Cheung Mo
18th February 2011, 18:07
This question is based on the True Scotsman fallacy and the interaction between identity and fact.
I'm not a Christian, but I know enough about Christianity that I shake my head when conservative evangelicals and other fundamentalists define the Christian faith in such a way as to exclude Roman Catholics, mainline Protestants, and people from a myriad of small sects that are as different from one another as they are from Catholics and Baptists.
I am a socialist, but yet I constantly argue that certain people and certain regimes that self-identify and that are popularly identified with socialism are anything but.
Nikloae Ceausescu and his fascist trash wife may have died singing the Internationale, but they ran a regime of racism, misogyny, and self-enrichment, leading lavish, disconnected lives while sucking off Richard Nixon for money and starving the proletariat to pay down the debt. Along with Mao's China, Ceausescu's Romania was the "socialist" state to recognize Pinochet's fascist regime in Chile. (And I doubt Dubcek would have been willing to do so had he been in power in Czechoslovakia)
Enver Hoxhas was anti-internationalist, his country's literacy rate rivaled Mubarak's Egypt while he was in power, and the Venezuelan party that derives their ideological and intellectual justification from Hoxha engaged in anti-Bolivarian violence at the behest of the corrupt rightist opposition (why anybody who claims to oppose Chavez from the left would ally themselves with COPEI, AD, and PV is a question not worth answering...If they're going to lie about their convictions, they ought to be liquidated by the Bolivarian state. You have the right to be a rightist, but you don't have the right to take up the mantle of the left while doing so.).
After the Sino-Soviet split, China frequently backed many of the same factions as the U.S. in the various sectional conflicts that inflamed Africa and its constituent nations, supports corrupt, democracy-hating right-wing oligarchs in Hong Kong and Taiwan, recognized Pinochet, and was the 3rd biggest backer Nepal's feudalist dictatorship behind the US and UK. I'm sure the irony of China's arming and funding a dictatorship fighting a Maoist insurgency isn't lost on anybody here.
Virtually every member of the Socialist International has embraced neoliberalism to some degree. Some even eschew such bourgeois left-liberal niceties as parliamentary democracy, civil libertarianism, the welfare state, and the rule of law. Names like Tony Blair, Hosni Mubarak, and Carlos Andre Perez reveal enough about the utter worthlessness of this organization. Barbados is a tax shelter for the rich, and both of its parties claim the mantle of democratic socialism, with one being a member of the SI. They've still not gotten around to expelling PRI or AD for some reason.
Does the fact that identify as a socialist whereas I merely know Christianity but don't identify as one (save for the celebration of a few secular rituals of Christian and Euro-Pagan origin) mean that I impose a higher burden on the question of who has the right to call themselves and be considered socialist than I do with respect to Christianity (making me similar to a fundamentalist Christian in this respect), or is there some sort of meaningful difference in the two questions?
I'm not a Christian, but I know enough about Christianity that I shake my head when conservative evangelicals and other fundamentalists define the Christian faith in such a way as to exclude Roman Catholics, mainline Protestants, and people from a myriad of small sects that are as different from one another as they are from Catholics and Baptists.
I am a socialist, but yet I constantly argue that certain people and certain regimes that self-identify and that are popularly identified with socialism are anything but.
Nikloae Ceausescu and his fascist trash wife may have died singing the Internationale, but they ran a regime of racism, misogyny, and self-enrichment, leading lavish, disconnected lives while sucking off Richard Nixon for money and starving the proletariat to pay down the debt. Along with Mao's China, Ceausescu's Romania was the "socialist" state to recognize Pinochet's fascist regime in Chile. (And I doubt Dubcek would have been willing to do so had he been in power in Czechoslovakia)
Enver Hoxhas was anti-internationalist, his country's literacy rate rivaled Mubarak's Egypt while he was in power, and the Venezuelan party that derives their ideological and intellectual justification from Hoxha engaged in anti-Bolivarian violence at the behest of the corrupt rightist opposition (why anybody who claims to oppose Chavez from the left would ally themselves with COPEI, AD, and PV is a question not worth answering...If they're going to lie about their convictions, they ought to be liquidated by the Bolivarian state. You have the right to be a rightist, but you don't have the right to take up the mantle of the left while doing so.).
After the Sino-Soviet split, China frequently backed many of the same factions as the U.S. in the various sectional conflicts that inflamed Africa and its constituent nations, supports corrupt, democracy-hating right-wing oligarchs in Hong Kong and Taiwan, recognized Pinochet, and was the 3rd biggest backer Nepal's feudalist dictatorship behind the US and UK. I'm sure the irony of China's arming and funding a dictatorship fighting a Maoist insurgency isn't lost on anybody here.
Virtually every member of the Socialist International has embraced neoliberalism to some degree. Some even eschew such bourgeois left-liberal niceties as parliamentary democracy, civil libertarianism, the welfare state, and the rule of law. Names like Tony Blair, Hosni Mubarak, and Carlos Andre Perez reveal enough about the utter worthlessness of this organization. Barbados is a tax shelter for the rich, and both of its parties claim the mantle of democratic socialism, with one being a member of the SI. They've still not gotten around to expelling PRI or AD for some reason.
Does the fact that identify as a socialist whereas I merely know Christianity but don't identify as one (save for the celebration of a few secular rituals of Christian and Euro-Pagan origin) mean that I impose a higher burden on the question of who has the right to call themselves and be considered socialist than I do with respect to Christianity (making me similar to a fundamentalist Christian in this respect), or is there some sort of meaningful difference in the two questions?