Enemies

Some wisdom courtesy of "the official website for Revolution newspaper, voice of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA," a publication that does not pretend to Support the Troops. My enemy's enemy, yada yada.

Islamic fundamentalism is a reactionary force. Like other brands of religious literalism, it is a program full of oppressive and outmoded content: patriarchy, bigotry, religious warfare and the all-round promotion of superstition and ignorance.

But the U.S. is the far, far more aggressive, and dangerous reactionary force in the world. And those who live inside the U.S. have the particular responsibility to oppose this power. What is needed right now, on campuses and around the country (and the world) is to bring forward a movement, and critical thinking that opposes the crimes of U.S. imperialism, and, in the process, brings forward a whole different alternative—both in the imperialist countries and in the nations oppressed by imperialism.

Some things never change.

When it comes to picking sides, the hard Leftists never have a doubt about where the greater evil is to be found. They operated the same way in the 1930s, and (oops!) ended up playing a key role in bringing Hitler to power. He showed his gratitude by promptly killing every one of them he could lay hands on. They think it would be different this time, which would seem to be a clear case of "superstition and ignorance." Insanity has been defined as doing the same thing and expecting a different result, but I'm trying to be conciliatory and nonjudgmental here. In any case, we can plainly see the kind of impressive progress in political analysis that has occurred among these "progressives" during the past 75 years.

These folks claim to wholeheartedly accept Darwin's account of evolution by natural selection, but you get the feeling that they really haven't quite grasped the basic idea, which is that the wrong kind of environment gets you killed off. Hitler provided the wrong kind of environment for leftists, and so would the Islamists. Is this rocket surgery? Well, yes, if you happen to be a Marxist zombie. Marxist zombies can only believe Marxist scripture, which portrays history as a necessary unfolding of events, driven by an internal logic that makes the triumph of Communism inevitable. They believe that nonsense even after watching history collapse the whole project into a stinking heap, a severe test of Marxist faith indeed. Sorry, but this just looks like another helping of "superstition and ignorance" to me. These would-be vanguard thinkers may have more in common with the Islamists than even they realize.

Byron