ALB
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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 complicit
I 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.
gnome wrote:And who can really blame them given the murderous activities of the West (and in particular, the U.S.) in the Middle East dating back at least 200 years?Socialists can. They should direct their anger at capitalism as a whole, not particular capitalist powers. As some have. Some are members of our party or of other groups that stand for socialism. They made the right analysis and the right choice. The Islamists made the wrong one.
Party members who are vegetarians should not advocate this in the name of the Party. That's the danger. That they are trying to convince the rest of us to become vegetarians is one reason why we cannot let religious people in. They would do the same and we'd be side-tracked into arguing amongst ourselves about that too.
Not all socialists are vegetarian nor want socialism and vegetarianism to be linked. William Morris for one:
Quote:Our readers will have noticed several letters amongst our correspondence on the subject of Vegetarianism, one or two of which were written in a somewhat aggrieved tone, apropos of attacks by Socialists on that doctrine, if one may call it so, though several comrades and friends are vegetarians. It seems to me that there is no need either to attack a vegetarian or to confer a vote of thanks on him, so long as he is one because he chooses to be so on any grounds that please himself, whether he makes it a matter of health, or economy, or sentiment. But a man can hardly be a sound Socialist who puts forward vegetarianism as a solution of the difficulties between labour and capital, as some people do, and as one may think very severe capitalists would like to do, if the regimen were not applied to themselves; and again, there are people who are vegetarians on ascetic grounds, and who would be as tyrannical as other ascetics if they had the chance of being so. I do not mean to say that Socialist vegetarians are likely to fall into these traps; they only make themselves liable to the sneer of an anti-Socialist acquaintance of mine, who said to me one day 'All you Socialists have each of you another fad besides Socialism'. (Commonweal, in September 1886).George Orwell made the same point in The Road to Wigan Pier, less politely (but we are all Charlie Hebdo now, aren't we?):
Quote:One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words "Socialism" and "Communism" draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, "Nature Cure" quack, pacifist, and feminist in England….The food-crank is by definition a person willing to cut himself off from human society in hopes of adding five years on to the life of his carcase; that is, a person out of touch with common humanity.We must avoid associating socialism with one particular lifestyle choice, especially as most humans have always been meat-eaters and always will be.
alanjjohnstone wrote:I can say now that the consequences will be serious for those who are atheists. Won't be long before the Dave Allen's of the comedy world will be silenced…jokes on priests and paedophilia will soon be banned because of religious "hurt". And the law will be selectively applied only against those that the State disapproves of.Actually, they did try this but were forced to back down, as Boyd Tonkin recalls in yesterday's i paper:
Quote:… in 2005 came the lamentable attempt to strangle the critique of religion via the first draft of the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill, with its scattergun provisions against "insulting" belief. It took an energetic and well-organised revolt of artists, writers and comedians to knock sense into that statute.Agreed, though, that the very fact that they (and the Labour government was in charge of the State at the time) wanted to do this exposes their hypocrisy.Reading the correspondence columns of the Times shows that Christians too do not believe in freedom to criticise religion, with letters from vicars and professors of divinity saying that papers like Charlie Hebdo should not have the right to insult and mock religions in the way they do. They want to stop them doing this, not by shooting them by making it illegal and sending them to jail if they do.
