According to the news reports the Pope cracked off his visit to Britain by attacking "Atheist extremism". A bit rich coming from someone who was a member of the Hitler Youth and who represents a "State" that only exists because of a deal it did with the fascist Mussolini! A roll call of the grotesque, reactionary beliefs that this Pope and his Church wish to foist on its members, and anyone else who they can bamboozle, or frighten into submitting to, shows just who the extremists are.
If that wasn't bad enough one of this old blokes associates the other day talked about Britain being like a Third World country. This from an organisation still mired in Medieval mysticism and obscurantism. What was interesting, of course, was that this organisation that still lies openly to its members to try to keep up that mysticism, for example in lying about the transformation of the wine into blood, cannot rely on such magic in order to achieve a simple thing such as transporting the Pope from Rome to Scotland, or even from one part of Scotland. On the contrary, he is quite happy it appears to be transported by jet airliner, and Jaguar, both the products of that atheistic science he condemns.
The nonsense and crawling to this relic of the Middle Ages, by Alex Salmond ought to be enough to dispose of any credibility as some kind of radical that he might have had. At least Clegg admits his Atheism, which ought to make him feel uncomfortable by the fact that the Tories have taken the opportunity of the Pope's visit to attack the previous Government's atheism - really, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown are athesists! - and to declare that "they do God"! Baroness Warsi, interviewed on the BBC's Daily Politics declared that they beleive that the religious leaders ought to be given more power and responsibility in policy making. Really? So does that mean then that they would support the idea that Muslim Leaders ought to be able to establish policy in Muslim areas to introduce Sharia Law, to go along with the Tories proposals for extending Faith Schools as another form of indoctrtination?
That the Churches are going on the offensive against secularism, and that they are being supported by the Tories, is no surprise. In part it is the logical conclusion arising from the fawning of sections of the left at the feet of religion. Its not just that sections of the left crawled into bed with the most reactionary elements of Political Islam, describing any criticism as "Islamaphobia", or that when free speech was threatened by such religious extremists over things like the cartoons affair, the Liberal elite lacked any bacbone to stand up to them, it is the long standing fawning of sections of the Left towards "Faith Groups" in various Popular Fronts.
In fact, Newsnight's Paul Mason has an excellent blog about the self-same phenomenon in the US - Delaware To Planet Earth. In it he speaks about the latest success of the extreme Right Teaparty movement in the US, whose leader is becoming Sarah Palin, a woman who makes the religious leanings of George Bush look modest. Palin is a member of a Church which preaches the doctrines of the "Endtimers" who look forward to the imminent second coming, to be announced by a war in the Middle East. But Paul is right to describe this movement as "plebeian". It is not a movement of the more enlightened sections of Big Capital in the US, whose interests are more aligned to the policies of Obama and the Democrats, but of those same backward layers of society from within the middle class, and working class that I have described as explaining the current politics of the Tories.
"The Teaparty movement was born out of the rightwing populist-led protests against the original plan to bail out Wall Street, the TARP, in October 2008. As the bailout morphed into a $787bn fiscal stimulus, the demands of the movement coalesced around an agenda of tax cuts, lower public spending and a balanced budget (America's national debt is $13.5 trillion). Then it moved on again to migration, abortion, gun-control and challenges to US Federal law."
That is exactly the description I would use of the Tories - right-wing populism, and it has emerged and based itself on exactly the same ground as the teaparty movement. It is no wonder that it is following them in the drive towards those other reactionary areas of religion. The contrast between that movement of the Tories and the real interests of Big Capital could be glimpsed in comments by Digby Jones when he was reviewing the day's papers late last night on the BBC's News Channel. The pope should be free to come here, he said, because that is a sign of our support for freedom. But, especially at a time when workers are being asked to make sacrifices, he said, why should the cost of it be borne out of the public purse? And he then went on to make the statement, which sets out the clear interests of Big Capital, when he said that, of course the deficit had to be brought under control, but it had to be done in such a way as not to send the economy into a renewed recession. To make his point he condemned the Tories scrapping of the Schools Building Programme, which he said not only threatened future education, but here and now had a devastating effect on construction activity and the economy.
In a way, we have a similar situation to that analysed by Marx and Engels, and by Trotsky in the Theory of Permanent Revolution. Then it was the bourgeoisie whose modernising and revolutionising ideas stood in opposition to the old ideas of feudal society. But, they could only win support for those ideas if they could mobilise the workers behind them. But, when the workers themselves became powerful enough to advance their own interests going beyond those of the bourgeoisie, that bourgeoisie was led to sell-out for fear of the workers. In the end, it won as its own economic and social power became so great that they could suborinate the old ruling classes, politically and ideologically, and as Engels points out, that Big Bouregoisie was then able to incorporate the working-class by adopting its political programme, by establishing that "Social Democratic Consensus", I described in my blogs A Tale Of Contradictions. Today, that is manifest by the fact that in the US, Big Capital, was the driving force behind Obama's Health reforms - indeed it had pressed the republicans to introduce some socialisation of healthcare, and they transfered $750 billion of health costs off the books of companies and on to those of the State - and who demanded the massive Keynesian stimulus programmes to prevent the US economy from collapsing. Big Capital needs similar policies by the UK and European governments, and for the same reasons. It also needs more liberal social policies as recent statements by its representatives have set out that reduce tensions from racism etc. The opponents of such policies today are not those old ruling classes, but those sections of society that were never dragged along into the modern world, because of their economic and social position within it. The Church of England was once described as the Tory Party at prayer, but the shared membership were those layers of the middle class whose narrow mindedness is reflected in the papers that feed their bigotry like the Daily Express and Daily Mail. But, in addition they aree supported by those layers of the working-class who have also missed out on the liberating, and secularising aspects of Education - even in its limited Capitalist form, and its own schizophrenic attitude towards religion (I was once told by one of my old teachers later in life that without all the Christmas activities in school the teachers would have to think up something to cover the two or three weeeks leading up to the holiday) - the same layers who also have missed out on the organised labour movement, and its ability to encourage free thought.
Today, those modernising elements of Big Capital should form an alliance with the radical sections of society, with the Labour Movement to push for those ideas, and against the dangers being presented by the growing religious, obscurantist, populist Right - the same forces that lead ultimately to fascism - but it won't, for the same reason it would not ally with the workers in the past. It would mean an open break with sections of its own class, an open conflict which would expose its weakness to the working class. And, it will not do so for fear of really unleashing the power of the working-class, which might simply roll over it. Instead, it will do what it has done for the last 100 years. It will act through its back channels in the State, it will push its interests via bureaucratic means. In doing so, it risks simply feeding the reactionary forces even more in the way that Paul mason outlines in his blog.
Showing posts with label Endtimers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Endtimers. Show all posts
Thursday, 16 September 2010
Thursday, 2 September 2010
Suffering With a Bad Code
A few years ago, I was in Ireland for a couple of weeks. Just after Sunday lunch I was watching a programnme on Irish TV that caught my interest. It did so for two reasons. The programme was about Mary Magdalene, and given the nature of Catholicism in Ireland, I was surprised by the openness of the programme, which detailed how Mary Magdalene had in fact been the most important of the Apostles, closest to Jesus and who as a result had been carved up by the other Apostles in the political jostling after Jesus' death. This included the actions of their followers who in writing the New Testament deliberately confused Mary Magdalene with Mary the prostitute, an act which apparently the Catholic Church has only fairly recently apologised for. The second reason it caught my interest was that, like many other people, I enjoy a good mystery, and these kinds of historical revelations seem to hold our attention, which is why 40 years on conspiracy theories still abound over the assassination of JFK. Theories surrounding Jesus and Mary Magdalene abound. There have been documentaries detailing their supposed marriage, that Mary gave birth to a child after having gone to live in France and that the Holy Grail protected by the Templars is not in fact the Holy Grial San Greal but Royal Blood - Sang Real. Its the stuff of Dan Brown's "Da Vinci Code"
According to Jonathan Miller in his series on disbelief, humans seem to have a need for such a belief in something beyond what can be easily explained by material facts. He argued that such beliefs and mysteries preceded religion and cannot be explained simply in terms of trying to understand events with inadequate tools, but that such phenomena seem to be built into the human psyche, hardwired into our brains.
Such mysteries, conspiracy theories etc. continue to abound and provide lucrative earnings for authors and publishers. Mostly they are pretty harmless, sometiems they may have a particualr purpose e.g. the US definitely encouraged belief in UFO's to cover its own high tech military experiements, but when coupled with religion such things can have a powerful and often reactionary effect.
In order to debunk at least one of these religious mysteries, which is a fundamental part of Judaeo-Christian religion, but also the basis of many modern occult thrillers (when I told someone at work a few years ago that when I watched The exorcist it made me laugh because it was so ridiculous and so bad, they said "But would you have laughed if you'd known it was based on a true story", which just made me laugh even more.) the Revelation of John, I thought it would be useful to give Engels explanation of the Revelation as contained in his "On the History of Early Christianity." Engels explains the numerology of 666, and despite the fact that these explanations have been known for a long time, few people are actually aware of them, which is why filmmakers can continue to make films about the coming of the antichrist, and provide all kinds of possible interpretations of the Revelation. Numerology was big in early Christian times, it features in the occult novels of Dennis Wheatley too, and many of the more successful examples of the genre, whilst not being based on numerology as such, are based on numbers and codes for example the Da Vinci Code, Bible Code etc. This probably reflects our interest in numbers too which have a similar kind of mystery to them - magic squares etc.
As Engels points out the treatment of John and his Revelation is similar to the treatment of Mary Magdalene. We are led to believe that the John providing the Revelation is John the Apostle, but in fact he is not. The authors of the Bible created the confusion deliberately in order to give this John greater clout. Anyway here is Engels explanation.
"For the interpretation of these prophecies, as far as they refer to events of that time, we are indebted to German criticism, particularly Ewald, Lücke and Ferdinand Benary. It has been made accessible to non-theologians by Renan. We have already seen that Babylon, the Great Whore, stands for Rome, the city of seven hills. We are told in Chapter XVII, 9-11, about the beast on which she sits that:
The seven heads" of the beast "are seven mountains, on which the woman sitteth. And there are seven kings: five are fallen, and one is, and the other is not yet come; and when he cometh he must continue a short space. And the beast that was, and is not, even. he is the eighth, and is of the seven, and goeth into perdition.
According to this the beast is Roman world domination, represented by seven caesars in succession, one of them having been mortally wounded and no longer reigning, but he will be healed and will return. It will be given unto him as the eighth to establish the kingdom of blasphemy and defiance of God. It will be given unto him
...to make war with the saints and to overcome them.... And all that dwell upon the earth shall worship him, whose names are not written in the book of life of the Lamb.... And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: and that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six. (XII, 7-18.)
We merely note that boycott is mentioned here as one of the measures to be applied against the Christians by the Roman Empire -- and is therefore patently an invention of the devil -- and pass on to the question who this Roman emperor is who has reigned once before, was wounded to death and removed but will return as the eighth in the series in the role of Antichrist.
Taking Augustus as the first we have: 2. Tiberius, 3. Caligula, 4. Claudius, 5. Nero, 6. Galba. "Five are fallen, and one is." Hence, Nero is already fallen and Galba is. Galba ruled from June 9, 68 to January 15, 69. But immediately after he ascended the throne the legions of the Rhine revolted under Vitellius while other generals prepared military risings in other provinces. In Rome itself the praetorians rose, killed Galba and proclaimed Otho emperor.
From this we see that our Revelation was written under Galba. Probably towards the end of his rule. Or, at the latest, during the three months (up to April 15, 69) of the rule of Otho, "the seventh." But who is the eighth, who was and is not? That we learn from the number 666.
Among the Semites -- Chaldeans and Jews -- there was at the time a kind of magic based on the double meaning of letters. As about 300 years before our era Hebrew letters were also used as symbols for numbers: a=l, b=2, g=3, d=4, etc. The cabbala diviners added up the value of each letter of a name and sought from the sum to prophesy the future of the one who bore the name, e.g., by forming words or combinations of words of equal value. Secret words and the like were also expressed in this language of numbers. This art was given the Greek name gematriah, geometry; the Chaldeans, who pursued this as a business and were called mathematici by Tacitus, were later expelled from Rome under Claudius and again under Vitellius, presumably for "serious disorders."
It was by means of this mathematics that our number 666 appeared. It is a disguise for the name of one of the first five caesars. But besides the number 666, Irenaeus, at the end of the second century, knew another reading -- 616, which, at all events, appeared at a time when the number puzzle was still widely known. The proof of the solution will be if it holds good for both numbers.
This solution was given by Ferdinand Benary of Berlin. The name is Nero. The number is based on xxx xxxx Neron Kesar, the Hebrew spelling of the Greek Nerôn Kaisar, Emperor Nero, authenticated by means of the Talmud and Palmyrian inscriptions. This inscription was found on coins of Nero's time minted in the eastern half of the empire. And so -- n (nun)=50; r (resh)=200; v (vau) for o=6; n (nun)=50; k (kaph)=100; s (samech)=60; r (resh)=200. Total 666. If we take as a basis the Latin spelling Nero Caesar the second nun=50 disappears and we get 666 - 50 = 616, which is Irenaeus's reading.
In fact the whole Roman Empire suddenly broke into confusion in Galba's time. Galba himself marched on Rome at the head of the Spanish and Gallic legions to overthrow Nero, who fled and ordered an emancipated slave to kill him. But not only the praetorians in Rome plotted against Galba, the supreme commanders in the provinces did too; new pretendants to the throne appeared everywhere and prepared to march on Rome with their legions. The empire seemed doomed to civil war, its dissolution appeared imminent. Over and above all this the rumour spread, especially in the East, that Nero had not been killed but only wounded, that he had fled to the Parthians and was about to advance with an army over the Euphrates to begin another and more bloody rule of terror. Achaia and Asia in particular were terrified by such reports. And at the very time at which the Revelation must have been written there appeared a false Nero who settled with a fairly considerable number of supporters not far from Patmos and Asia Minor on the island of Kytnos in the Aegean Sea (now called Thermia), until he was killed while Otho still reigned. What was there to be astonished at in the fact that among the Christians, against whom Nero had begun the first great persecution, the view spread that he would return as the Antichrist and that his return and the intensified attempt at a bloody suppression of the new sect that it would involve would be the sign and prelude of the return of Christ, of the great victorious struggle against the powers of hell, of the thousand year kingdom "shortly" to be established, the confident expectation of which inspired the martyrs to go joyfully to death?
Christian and Christian-influenced literature in the first two centuries gives sufficient indication that the secret of the number 666 was then known to many. Irenaeus no longer knew it, but on the other hand he and many others up to the end of the third century also knew that the returning Nero was meant by the beast of the Apocalypse. This trace is then lost and the work which interests us is fantastically interpreted by religious-minded future-tellers; I myself as a child knew old people who, following the example of old Johann Albrecht Bengel, expected the end of the world and the last judgment in the year 1836. The prophecy was fulfilled, and to the very year. The victim of the last judgment, however, was not the sinful world, but the pious interpreters of the Revelation themselves. For in 1836 F. Benary provided the key to the number 666 and thus put a torturous end to all the prophetical calculations, that new gematriah."
According to Jonathan Miller in his series on disbelief, humans seem to have a need for such a belief in something beyond what can be easily explained by material facts. He argued that such beliefs and mysteries preceded religion and cannot be explained simply in terms of trying to understand events with inadequate tools, but that such phenomena seem to be built into the human psyche, hardwired into our brains.
Such mysteries, conspiracy theories etc. continue to abound and provide lucrative earnings for authors and publishers. Mostly they are pretty harmless, sometiems they may have a particualr purpose e.g. the US definitely encouraged belief in UFO's to cover its own high tech military experiements, but when coupled with religion such things can have a powerful and often reactionary effect.
In order to debunk at least one of these religious mysteries, which is a fundamental part of Judaeo-Christian religion, but also the basis of many modern occult thrillers (when I told someone at work a few years ago that when I watched The exorcist it made me laugh because it was so ridiculous and so bad, they said "But would you have laughed if you'd known it was based on a true story", which just made me laugh even more.) the Revelation of John, I thought it would be useful to give Engels explanation of the Revelation as contained in his "On the History of Early Christianity." Engels explains the numerology of 666, and despite the fact that these explanations have been known for a long time, few people are actually aware of them, which is why filmmakers can continue to make films about the coming of the antichrist, and provide all kinds of possible interpretations of the Revelation. Numerology was big in early Christian times, it features in the occult novels of Dennis Wheatley too, and many of the more successful examples of the genre, whilst not being based on numerology as such, are based on numbers and codes for example the Da Vinci Code, Bible Code etc. This probably reflects our interest in numbers too which have a similar kind of mystery to them - magic squares etc.
As Engels points out the treatment of John and his Revelation is similar to the treatment of Mary Magdalene. We are led to believe that the John providing the Revelation is John the Apostle, but in fact he is not. The authors of the Bible created the confusion deliberately in order to give this John greater clout. Anyway here is Engels explanation.
"For the interpretation of these prophecies, as far as they refer to events of that time, we are indebted to German criticism, particularly Ewald, Lücke and Ferdinand Benary. It has been made accessible to non-theologians by Renan. We have already seen that Babylon, the Great Whore, stands for Rome, the city of seven hills. We are told in Chapter XVII, 9-11, about the beast on which she sits that:
The seven heads" of the beast "are seven mountains, on which the woman sitteth. And there are seven kings: five are fallen, and one is, and the other is not yet come; and when he cometh he must continue a short space. And the beast that was, and is not, even. he is the eighth, and is of the seven, and goeth into perdition.
According to this the beast is Roman world domination, represented by seven caesars in succession, one of them having been mortally wounded and no longer reigning, but he will be healed and will return. It will be given unto him as the eighth to establish the kingdom of blasphemy and defiance of God. It will be given unto him
...to make war with the saints and to overcome them.... And all that dwell upon the earth shall worship him, whose names are not written in the book of life of the Lamb.... And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: and that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six. (XII, 7-18.)
We merely note that boycott is mentioned here as one of the measures to be applied against the Christians by the Roman Empire -- and is therefore patently an invention of the devil -- and pass on to the question who this Roman emperor is who has reigned once before, was wounded to death and removed but will return as the eighth in the series in the role of Antichrist.
Taking Augustus as the first we have: 2. Tiberius, 3. Caligula, 4. Claudius, 5. Nero, 6. Galba. "Five are fallen, and one is." Hence, Nero is already fallen and Galba is. Galba ruled from June 9, 68 to January 15, 69. But immediately after he ascended the throne the legions of the Rhine revolted under Vitellius while other generals prepared military risings in other provinces. In Rome itself the praetorians rose, killed Galba and proclaimed Otho emperor.
From this we see that our Revelation was written under Galba. Probably towards the end of his rule. Or, at the latest, during the three months (up to April 15, 69) of the rule of Otho, "the seventh." But who is the eighth, who was and is not? That we learn from the number 666.
Among the Semites -- Chaldeans and Jews -- there was at the time a kind of magic based on the double meaning of letters. As about 300 years before our era Hebrew letters were also used as symbols for numbers: a=l, b=2, g=3, d=4, etc. The cabbala diviners added up the value of each letter of a name and sought from the sum to prophesy the future of the one who bore the name, e.g., by forming words or combinations of words of equal value. Secret words and the like were also expressed in this language of numbers. This art was given the Greek name gematriah, geometry; the Chaldeans, who pursued this as a business and were called mathematici by Tacitus, were later expelled from Rome under Claudius and again under Vitellius, presumably for "serious disorders."
It was by means of this mathematics that our number 666 appeared. It is a disguise for the name of one of the first five caesars. But besides the number 666, Irenaeus, at the end of the second century, knew another reading -- 616, which, at all events, appeared at a time when the number puzzle was still widely known. The proof of the solution will be if it holds good for both numbers.
This solution was given by Ferdinand Benary of Berlin. The name is Nero. The number is based on xxx xxxx Neron Kesar, the Hebrew spelling of the Greek Nerôn Kaisar, Emperor Nero, authenticated by means of the Talmud and Palmyrian inscriptions. This inscription was found on coins of Nero's time minted in the eastern half of the empire. And so -- n (nun)=50; r (resh)=200; v (vau) for o=6; n (nun)=50; k (kaph)=100; s (samech)=60; r (resh)=200. Total 666. If we take as a basis the Latin spelling Nero Caesar the second nun=50 disappears and we get 666 - 50 = 616, which is Irenaeus's reading.
In fact the whole Roman Empire suddenly broke into confusion in Galba's time. Galba himself marched on Rome at the head of the Spanish and Gallic legions to overthrow Nero, who fled and ordered an emancipated slave to kill him. But not only the praetorians in Rome plotted against Galba, the supreme commanders in the provinces did too; new pretendants to the throne appeared everywhere and prepared to march on Rome with their legions. The empire seemed doomed to civil war, its dissolution appeared imminent. Over and above all this the rumour spread, especially in the East, that Nero had not been killed but only wounded, that he had fled to the Parthians and was about to advance with an army over the Euphrates to begin another and more bloody rule of terror. Achaia and Asia in particular were terrified by such reports. And at the very time at which the Revelation must have been written there appeared a false Nero who settled with a fairly considerable number of supporters not far from Patmos and Asia Minor on the island of Kytnos in the Aegean Sea (now called Thermia), until he was killed while Otho still reigned. What was there to be astonished at in the fact that among the Christians, against whom Nero had begun the first great persecution, the view spread that he would return as the Antichrist and that his return and the intensified attempt at a bloody suppression of the new sect that it would involve would be the sign and prelude of the return of Christ, of the great victorious struggle against the powers of hell, of the thousand year kingdom "shortly" to be established, the confident expectation of which inspired the martyrs to go joyfully to death?
Christian and Christian-influenced literature in the first two centuries gives sufficient indication that the secret of the number 666 was then known to many. Irenaeus no longer knew it, but on the other hand he and many others up to the end of the third century also knew that the returning Nero was meant by the beast of the Apocalypse. This trace is then lost and the work which interests us is fantastically interpreted by religious-minded future-tellers; I myself as a child knew old people who, following the example of old Johann Albrecht Bengel, expected the end of the world and the last judgment in the year 1836. The prophecy was fulfilled, and to the very year. The victim of the last judgment, however, was not the sinful world, but the pious interpreters of the Revelation themselves. For in 1836 F. Benary provided the key to the number 666 and thus put a torturous end to all the prophetical calculations, that new gematriah."
Wednesday, 1 September 2010
Morons On The March
The other day in my Blog on "Creationists On The March", I pointed to the apparent contradiction between the fact that although the US is by far the world's most technologically advanced society, it continues to have tens of millions of people who beleive literally in the Bible, and who have little or no appreciation of basic scientific facts. In a forthcoming blog I shall be looking at similar contradictions that seem to abound across the world today, and explain the basis of these contradictions, and their implications.
In the meantime, I was struck by the Newsnight report last night on the growing opposition to Obama, and influence of the Tea Party movement. The report was interesting because it illustrated this contradiction once again. On the one hand, the Murdoch Empire represents the application of the most modern technology to the purpose of media production and distribution. Yet, despite that the Fox News Network not only represents the most reactionary, mangling of facts and opinion you could come across outside some former Eastern European regime, but also the perpetuation and dissemination of this kind of medieval mysticism and bigotry.
For those of us in Europe, the images of the oily preachers, spouting the most cheesy lines, and effecting fake emotion, come over for what they really are, comical snake oil salesmen, preying on gullible, often poor, ill-educated people. We are even more likely to see such creatures as objects of derision, given that so many of them soon turn out to, not only have been lining their pockets, and living the high-life, but a high-life that includes not a small amount of indulgence in each of the seven deadly sins! Though we might be still taken aback by the extent to which those they have previously gulled, are quick to line up and hand over their money once again, no sooner has their chosen one expressed their profound repentance at having been caught out.
But, such sepctacle is even more stomach churning when the snake oil salesmen is not one of these hokey preachers, but a main news man on Fox News, and who was so obviously fake that even the BBC reporter commented on his attempts to force an ingenuous tear, unsuccesfully. Yet, as the report shows this particular snake oil salesmen was able to attract, tens of thousands of people to the Lincoln Memorial on the Anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream", speech to hear his fifth rate, counterfeit product, and to rail against Obama's "Socialism"! The further irony, looking at many of those who attended, is that these are likely to be precisely the kinds of people who would gain most from an authentic Socialism.
The tendency must be to simply dismiss such people as morons, but we cannot do that for many reasons. Firstly, what this demonstrates is the extent to which, without prolonged work by socialists amongst all layers of the working class, there are large numbers of people who will look for easy answers to their problems, and those easy answers are always reactionary. Secondly, the US, but not only the US, there are other states, with their own religious zealots, has nuclear weapons, and by far the world's largest military. I tend to beleive that the ruling class, and its State, who do not share these nonsensical medieval ideas, would not stand idly by, and allow a Government of religious bigots to just blow up the plante on a whim. At the same time, the experiecne of Nazism demonstrates how, under certain conditions, a group of zealots, able to secure control of the Governmental power, and to exercise a control over the State, can gain a degree of independence from the ruling class that might not so easily be constrained. Sarah Palin is reported to attend a Church that preaches the doctrines of the "Endtimers", who hold the nutty, and odious view that any time now, millions of true beleivers will simply disappear off the face of the Earth in the Rapture, whilst God brings about Armageddon, an event they beleive which will be sparked by a War in the Middle East. There are more of these Endtimers who go on pilgrimages to Jersusalem, and who finance right-wing Israeli zealots, than there are Jews.
But, as my forthcoming series of blogs will argue these contradictions have a material basis. They are contradictions the Left should take seriously.
In the meantime, I was struck by the Newsnight report last night on the growing opposition to Obama, and influence of the Tea Party movement. The report was interesting because it illustrated this contradiction once again. On the one hand, the Murdoch Empire represents the application of the most modern technology to the purpose of media production and distribution. Yet, despite that the Fox News Network not only represents the most reactionary, mangling of facts and opinion you could come across outside some former Eastern European regime, but also the perpetuation and dissemination of this kind of medieval mysticism and bigotry.
For those of us in Europe, the images of the oily preachers, spouting the most cheesy lines, and effecting fake emotion, come over for what they really are, comical snake oil salesmen, preying on gullible, often poor, ill-educated people. We are even more likely to see such creatures as objects of derision, given that so many of them soon turn out to, not only have been lining their pockets, and living the high-life, but a high-life that includes not a small amount of indulgence in each of the seven deadly sins! Though we might be still taken aback by the extent to which those they have previously gulled, are quick to line up and hand over their money once again, no sooner has their chosen one expressed their profound repentance at having been caught out.
But, such sepctacle is even more stomach churning when the snake oil salesmen is not one of these hokey preachers, but a main news man on Fox News, and who was so obviously fake that even the BBC reporter commented on his attempts to force an ingenuous tear, unsuccesfully. Yet, as the report shows this particular snake oil salesmen was able to attract, tens of thousands of people to the Lincoln Memorial on the Anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream", speech to hear his fifth rate, counterfeit product, and to rail against Obama's "Socialism"! The further irony, looking at many of those who attended, is that these are likely to be precisely the kinds of people who would gain most from an authentic Socialism.
The tendency must be to simply dismiss such people as morons, but we cannot do that for many reasons. Firstly, what this demonstrates is the extent to which, without prolonged work by socialists amongst all layers of the working class, there are large numbers of people who will look for easy answers to their problems, and those easy answers are always reactionary. Secondly, the US, but not only the US, there are other states, with their own religious zealots, has nuclear weapons, and by far the world's largest military. I tend to beleive that the ruling class, and its State, who do not share these nonsensical medieval ideas, would not stand idly by, and allow a Government of religious bigots to just blow up the plante on a whim. At the same time, the experiecne of Nazism demonstrates how, under certain conditions, a group of zealots, able to secure control of the Governmental power, and to exercise a control over the State, can gain a degree of independence from the ruling class that might not so easily be constrained. Sarah Palin is reported to attend a Church that preaches the doctrines of the "Endtimers", who hold the nutty, and odious view that any time now, millions of true beleivers will simply disappear off the face of the Earth in the Rapture, whilst God brings about Armageddon, an event they beleive which will be sparked by a War in the Middle East. There are more of these Endtimers who go on pilgrimages to Jersusalem, and who finance right-wing Israeli zealots, than there are Jews.
But, as my forthcoming series of blogs will argue these contradictions have a material basis. They are contradictions the Left should take seriously.
Monday, 23 March 2009
Creationists on the March
In recent times it has become clear that religion is on the March. Craig Ventnor who decoded the Human Genome in a lecture a few months ago spoke of his despair that in his own country of the United States, the most technologically advanced on the planet, there were still a large majority of people who thought the world was only 7,000 years old as the Boible says, that people walked the Planet alongside dinosaurs and so on. Even in Europe where it was thought that such ideas had died out decades ago with the succesful fights over "Lady Chatterley's Lover", "Gay News" and so on, and the general acceptance of the Theory of Evolution, there has been a growth of religious fundamentalism, and even of Creationism, despite the fact that in Britain only about 20% of people say they believe in God. It is a determined minority that is on the offensive, and it now they are getting backing ffrom fundamentlaists in the US who have big bucks and TV channels to back them up. Already on UK Cable TV we have a GOD Channel, as well as fundamentalist preachers occupying slots on other channels at the weekend.
In part, sections of the Left are to blame. They have accepted the Liberal nonsense of Multiculturalism rather than arguing that all existing cultures - all of which rest in large part on some set of reactioanry religious and moral beleifs - are oppressive, all are the cultures of the slaveowners, and Socialism will require a single, secular, working class culture if it is to be succesful. Sections of the Left in that vein have bowed down afraid to criticise in particular the cultures of ethnic Minorities in their midst - many of which unreformed as Judeo-Christian based cultures have been over the last 50 years or so, in particular, in order to survive in a largely secular, modernist world, are even more reactionary than that Western Culture - for fear a) of being criticised as in some way racist or b) for fear of losing potential recruits for their organisations within such communities or c) because having lost faith in the working class they have found themselves as foot soldiers of assorted religious zealots engaged in this or that "anti-imperialist" struggle. And as was bound to be the case one group of reactioanry religious fundamentalists feeds off the success of another. The Christians understandably say, "If you can't criticise or mock Mohammed, why should it be okay to criticise or mock Jesus?" The door is pushed open to a retun of all of that religious fundamentalism and censorship that most of us thought we had seen the end of in the 1960's.
But, the Left has to be careful not to respond with a censorship of its own. I agree people should be free to believe whatever nonsense they like. Galileo should have been free to argue his viewpoint after all when the majority of the planet thought he was a nutter. The problem, however, seems to me to be this. We are socialists, Marxists even, we have a view not just of how the world is, but how it should be. We do not wish just to have the right to hold those beliefs, but to convince others that they are correct. That means also then creating a world and society according to those values. In that world people might be free to hold whatever beliefs they continued to have, but the dominant view would prevail.
Someone who continued to believe that freedom could only be achieved through a free market for instance might be free to put that into practice in terms of employing themselves or maybe even a few other people, but many Marxists (I wouldn't be amongst them) would see it as the function of the state to prevent such people from say owning a large enterprise that exploited workers.
In short what I am saying is that if you have a world view the whole point is that if you hold it sincerely then you DO want it to be put into practice, and not want it to be something you just take out to read every so often. The problem secularists are now having with religion is that for a long time they have got used to religionists being hypocrites, people who hold their religious beliefs as a token, who even at the highest levels of the Church have effectively given in to Science, and compromised their beliefs. It is the shock of now confronting people who assert their beliefs, and their right to try to structure a world according to those beliefs as determinedly as socialists put forward their beliefs and try to create a world according to them.
Socialists would be appalled if anyone suggested that they should not try to implement their beliefs in practice, so why should socialists expect religionists to be any less appalled. This makes the answer difficult. No secularist wants to allow religionists to impose their views on society, but to deny the right to put those views into practice sets a dangerous precedent for socialists. Just as legitimately could a bourgeois society refuse to allow socialists to put its views into practice, could argue against the formation of Trade Unions, Co-operative organisations etc. or any other practical application of socialist ideas.
The answer must surely be not to look at measures which effectively amount to censorship and limitation of freedom, but to once and for all destroy the arguments upon which the religionists stand.
In part, sections of the Left are to blame. They have accepted the Liberal nonsense of Multiculturalism rather than arguing that all existing cultures - all of which rest in large part on some set of reactioanry religious and moral beleifs - are oppressive, all are the cultures of the slaveowners, and Socialism will require a single, secular, working class culture if it is to be succesful. Sections of the Left in that vein have bowed down afraid to criticise in particular the cultures of ethnic Minorities in their midst - many of which unreformed as Judeo-Christian based cultures have been over the last 50 years or so, in particular, in order to survive in a largely secular, modernist world, are even more reactionary than that Western Culture - for fear a) of being criticised as in some way racist or b) for fear of losing potential recruits for their organisations within such communities or c) because having lost faith in the working class they have found themselves as foot soldiers of assorted religious zealots engaged in this or that "anti-imperialist" struggle. And as was bound to be the case one group of reactioanry religious fundamentalists feeds off the success of another. The Christians understandably say, "If you can't criticise or mock Mohammed, why should it be okay to criticise or mock Jesus?" The door is pushed open to a retun of all of that religious fundamentalism and censorship that most of us thought we had seen the end of in the 1960's.
But, the Left has to be careful not to respond with a censorship of its own. I agree people should be free to believe whatever nonsense they like. Galileo should have been free to argue his viewpoint after all when the majority of the planet thought he was a nutter. The problem, however, seems to me to be this. We are socialists, Marxists even, we have a view not just of how the world is, but how it should be. We do not wish just to have the right to hold those beliefs, but to convince others that they are correct. That means also then creating a world and society according to those values. In that world people might be free to hold whatever beliefs they continued to have, but the dominant view would prevail.
Someone who continued to believe that freedom could only be achieved through a free market for instance might be free to put that into practice in terms of employing themselves or maybe even a few other people, but many Marxists (I wouldn't be amongst them) would see it as the function of the state to prevent such people from say owning a large enterprise that exploited workers.
In short what I am saying is that if you have a world view the whole point is that if you hold it sincerely then you DO want it to be put into practice, and not want it to be something you just take out to read every so often. The problem secularists are now having with religion is that for a long time they have got used to religionists being hypocrites, people who hold their religious beliefs as a token, who even at the highest levels of the Church have effectively given in to Science, and compromised their beliefs. It is the shock of now confronting people who assert their beliefs, and their right to try to structure a world according to those beliefs as determinedly as socialists put forward their beliefs and try to create a world according to them.
Socialists would be appalled if anyone suggested that they should not try to implement their beliefs in practice, so why should socialists expect religionists to be any less appalled. This makes the answer difficult. No secularist wants to allow religionists to impose their views on society, but to deny the right to put those views into practice sets a dangerous precedent for socialists. Just as legitimately could a bourgeois society refuse to allow socialists to put its views into practice, could argue against the formation of Trade Unions, Co-operative organisations etc. or any other practical application of socialist ideas.
The answer must surely be not to look at measures which effectively amount to censorship and limitation of freedom, but to once and for all destroy the arguments upon which the religionists stand.
Tuesday, 9 September 2008
The End of the World is Nigh
The Big Bang Machine
Some people think that tomorrow might be the end of the world. In the early hours of tomorrow the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland will be turned on. The LHT accelerates particles to within a fraction of the speed of light in order to collide them together at immense energies with the intention of creating new particles. It is hoped that the results of these experiments will either confirm or repudiate the basic assumptions of physics that have operated for some decades now through what is known as the Standard Model. In particular, it is hoped that the experiments will produce if only for a fraction of a second the elusive Higgs Boson, a particle theorised as having existed right after the Big Bang, and which is the particle whose existence is necessary to prove the existence of the Higgs Field which is supposed to explain how matter achieves mass.
But, some scientists have argued that the experiments are dabbling in things not properly understood, and could create phenomena, which could destroy the planet. One common theory is that of the creation of micro black holes, which could grow due to their immensely dense mass to consume all other surrounding matter. Some of these ideas are discussed on Wikipedia here.
I'm not a physicist so I'm not qualified to say whether any of these ideas hold water or whether the response to them from the majority of scientists, which states that the risks put forward do not constitute good science are valid. Similar concerns have been raised in the past, and science does have a habit of undertaking activities that might be dangerous. For example, when the nuclear bomb was being developed the scientists working on the programme themselves did not know whether the chain reaction started by the explosion would be contained or not. From what I do understand of the contending views being put I think it unlikely that these experiments will mean the end of the world, but to an extent that is besides the point. As the above Wiki article points out Britain's own Astronomer Royal, Martin Rees, has speculated in a recent book that mankind has a 50-50 chance of destroying itself. The important issue surely is that science has now reached such a level that in a whole series of disciplines the consequences of error can spell catastrophes on a scale never previously possible. Just look at the way CFC's in a few short years of their extensive use led to the creation of the Ozone hole. It is surely time that the working class demanded that science be brought udner far greater democratic control, that some degree of workers inspection be developed to prevent a small minority who ultimately work in the interests of Capitalist society do not destroy the whole of mankind.
The Big Bucks Machine
In a CNN report today it was disclosed that Sarah Palin, the Republican Vice Presidential candidate, is not only a Creationist - which was disclosed last week - but that she was a member of a Christian Fundamentalist Church in Alaska known as The Assembly of God. The nutters in this cult not only gibber away like cretins supposedly speaking in tongues, but are also Endtimers. There are soemthing like 10 million Endtimers mostly on the Christian Fundamentlaist Right in America, and they had some influence on US politics under Bush, though he mostly relied on their votes rather than subscribed to their views.
The Endtimers are a frightening group of religious zealots. Were they just a small group somewhere their views would be frightening enough. That there are 10 million of them in the world's most heavily and nuclear armed country, a country where 70% of the population still believe that the world is less than 7,000 years old as the Bible bashers claim, and that Man walked on the Earth at the same time as the dinosaurs is even worse. That in such a country one of these nutters is possibly going to be in a position to have her finger on the nuclear trigger if the aged John Mccain were to pop his clogs by natural or other causes is far more frightening than the thought of either the world coming to an end through the experiments at CERN or the possession of a nuclear bomb by Ahmedinejad. Every year thousands of Entimers ffrom the US, UK and elsewhere visit Israel. They encourage conflict between Israel and Palestine hoping that sch a conflict will escalate into the Armageddon prophesied in the Bible, which will bring about the End of Days, and the Second Coming of Christ through which these religious lunatics hope to be saved.
See:Channel 4 - The Doomsday Code
It is necessary to do everything possible to stop Palin and McLean being elected. Of course, I'm not suggesting, even as a topic for discussion, that the fact that the world's most heavily armed nuclear power - and the only one to ever have used its nuclear arsenal (twice) - might under Palin bring about the end of humanity should lead to some pre-emptive strike against the US's nuclear capability or against the Republican candidates. Unlike others supposedly on the Left I can think of many socialist reasons why such actions would have to be condemned. Rather its necessary to build a working class in the US and internationally that is strong enough to remove such threats to human existence.
Some people think that tomorrow might be the end of the world. In the early hours of tomorrow the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland will be turned on. The LHT accelerates particles to within a fraction of the speed of light in order to collide them together at immense energies with the intention of creating new particles. It is hoped that the results of these experiments will either confirm or repudiate the basic assumptions of physics that have operated for some decades now through what is known as the Standard Model. In particular, it is hoped that the experiments will produce if only for a fraction of a second the elusive Higgs Boson, a particle theorised as having existed right after the Big Bang, and which is the particle whose existence is necessary to prove the existence of the Higgs Field which is supposed to explain how matter achieves mass.
But, some scientists have argued that the experiments are dabbling in things not properly understood, and could create phenomena, which could destroy the planet. One common theory is that of the creation of micro black holes, which could grow due to their immensely dense mass to consume all other surrounding matter. Some of these ideas are discussed on Wikipedia here.
I'm not a physicist so I'm not qualified to say whether any of these ideas hold water or whether the response to them from the majority of scientists, which states that the risks put forward do not constitute good science are valid. Similar concerns have been raised in the past, and science does have a habit of undertaking activities that might be dangerous. For example, when the nuclear bomb was being developed the scientists working on the programme themselves did not know whether the chain reaction started by the explosion would be contained or not. From what I do understand of the contending views being put I think it unlikely that these experiments will mean the end of the world, but to an extent that is besides the point. As the above Wiki article points out Britain's own Astronomer Royal, Martin Rees, has speculated in a recent book that mankind has a 50-50 chance of destroying itself. The important issue surely is that science has now reached such a level that in a whole series of disciplines the consequences of error can spell catastrophes on a scale never previously possible. Just look at the way CFC's in a few short years of their extensive use led to the creation of the Ozone hole. It is surely time that the working class demanded that science be brought udner far greater democratic control, that some degree of workers inspection be developed to prevent a small minority who ultimately work in the interests of Capitalist society do not destroy the whole of mankind.
The Big Bucks Machine
In a CNN report today it was disclosed that Sarah Palin, the Republican Vice Presidential candidate, is not only a Creationist - which was disclosed last week - but that she was a member of a Christian Fundamentalist Church in Alaska known as The Assembly of God. The nutters in this cult not only gibber away like cretins supposedly speaking in tongues, but are also Endtimers. There are soemthing like 10 million Endtimers mostly on the Christian Fundamentlaist Right in America, and they had some influence on US politics under Bush, though he mostly relied on their votes rather than subscribed to their views.
The Endtimers are a frightening group of religious zealots. Were they just a small group somewhere their views would be frightening enough. That there are 10 million of them in the world's most heavily and nuclear armed country, a country where 70% of the population still believe that the world is less than 7,000 years old as the Bible bashers claim, and that Man walked on the Earth at the same time as the dinosaurs is even worse. That in such a country one of these nutters is possibly going to be in a position to have her finger on the nuclear trigger if the aged John Mccain were to pop his clogs by natural or other causes is far more frightening than the thought of either the world coming to an end through the experiments at CERN or the possession of a nuclear bomb by Ahmedinejad. Every year thousands of Entimers ffrom the US, UK and elsewhere visit Israel. They encourage conflict between Israel and Palestine hoping that sch a conflict will escalate into the Armageddon prophesied in the Bible, which will bring about the End of Days, and the Second Coming of Christ through which these religious lunatics hope to be saved.
See:Channel 4 - The Doomsday Code
It is necessary to do everything possible to stop Palin and McLean being elected. Of course, I'm not suggesting, even as a topic for discussion, that the fact that the world's most heavily armed nuclear power - and the only one to ever have used its nuclear arsenal (twice) - might under Palin bring about the end of humanity should lead to some pre-emptive strike against the US's nuclear capability or against the Republican candidates. Unlike others supposedly on the Left I can think of many socialist reasons why such actions would have to be condemned. Rather its necessary to build a working class in the US and internationally that is strong enough to remove such threats to human existence.
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