Thomas_More
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Rubbish.
As in Japan and Russia, the capitalist revolution was not led by the bourgeoisie itself, unlike in Europe.
In China it was the peasants who carried it off, led by Mao, himself a peasant.
Hence his admiration of the Taipings a century earlier and his identification with them.As for the weak Chinese bourgeoisie, excepting those tied to Chiang, most moved their industries to the Red areas during the civil war.
Zelenskyy is Jewish, isn’t he?
Nazis are unpleasant racist people, but Nazism as a state ideology came about through the specific conditions of 1920s Germany. It cannot exist as such in modern Europe, regardless of neo-Nazi wannabes and racist groups. The closest thing to it is Putin’s Russia, which is in a similar position to Hitler’s Germany in the 1930s. This is not to justify the Ukrainian state at all, by the way, and it is NATO that has helped to create a militaristic Russia. The racism might not be present in Russia, not against Jews that is, but likely as not against Tatars, but the regimentalised, militarised nature of Nazism is there in the new Russian nationalism, together with the repression of dissidents and of the press.
“Dead nature”?
I would be interested in reading the avian’s view of how life began on Earth. At some point, he must concede, the “inanimate” became animate.
Like it or not (and I like it, being without prejudice), the ancestor of both avians and Marxists was … mud!A DROP OF DEW by Lafcadio Hearn.
To the bamboo lattice of my study-window a single dewdrop hangs quivering.
Its tiny sphere repeats the colours of the morning,—colours of sky and field and far-off trees. Inverted images of these can be discerned in it,—also the microscopic picture of a cottage, upside down, with children at play before the door.
Much more than the visible world is imaged by that dewdrop: the world invisible, of infinite mystery, is likewise therein repeated. And without as within the drop there is motion unceasing,—motion forever incomprehensible of atoms and forces,—faint shiverings also, making prismatic reply to touches of air and sun.
*
Buddhism finds in such a dewdrop the symbol of that other microcosm which has been called the Soul…. What more, indeed, is man than just such a temporary orbing of viewless ultimates,—imaging sky and land and life,—filled with perpetual mysterious shudderings,—and responding in some wise to every stir of the ghostly forces that environ him?…
*
Soon that tiny globe of light, with all its fairy tints and topsy-turvy picturings, will have vanished away. Even so, within another little while, you and I must likewise dissolve and disappear.
Between the vanishing of the drop and the vanishing of the man, what difference? A difference of words…. But ask yourself what becomes of the dewdrop?
By the great sun its atoms are separated and lifted and scattered. To cloud and earth, to river and sea they go; and out of land and stream and sea again they will be updrawn, only to fall and to scatter anew. They will creep in opalescent mists;—they will whiten in frost and hail and snow;—they will reflect again the forms and the colours of the macrocosm; they will throb to the ruby pulsing of hearts that are yet unborn. For each one of them must combine again with countless kindred atoms for the making of other drops,—drops of dew and rain and sap, of blood and sweat and tears….
How many times? Billions of ages before our sun began to burn, those atoms probably moved in other drops, reflecting the sky-tints and the earth-colours of worlds in some past universe. And after this present universe shall have vanished out of Space, those very same atoms—by virtue of the forces incomprehensible that made them—will probably continue to sphere in dews that will shadow the morning beauty of planets yet to be.
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Even so with the particles of that composite which you term your very Self. Before the hosts of heaven the atoms of you were—and thrilled,—and quickened,—and reflected appearances of things. And when all the stars of the visible Night shall have burnt themselves out, those atoms will doubtless again take part in the orbing of Mind,—will tremble again in thoughts, emotions, memories,—in all the joys and pains of lives still to be lived in worlds still to be evolved….
*
Your personality?—your peculiarity? That is to say, your ideas, sentiments, recollections?—your very particular hopes and fears and loves and hates? Why, in each of a trillion of dewdrops there must be differences infinitesimal of atom-thrilling and of reflection. And in every one of the countless pearls of ghostly vapour updrawn from the Sea of Birth and Death there are like infinitesimal peculiarities. Your personality signifies, in the eternal order, just as much as the especial motion of molecules in the shivering of any single drop. Perhaps in no other drop will the thrilling and the picturing be ever exactly the same; but the dews will continue to gather and to fall, and there will always be quivering pictures … The very delusion of delusions is the idea of death as loss.
There is no loss—because there is not any Self that can be lost. Whatsoever was, that you have been;—whatsoever is, that you are;—whatsoever will be, that you must become. Personality!—individuality!—the ghosts of a dream in a dream! Life infinite only there is; and all that appears to be is but the thrilling of it,—sun, moon, and stars,—earth, sky, and sea,—and Mind and Man, and Space and Time. All of them are shadows. The shadows come and go;—the Shadow-Maker shapes forever.What have you got against rocks and mud? You came from them and will be them again … and again … and again …
Me too.Since the super rich and heads of state, including Putin, have their super de luxe underground palace bunkers, they could well initiate nuclear war by ignorantly thinking they and their families would be immune and super safe.
The trendy young women saying men have to fight for the “Motherland” would instantly turn away from an ex-soldier missing a face.
Minks are shy, solitary animals who are fearful of humans and like to forage, climb, and swim in vast habitats. But undercover investigations have revealed that fur farms confine them to cramped wire cages that are often caked with waste. The animals frequently show signs of extreme psychological distress, such as frantic circling and self-mutilation, and suffer from infections, gaping wounds, and other illnesses and injuries that commonly go untreated. Mink farmers commonly use the cheapest killing methods available – including gassing, electrocution, and neck-breaking – before peeling the skin off the minks’ bodies.
False-eyelash companies like Lilly Lashes know that no one wants to buy vile animal fur, so they are making misleading claims about their mink lashes: Lilly Lashes markets some mink-fur lashes as “vegan”.
However, TS, won’t the absorption of the Donbas into Russia Proper (happening now via the referenda) mean that Ukraine’s attacks on it, using NATO arms, will be construed as just that: an attack on Russia?
Which will then push Moscow to nuke the West?Both Russia and the U.S. are influenced by armageddonist churches, on one side evangelicalism, on the other Orthodoxy. But only in the case of Russia are the armageddonists presently, in the form of Orthodoxy, part of the structure of government.
Modern Catholicism is not armageddonist, but Orthodoxy is – especially Slavic Orthodoxy. It might outwardly resemble more the Catholic Church (ostentatious ritual, incense etc.), but its ideology is closer to evangelical fundamentalism. The Orthodox Church is fundamentalist. Modern Catholicism is not.
