ALB
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Another interesting coup was the one that overthrew the dictatorship in Portugal in 1974. This showed that no regime that looses the confidence of the armed forces can survive:https://portugueserevolution25thapril1974.wordpress.com/2014/04/23/a-bloodless-coup/Of course a military coup by socialist-minded junior army officers is not how capitalist rule is going to be ended !
Darren redstar wrote:Damn you alb, apologising before I could get angry.It was Alan not me who apologised ! I just asked for one on our behalf. As to conspiracy theories about this, they are already circulating. One problem with them is that they let those who did it off the hook, since if it was the French State that did it (eg as a pretext to increase its repressive powers) then the political Islamists didn't.
The Pope wrote:If I repeated some passages from the homilies of the Church Fathers, in the second or third century, about how we must treat the poor, some would accuse me of giving a Marxist homily.This is precisely what James Connolly does in chapter 2 of his 1910 pamphlet Labour, Nationality and Religion:
Quote:“The use of all things that are found in this world ought to be common to all men. Only the most manifest iniquity makes one say to the other, ‘This belongs to me, that to you’. Hence the origin of contention among men.” – St. Clement.“What thing do you call ‘yours’? What thing are you able to say is yours? From whom have you received it? You speak and act like one who upon an occasion going early to the theatre, and possessing himself without obstacle of the seats destined for the remainder of the public, pretends to oppose their entrance in due time, and to prohibit them seating themselves, arrogating to his own sole use property that is really destined to common use. And it is precisely in this manner act the rich”. – St. Basil the Great.“Therefore if one wishes to make himself the master of every wealth, to possess it and to exclude his brothers even to the third or fourth part (generation), such a wretch is no more a brother but an inhuman tyrant, a cruel barbarian, or rather a ferocious beast of which the mouth is always open to devour for his personal use the food of the other companions.” – St. Gregory. Nic.“Nature furnishes its wealth to all men in common. God beneficently has created all things that their enjoyment be common to all living beings, and that the earth become the common possession of all. It is Nature itself that has given birth to the right of the community, whilst it is only unjust usurpation that has created the right of private poverty.” – St. Ambrose.“The earth of which they are born is common to all, and therefore the fruit that the earth brings forth belongs without distinction to all”. – St. Gregory the Great.“The rich man is a thief”. – St. Chrysostom.These people beat Gerrard Winstanley to it by over a thousand years. Mind you, the Pope is being a bit disingenous in suggesting that these passages are just about how to treat the poor rather than that the Earth and its fruits should be commonly owned.
alanjjohnstone wrote:but you and Redstar will fault Fisk's insistence that not all muslims are the same and arts perpetuated in its name does not make every muslim complicitI beg your pardon. When have either of us ever said that or anything like that? I think you withdraw this slur.
alanjjohnstone wrote:No one has said vegetarianism will be compulsory,Let's see what John Oswald says.
French troops are based in lots of their ex-colonies in Africa. I suspect Fisk's real first reaction (like mine and most other people's I imagine)) was "Muslims" but that he was afraid to say so for fear of being accused of "islamophobia".
John Oswald wrote:The end of nonhuman exploitation and of human exploitation go together.That depends on your definition of "nonhuman exploitation". What it is? Is torture and cruelty to animals? Obviously that will go in socialism. Or is it that that they are used to provide food for humans? That this will go in socialism is far from obvious and uneforceable anyway.and makes us look fools or authoritarians if we say it will.
Quote:Egypt jails atheist student for three yearsBel Trew CairoAn Egyptian court has sentenced a man to three years in jail for "contempt of Islam" after he admitted being an atheistThe jailing of the engineering undergraduate Karim al-Banna, 22, who was arrested in November in the Nile delta city of Idku after writing a private Facebook post, comes after a drive by the military government against "immoral behaviour".Mr Banna's neighbours read the posting and invited him to talk about it at a cafe, where they secretly called the police, said Fatma Serag, a lawyer with the Association for Freedom of Thought and Expression, which is representing the student.Atheism is not illegal but Mr Banna was found guilty of insulting the Muslim faith under the Egyptian penal code which criminalises defamation of religion, she added. His sentence could be suspended until a verdict is issued by the appeals court if he pays bail of £93.It comes after a steady increase in "contempt of religion" cases since the military's 2013 overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood as it attempts to curry favour with conservatives.Fatma Naoot, a writer, is standing trial after allegedly criticising the traditional slaughter of sheep during the Muslim holiday of Aid, while the poet Karim Saber was jailed last year for his short story collection entitled Where is God?In Luxor at least three people were jailed, including Demiana Emad, a Christian schoolteacher, after she held a lesson on different faiths. In December the security forces shut down a Cairo cafe for allegedly harbouring "atheist devil-worshippers".The military-backed authorities want to prove they are more Islamic than the Islamist regime they ousted, said Ishak Ibrahim, of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, which is monitoring the trials."They want to be the guardian of public morals. It wins them popularity," he added.(The Times, 12 January 2015)These people basically agree with the Charlie Hebdo killers that insulting islam should be punished, only they think it should be done by the State and that the penalty should be less harsh. In any event, they don't believe in free speech.
Quote:Long before the identity of the murder suspects was revealed by the French police – even before I heard the names of Cherif and Said Kouachi – I muttered the word “Algeria” to myself.And the person who attacked the Jewish supermarket came from …. Mali.You didn't guess that, did you, Fisk?
mcolome1 wrote:In 1961 there was a massacre in Paris against the protestors who refused the French war in AlgeriaYes, but the struggle for an independent Algerian state was led by the FLN which was not Islamist but nationalist and even claimed to be socialist. When it got independence in 1962 with Ben Bella as president it said it was building "socialism" and some trotskyists went there as advisers (Pablo, or Michael Raptis, for example). They were building state capitalism of course but not an Islamic state.I recall going to an Algerian cafe in Paris in the 1970s with a French comrade from the French West Indies and having a discussion there with some Algerians who knew their Marxism or at least their Leninism. They knew immediately what we meant when we described what we meant by socialism, saying "yes, that's communism, our eventual goal". So, these were people on the same sort of wavelength as us. Not Islamists. There were and probably still are Algerian political groups which described the Algeria of the time as state capitalist.In 1965 Ben Bella was overthrown in a military coup and the military remain the dominant force to this day. In 1991 the Islamists looked like winning the elections but the army stepped in to stop this and a brutal civil war resulted. This is why some Algerians support Islamism. Most, I suspect, support the military government which has had to make some concessions to the fact that most people there are of that religion.In other words, the history of French atrocities in Algeria cannot be used as a justification for Islamism. It could just as validly (or more logically) be used to justify a general "anti-imperialist" position, to establish a national state capitalism rather than an Islamic State. Fisk is wrong.
Quote:BP:The meat-eating that we do, or that our ancestors did even back to the earliest time we were eating meat, is culturally mediated. You need some kind of processing technology in order to eat meat, and there’s an amazing amount of social diversity in the way that meat is used, cooked and eaten in the modern world. So I don’t necessarily think we are hardwired to eat meat, but it is an important part of our evolutionary history.That's a good point Briana Pobiner makes. Human behaviour is culturally not biologically determined so we can eat a wide variety of foods. We are neither "hard-wired" to eat meat — nor not to eat meat, as vegetarians used to argue saying that our gut had evolved to eat vegetables only. I don't know if they still argue this, but if they do they are wrong. What foods are eaten is, in pre-industrial societies, culturally-determined. In urban, industrialised societies it still is, though indivuduals can determine more what they eat as a life-style choice. I imagine (in fact, I'm sure) that will continue into socialist society.
Darren redstar wrote:didnt Tariq ali write a book in the 90s about Trotskyists whose Lenin God had failed all joining the worlds religions instead?Yes, Redemption, a brilliant satire of Trotskyism in the style of Charlie Hebdo. Reviewed in the Socialist Standard here:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1990s/1991/no-1046-october-1991/collapse-trotsky%E2%80%99s-monumentA must-read for all socialists (and trotskyists).
Current-day vegetarianism could not exist in the absence of urban, industrial society as one that can allow people to choose to eat only vegetables. People in pre-industrial times didn't have this choice. Imagine the Inuits or the Australian aborigines trying to live as vegetarians. I don't think any of the surviving hunter(sic)/gatherer tribes do, do they? Which explains why they are not so squeamish about killing animals, as indeed people in agricultural areas under capitalism aren't today.
