ALB
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mcolome1 wrote:In 1961 there was a massacre in Paris against the protestors who refused the French war in Algeria
Yes, 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.
alanjjohnstone wrote:And from Robert Fisk providing some much needed historical perspectivehttp://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/charlie-hebdo-paris-attack-brothers-campaign-of-terror-can-be-traced-back-to-algeria-in-1954-9969184.htmlFisk has written some good stuff but he is far too pro-Muslim for my liking, coming near to the position that Darren Redstar has criticised here of condoning what politicized Islamists do as a reaction to imperialism. He ends that article:
Quote:You can see why some Algerians went to fight for the Iraqi resistance. And found a new cause…I'm afraid I can't. They can't use history as an excuse. I can see rather why millions of people from Algeria, both there and in France, would just want to get on with their lives under capitalism without the additional complication of violence from fanatical, murderous Islamists.
Oh dear, the conspiracy theories havealready started. This from another forum I'm on (in the US, naturally):
Quote:I am very skeptical of the official account as to what happened and who the perpetrators really were, as for one thing the details of this official account seem to change by the day, if not the hour, and some of them strike me as nothing less than a pile of crap, stuff like the precision killer team leaving an ID or two in a getaway car, and the way the explanations for why have changed back and forth a bunch of times in less than 72 hours. Much of this reminds me of 9/11, which i am absolutely convinced was an inside job false flag terror attack, just like the “terrorist” wave of bombings which hit Italy in the late ‘60s and ‘70s, about which Sanguinetti the situations wrote a book, and which was subsequently revealed to be the work of the Italian state and NATO intelligence agencies, including the CIA.duncan lucas wrote:No my vision of Socialism is more realistic and achievable than yoursWhat, an English-hating Scottish nationalism ! Maybe at the moment that is more achievable than a world without frontiers where the Earth's resources have become the heritage of all humanity, but it's not socialism. Incidentally, I'm not "English" by your standards, let alone ours. I don't understand why you seem to hate those fellow humans you call "English". It's a bit like the xenophobia UKIP propagates, only even narrower.
duncan lucas wrote:Scots dont vote Tory only one MP in Scotland 100s in England we dont think the same as England our first thought is to those less well off than themselves Englands first thought is -how are my shares doing or is the price iof my house rising. THey just dont CARE the same its called Humanitarianism and they are sadly lacking in that area .Once again what you say needs correcting.According to a recent book Sex, Lies and the Ballot Box (edited by Philip Cowley and Robert Ford. Biteback Publishing), it would also appear that the prevailing underpinning values of voters in Wales and Scotland, for instance, are not that different on most issues to those of people in parts of the UK that tend to vote Conservative.More here:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/scotland/scottish-politics/11242539/Scotland-and-England-How-different-are-they-really.html
Quote:According to Ms Henderson, the data shows "in no case are there significant differences between Scotland, Wales and England", but she notes Scots are more likely "to report themselves as being left-wing than other Britons".
