Wez
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‘None of the above statement is true.’
Perhaps I’ve been misinformed by the BBC again? My contention is that it’s entirely understandable why many have doubts about the efficacy of the vaccine. Our sources of information are the pharmaceutical companies and their scientists, the tory government and their scientists and the NHS. The first two have little credibility and the NHS is in its usual chaos. I find it surprising that a comrade is so ready to accept the establishment’s word on anything since our whole case is that capitalism corrupts everything.
‘The entire reason for such a hurry was and is people dying by the thousands.’
I very much doubt that. Suddenly we’re to trust the motivation of big pharma? Anyway we now know that some of it is useless for combating the new variants and for the over 65s.‘Having said this, there is an element of experiment in the UK programme — not giving the second jab within the recommended three-months. They have extended the time limit to 12 weeks without knowing what effect this will have. It probably won’t have any adverse effect but they don’t know and are in effect carrying out an experiment to see if this is the case.’
It goes a bit deeper than that. Those with my condition (autoimmune disease) were excluded from trials of the vaccine to get it legitimised in such haste with the result that I still don’t know if it is safe for me to take. Knowing the system as we do it would be hard to refute that part of the reason for such a hurry was driven by competition and profit.
‘The military might back down or they might crack down. It’s up to them.’
It depends on, like the socialist revolution scenario you described earlier, what level of political awareness the members of the military possess. Of course, in the long term, we are in the business of prediction as this is the only way to empirically test our model of historical development. The interface between long and short term predictions based on historical models is interesting – where is the boundary?
‘But in the longer term they will have to bow to the popular will. We will have to see what happens as nothing can be predicted.’
ALB – having made a prediction in the first sentence you deny the efficacy of doing so in the second sentence. Which is it?TM – I suppose it varies according to period and what school of art. Personally I always shudder when I see a cathedral – inhuman monuments to a dark perverse superstition. I remember whilst studying at art school we went on a visit to a museum and I came across a tiny paleolithic carving of a bison in stone. It took my breathe away. Both of these reactions are emotional and aesthetic and both inspired me to learn more about medieval cathedrals and stone age art – for profoundly antithetical reasons.
‘So enjoying Wagner would convert a socialist to racism, and enjoying medieval art would make him go and get baptised Catholic?’
How is it possible to have a rational debate with someone who comes up with such nonsense? I must simply repeat that an exclusively emotional/aesthetic response to art is superficial and tells you nothing about what has informed/conditioned our perception of what is beautiful and how this effects political and moral values etc. I am amused by the idea that anything produced by the Frankfurt school could be compared to anything ‘right wing’ – not that socialists recognise the efficacy of such a right/left perspective anyway.
‘Except when you destroy and soil the art of the past you also insult and destroy the memory of the workers and artisans who created it. Socialism is to be the maturing of humanity, not the iconoclasm of angry lefties.’
Another irrational tirade against a non existing enemy. We should all be allowed to stand back from our emotional/aesthetic response to art and examine it critically. It’s easy to love the beautiful and that’s why it can be so manipulative and destructive.
‘One can even draw panels showing Crusaders without supporting or condoning the Crusades.’
But that’s the only reason they exist at all – as propaganda condoning violence in the name of European hegemony.
‘Who is to tell me I am not to have access to medieval art or Catholic chant because of the horrors of the Albigensian Crusade and the burninf of heretics? Is a socialist society going to burn books and outlaw Wagner and the New Testament? I ask again, are you for the bulldozing of 12th century cathedrals and the Potala Palace or Nostre Dame? You don’t trust me to listen to the Greek Liturgy in case I rush out to lynch Jews? I have this news: i’m a socialist who will fight anyone wanting to destroy the things I love on the plea that pre-socialist society produced them.’
TM – There you go again – you really are a master of the non sequitur and the creation of straw men. Who said anything about you not having access to certain art works or that they should be banned? My query is about the value of trying to divorce certain works of art from the ideological motivation for their creation and enjoying them purely aesthetically. Surely that merely renders them hollow and superficial – the stuff of contemporary ‘entertainment’.
Is it possible to rip art out of its political and cultural context and enjoy it for its aesthetics only? Can we listen to Wagner without acknowledging the racist and nationalist ideology that informed it and which it seeks to promulgate? Isn’t the purpose of art to communicate ideas and emotions? If the ideology that motivates some specific art work is reactionary shouldn’t we reject it however beautiful it might be?
‘So can a socialist appreciate the beautiful in art, literature and music of a religion whilst discarding its beliefs and historical iniquities, the facts of which s/he knows and will tell of.’
TM – But it’s not as simple as that – aesthetics can be used to subvert and pervert the political and moral values of the working class. The beautiful in art so often disguises an ugly ideology (Christianity, Fascism etc.) and is one of the most powerful propaganda tools available.
Furthermore, Christianity did not come from “the Dark Age hordes” the Romans despised. It was the Romans who were Christians and who set out to convert the “hordes.”
That was Gibbon’s point, it was the adoption of Christianity by the empire that helped destroy Rome from within. So do you agree or deny that contact with Muslim culture stimulated European Medieval development courtesy of their preservation of the knowledge of ancient Greece and Rome?
Of course, I know there are many, maybe most, Marxists – especially those arriving from Left groups and parties, who read very little apart from Marx and Engels, and never look into any research or knowledge realised after and since Marx’s death.
I would not consider such strange individuals as Marxists.
TM – I think it was rather more than just personal hygiene that was lost but also medical science, philosophy, astronomy, many technologies etc. Historians make the point that it was the cultural encounter with the Muslims during the crusades (Spain as well as the Levant) that enabled Medieval Culture in Northern Europe to begin to flourish culminating a few centuries later in the Renaissance. Phrases like: Medieval, Renaissance and The Dark Ages have become very unfashionable but I think it is important to emphasize that history does not always develop smoothly and progressively if only because this was one of the great erroneous criticisms of Marxism.
