prague spring and

we flew from ulaan bator to prague instead of budapest because the connection in russia would have left us in moscow airport for 23 hours, as opposed to 4 for prague. we chose wisely. obviously with no visas they keep you penned in, with upper-class consumer goods duty free (but not 500% markup-free) shops and restaurants. the real problem was that a half liter of water would have cost us almost $10. and we were thirsty. and there were no drinking fountains. the exchange rate with russian rubles is intolerable steep. good thing those bureaucrats gave us such a headache, otherwise we'd have gone in and i'd have gone broke.

after three weeks of grey windy death-dry winter in mongolia and china (i know i shouldn't complain about a winter so short, but) the spring in prague felt just like heaven. i was giddy. there were little buds everywhere, tiny white flowers all over bushes, trees just barely getting their leaves out. the city is small, and it is surrounded on most sides by big hills, each of which are covered in parks. i love that they've kept them as they are, prevented the private development that must want that prime territory. we got on top of eight of them in our four days in the city. there are mossy broken stone staircases winding up through neighborhoods that lead up into the parks, and redundant layers of paths crisscrossing all through them. they were full of people walking their dogs. and the spring smells- again, just giddy.

we heard that prague has quite a nightlife, but i was sleeping from about 10 pm til 7 am each night, so i have no idea. we did visit some local bars and restaurants, which were very nice. eastern european beer is the best. and czech food isn't too bad either - we had some amazing garlic soup. i keep thinking about it. the standard local fare seemed to be pizza, which was unexpected. we did plenty of cooking at our hostel's kitchen.

one day i walked southwest from our hostel, and within a half our was in meadows that bordered on farmland. prague is tiny. we walked all over it in just four days. a perfect city for walking.

last friday we caught a bus for budapest. it took about 9 hours, through southeastern czech republic, the western edge of slovakia, then continuing on southeast in hungary. we passed mostly agriculture and forests, mixed together with little towns. we showed up, figured out the subway, and made it to philip's apartment in District VI, on the pest side of the danube. philip and rachael came back on saturday, after spending a week in the netherlands where philip had to do some work in person.

we've spent the last few days wandering around, getting to know the city. we visited kerepesi cemetery, which i loved for its ancient crumbling overgrown headstones back in the woods, and for its weird russian section. the majority of the graves were for russian soldiers who were killed while helping the nazis off in world war II. but then there is a section for those who died in 1956, suppressing the hungarian uprising. it seemed strange to us that, now that the USSR has fallen, the hungarians don't tear down these monuments to their own suppression by stalinism.

1956 is the most fascinating thing about this city to me. there are bullet-holes everywhere. for about 10 days hungary had a government in which stalinist leaders were replaced with democratically-elected ones, workers' councils were rebuilt and re-empowered, power was decentralized to these councils, and the entire military (eventually) sided with the uprising. this is everything a trotskyist advocates and works for in a stalinist deformed workers' state. unfortunately, all trotskyists and other left-commies had long been purged, so there was a disturbing lack of leadership. also, the red army rolled in and crushed the puny hungarian army, purged the army leadership of sympathizers, executed a bunch of politicians, re-instituted mandatory indoctrination for rank and file soldiers, suppressed the new councils and unions, etc. hence, 10 days.

we wanted to take a walking tour of the history of communism in the city, but it was going to cost about $50 per person. so, eli and i spent a couple days doing research, and gave the tour ourselves. we took philip and rachael up to the castle district in buda where students at the technical university had helped organize, agitate for and instigate the uprising, alongside the working class at every step (one good thing about stalinism that allowed this- the middle class monopoly on higher ed was replaced by a reactionary system of giving the education to working class and peasant kids instead).

then we walked down to Bem Ter in buda, where a crowd of between 10 and 100 thousand people rallied on 23 october 1956, the first big show of force by the people. then we walked across the Margit bridge, following the path of the workers and students as they headed into pest. they split up to head to the parliament building where they joined with others, forming a crowd of 200 thousand; to the world's biggest statue of stalin, which they tore down; to the radio building, which they tried to take over to broadcast their demands; to various military barracks, where they convinced soldiers to join them; and to communist party offices, the homes of politicians, and every other strategic point in the city. the soviet soldiers stationed here sympathized (they were of the same class, and were equally abused under stalinism) and showed very little resistance. USSR leaders could only get their soldiers to fight the hungarians when they brought in fresh ones who were told they were off to fight nazis or capitalist troops at the suez canal.

well i could go on and on (and on and on) about this, but the important thing is this: the students and workers explicitly stated that they did not want a capitalist counterrevolution. they understood how much worse that would be than stalinism. they fought for exactly what i would have fought for in their situation: a more free, democratic version of what they already had. this is exactly what modern trotskyists fight for, and it's inspirational to see how far these folks got in '56, despite the forces stacked against them.

on the 50th anniversary, just a year and a half ago, this city erupted. riot cops had to bust skulls left and right to get everyone to lie back down again. the heritage of '56 is alive and kicking. i've certainly never been in a place so rich with progressive revolutionary history, and, just under the surface, contemporary energy...

today eli and i went to the national museum, which had decent exhibits on the last 900 years or so. its funny to see their history of the mongolian invasion, after seeing it from the other side in mongolia's national museum in UB. they glossed over the communist period, so we really didn't learn much. there was crap propaganda, trying to talk up the economic development during their capitalist periods while ignoring the development under stalin (which dwarfs the economic progress of any other period). they also didn't give much attention to '56, treating it like a anti-communist insurrection (which is ironically the same thing the USSR insisted that it was- an attempted counterrevolution. this is significant, that these two types of ruling classes would propagandize against '56 in the same way. both clearly feel threatened by it.)

we also visited the radio station today, where the first major battle of '56 was fought, and where the first budapest resident was killed (by the hated AVH - hungarian secret police - who were holding the station. they all got killed by the way).

just a few other little things:

standard fare here is turkish food. been eating gyros and falafel every day.

also, i've attended the practices of three different budapest ultimate frisbee teams in the last 4 days. this is my first real foray into strategy, set plays, reading the field and knowing how to move properly. i am exhausted and sore, both physically and mentally.

also, eli tricked me into eating a piece of cheese with ketchup on it. i thought it was sriracha hot sauce. it wasn't. it was gross. to get him back i emptied the sri from his bottle and replaced it with ketchup. bizarrely, he hasn't even noticed. i almost died watching him eat a sandwich covered in it last night. he is all hell of dense. damn revenge is sweet. this is even funnier because i'm writing about it, but he won't read this for a long time, if ever. don't tell him or anything, i want to see the expression on his face when he figures it out.

Free Tibet (from a return to feudalism!)

The liberal argument for the freeing Tibet from Chinese governance is based largely on the principals of self-determination and freedom of religion.

Freedom of religion is fine, accept when it is tied up with the materialist world of class structures and mass exploitation in feudalist and capitalist societies. In this case class war must be waged against religious elites until they relinquish their hold on the means of production. After this is accomplished, there is nothing wrong with congregations democratically choosing to donate money to their local church, priests, monks, etc, allowing the less harmful aspects of religion to continue on as they were.

Self-determination takes precedence in many cases, but not always. In Iraq and Afghanistan, we fully back the local resistance against US imperialism, even given the quantitative differences (it's all capitalism) between the dictatorial Hussein regime and the theocratic US puppet regime, between the theocratic Taliban and the current warlord puppets. The blows dealt by these local resistances to the international ruling class and the power of the current hegemony are always desirable. More importantly, the type of social change that needs to happen in these places can only come from working class power (either domestic or international) and cannot possibly come from some imperialist power clearly just bent on oil profits and military bases on new frontiers. Imperialist success only strengthens the power of core capitalists, so class war demands that we fight them on all fronts.

However, the right of self-determination is overridden in certain situations, even according to liberal logic. Liberals argue for "humanitarian" intervention (by imperialist powers) in situations of genocide, such as Rwanda, Sudan, and Serbia, thinking (incorrectly) that core-type ("first world") democratic political systems will replace abusive, dictatorial domestic governments.

While we disagree with liberals on the legitimacy or desirability of imperialist intervention (violation of self-determination) for "humanitarian" purposes, we see communist intervention (same violation) in non-communist territory as an essential aspect of international revolutionary activity. The international working class should do everything it can, in any of its organizational forms, to support domestic working classes. For example, the Soviet regime in Afghanistan was by far the most progressive in Afghanistan's sordid history (especially for women). The imperialist intervention on behalf of the "right of domestic self-determination" resulted in weakening the Soviet Union, a civil war and rule of theocratic warlords in Afghanistan, and the material basis for the current power of "al-Qaeda" terrorist organizations. So in this case, Afghanistan's right of self-determination is overridden by the need for internationalist working-class revolution.

Before China invaded Tibet, the region had a feudalist society. Almost all the land was owned by a small ruling class of secular landlords and elite monks (with the Dalai Lama at the top) who used a police-army to maintain their position of power. Everyone else was a serf, barely a step away from slaves, who were bonded to the land (imprisoned, beaten, mutilated or killed if they tried to escape). They could only keep enough of the food they produced to survive, and sometimes not even that. Peasants were taxed for nearly everything they did, keeping them in a constant state of poverty.

There were thousands of beggars. There were slaves - whose children were the same - who were kept as domestic laborers. Peasants had neither schools nor medical services. Female peasants were taken by both secular and Buddhist elites and forced into sexual slavery. Life expectancy in the 1950's was 35.5 year (in 2001 up to 67) and infant mortality was 430 per 1000 births (now down to 6.61). Elite monks maintained an underclass of lower monks, who ran the monasteries and served the elites. Young boys were forcefully taken from their peasant families to join this part of the underclass. Torture was standard practice, used by elites against insubordinate or runaway peasants. The ruling class used all the coercive powers of state terrorism to maintain the class structure.

That class structure still exists today in capitalist regions. During our travels in Thailand and Laos we saw hundreds of wats (temples), which were ornately designed, covered in gold leaf and full of statues and offerings. They were the largest buildings in small towns, and were clearly the end result of the systematic appropriation of the vast majority of the wealth of the people. We saw monks everywhere, a class of people who do not work - fail to contribute materially at all to society - but still eat and live comfortably in their compounds. Even on the subway in Bangkok we saw a sign that told passengers to give up their seats to monks.

The Buddhist idea of karma and multiple lives is used to justify all of this - if you are suffering in this life, it's because you did something to deserve it in a former life. And by suffering in this life, in the next you will be born into a more privileged position.

The Chinese Maoists invaded in 1951 but they didn't make serious changes right away. Horrified by the threat of communism, the Tibetan ruling class tried to instigate an insurrection against the Chinese, from 1956-57. This revolt was coordinated and funded by the CIA, which provided military training, support camps in Nepal, and regular airlifts. The revolt was extremely unpopular and the elites trying to push it were crushed by both the Chinese and their own peasants.

After the failed revolt the Chinese abolished slavery, the system of unpaid serfdom, and the oppressive taxes. They built secular schools and power grids and running water systems. By 1961 the Chinese had expropriated much of the land, giving it to peasants and forming communes to control production. Improvements were made across the board, in livestock, irrigation and agriculture.

Since then the Tibetan peasantry, alongside the rest of the toiling masses of China, has been the victim of the array of problems of Stalinism. Forced collectivization, mistakes in planned economy leading to starvation, the 1966-67 Cultural Revolution suppressing religious freedom and the recent colonization by Han Chinese. In the 1970's and 80's China admitted many mistakes and passed reforms to try to correct them, but there is clearly a great deal of political repression and lack of economic power in the worker and peasant classes.

Because the Dalai Lama has been forced from power, he has had to grant concessions and pander to many groups in his efforts to gain support for a counterrevolution in Tibet. He called himself half Buddhist, half Marxist in an effort to co-opt the socialist-leaning sections of the Tibetan masses. He lobbies liberals all over the world with appeals to human rights and religious freedom (China's Stalinism has given him plenty of fodder). He claims that the Chinese occupation has killed about 1.2 million Tibetans, but there is no evidence for this. His assertion that monasteries have been reduced in both numbers and population is also baseless. He admitted that there problems with the old system, and has proposed reforms, hoping to convince those who know Tibet's true history. However, he still keeps the same old circle of Tibetan feudalists around him as advisers and political allies, and these peoples' interests will certainly have a predictable impact. The Dalai Lama has cleverly and effectively used lies, omissions and distortions to manipulate liberals - as well as conservative class warriors fighting communism - into his campaign to free Tibet from Chinese control.

The international ruling class solidarity with the Dalai Lama is transparent. The exiled Tibetan ruling class received $1.7 million a year throughout the 1960's, and now the US Congress currently gives them $2 million a year for "democracy activities". The Dalai Lama also receives money from capitalists like George Soros.

As Trotskyists we advocate political revolutions in Stalinist deformed workers states like China - rebuilding workers councils and using their power to replace bureaucrats with democratically elected leaders. This necessitates a large, strong, educated, organized urban working class, which can only be created by the development of economic infrastructure - factories and service industries. Chinese central leadership, as corrupt and abusive as it is, has moved Tibet in this direction. The old Tibetan ruling class, with the Dalai Lama at its head, would pull Tibet back two huge steps - from deformed communism, past capitalism, to feudalism. It would be a long and tortuous road from there back to a stage where a working class is growing and empowering itself. Therefore, we support the Chinese occupation of Tibet, and its suppression of the feudalist movement, which is merely cloaked in the garb of Buddhism.

If Tibet's independence movement was like that of Hungary in 1956, where a domestic political revolution moved the nation from Stalinism toward a more libertarian, free, democratic socialism, we would fully back a Free Tibet campaign. However, because the Free Tibet campaign is led by feudalists, it is far more similar to Afghanistan in the 1980's. "Freeing" Tibet would really just free the old ruling class to retake it, which would let loose hell on the toiling masses.

This is a materialist argument, as as such cannot address spiritual concerns. A spiritualist could argue that all horrors of feudalism are acceptable because it allows a small group of monks to pursue enlightenment, an endeavor which cannot have a material value assigned to it. There is no logical rebuttal to this, except that in socialism, all people would have equal access to such spiritual quests. Spirituality would not be based on a ruling class's ability to exploit and enslave the vast majority of the population.

If you have any doubts or questions or would like to learn more we strongly encourage you to read these articles - one independent, one from a bourgeois university, and one Trotskyist.

http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html

http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/24045

http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/911/tibet.html

books read in asia

reading western books while traveling can be a very dramatic experience. sometimes i really do get lost in them, and when i look up and realize where i am its almost like nausea or vertigo or panic. like waking up from a powerful dream. also, the associations i form between these books and the places where i read them are fantastic. the memories are all intertwined.

here are the books that i read in the last two months:

ward churchill - marxism and native americans
jose saramago - all the names
immanual wallerstein - alternatives: the US confronts the world
edward abbey - hayduke lives!
joseph heller - catch 22
tom wolfe - radical chic & mau mauing the flack catchers
j. m. coetzee - disgrace
kurt vonnegut - galapagos
harry cleaver - autonomous marxism
kurt vonnegut - breakfast of champions
edgar allen poe - the murders in the rue morgue and other short stories
graham greene - the quiet american
maurice brinton - the bolsheviks and workers control
jonathan safron foer - everything is illuminated

most of it is political, even several of the novels. i learned a great deal from these. also, lots of it is dark. that darkness has had quite an effect on my experiences. imagine reading poe (variations on the deaths of women) while fasting in the jungle of southern thailand. or coetzee (did not like- just rape and dog murder) with a fever in patong (hell). or all this critique and rebuilding of marxism while hanging out in nations whose governments have been guided by the very worst, corrupted interpretations of marx and his successors. (4 of 5 countries visited so far have such histories, counting czech republic, where we just arrived).

getting checked

we spent two days in terelj national park, sleeping in a ger (mongol yurt). the park is gorgeous - i recommend looking at pictures on google image. those rocks, all granite i believe, made for the best climbing yet in these last couple months. the first day we took a horse ride, but it was not good. it was far too cold, with the wind piercing easily every piece of clothing i had. it was warmer to just walk, so i did. this evoked the wrath of our guide. he had been micromanaging us the entire time, yelling at us to go the same direction we were already going, over and over. he screamed at me, got off his horse, did everything he could without actually touching me, but i was too stubborn and too uncomfortable to just do what i was told. he finally gave up, but there were some strong feelings left in the air between us the rest of the ride. (i wish i'd known at the time, some tourists on a ride the day before had been very rude and disrespectful. so he was probably just primed for a nasty confrontation.)

the second day eli and i tried to get as far as we could in one day. we hiked along the ridge-tops going east from our camp, climbing up lots of the big rocks for the views. i collected rocks all along the way, finding (quartz?) crystals and obsidian other things i can't identify. i regret not studying a natural science, geology really, instead of what i did. i could have given myself my political education in any case. i really am hooked on rocks at this point. and lichens. terelj was thick with them. just perfect, it easily made up for the fact that just about everything else was dormant and brown and hunkered down for the brutal mongol winter.

besides those two excursions, we spent most of those two weeks in ulaan bator. its odd that i was ok with it, as cities usually repulse me. it might have been the cold (!) and the wind (!), keeping us near the warmth and comfort of our hostel. it might have been the abundance of international food, and how cheap it was. it might have been the fact that i had the energy and initiative to get political research done, and hash it all out with eli. lots of time went into this.

one of our last nights there, i had one of the more dramatic adventures of my travel life so far. we were out to celebrate the birthday of william, a british guy we'd been hanging out with. by 3 am, we had stopped at about four establishments, and were ready for home. in UB there are only a couple metered taxis - traditionally, anyone can just wave down any car, and they will reset their trip odometer. they charge about 50 cents per km. this worked out almost every time, although sometimes we had to argue. in this case, the driver demanded some ridiculous amount, and we argued. i was in the front seat, with my bag on my lap, and everyone else got out. to prevent me from getting out, he grabbed onto the strap of my bag, and he was big, way bigger than me, so there were no questions about a struggle. then he hit the gas. my door flapping open, eli and the two brits chasing us down the street, his meaty hand clamped on my bag, we took off.

i told him take us to the cops, they will sort this out. this was preferable to being dropped off way outside the city, but i knew what would happen with the cops. they would listen to and understand him (and his lies about how much i owed) and would take everything of value from me, sharing it with the taxi but taking a cut of course. so we find some cops, and they search me, taking my money (luckily only had about $1.50). but they also take my leatherman. the taxi drove off, leaving me to argue with the cops. i was not about to lose that tool. it was a gift from my mother, was useful almost every day, was indispensable for work in AK, was worth about $80, and certainly could not be replaced in mongolia.

i knelt inside the cop car's open door, leaning in, and badgered those cops, holding out my hands for them to return my tool, spouting off every argument conceivable to me. you are stealing from me, its not right to steal. that was a gift from my mother (i drew them a family tree). my initials are carved into it, here is my ID, my name, my initials, mine. how could you keep this knowing my initials are on it? repeat, repeat, repeat. they yelled "ugui!" (no) and i yelled ugui! right back. they shoved me, made threatening gestures - dragging knife across throat, pretended to kick me, grabbed at my neck. but they weren't really serious. i could tell, they kept looking down, looking at the leatherman, unsure of themselves. i was having a hard time not cracking up. i kept having to look away. it was the same coping method as dealing with the enraged screaming horse guide: look away, imagine self somewhere else, take deep breath, and continue playing determined role in a detached way. stubborn, ignoring adversaries, just going through motions.

it finally worked. they handed it back, i walked away. as soon as i was out of sight, i sprinted home, cackling maniacally the whole way. i never could have done all that, badgering those cops into returning my tool, if i hadn't been fairly intoxicated. its not like i would have been scared if sober (there were people all around, no reputations of police brutality, especially for foreigners), but i would have been self-conscious and my normal timid self. i would have given up early.

back at the hostel, my three friends were upset. they had tried to call the cops, had one of the managers on the phone, had told everyone that i'd been kidnapped by a taxi. it was all much harder for them than it was for me. they had to worry about the unknown, i just had to say to myself "well here we go..."

i found out the next day that technically it's illegal to carry a knife, so maybe the cops were trying to tell me that. it was a miracle that they gave it back.

oh yeah, and "getting checked" because mongolians seem run into each other a lot. on a big wide sidewalk, people will just put their shoulders right into you. it doesn't seem loaded with intimidation like it would in the states. maybe its just how they cuddle. in any case, we got kind of tired of it. also, russia checked us pretty effectively. its funny how poorly that chunk of our travels turned out. if we'd known, we probably would have flown straight from bangkok to eastern europe. its hard to regret those last three weeks though.