Same old crap... different day, different country.

Better Red than Fed

From Joe at No Pasaran

At the heart of the Bailadila Hills in central India lie 1.1 billion tons of raw ore so pure and plentiful that half a century after miners first hacked at it with pickaxes, it remains the richest, and one of the largest, iron deposits on the planet.

Enter the spoiler.

Yet on this quiet June day, cobwebs hang on rusted pipes in the all-but-abandoned facility, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its September 2010 issue. Caretakers prepare to switch truck-size rock crushers out of their coma, rousing the machines for five minutes a month to ensure they still work.

Maoist rebels from the surrounding Dandakaranya forest armed with guns and explosives -- and some wielding axes and bows and arrows -- attacked the facility four times in little more than a year, officials at the now-mothballed plant say. They burned 54 trucks waiting at factory gates in April 2008 and damaged part of the slurry pipeline, the world’s second longest, in June 2009. Essar idled the plant that month.

One constant of the universe seems to be that Marxist-Leninist-Maoist-whateversseem to enjoy their destructive revolutionary fervor more than their any affection that they have for “the proletariat”. In fact “the good of the people” seems more like a distant, ignorable abstraction to them more than they are to those of any other belief system.

Maoist-related violence killed a record 998 people last year as assaults on economic targets reached an all-time high, according to Ministry of Home Affairs data.

A Mumbai-bound train derailed in May, killing at least 146 people, after what police suspect was sabotage by a Maoist group. More than 200 security officers died in attacks in the first six months of 2010.

More specious still, for them to say that they were “sucked into the conflict” blithely ignores the fact that the Maoists are the ones who created it.

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