The global proletariat is not going to love you for an attempt to kill all clergy. They’ll hate you even more if they see you openly planning to deceive them like the person @oliveoil@hexbear.net was quoting did.
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.
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
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.
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
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?
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: 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.
The fact that you’ve got a bunch of people telling you more gently than I why your stance is wrong, and all you do is either shift slightly to pretend you never said what we saw you say, or double down, is disturbing. Idk whether to tell you to stop hanging out on :stormfront or to go back there where you belong. Either way, and I can’t believe I’m doing this given how much I advocated for discipline and not doing this to each other:
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What all the proreligious people fail to notice or gloss over is that it did worked. In every former and current socialist country religiousness failed dramatically, and in postsocialist countries resurgence of fascism is closely tied to resurgence of religion being used as a vessel to spread anticommunism.
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.
Yes, I think the strategy of “lie to religious people, get into power, and kill the priests” (even if it weren’t a betrayal of the peoples’ trust) would not only fail in the Muslim world, but make it very difficult for another revolution to follow anywhere in the Muslim world for decades afterwards.
the science of marxism is when we look at every revolutionary movement and discard the things that worked, and embrace things that have never worked and will never work
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.
I don’t know how you could come up with a general formula like offing all the religious leaders, when the current conditions are that most people in MENA are quite religious.
And religiosity increases under war and poverty, the very conditions wherein the contradictions of capital break and make way for communism.
So your greatest point of opportunity coincides with the highest point of religiousity. And you want to pursue the the most heavy handed route against that population?
If you won’t consider the idea that it’s ever possible for an organization to be too anti-religious for a popular movement when there are many places in the world where the large majority of people are deeply religious, I don’t think this discussion is going anywhere and I’m going to respectfully agree to disagree with you.
Edit: you removed the portion of your comment I actually replied to, and added the last line.
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.
We’re not discussing in a vacuum here, we’re talking about someone asserting that protesters should wait until after the revolution to burn down mosques. Your response to this was that there should always be a plan to kill clergy. These assertions are not compatible with building popular movements in parts of the world where most people are religious.
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.
The global proletariat is not going to love you for an attempt to kill all clergy. They’ll hate you even more if they see you openly planning to deceive them like the person @oliveoil@hexbear.net was quoting did.
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.
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
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.
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
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?
This is an important failure too, as it contributed to the death of the USSR - ala Afghanistan.
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:
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.
Removed by mod
The fact that you’ve got a bunch of people telling you more gently than I why your stance is wrong, and all you do is either shift slightly to pretend you never said what we saw you say, or double down, is disturbing. Idk whether to tell you to stop hanging out on :stormfront
or to go back there where you belong. Either way, and I can’t believe I’m doing this given how much I advocated for discipline and not doing this to each other:
Removed by mod
KKKracKKKer
This is a clearer argument than what you said originally.
This was what you said before, which is very different from the idea that the clergy should be marginalized from political power.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
they didn’t purge religion hard enough
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.
What all the proreligious people fail to notice or gloss over is that it did worked. In every former and current socialist country religiousness failed dramatically, and in postsocialist countries resurgence of fascism is closely tied to resurgence of religion being used as a vessel to spread anticommunism.
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.
Exactly, this is the science of Marxism. Analyze the actual conditions and make appropriate prescriptions based on the circumstances.
Yes, I think the strategy of “lie to religious people, get into power, and kill the priests” (even if it weren’t a betrayal of the peoples’ trust) would not only fail in the Muslim world, but make it very difficult for another revolution to follow anywhere in the Muslim world for decades afterwards.
the science of marxism is when we look at every revolutionary movement and discard the things that worked, and embrace things that have never worked and will never work
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.
I don’t know how you could come up with a general formula like offing all the religious leaders, when the current conditions are that most people in MENA are quite religious.
And religiosity increases under war and poverty, the very conditions wherein the contradictions of capital break and make way for communism.
So your greatest point of opportunity coincides with the highest point of religiousity. And you want to pursue the the most heavy handed route against that population?
If you won’t consider the idea that it’s ever possible for an organization to be too anti-religious for a popular movement when there are many places in the world where the large majority of people are deeply religious, I don’t think this discussion is going anywhere and I’m going to respectfully agree to disagree with you.
Edit: you removed the portion of your comment I actually replied to, and added the last line.
We’re not discussing in a vacuum here, we’re talking about someone asserting that protesters should wait until after the revolution to burn down mosques. Your response to this was that there should always be a plan to kill clergy. These assertions are not compatible with building popular movements in parts of the world where most people are religious.
“eventually marginalize” and mass murder/incineration are two very different things wtf
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.