• Keld [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
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    3 days ago

    If as a leftist state project you dont have a plan to immediately rid yourself of organised religion you don’t possess pattern recognition.
    As soon as you seize power you have to think about how to kill the clergy.

    Edit: This is not a joke.

    • oliveoil [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      3 days ago

      You should have a plan on how to neuter the clergy, but if you use organized religion to help the revolution only to clamp down violently on them - you’re going to create a corrupt failed state with failed promises.

      Inherently, betraying revolutionaries who helped you involves failed promises.

      The people who would carry out those orders and make those plans -inherently would not hold paramount the values of the revolution. These people would also be the ones consolidating power.

      The legitimacy of your new government, founded on the abandoned values of the revolution, would fall into question.

      Boom. You have a government with as much strife as the Islamic Republic of Iran, and foreign powers invade, attack, and subvert you from the inside.

      • Keld [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
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        3 days ago

        Literally all successful revolutionary movements have had to eventually marginalise the clergy. The interests of a socialist project and the interests of the clergy will never align once an immediate threat has been dispatched, and the clergy has always and will always seek to snuff out the revolution, as indeed it did in Iran.

        Anticlericalism is objectively the right position for the left, Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Castro were right.

        • CyborgMarx [any, any]@hexbear.net
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          3 days ago

          Clerics should be carefully marginalized from political power, but the way you’re expressing and conceptualizing that necessity is the worst possible way to go about it when it comes to the region

          If you ever in a million years want socialism to even remotely have a fringe presence in the muslim world then you best drop this nonsense quick and in a hurry

          The muslim world is not the west with its slow history of secular anticlericalism born from the fractures of Christian polities, literally the ONLY THING keeping a billion muslims from hoisting the sickle and hammer is the successful Saudi-led propaganda victory that tied militant atheism to communism in the minds of practically every muslim

          • oliveoil [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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            3 days ago

            Exactly.

            Anti-colonial, anti-western bloc of people, open to wealth redistribution - perfect for communism.

            But, they are deeply religious, and western and soviet thinking on how to deal with that will result in the same defeats we have seen time and time again throughout MENA.

            • CyborgMarx [any, any]@hexbear.net
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              3 days ago

              It’s incredibly disheartening that even after all these decades, examination of WHY socialism failed so utterly in MENA still isn’t given top priority, no subconsciously everyone just assumes the machiavellian supermen of the west deemed MENA socialism to fall, and it fell, just like that, cause they used religion like a pokemon, instead of clocking it was a carefully crafted subversion of proto-socialist currents within deeply religious communities

              The irony is that this is one of the easiest to solve dilemmas in socialist history, an adaptation and correction that barely take 10 mins to conceive of; “capitalism is destroying Islam, politics corrupts religion”, wow how difficult was that

              • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]@hexbear.net
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                2 days ago

                Western Marxists can’t stop being Reddit atheists. China already gave us the blueprint: keep the religion, control the clergy, liquidate those who refuse to toe the party line.

                Why should socialists liquidate the Roman Catholic church when it’s much more profitable to seize control of its institutions?

        • CommunistCuddlefish [she/her]@hexbear.net
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          2 days ago

          I don’t know what the fuck your problem is, but my “western chauvinist fascist” alarms start going off whenever I see someone going all :frothing-fash: frothingfash about killing Muslims, even when “but they’re religious zealots!” is the excuse.  Whatever the excuse, it still disgusts me.

          The most charitable guess I can hazard is to suspect you are making the very common western atheist anti-christian mistake of generalizing your experience of being oppressed by Christianity and then applying that to a completely different religious, cultural, and political context.

          Shut the fuck up, take a step back, and think this shit through.

        • LeninWeave [none/use name, any]@hexbear.net
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          3 days ago

          This is a clearer argument than what you said originally.

          As soon as you seize power you have to think about how to kill the clergy.

          Edit: This is not a joke.

          This was what you said before, which is very different from the idea that the clergy should be marginalized from political power.

          • Keld [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
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            3 days ago

            The marginilisation of the clergy in a place where the clergy hold any kind of institutional power inevitably involves violence. You should always have a plan to kill the fucking priests.

            • LeninWeave [none/use name, any]@hexbear.net
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              3 days ago

              You should always have a plan to kill the fucking priests.

              So you should lie to religious people to get them on your side during the revolution and then massacre their leaders which they respect afterwards? In the context of this thread of comments, this is what you’re saying - we’re discussing a negative response to the statement “Come on, burn the mosques after the revolution, doing it before is just dumb, you’ll lose the religious supporters”.

              • Keld [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
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                3 days ago

                You should absolutely let whoever wants to help you tear down the bourgeois state. and then seize on power and solidify a proletarian state. Look to your namesake on this one. Clergy participated in the February revolution, they were allowed in the soviets, and then they were marginalised by force when necessary.

                • Nacarbac [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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                  3 days ago

                  A move which, famously, solved religion forever and didn’t create weakpoints ripe for exploitation by their enemies.

                  Excessive haste in achieving Communism, demanding the masses catch up. This is another type of idealism.

                  • Keld [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
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                    2 days ago

                    Yeah dude the thing that created issues for the soviets was opportunism with regards to clergy being allowed in the soviets, not the entire institutional left siding with fascist and the germans invading.

                  • Le_Wokisme [they/them, undecided]@hexbear.net
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                    3 days ago
                    1. they didn’t purge religion hard enough

                    2. a few more decades of people growing up without religious indoctrination would’ve broken the ideological chain and gone a long way towards keeping it from springing back up.

                • LeninWeave [none/use name, any]@hexbear.net
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                  I don’t think it’s good analysis to say that because the USSR marginalized clergy politically and this sometimes required force, “As soon as you seize power you have to think about how to kill the clergy.”

                  The USSR also wasn’t perfect and sometimes alienated people (especially Muslims) through excessive anti-religiousness. The revolution will look different depending on the conditions of where and when it emerges.

                  • Keld [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
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                    3 days ago

                    excessive anti-religiousness.

                    The Orthodox clergy worked with the anti communists, they kept working with anti communists after they were marginalised, they kept doing it after they were let back in, they kept doing it for the entire rest of the lifespan of the soviet union, and they didn’t stop after the union died.
                    The Catholic church has 100 years siding with fascism on every level on every continent and repaying every single olive branch from the left with betrayal.
                    And how did working with the religious powers work out for the Ba’athists and Iranian leftists?

                    You are eager to learn from the mistakes of maybe being a little too eager to pursue secularisation, but the greater mistake here tends more towards not being more anti religious.

        • causepix@lemmy.ml
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          2 days ago

          “eventually marginalize” and mass murder/incineration are two very different things wtf

        • oliveoil [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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          3 days ago

          Your plan should not be created immediately after the fact. You should have a plan beforehand, because it must not contradict the premise of the revolution.

          If you don’t manage your promises to the religious population, and you inevitably have to break them ad-hoc - then your legitimacy as a government falls into question.

    • purpleworm [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      3 days ago

      There is a huge difference between destroying religious authority/political organization vs burning churches and killing people for being clergy. The first one is absolutely necessary and the second is ridiculous and reactionary.

    • oliveoil [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      3 days ago

      What we are taking about is claiming to have a cross-political revolution combing various religions, ethnicities, and economic outlooks (capitalism, socialism, communism, anarchism, etc) - only to completly fuck them over after the fact.

      All this knowing full well beforehand.

      The Islamic revolution that brought this government did this too by killing and purging communists. This doesn’t end well.

        • oliveoil [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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          3 days ago

          They immediately got invaded and dragged into a war worse than the Russia Ukraine war in terms of destruction and casualties, and they struggle to this very day to keep it together.

          • Keld [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
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            3 days ago

            This was caused in part by the Iranian Supreme leader calling for the overthrow of the Ba’athist government, not by the betrayal of the revolutionaries. It was not a result of the betrayal. This is… I don’t know what you’re trying to do here, but it doesn’t seem cogent.