Is there a way to revel in my ignorance?

[Stew312856]

I am completely out of the water here, want to make friends, not a troll and not Fascist/anti-woman/racist/homophobe KNOWINGLY (we all have our little hang-ups we don't recognize in ourselves at first). I want to learn, evolve, and grow. Any help? Also, am a massive comedic poster, believe in having a good laugh.

[ComradeOm]

Read and argue. RevLeft is (or at least was) a fantastic learning resource and it shouldn't take long to get up to speed by engaging with people. You never really understand a position until you have to defend it. I look back with embarrassment at some of the lines that I was pushing in long thread arguments back in the day but I still learnt a great deal from the experience

Just be sure to argue/debate in a constructive manner. You can do so in good humour but be sure to engage with others and not just laugh at/with them. Basically don't be a dickhead. And frankly you're already one step ahead of most of this site in that regard: you acknowledge your ignorance and want to correct it. So don't worry too much

[El Louton]

As a 'Noob' I suggest reading these threads, they really helped me kinda 'understand' who and what I am therefore allowing me to post better- Well I hope I have!

The threads:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/high-school-commie-t22370/index.html
http://www.revleft.com/vb/revolutionary-left-dictionary-t22628/index.html
http://www.revleft.com/vb/revolutionary-left-39-t22627/index.html

[Lanky Wanker]

I am completely out of the water here, want to make friends, not a troll and not Fascist/anti-woman/racist/homophobe KNOWINGLY (we all have our little hang-ups we don't recognize in ourselves at first).

How can you be a patriarchal, homophobic, racist fascist and not know it...? :confused:

That said, welcome. Check out the stickies made for n00bs and you'll be joining in on never ending debates with your leftist enemies in no time.

[the Left™]

I am completely out of the water here, want to make friends, not a troll and not Fascist/anti-woman/racist/homophobe KNOWINGLY (we all have our little hang-ups we don't recognize in ourselves at first). I want to learn, evolve, and grow. Any help? Also, am a massive comedic poster, believe in having a good laugh.



I understand what you mean. As an institutionalized drone of the democratic and green parties in my county for many years, having been acquainted with legal and political structures of authority like the judicial system, I too am newer to this thing we like to call the "left". xD. It's sort of the thing where your life has been redefined and nothing is safe anymore. I too, want to learn evolve and grow. The day I discovered that progressive ideology is NOT the most left-wing political identity was truly one of the more happy days of my nascent political existence.

So, you and I are similar I think, two new fish in the big pond of radical ideology and political experience, wandering the possibilities. :)

[Marxaveli]

I am new here myself, and in general im relatively new to Marxism (I've only been one about 2 years now). But just by reading some of the discussions here in the last week, I've already learned quite a bit, while offering some of my own input and perspective on things. There is a lot of very knowledgeable people here though, so it can be intimidating at times, but dont let it worry you. Just actively engage yourself in a respectful manner, and ask questions.

[Commissar Rykov]

Reading and discussing usually helps me. I find proper study can't be emphasized enough and helps you think of problems you might not have thought of before or give you an entirely different perspective on the problems. Welcome to the boards and don't let all the tendency fighting scare you away.

[The Idler]

Welcome, if you're not interested in Learning though, stick to Chit-Chat.

[Stew312856]

How can you be a patriarchal, homophobic, racist fascist and not know it...?

Obviously you weren't raised in the American Catholic Church.

As for my own post-Soviet Marxism, it entails a rebuttal to sham anti-imperialism that would allow the rise of oppressive regimes, as in the case of the Middle East. Christopher Hitchens, himself a former Trotskyist, has a great video about this topic on YouTube called "Hitchens tackles a typical West hating Marxist". The poster of the video is apparently biased against Marxist but the Marxism in Hitchens himself is still there.

Any insights?

[Geiseric]

Is it the same hitchens who was in favor of the invasion of Iraq? He has some quasi-leftist viewpoints, however simply stating the truth about the soviet union doesn't make one a socialist. He said that the invasion of Iraq was justified because of "Fascism with an Islamic Face." From what I'm reading on wikipedia, he said himself in 2001 that he isn't a socialist and that he supports Capitalism.

Key word is former trotskyist.

[Belleraphone]

Yeah, Hitchens is a dogmatic pro-USA imperialist. Fuck him.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZH9QqBEofPw

Edit: Ah Syd, you beat me to it :|

And to relate back to your original point, most of revleft hates Hitchens except when he talks about religion. Only problem he uses his "enlightened atheism" to justify intervention in the Middle East.

[Stew312856]

First, Hitchens writes from the on-the-ground experience in his book GOD IS NOT GREAT about Iraq. The sentiments in his book is such:

Dennis Prager [SP?] once asked if Hitchens would feel more or less safe if he were approached by a group of men leaving a prayer meeting. Hitchens counters by naming five cities, Beirut, Bombay, Baghdad, Belfast, and Belgrade, where he reported from when he was indeed quite uncomfortable knowing the approaching group of men would be emerging from prayer meeting. He goes through the list, demonstrating how small-minded theocratic groups infiltrated the democratic process and exploited the opportunities to rise to power. For example, in Bethlehem and Belfast, the pettiness of religious lines divided those cities and increased bloodshed. In Baghdad, Sadaam Hussein utilized Pan-Islamic Militarism, emphasizing an old Muslim tribal division, to impose a reign of fascist terror on dissidents, opponents, minorities, and women.

THAT SAID, George W Bush did everything wrong, as did the UN and the rest of the world, in dealing with that regime. George HW Bush allowed a viable resistance movement within Iraq to be massacred by Sadaam's soldiers at the end of the Persian Gulf War, something neither Democrat nor Republican will own up to. Bill Clinton continued a disastrous embargo a la Cuba, which did nothing but push the poor towards 'the opium of the people', radicalized Islam. The important thing is to recognize that imperialism in the region is not something George W invented, it goes back to older policy of his father and Rumsfeld, who collaborated with Sadaam as capitalists against Iran during the Iran-Iraq War. We can't just jump on the war without jumping onto how the US Government created Sadaam's regime and fostered it.

So was the praxis correct? No. Were we lied to? Yes. Is Iraq now just as, if not even more, fucked up than it was with Sadaam? Yes. Did they hang him quickly so he couldn't testify against Rumsfeld, Cheney, HW Bush, et al? Yes.

HOWEVER, Marx is very clear on this, the liberation from Capitalism INCLUDES AND REQUIRES as a pre-requisite the liberation from religion, or what Althusser called Ideological State Apparatuses. Any serious revolutionary needs to be able to admit, with perhaps (and I emphasize my skepticism there) the exception of Liberation Theologies, the patriarchal, hetero-centric, homo-phobic, anti-woman currents of most mainline religions (and that certainly includes radical Iraqi Islam) needs to go. We are prolonging the capitalist monster in Iraq, yes, but Sadaam was an especially vicious capitalist who used religion to back his claims, his regime sponsored religious buildings, such as "The Mother Of All Mosques", which featured a Quoran using Sadaam's own blood as the ink.

What we need is the establishment of international support for openly Leftist Socialist groups that we can stand in solidarity with, much like the Spanish Civil War fund raising did in the 30's. But we need to be cautious of Sharia-minded individuals who try to infiltrate that process.

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

I think you got Marx's view on religion the other way around. For Marx, religion's main function was to assuage the suffering of the lower classes. If you take Marx's view seriously, the only sensible way of liberating the workers from religion is to remove its material cause, IE the general exploitation of the working class. It is this exploitation that requires an "opiate" to alleviate. You liberate them from Capitalism and the ideological super structures which religion imposes on society melt away, and any religious practice left over is of a harmless nature.

Saddam was mostly a secular person, he adopted religious symbolism now and again only when he thought it would help him. He sought to control Islam in Iraq, not because he was deeply religious but because he saw it as a method for social control (he may have been personally religious too but that is quite separate from his politics). Baathism is a quasi-fascist ideology but traditionally is more of an Arab-identity thing than a religious thing. Hitches IMO bought into some amount of the Orientalist discourse coming out of the white house and neoconservative circles about the nature of Hussein's government and the nature of what they call "Islamofascism" generally. Hitchens couldn't tell the propaganda from both Saddam and the White House from reality.

[Stew312856]

For Marx, religion's main function was to assuage the suffering of the lower classes. If you take Marx's view seriously, the only sensible way of liberating the workers from religion is to remove its material cause, IE the general exploitation of the working class.

I read it the other way, religion is on the decline here in the West, and that skepticism has (in my case at least) enabled a mental liberation entailing the ability to embrace Leftist politics. A great deal of New Atheists/Humanists have been getting involved with Occupy Wall Street.

Hitchens did admit in his writings to his own strange bafflement at finding himself on the neo-con side of Iraq. However, he sacrificed his friendships with figures like Edward Said due to his own a priori experience, not George W's propaganda.


Saddam was mostly a secular person, he adopted religious symbolism now and again only when he thought it would help him. He sought to control Islam in Iraq, not because he was deeply religious but because he saw it as a method for social control (he may have been personally religious too but that is quite separate from his politics).

The emphasis I would add here is not whether Sadaam was a theist or atheist, it doesn't matter. He used Islam to his advantage, though, instilling a God-granted (or Allah-granted, in this case) imperative to inspire his followers. Those Iraqis were later radicalized by al-Sadr and his squads that now ritualistically murder religious minorities in Baghdad.

[Stew312856]

I am not here going to elaborate a position on the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in April 2003. I shall simply
say that those who regarded his regime as a "secular" one
are deluding themselves. It is true that the Ba'ath Party was founded by a man named Michel Aflaq, a sinister Christian with a sympathy for fascism, and it is also true that membership of that party was open to all religions (though its Jewish membership was, I have every reason to think, limited). However, at least since his calamitous invasion of Iran in 1979, which led to furious accusations from the Iranian theocracy that he was an "infidel," Saddam Hussein had decked out his whole rule—which was based in any case on a tribal minority of the Sunni minority—as one of piety and jihad. (The Syrian Ba'ath Party, also based on a confessional fragment of society aligned with the Alawite minority, has likewise enjoyed a long and hypocritical relationship with the Iranian mullahs.) Saddam had inscribed the words "Allahuh Akbar"—"God Is Great"—on the Iraqi flag. He had sponsored a huge international conference of holy warriors and mullahs, and maintained very warm relations with their other chief state sponsor in the region, namely the genocidal government of Sudan. He had built the largest mosque in the region, and named it the "Mother of All Battles" mosque, complete with a Koran written in blood that he claimed to be his own. When launching his own genocidal campaign against the (mainly Sunni) people of Kurdistan— a campaign that involved the thoroughgoing use of chemical atrocity weapons and the murder and deportation of hundreds of thousands of people—he had called it "Operation Anfal," borrowing by this term a Koranic justification—"The Spoils" of sura 8— for the despoilment and destruction of nonbelievers. When the Coalition forces crossed the Iraqi border, they found Saddam's army dissolving like a sugar lump in hot tea, but met with some quite tenacious resistance from a paramilitary group, stiffened with foreign jihadists, called the Fedayeen Saddam. One of the jobs of this group was to execute anybody who publicly welcomed the Western intervention, and some revolting public hangings and mutilations were soon captured on video for all to see.
At a minimum, it can be agreed by all that the Iraqi people had endured much in the preceding thirty-five years of war and dictatorship, that the Saddam regime could not have gone on forever as an outlaw system within international law, and therefore that—whatever objections there might be to the actual means of "regime change"— the whole society deserved a breathing space in which to consider reconstruction and reconciliation. Not one single minute of breathing space was allowed.
Everybody knows the sequel. The supporters of al-Qaeda, led by a Jordanian jailbird named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, launched a frenzied campaign of murder and sabotage. They not only slew unveiled women and secular journalists and teachers. They not only set off bombs in Christian churches (Iraq's population is perhaps 2 percent Christian) and shot or maimed Christians who made and sold alcohol. They not only made a video of the mass shooting and throat-cutting of a contingent of Nepalese guest workers, who were assumed to be Hindu and thus beyond all consideration. These atrocities might be counted as more or
less routine. They directed the most toxic part of their campaign of terror at fellow Muslims. The mosques and funeral processions of the long-oppressed Shiite majority were blown up. Pilgrims coming long distances to the newly accessible shrines at Karbala and Najaf did so at the risk of their lives. In a letter to his leader Osama bin Laden, Zarqawi gave the two main reasons for this extraordinarily evil policy. In the first place, as he wrote, the Shiites were heretics who did not take the correct Salafist path of purity. They were thus a fit prey for the truly holy. In the second place, if a religious war could be induced within Iraqi society, the plans of the "crusader" West could be set at naught. The obvious hope was to ignite a counter-response from the Shia themselves, which would drive Sunni Arabs into the arms of their bin Ladenist "protectors." And, despite some noble appeals for restraint from the Shiite grand ayatollah Sistani, it did not prove very difficult to elicit such a response. Before long, Shia death squads, often garbed in police uniforms, were killing and torturing random members of the Sunni Arab faith. The surreptitious influence of the neighboring "Islamic Republic" of Iran was not difficult to detect, and in some Shia areas also it became dangerous to be an unveiled woman or a secular person. Iraq boasts quite a long history of intermarriage and inter-communal cooperation. But a few years of this hateful dialectic soon succeeded in creating an atmosphere of misery, distrust, hostility, and sect-based politics. Once again, religion had poisoned everything. -Christopher Hitchens, god Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

Thoughts?

[Azraella]

I read it the other way, religion is on the decline here in the West


Eh... not really. Though it's for a mix of reasons. One of the big things is that you're starting to see people abandon organized religion in favor of personal spiritualities.("I'm spiritual but not religious") or they join with a disorganized religion or develop eclectic spiritual practices. Atheism and agnosticism is admittedly on the rise(though I think it's more of a case of them coming out of the closet).

[Stew312856]

Eh... not really. Though it's for a mix of reasons. One of the big things is that you're starting to see people abandon organized religion in favor of personal spiritualities.("I'm spiritual but not religious") or they join with a disorganized religion or develop eclectic spiritual practices. Atheism and agnosticism is admittedly on the rise(though I think it's more of a case of them coming out of the closet).

Vacating the Houses of Worship, though, strips patriarchal power structures which uphold capitalism as a holy of holies of their power. In my case, Catholicism ex-communicates anyone who becomes a registered Communist (the fact they don't do the same for Klan and Nazi Party members is indicative of the hypocrisy). 'Spiritualism' and self-generated theologies don't necessarily engender anti-Socialism and Red Baiting like established churches do.

[Belleraphone]

HOWEVER, Marx is very clear on this, the liberation from Capitalism INCLUDES AND REQUIRES as a pre-requisite the liberation from religion
It does not, look at the Kibbutz.

[Stew312856]

It does not, look at the Kibbutz.

Judaism is a culture identity AND religion, Kibbutzes are cultural occurrences generated by secular Jewish culture.

However, does this Kibbutz rebuke patriarchal systems inherent in the religion of Judaism? Ergo, are we talking about Noam Chomsky/Howard Zinn ethnic Judaism with atheist tendencies or religious centers that enforce patriarchy?

[Rafiq]

Study Materialism. Learn Marxism.

[Belleraphone]

Judaism is a culture identity AND religion, Kibbutzes are cultural occurrences generated by secular Jewish culture.

However, does this Kibbutz rebuke patriarchal systems inherent in the religion of Judaism? Ergo, are we talking about Noam Chomsky/Howard Zinn ethnic Judaism with atheist tendencies or religious centers that enforce patriarchy?
There were many atheists in the Kibbutz, but most were still religious. The most important thing to remember is that they allowed freedom of religion.

What are you talking about with Chomsky/Zinn's ethnic Judaism? They don't believe the things they believe because they're Jews.

[Azraella]

My attitudes are probably not going to be a surprise. Religious violence is the result(whether rightly or wrongly) of people percieving that their rights to worship freely are being restricted. Most people simply do not want to harm you for believing differently than them. This is fact. In fact, most people probably wouldn't care what you believed unless you talked about it. I live in a society that supposedly celebrates religious freedom and diversity. Sure. That's the theory. The reality is much different. My personal religious views are marginalized, my son isn't allowed to go on play dates because I'm open about my beliefs, and hell, I've seen how atheists are treated. Christian fundamentalism is a reactionary attitude created by those who think their beliefs are getting trampled on. Islamic fundamentalism is pretty similar. The real solution to these problems is to really celebrate religious freedom and diversity. Proper education, real tolerance and understanding, and the promotion of non-oppressive beliefs.

I am anti-Israel and pro-Palestine. I want the Middle East to have a cultural evolution where it sees it's old ways as being bad. The chains that choke the people there will not get better unless we end the terrible concept of nationalism and promote peace there. Quite simply, the issue in the Middle East is in fact a result of imperialism and in the Palestine/Israel conflict.

God versus god will be the undoing of man, but the truth of all predictions is always in our hands.