, they will have to quickly begin agitating for the legalization of group sodomization as "just another form of the married life-style".
Dr. Wheeler is clearly a nut.
What's so nutty about that? Basically he is saying that people who want to practice polygamy (both gay and straight) will try to have their lifestyle legalized. Many Mormans in Utah and northern Arizona have already tried to do so. If you mean that he is nuts because he obviously doesn't like gay people then maybe you just aren't being tolerant enough.
Lefties are nutbars, what else is new ..
Normalcy is the new perversity, to the left if your not perverse your perverse. Orwells world.
As for Bolivia, I see here a common template, a neigbor drooling over the Gas reserves, has agents and money over the border stirring up agiprop.
When the whole mess finnaly blows, they will get to annex the portion they want, wherepon the restless natives, having served their use, will find the new rulers will have no reserve in their iron handed supression to restore order, it will be seen as nessisary, as the key players in the insurrection will be liquidated.
The usefull idiots serving as hapless tools, as they always are, for the taking from one ruling group to another ruling eliete.
Their neighbors covet the gas, and they will get it.
When Lenin coined the term "usefull idiots" it wasnt a metaphor
I would ask the moderator to supress the first two comments as they are entirely unrelated to the post.
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I have done agricultural development work in Bolivia--Cochabamba region--and would add another element to the analysis and discussion. In the uplands, such land as is owned by the campesinos (and most of it is) has been, and continues to be, partitioned into ever smaller pieces because inheritance rules generally dictate that it be evenly distributed amongst at least the sons.
Much below a half-hectare (1.2 acres) it becomes very difficult to do much more than feed the family. There is also a significant altitude component to the struggle. Most upland valleys, including Cocha lie at about 2600-2800 metres (8500-9000 feet, roughly). Land tenure there is private and often extensive, with emphasis on dairy, grain, meat and vegetable production. It was the breadbasket of the Spanish Empire in South America.
Many peasants live in the 'cabeza de valle' between 2800 and 3200 metres (9000-11,000 feet, roughly). This is the primary potato zone, as much above 3200 m potatoes are too often frosted out. It is indeed fortunate that things are settling down for the moment, as June is the primary potato planting season, as well as for peas and beans. Most land in the 'cabeza' is held privately, and it is there that the problems of fractionation are the most serious. There are also significant difficulties with overgrazing and erosion, but that is a post unto itself.
Campesino farmers are trapped (on eroding land) between harsh climate above and high-value land in the valleys. Surplus kids--there are many--are forced to abandon the land and seek wage employment in the cities of the valley. This is inherently unstable.
In the 'puna' above 3200 metres or so, land is generally held in common and agriculture consists of sheep, llamas, and struggling family gardens. Temperatures are generally below 10 C (50 F) year 'round, and there is no heat in the homes. It is a bleak, draining existence and their only future is migration to the cities, except they have even fewer resources than people leaving the 'cabeza.'
In this context, calls to expropriate farmland for distribution amongst displaced peasants are particularly troubling, for the simple reason that peasants accustomed to producing primarily for self-sufficiency will not be able to grow enough food to feed the cities.
In spite of its poverty, Bolivia has been generally well-fed and well nourished, especially in comparison to the three other Andean countries in which I have worked.
Chavez is already expropriating productive land in Venezuela and holds it out as the only acceptable form of land-tenure "justice" for Bolivia, as readily parrotted by Morales and the others. It is a formula for disaster, as Zimbabwe too gruesomely demostrates.
Far too often, naive calls for "social justice," if actually implemented, result in starvation, misery, and profoundly needless catastrophe. That Bolivia seems about to be driven down that path by demagogues with a larger agenda is for me a point of profound sadness.
Interesting information Bart.
I second your comment on the first two comments above.
Bart, great contribution from experience there. Many thanks.
Thought about the requests to remove the first 2 comments.
While unrelated to the subject of the post, they do question the credibility of the original source of material. That's relevant enough to let them stand, I think, and Mike's response seems to have answered the issue and let everyone go on to the substance of the post.
I'll add that Jeff's response wasn't paticularly intelligent as a debating tactic, given this post with its material that appears to back up Dr. Wheeler's April analysis for Bolivia. Logically, the original source's credibility loses most of its relevance at that point, unless you can cite the subsequent materials as derivative. And of course, they aren't and you can't.
But, per my entry in the comments policy, I don't ban people for making dumb arguments. Though I would call "stop" and begin deletions after that if the subject had hijacked the thread.
I will encourage future commenters to stick to the issue of Bolivia - there's lots to talk about there.
Bart: In this context, calls to expropriate farmland for distribution amongst displaced peasants are particularly troubling, for the simple reason that peasants accustomed to producing primarily for self-sufficiency will not be able to grow enough food to feed the cities.
There seem to be a lot of similarities to the peasant unrest in the last years of Czarist Russia.
Expropriation and redistribution were regular features of Russian peasant life for generations - every few years the communes would re-partition all of the land, taking from some and giving to others. The result, quite naturally, was that everybody thought they were getting cheated. Everybody thought that there was a vast amount of good land that was being held by landlords, when in fact peasants owned almost all of the arible land by the time of the Revolution.
The radicals were happy to encourage all these delusions, including the refusal to recognize that peasant farming was hopelessly inefficient and unsustainable. They've done their work very well in Latin America, too.
I'll add - Bart, you get around. Haiti, Bolivia, Montreal... do you have some kind of masochistic streak, or what?
Bart: partitioned into ever smaller pieces because inheritance rules generally dictate that it be evenly distributed amongst at least the sons.
I'd add that the overwhelming majority of Russian peasants followed the identical practice, called partible inheritance. The result was that agricultural progress was almost impossible - Russian farming was continually starting over from square one. Farms, households, families, and entire villages tended to disintegrate.
The eventual result was the commune system, in which no one owned land and distribution depended on village "wolf pack" politics. There was zero respect for property rights and therefore zero respect for the law - unless the law cracked down brutally, which it frequently did.
The day when everyone sees that invading marxism is as imperialist as its adversary, but without the benifits ...
Why must humanity always learn the hard way,, how many lives would be saved with a slug thru Comrade Chavez, how many lives was saved by Pinochet.
This sure smells of cross border agitprop to me.
When the mess blows up down there, get ready for another immigration wave.
There is a difference between the law as written down in the law books and the law of custom.
If it is custom that the land is repartitioned ever few years than you can not claim that law is broken because the law of custom helds in real life presidence over booklaw.
Marxism has in its core the believe that everything should be divided fairly which sounds pretty good if you don't own anything (as is true for subsistance farmers)
The day when everyone sees that invading marxism is as imperialist as its adversary, but without the benifits ...
Raymond, if you have to live under an imperialist boot than the boot of marxisme is best (which if you consider marxisme says a lot of the others)
"a", ah, that inconvenient "booklaw". If you are advocating for societies that lack stable legal institutions, you should know that is a substantial problem with third world cultures - its not a feature.
As for "imperialist" boots being worse than Marxist boots, frankly the simple statistics show that you do not know what you are talking about.
Nice too now you think i live in a third world country. Custom law is more stable than booklaw. All i need to change booklaw is a printing press (and power). Too change custom based law i need concenses. Booklaw is just a more explicit form of custom/concenses based law which is mostly ignored in the cases were it differentiate from it.
The problem with third world countries is not that they give president over custom law but that booklaw is so differgent from custom law.
I said imperial marxist boots, not simply marxist boots. And if you compare them to the rest than they come out less evil than others. After you kick out a marxist imperialist you have a country with doctors, scientists and factories. Something which is rarely true with a "liberal" imperalist
See for example Iraq, Congo, Algeria etc.
Sure, "a", lots of doctors and scientists. Unfortunate that they will all be found in the mass graves.
Mass graves are normal with imperialisme.
I didn't say that living under a marxist imperialist is not very bad. I said that it is less bad than the other forms of imperialisme which are all really bad.
Not true in fact, by at least an order of magnitude. No system of government has created as many mass murders as those inspired by marxism.
Also "a", when you look at the ungodly botch the Africans have made of everything since independence, it's hard not to conclude that the average African was, at the very least, no worse off under imperialism than s/he is now.
Order of magnitude.
100 million according to Raymond.
10 million is an order smaller
So no system of goverment has killed 10 million people?
Are you sure about that?
(atleast 3 non communists leaders did and if you measure it as a percentage of people under their rule than it is not even uncommon)
Besides we where not talking about countries ruled by marxists but ruled by foreign marxist (and their armies) and they behave themself quite well compared with others
A lot of the problems of modern Africa is due too it colonial history. Besides who says imperialisme is death in Africa?
You shouldn't ask if they live better than under imperialisme but if they would lived better without imperialisme ever having happened. If you look at the countries than it is quiet obvious that countries who felt little of the imperial boot are doing much better on average than countries that were felt the boot long and hard
"a", your comments are not making any sense. You appear to be making some distinction that only you can perceive. I don't think your claim is factual but even if it were, it is bizarre to claim that so long as marxist-inspired governments merely mass murder their own citizens in greater proportion than nations they occupy that you've established anything.
Certainly nothing relevant to this discussion of Bolivia.
a., suffice to say the gap is huge - a gap of many tens of millions is enough for most of us.
RE: inheritance laws... a. isn't completely off the beam here. Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto makes a point of codifying existing custom into book law, because he believes that is the best and most stable base for a property system to begin from.
He's probably right, though one hopes that the free market system will allow for customs and arrangements to arise that would serve to aid consolidation via buy-outs, trading, etc. Equal property inheritance systems seem to have led inexorably to misery and poverty just about everywhere they've existed.
If it's of any interest to anyone, Rudy Rummel's statistics on communist democide are here. China's death count alone may amount to 100,000,000 people.
That's neat Dave. I've used Rummel's website of articles and data from his book a lot but I'd missed that he had a blog.
Ahh mr backwards, gotta love em
sucking in some of those marxist lies A ?
IN reality, rule by western powers, with our morals and sense of right and wrong .. has been often the best the people have ever had ...
I suppose the exception would be india ... who have learned enough from the brits to make a go at civilisation.
It never fails to amuse the western self hating dysfuntional, who looks on forein monuments made of skulls in a romantic fashion.
But .. o well .. what can you say for a self hater on an eternal guilt trip
Raymond, British rule of the Indian subcontinent was relatively mild and there were worse colonizers. But British economic restrictions on the Indians were oppressive.
But Raymond, if you think that the Indian subcontinent lacked civilization before the arrival of the British, you need to spend some more time studying history. The Indian subcontinent was the site of one of the three or four great civilizations of the ancient world.
Robin, the loves stories inside the Chinese imperial court, the poems of the Indian ruling eliete, and ohh lets not forget the love letter between the Tsar and his wife ...
and so on....
Even with the aztecs... the 200 Spaniards didnt conquer them on their own.
Those racks of skulls and blood flowing down the pyramid stairs for days at a time, just might explain why the surrounding populations was so eager to help them.
Dont study Ghandi too close, cause the man had a few ... er,, strange .. um .. quirks.
Beware the romanitic history promulgated by the left, most of those cultures they elevated while they paint the west as evil incarnarte was in actuality barbaric, and you find it everywhere you look ... and boy oh boy, just wait till you get a load of prewestern Japan ....
Ohh sure, inside the homes of the Shoguns and the samuri its was clean pretty and with ritual...
Heh ... but wo on the commoner who came up a bag of rice short. who might be advised to end it quickly rather than have his entrials strung out on display in the court yard while he is alive.
And the vietmihn murdered by quota, and made piles of the vacinated arms of children, but compared to what was there 100 years earlier you could look opon them as an improvement .. as was the french.
Its a leftist myth that there was peace and tranquility all over the earth before the west built their ships, but thats a bunch of complete crap.
a: If it is custom that the land is repartitioned ever few years than you can not claim that law is broken because the law of custom helds in real life presidence over booklaw.
Actually the commune system was "booklaw" as well as custom (Russian communism wasn't invented by the Bolsheviks). It wasn't that particular law the peasants had no respect for, it was all laws in general.
Having no permanent property and no stable social structure, the peasants had little use for theoretical rule of law. They had to be constantly reminded of laws or they tended to think of them as temporary one-time orders. The authorities continually reissued decrees, and when that wasn't enough they cracked down with raw force, which the peasants did respect. That in spite of the fact that the peasants were overwhelmingly loyal supporters of the Czarist regime.
As for "custom law", in Russia that ranged from stealing firewood to raping, robbing, and murdering Jews. Don't knock book law.
When the anti-globalization anarchists are in charge and all property is abolished, they'd better have one hell of an army to keep order.
Raymond, you need to cease putting words in people's mouths.
Western Colonialisme:
Genocide, stealing best land for own people, keep sure that locals don't learn, ruled by colonists on even a very low level, de-industrialize, crappy economic system
Marxist Colonialisme:
Genocide(but less than under western style), keep land in local ownership, educate people, ruled by local people almost to the top, industrialize, crappy economic system
Marxist colonialisme sounds less worse than the Western brand.
Western Colonialism...
I think you are not talking about English colonialism, see India today, the biggest democracy in the world, see Hong Kong, Malasia, Singapur... Please, don't put at the same level the subdits of her Gracious Majesty with the rest of barbarian European countries.
a,
Western Colonialisme:
Genocide: Specifics please.
Stealing best land: You mean like African and Middle Eastern warlords do now?
Complete rule by colonists: I don't know much about other European colonies, but the British always had an educated elite of locals to help them rule the colony.
De-Industrialization: Concede that one.
Crappy economic system: As opposed to the hunter-gatherer, barter, or primitive merchant systems they had before? Or as opposed to the thriving economies they have now?
Re: Blaming imperialism for contemporary African or other third world difficulties; in a word, bunk. They were slaughtering each other for millenia before the Europeans got there, and they'll be slaughtering each other for millenia. One of the largest and most brutal African empires was the Zulu. The reason a handful of conquistadors could conquer the Aztecs was because they found allies wherever they went among the other native peoples brutalized by the Aztecs. If you think the Europeans corrupted an edenic life among noble savages living in utopian harmony with nature--or if you think those "noble savages" would have such an existence now had it not been for colonialism--you've been reading too much Rousseau.
India has elections but to call it a democracy is something else. For that there shouldn't be large regions of land that want to be independant.
Stealing the best land like the English did in Malaysia, Zimbabwe, Kenia
Genocide: Specifics please.
It is easier to just name a country you want to hear where they masacred mass number of locals because i don't want to have typing cramp
I think you are not talking about English colonialism,
No, British colonialism.
ps.
Or as opposed to the thriving economies they have now?
Is this a joke?
Robin, was I ?
Point is, the reality isnt the romantic visions that have been given to us.
hehe,, A seems to be dreaming of the wonderfull Ottoman empire... or Byanthium ? or Rome or the man Alexandria Egypt was named after ?, perhaps the Persian empire, Im a bit unclear which period he has in his head as mans golden age...
Perhaps he envisions some short intermissions inbetween .. and those are few short, and often nonexistent.
And if im not mistaken, the indeno's of Bolivia have been around for a while, if life was always shangrala there .. then by today the common parcel of land is the size of a matchbox ..
So something happend, such as a radical reduction in the mortality rate .. gee, wonder who is responsible for that ?
Raymond, no reality isn't the romantic version so many have. Neither is history.
But don't let "a" confused comments drive you to excess.
Raymond, what are you talking about, did i say that they lived better lifes in the past? No, but they would have lived better lifes now if they where never colonialized.
they would have better lives now than if they were never colonized.
Like I said, you've been reading too much Rousseau. In Africa and Central and South America, including Bolivia, the natives would still be living in mud huts chasing dinner with sticks, living to about 30 with infant mortality about half (like they were before colonization). The middle east would still be a violent shithole just with different borders. Europeans didn't have to teach colonials how to slaughter each other. Do you really think the Hutus and Tutsis would be cuddling each other if Africa had never been colonized? Bat guano. People like Mugabe kill more people now than if they hadn't been colonized because they have better technology. Had they not been colonized, they would still be killing as many people as they could with sticks. And are you really saying with a straight face that India, Hong Kong, Malaysia, the United States, Australia and other British colonies would have been better off had they not been colonized?
PS: Yes, the bit about thriving economies (#31) was writ ironical.
a:
I don't know what the hell you think happened in Malaysia (you keep bringing it up) but when the British left it the Malays were still there - by all appearance quite un-genocided - and their subsistence agriculture had been replaced with a lucrative rubber trade and an export economy. Along with the roads, schools, and other typical British Imperialist debris. All the land was left behind as well.
Yes, we all disapprove of colonialism, but the British ceased their condescending bridge-building activities in Malaysia more than 50 years ago, and their problems rank pretty low on the World List of Woes, so when are you going to get over it?
Robin.. to use a nuke instead of the tip of my shoe,, well,, its in character eh ?
As for a, As usual, the nuronic inverter performs flawlessly.
Some 10,000 years of civilisation, with the entire body of human knowlege lost many times.
example, Romans built with cement.
There is a grand round building, an emmese domed structure capped with a roof made of concrete, many feet thick at the rim and thin at the cap, and made of several blends of graduating heavy to light mixes ... and it used no reenforcing steel
2000 year old non reinforced concrete, and no cracks... in a dome ROOF .. behold The Pantheon.
Not that they didnt know iron, Roman slag mounds provided most of the iron for mousulini's military build up.
The secrets of its contruction, and the secret of concrete was lost for almost 2000 years, and today for it to be replicated would require years more of study for an actual attempt, and without the ablity to core sample the roof, there is still lots of room to ponder if the attempt might fail.
A, you seem like a perfect leftist, parroting the inverted junk they teach at university today, a manufactured fantacy to forward a political agenda, part of the cultural marxist brainwash pogrom of self hate and cultural societal destruction.
You rail at western culture because it is successfull.
With the most horrific example of glaring failure that promulgated by the kantian marxists of every flavor.
Must really suck to uphold a failure, to advance failure, to be so blindly devoted to failure.
Communist Goal # 43.
They was successfull in many cases, and where marxism got power, famine, death, the leftist media LIE factories blamed it on anything and everything except what caused it . Etheopia for example.
Zimbabawe ...
Western science and agraculture creates a large food supply increase .. the native population mortality rate declines ... the commies come along and destroy the support for the population.
A pattern repeated over and over and over and over again ... Hugo Chaves looks to repeat the example,, he will destroy agraculture, and spread death with his 100,000 new machine guns.
When the explorers brought pathogens to new populations, you could almost forgive them for their ignorance of the vulnerability of isolated peoples.
But after a perfect record of failure and holocaust,,, evil incarnate, no such excuse can you entertain for the marxists.
An idea,, an evil idea, has proven to cause as much misery and death than any germ or virus.
The leftist story about intentionally giving infected blankets to the indians is false.
But bringing the marxist infection to them is a fact, and it was intentional.
Just like they do in Thailand and Japan? There everybody still lives in mud huts.
When Bolivia was colonised it was one of the most developed regions of the world with a very large trade with the surrounding areas but i know you don't want to know that.
The hatred between Hutu's and Tutsi's has been intensified by the Belgium to rule the country. You do understand the concept of divide and conquer. They were also ruled by Leopold, a man who makes Stalin look good.
India was richer and more cultured before than after the British.
Hong Kong is to small so should be viewed from the point of China. In that case it is the crackhouse of a drugs pusher who only is nice to the old lady who's house it is in the 5 minutes before the cops show up. Before he treated her as a slave.
Malaysia, was muslim at the time so they probably were quiet developed on trade and rule of law.
ask a native american about the United States and Australia,
and other British colonies,
Boers didn't like Britisch rule and their concentration camps, Kenyains still want the most fertile ground back from the British, same is true of Zimbamwe and one of the reasons that the opposition can't get rid of Mugabe. The only legacy in Iraq is chemical weapons and three zones who at the time didn't belong together.
I think it is quiet obvious that they all would be better off without British rule.
"a", the Boers would have been better off without British rule?
That's hilarious. I don't think anyone could have done a better job of parodying you than you've done yourself.
Do you have any clue who the Boers were? Or what they did in South Africa after declaring themselves independant? I may have strained a rib laughing.
a: Boers didn't like Britisch rule
If I were Her Majesty the Queen, damned if I'd listen to a lecture on colonialism from a freaking Boer.
native populations is never ready for self-government
Ethiopia was only for a very short time a colony. Italy invaded it in the thirties and it again became independed in WWII. It was for such short time a colony that i think you can only speak of an occupation.
Zimbabwe is a country which has land with a very rich soil. They probably could fead their population with old fashion agricultural. That they need food aid is because Mugabe has given the farms he stole from the big farmers to cronnies who can't farm. Those farms will be gone in a few years.
Marxism is not an invention. It comes naturally to any situation where there is a big difference between a large, poor group and the small, rich group. See for example the peasants war in Germany.
To the victor goes the spoils. Boers won so they got everything the British conquered. Otherwise their land area would be much smaller.
Bridges roads schools medicine sanitation, the notion of a fair justice system, communicatons travel tourism. (for them as well as visitors).
Replacment of the lynch mob with the cop.
Now in addition to the marxist germ is the Islamic germ, the modern form being nazi-blends with a bit of stalin thrown in .. An absolutist Religion blended with a toxic socialist virus.
Moronic Convergence in Brazil
Nazi jew hate in south america imported with the left.. but when did it arrive ?
Nazi Salvador Allende
Course replace the jew hate with self hate, and its called the "Third Way"
Deng Xao pengs capitalist roader China today shows the Facist flavor of socialism, at least they are not on an endless guilt trip.
Leftism. pick your flavor, its no way to live, it offers misery death decline and failure with an iron clad garranty
Lord help em in Bolivia ... after the thing blows and the border states move in to protect their gas supplies, I wonder how long it will take to bury the dead, I wonder who ends up with the best pieces.
Yup, according to A, we should look for enlightment to the Zulus.. Chaka Kahn is the new socraties and Dali Lama for the left.
An endless war against western success and worship of the barbaric and the backward.
And it gets worse and further reality departed from there.
Man, the picture he paints of the inside of his head recalled the Ad council of an egg plopping into the pan.
Ohh the dear sweet angel that keeps Him fed and helps him into his jumpers for the day ...
He reminds me of a post by Norman Geras.
We will know Bolivia is lost when Carter shows up to give his blessing on something.
Raymond, i'm gone learn how to cite people out of context. It is a brilliant strategy. Are you a former Marxist?
a. your laughable inability to utter truthful statements isn't helping you, either. The Boers won the Boer War? Someone should tell them the good news.
Raymond, you aren't doing much better re: South America's history with fascism. Hint: it most certainly did NOT arrive with Allende. The roots are long-standing, and begin before the Second World War. Again, as a trivial Google-based investigation would reveal.
If you want credibility, you have to possess some understanding of the things you comment on beyond what you think of the left.
And you are drifting way off the subject of Bolivia. That's a formal warning.
Officially they lost but if you looked at the situation after the war than it is obvious that the boer won.
Would you call it a defeat if the Chechen give up under the condition of home rule and that they and Ingushetia can become independend in ten years time.