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And the fact that you took that seriously just exposes your lack of a sense of humour.
His treatment of the Berber peoples and of black Africans has been rather less than stellar. Not on a Hitlerian level, granted, but, again: piss-take.
I'll be honest, he was not the one of the pair whose dress-sense I expected to see defended.whoa whoa WOAH hold it right there.
Are we talking about the same Muammer al-Gaddafi !?!?
Gaddafi is a Berber.And the fact that you took that seriously just exposes your lack of a sense of humour.
His treatment of the Berber peoples and of black Africans has been rather less than stellar. Not on a Hitlerian level, granted, but, again: piss-take.
I'll be honest, he was not the one of the pair whose dress-sense I expected to see defended.
"Machinery in itself is a victory of man over the forces of nature, but in the hands of capital it makes man the slave of those forces" - Uncle Karl
The Gaddafi tribe are Arabised Berbers, yes, but he not only explicitly rejects a Berber identity, but denies that the Berber ethnicity is in fact existent, holding it- contrary to all evidence- to be an invention of Western imperialists, intended to divide and rule the North African Arabs. As such, he has pursued a campaign of mass Arabisation amongst the Berbers, or, to put it more damning terms: cultural genocide.
So, granted, perhaps "ethnic supremacist" rather than "racial supremacists", but, yet again: piss-take. I wasn't exactly going for a scholarly critique.
What does "arabisation" involve?
"Machinery in itself is a victory of man over the forces of nature, but in the hands of capital it makes man the slave of those forces" - Uncle Karl
Banning the language, interfering in their cultural sovereignty, etc
More or less the same thing that the USA did to Native Americans (I dont know which was worse)
You have GOT to be fucking kidding me.
"Machinery in itself is a victory of man over the forces of nature, but in the hands of capital it makes man the slave of those forces" - Uncle Karl
he is also the only male world leader with long hair. just putting that out there
Formerly zenga zenga !
And he's not exactly a winning advertisement for the style.
And Stalin was a Georgian, but that didn't prevent him from overseeing the curbstomping of Social Democratic Georgia, and subsequent Great Russian chauvinist policies.
Apart from being a "legend", he is (or certainly was) a multi-billionaire capitalist exploiter and a nasty peice of work to boot willing, it seems, to authorise the shooting of unarmed protestors amongst other things. It speaks volumes for the anti-socialist and anti-democratic credentials of those who think we should support this scumbag
And, no, you dont have to support the rebels or NATO interventionism in order to oppose the Gaddafi regime. Some people on this list still haven't got this through their thick skulls. In their armchair black or white perspective on life, you must chose to support one side or the other; you cannot chose not to. Sorry, but reality is a little more complicated than this simplistic analysis of the situation suggests and Im fucked if Im gonna be browbeaten by someone rabbiting on about the evils of imperialism into supporting a despicable regime and one which incidentally has itself been a minor imperialist power in its own right judging by the billions of dollars invested abroad out of its "sovereign wealth funds"
Whether or not it is true, is it justified? Mrs Thatcher came to power in the UK - or at least with her second term of office - with a landslide and with the support of vast numbers of workers. Should we therefore have curtailed our citicism of her regime on that account?
So, excluding a majority of the population, a majority supported the Nazis. Isn't that another way of saying, 'no, a majority of Germans did NOT support the Nazis'?
Excluding white people, most Americans are people of color.
to be "controversial" on a completely frivolous note lol - i quite like his style....(of dress) [stands back]
R.I.P Juan Almeida Bosque
"The true focus of revolutionary change is never merely
the oppressive situations which we seek to escape,
but that piece of the oppressor which is
planted deep within each of us." Audre Lorde
This really only proves that the NATO attacks have had an impact on the consciousness of the masses, that is, part of them. It looks like Libya is breaking up along tribal lines, with one faction pro-NATO and another pro-Gadaffi. Consciousness can drop back in times of war and people (or in this case a tribal faction of the population) tend to stand behind their leaders against a greater evil, in this case NATO. This demo is an expression of how the revolutionary potential is destroyed by imperialism.
I think, thus I disagree. | Chairperson of a Socialist Party branchMarxist Internet Archive | Communistisch Platform
Working class independence - Internationalism - Democracy
Educate - Agitate - Organise
No, plenty of working class Germans supported the Nazis as well.
“Precisely because so many Germans did in fact benefit from Nazi Germany’s campaigns of plunder, only marginal resistance arose. Content as most Germans were, there was little chance for a domestic movement that would have halted Nazi crimes. This new perspective on the Nazi regime as a kind of racist-totalitarian welfare state allows us to understand the connection between the Nazi policies of racial genocide and the countless, seemingly benign family anecdotes about how a generation of German citizens ‘got through’ World War II.”
“The Third Reich was not a dictatorship maintained by force. Indeed, the Nazi leadership developed an almost fearful preoccupation with the mood of the populace, which they monitored carefully, devoting considerable energy and resources toward fulfilling consumer desires, even to the detriment of the country’s rearmament program.”
“For most young Germans, National Socialism did not mean dictatorship, censorship, and repression; it meant freedom and adventure.”
“Germans were kept passive and generally content by a lavish social welfare system that was paid for by these riches. The improvement in the public mood that came with increases in people’s material welfare…”
“Nothing less than massive popular greed made it possible for the regime to tame the majority of Germans with a combination of low taxes, ample supplies of consumer goods, and targeted acts of terror against social outsiders. The best strategy in the eyes of the public-opinion-conscious Nazi leadership was to keep all Germans happy.”
“Later, when the fighting was over, the fateful collaboration of millions of Germans vanished, as if by magic, to be replaced by a wildly exaggerated — and historically insignificant — record of resistance to Hitler.”
“[T]he Gestapo in 1937 had just over 7,000 employees, including bureaucrats and secretarial staff. Together with a far smaller force of police, they sufficed to keep tabs on more than 60 million people. Most Germans simply did not need to be subjected to surveillance or detention.”
(Gotz Aly, Hitler's Beneficiaries, Holt Paperbacks, USA: 2005)
"The spiritual atom bomb that the revolutionary people possess is a far more powerful and useful weapon than the physical atom bomb"
-Lin Biao
The question was not about "plenty of working class Germans."
The point was about a poorly constructed sentence, that basically created an opposite "fact" something by defining out a large group of people.
In truth, the Nazis never had more than a plurality of support, 44%, and half of that was a protest vote.
Basing how people felt about the Nazis based on a few years of plunder, basically 1939-43, is like basing the support for George Bush only on the period after 9/11, instead of all eight years.
Can I meh? Many Orthodox churches chose not to betray their country instead opting to back the Red Army against the most powerful army ever built by imperialism. Big deal. Many Imams in the USSR declared jihad on the Axis (got this from khad), are you going to accuse Stalin of Islamism too?
All this is irrelevant anyway and I stand by my original claim. People have legitimate reasons for supporting Gaddafi, none at all for supporting NATO.
Last edited by Sir Comradical; 10th July 2011 at 05:54.
"Machinery in itself is a victory of man over the forces of nature, but in the hands of capital it makes man the slave of those forces" - Uncle Karl
To be fair, most people in Iraq would rather live under Saddam than what they have right now.
[FONT="Courier New"] “We stand for organized terror - this should be frankly admitted. Terror is an absolute necessity during times of revolution. Our aim is to fight against the enemies of the Revolution and of the new order of life. ”
― Felix Dzerzhinsky [/FONT]
لا شيء يمكن وقف محاكم التفتيش للثورة
is their data to support this?
'heavens above, how awful it is to live outside the law - one is always expecting what one rightly deserves.'
petronius, the satyricon
I don't see a class basis on either side of the conflict sufficient for working-class militants anywhere to feel any sense of allegiance or solidarity to either side. As far as I can tell the splits between the regime and the rebels are on two bases, regionalism and ethnicity. First there's the east-west historic regional distinction between eastern Cyrenaica and western Tripolitania, with the quite stagnant battle line along that front almost exactly at the historic border between the two. Then where you do have significant rebel activity in the west, in the mountains along the Tunisian border, seem to be not-so-coincidentally also the areas of heavy Berber ethnic population. (I don't know enough about the details of the social situation in Misurata to explain why it is the other base of rebel activity, but I'll bet it has sfa to do with class as well.)
COMMUNISM !