ALB
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No, that’s not my view but your and my preferences and tastes are of no significance or relevance.
But to return to the subject, in your opening posting you claimed that the patron saint of England was “George of Cappodicia”, that this historical figure had been made a saint by the Catholic church and that thus contradicted their own dogmas since he had been labelled a heretic.
The Catholic Church denies that the George they made a saint was this historical figure but was someone else. So, for them, they didn’t made a heretic a saint.
Your claim then gets downgraded to the claim that the mythical figure called George who was made a saint (and for who the church concocted a life story) arose from some cult around George of Cappodicia.
Even if true this would still not justify a claim that the church had made George of Cappodicia, a designated heretic, a saint.
The alternative theory that “Saint” George never existed but is just a mythical figure (a bit like JC himself) seems more plausible.
Actually, I use Wikipedia nearly every day. It is a very useful source of information. Of course you don’t have to believe everything you read there but at least it gives a lead where to look if you want to check anything.
In the pre-Wikipedia days you had to have your own encyclopaedia or go to the local references library to look up the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Speaking of which:
“The 2010 version of the 15th edition, which spans 32 volumes and 32,640 pages, was the last printed edition. Since 2016, it has been published exclusively as an online encyclopaedia.”
At least this is what its entry in Wikipedia says. I have no reason to think that this is not true.
Have you room in your bedside for the 32 printed volumes?
I have nothing agsinst Gibbon. His Deckline and Fall of the Roman Empire is a good read. I’ve got the book but it’s also available online, here for instance:
https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/25717/pg25717-images.html
The internet has made available for free all sorts of interesting texts to thousands who could afford to buy the books. Surely that can’t be bad, can it?
But you still haven’t said how you are going to stop your local parish priest getting you by pointing out that their St. George is not the same as Bishop George of Cappadocia who was not made a saint.
He seems to have been a nasty piece of work who suffered a fitting end:
Yes, but what if this isn’t a religious inconsistency? Your argument is undermined. As is your credibility. A mere parish priest might refer you to the Wikipedia entry on St. George, which says:
“Edward Gibbon argued that George, or at least the legend from which the above is distilled, is based on George of Cappadocia, a notorious 4th-century Arian bishop who was Athanasius of Alexandria’s most bitter rival, and that it was he who in time became George of England. This identification is seen as highly improbable. Bishop George was slain by Gentile Greeks for exacting onerous taxes, especially inheritance taxes. J. B. Bury, who edited the 1906 edition of Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall, wrote ‘this theory of Gibbon’s has nothing to be said for it’.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_George
I know you like to rely on 18th century authors but you seem to have got stuck there.
What is the evidence he was a follower of Arius? In fact what is the evidence that he even existed (any more than the dragon he is supposed to have slain did)?
Anyway, what’s all this got to do with anything?
But that was weeks ago. Has this got something to do with current events in Georgia where the crowds seem to be English supporters?
We know that but do the Scots Nats? I imagine Alba, the name of Alex Salmond’s breakaway party, is also based on a myth or at least a misrepresentation.
That’s a good point. I think I’ll send a letter to the Weekly Worker pointing this out, but in relation to TUSC rather than the CPB.
Meanwhile here is TUSC’s own take on how they did generally:
‘Best campaign since relaunch’, says TUSC results draft report
Interesting that “nearly a fifth of the candidates not members of any political party or group within the coalition.” That will mean that they will not be dyed-in-the-wool Leninists out to manipulate workers into following them as a vanguard by dangling “transitional demands” in front of them. Probably they will be ordinary trade union militants justifiably pissed off with the Labour Party.
I dare say that could be the case of some of the new members of SPRW itself. Our members who attended the SPEW meeting in Vauxhall on “Reform and Revolution” during the campaign reported that they were not allowed to give leaflet to all of the 8 present but were told that one would be sufficient. We left 2. Clearly, the leader of the meeting didn’t want the ordinary members there from investigating further what we have to say.
Here is the Weekly Worker’s take on the London elections:
“ London Assembly
The London Assembly is elected by a complex combination of a party list system plus constituency candidates. The Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain stood in the party list element, while candidates from the Socialist Party of Great Britain and Tusc stood in constituencies. The party list element was headed by Labour (38.4%), followed by the Tories (26.2%), Greens (11.6%), Lib Dems (8.7%) and Reform UK (5.9%). The CPB ranked 13th at 0.4% (10,915 votes) – an improvement on last time, when it obtained 0.3%.
Among the constituency candidates, Labour took 10 seats, the Tories three and the Lib Dems one, with the Tories taking the ‘white flight’ areas of outer east London and the Lib Dems the outer south west, reflecting the Tory decline in Surrey. Outside the one seat the Lib Dems won, the Greens tended, though not invariably, to outpoll them. On the left, the two SPGB candidates both came in last, with just one percent of the vote.
Among the Tusc candidates, in City and East Lois Austin came in 7th (after an independent) with 4,710 (2%); April Jacqueline Ashley in Croydon and Sutton was 6th with 2,766 (0.7%); Andy Walker in Havering & Redbridge was 7th with 2,145 (1.3%); and Nancy Taaffe in North East was 6th with 5,595 (2.7%). These results show Tusc polling in the same range as the SPGB, though ahead of the CPB.”https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1490/local-election-barometer/
Anathema = “something or someone that one vehemently dislikes”.
I don’t think the election results show that “the overwhelming majority” vehemently dislike socialism as a word let alone as properly understood.
Opinion polls show that an increasing number of people, particularly younger people, don’t mind the word “socialism”. Of course there are some people who have suffered under some state-capitalist dictatorship calling itself socialist who do hate the word (we met a couple in the course of our campaign).
When socialism, as a society of common ownership and democratic control with production to directly satisfy people’s needs not profit, is presented to people they don’t dislike it but don’t think that it is practicable. Which is not at all the same thing.
More psephology. There was only one other group using the word “socialist” standing in the GLA elections — TUSC, the front organisation of the spurious socialist but actually state-capitalist organisation that calls itself SPEW.
They stood in 4 geographical constituencies like the 2 we stood in. Here is how they did:
North East: 5595 2.7%
City and East: 4710 2.6%
Croydon & Sutton: 2766 1.6%
Havering & Redbridge: 2145 1.2%The same league as us even if higher up the table despite offering attractive sounding reforms in the hope of garnering votes. A minor reformist party that can’t compete with the bigger ones when it comes to that.
Their task is as difficult as ours but at least ours — socialism — is worth campaigning for.
Yes, that’s a good article (but you didn’t say it was going to be a “long read”!). I agree that blaming “neo-liberalism” for the growth of conspiracy fictions is a weak part. After all, Jewish conspiracy fictions pre-date that by a long way and were around under state capitalism let alone Keynesianism.
Anyway, neo-liberalism seems to be on the way out as the main capitalist ideology, especially as concerns international trade with the leading capitalist states imposing sanctions on rivals ostensibly for political reasons. Even internally, the trend is towards state support for selected private capitalist enterprises in the form of contracts and subsidies — the sort of “crony capitalism” that the Labour Party is proclaiming from the rooftops it is aiming to practise when it takes over later this year.
Looks like not many voters followed Ed Griffiths’s advice (which we didn’t endorse) and voted for us in the constituencies and the Communist Party for the party list vote:
In Barnet & Camden the CPB list got 719 votes and in Lambeth & Southwark 945.
I met the Reform UK candidate, Tony Sharp, at the count and he described the CPB as tankies. I suppose most of them would have been. Apparently he was once the deputy leader of UKIP.
