Thomas_More
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” Which is historically responsible for the most deaths and misery, religion or capitalism?”
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Capitalism, obviously. In countries where religion is still strong, it is adopted and exploited by nationalism for capitalist ends. Nationalism (also called patriotism, there is no difference) is in fact the strongest “religion” of today, and the most dangerous. The violent sectarian aspects of religion are harnessed by states and state-sponsored movements in the less secularised parts of the globe as allies of nationalism. Religious pacifists are drowned out, and even sometimes killed.
Past attitudes, as remnants of old superstructures, still linger in countries such as Ukraine, and these are also exploited (like Luther’s hatred of Jews fuelling Nazism), and Ukraine has a bloody legacy from these too – being one of the old buffer states between Catholicism and Orthodoxy. (The Uniate churches being Catholic in Orthodox guise).
The Crimean Tatars are also victims today of a lingering legacy.https://images.app.goo.gl/g5xaKFWjGytXiLAs5
https://images.app.goo.gl/31K94gL8aTUj329f7
“To him who hath, more shall be given, but to him who hath not, even what he hath shall be taken away.”
The Bible’s connivance with capitalism.
Mme. de Stael had to keep fleeing the tyrant from land to land as Bonaparte’s armies marched through Europe.
Napoleon had overthrown the bourgeois democracy anyway, and made himself military dictator, so why would he be interested in communism?
He was the enemy of the working class. He crushed the free press, arrested critics, roped young men into his war machine, had thugs sent across borders to seize or murder political opponents. A real hero! Granted, he didn’t execute deserters, just re-drafted them. But the youth of France was collectively in dread of his press gangs.
No, I don’t think communism would even register on his radar, except to pounce and incarcerate.He also re-instituted slavery.
I remember a humorous scene from an old movie about a slave revolt, whereby one of L’Ouverture’s men is asked to give the password by a Napoleonic sentry. The slave replies, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity!” The sentry says “That’s not the password”, to which the slave retorts, “It should be!” and clonks the sentry unconscious. đNapoleon also banned La Marseillaise, so Tchaikovsky was wrong to include it in his 1812 Overture.
The Discovery of Australasia by a Flying Man.
Thanks for this.
Just as utopian thinkers were anticipating socialism (communism) in the 18th century, they were simultaneously anticipating Darwin.
Not just, obviously, Erasmus Darwin and Buffon, but also Rousseau, at the beginning of his Discourse on Inequality, and Restif, in his The Flying Man. In the latter work, Restif proposes the opposite to violent colonisation, namely mutual aid and friendship toward newly discovered peoples.Movimiento, don’t leave the forum. You are invaluable and give us insights from your experience many of us don’t have.
Don’t let yourself be bullied. Ignore the bullies, but please don’t leave, comrade.If you don’t want to know anything about Sade, fair enough; but don’t begrudge me opening a thread on him, which I may. You jump straight in and tell me I “need help.”
I have always liked Sade, and that doesn’t mean I am somehow ill.
I have many interests and like many writers, artists, musicians (did you know Sade wrote musicals too?) and other great thinkers.Your words show any knowledge you have of him to be paltry.
Prostitution is sadly part and parcel of class society, both in Sade’s day and today. I say this because there is no proof Sade ever engaged in non-consenting sexual activity, not in rape, nor kidnapping.
Rose Keller was as hard-nosed a woman of the streets as they come. Her story was proven false and another attempt on her part to extort money, for which she was notorious.
Are those today who pay “dominatrices” for sex games guilty of a terrible crime?I doubt I would have liked Sade personally, but he was no Jack the Ripper or Gilles de Rais.
And as to Sade himself, again you have to use discernment and avoid the sensationalist trash out there.
These are the worthwhile writers available in English:
Geoffrey Gorer
C.R. Dawes
Guy Endore
Gilbert Lely
Maurice Lever
Francine du Plessix-Gray
Simone de BeauvoirGenerally I would avoid the internet.
A Christian I knew had a book identifying Marx as the devil. The cover showed a drawing of Marx with horns.
You accuse Sade of some terrible things. His writings can also be interpreted in other ways by anti-socialists. They focus always, and only, on the three or four “obscene” works, which, although weighty tomes, are but the smallest part of his output. These are in fact a critique of his own class, as well as of the haute bourgeoisie his father forced him to marry into.
The opening of the most infamous of these three books starts off by expressing Sade’s utter contempt for the super rich perpetrators of the horrors in the novel, whom he calls upstarts and parasites.As to the worst of Sade himself, you can only be thinking of the Rose Keller affair, which is well documented. Known as a blackmailer, Rose Keller’s physical examination did not bear out what she had accused Sade of.
Had she been picked up by the comte de Charolais instead, she wouldn’t have lived to tell any tales.
