Islamic Terrorism

Before 9-11, I can remember a time when the term “Islamic terrorism” had no meaning for me. I didn’t really know about the wars happening in the Middle East, I wasn’t paying attention to the Gulf War (I was young, ok) and the US was supposedly at peace. (Not really true, as America is always bombing someone). But that world changed suddenly on that fateful day, when I saw as a young man, those planes drive into that tower in New York on live TV. Many innocent people lost their lives that day, and a few bankers too. Suddenly, the next few years were nothing but ISLAMIC TERRORISM AHHHHHH as the US turned up the heat on the Middle East, invading Iraq, and Afghanistan. Political scientists like Samuel Huntington and Francis Fukuyama got their day in the sun as they shouted about the coming clash of liberal democratic Western values with that of the evil Islamic hordes. Twenty years ago, most people in the US had no opinion on Islam. Now, racist reactionaries across America love to hate them. But, what is the reality of Islam? And what is the history of the West in the Islamic world? Let’s take a deeper look.

What is Islam

Islam is the most recent of the three branches of Abrahamic monotheistic religion. Judaism, and Christianity being the other two. They share the same god, a lot of the same mythology and history. Much of their theology is related. There is a common misconception that Allah is a name. It’s not. Allah is the Arabic word for God, related to the Hebrew El (like in Elohim). Here, you can see the history of the word at this wikipedia link! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_(deity)
The main belief in Islam is that there is one Allah (meaning god) and that Mohammad is his prophet. There are five pillars of Islam: Faith, prayer, charity, fasting and the Haji, or pilgrimage to Mecca. Islam especially puts a lot of weight on charity and social justice. Read more about it here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Pillars_of_Islam
Islam is a religion that even outlaws usury, banning the use of interest in banking. Pretty progressive for a religion founded in the 7th Century CE.
There are a lot of misconceptions surrounding Islam, and you can educate yourself so you don’t fall victim to bigoted ignorance. In reality, Muslims are just like any other people. They follow their religion to be good people, and to live happy and fulfilling lives as much as they can. Read more here: http://www.worde.org/publications/commentary/empowering_asj__sufi_muslim_networks/5-myths-about-islam-and-muslims/

Imperialism in the Islamic World

Muslims have felt attacked by the west for centuries. While there was political conflict with Europe and the Ottoman Empire, the West’s intrusions into the Muslim world in the modern era have been imperialistic, and quite devastating across the board. France, Italy, the Netherlands, and especially Britain wreaked havoc across the Muslim world, colonizing, murdering and subjugating Muslims under their Christian capitalist empires. Iraq was formed arbitrarily out of the subjugation of different religious and ethnic groups, shoving together the Kurds, Sunni Muslims and Shia Muslims. The British also set up the Palestinian Mandate and gave it to European Jews for them to set up their racist colony, Israel from 1948. The US attacked and cajoled the Middle East as well, giving support to the Wahabbist Saudi royal family that has ruled the Holy City of Mecca since the 17th century, as they use the country sacred to Muslims to enrich themselves at the cost of other Muslims. Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, all occupied and enslaved under Western imperialism. Iraq was invaded many times. Afghanistan set up a democratic, socialist system that gave full rights to women in the 1970s. The US response was to arm extremist cultists to overthrow the legitimate government of Afghanistan and even went so far as to arm and train the Saudis doing it, such as the young Osama Bin Laden. This plunged Afghanistan into decades of war and violence, claiming the lives of millions. This continues even now.
Libya was the country in Africa with the highest Human Development Index (HDI) with women’s rights, a secular government, free health care and education. Now it lies in smoking ruins from Western bombs. Destroyed. Again. Are you starting to undestand why the Muslims of the world, from formerly Dutch occupied Indonesia to Syria might have some ill will towards the West? The global “War on Terror” is really a war on Islam, and Islamic countries. Some have even called it a genocide. It’s hard to argue with that. Read the argument here:

http://www.mintpressnews.com/4-million-muslims-killed-in-western-wars-should-we-call-it-genocide/208711/

Brian Becker of the Party for Socialism and Liberation has a lot of experience writing on this topic. Here’s one example: https://www.liberationnews.org/imperialism-islamic-state-policy-endless-war/

I encourage you to read, study and get to know the rich and diverse history of Islam and the many hundreds of millions of people around the world that practice this ancient religion. Knowledge is power, and with the internet and so much access to information, the onus is on you to empower yourself, as much as you can. Fear is the enemy of humanity, the enemy of hope and ignorance is its fuel. End Islamophobic hatred. I am a Buddhist, and I support wrapping Muslims in love and care, like every other religion. The real threat to the world is capitalist imperialism, and the center of that is the illegal and illegitimate government called the United States of America. That imperial entity is the enemy of all humankind. Overthrow capitalist oppression, and then we will have true religious and spiritual freedom.

Thanks for reading.

Women’s Rights

During the campaign for president, Donald Trump’s disdain for women was on full display. Old recordings of him bragging about sexually assaulting women, his attacks on reproductive rights, his followers love of using sexually degrading language, and much much more all pointed to a man who has spent his life treating women like so much cattle. He has no respect for women, and women know it. In fact, they know it so well that they amassed in the literal millions to protest the attacks on reproductive rights, and their bodies that President Trump has and will conduct. But then came the post modernist nutjobs with their naysaying anti-feminism.

In fact, a great guy collected all of the ridiculous shit and posted it here:

https://storify.com/KatanaOfLogic/trans-activists-womens-march

But that isn’t all. There’s a man who runs a webcomic called “assigned male” (as if genitals are assigned like my boots in the military were)

He posted a comic that actually shamed women for protesting for WOMEN’S RIGHTS

So let’s get something straight, dude.
1. Woman is defined as an adult human female

2. Females are defined by their primary and secondary sex organs and characteristics.
3. Sex means, inherently, reproduction. The sex of a human is the reproductive role their organs play in human reproduction.

 

I have had quite enough of people bashing women’s rights. Trans women are men. If they were just women, they wouldn’t need the trans before the woman. They’re male. Intersex people aren’t trans. Women’s rights matter. Stay tuned for my podcast.

 

Identity

Who the hell are you? No, really, who are you? Do you define yourself by the way you dress, by the music you listen to, by the color of your skin or your nationality? Do you identify by the flag that waves over your head, or by the ideologies you hold dear? What, makes YOU, you?

This is a question that is pretty human. It’s at the center of all that is human. Religion and philosophy, usually intertwined have long aimed to answer that question. Nowadays, we hear a lot about identity politics.

I probably lost half my readers there, but if you’re game, please bear with me. I am not, I promise you, about to go on a rant of #alllivesmatter or something like that. Hear me out.
Identity is a real issue. But it’s not the main issue, and I am about to tell you why.

Idealism

You hear a LOT about this word about the left, and from the left. Leftists are “idealistic”. Marxists are against idealism, and so on. But what does it mean in an ideological, or philosophical sense? It means that you think that ideas cause material change. A materialist is one who thinks that material conditions cause change. It really is that simple. So to Marx, the cause of revolution is not that someone, somewhere, stood up and spontaneously, apropos of nothing, had the idea of a republic and also of cutting off the king’s head, but that the, say, French Revolution was the result of material forces. The ancien regime had lost it’s material basis for existing and was thus overthrown by the people it no longer could control, and who were quite fed up with the exploiting and wasteful aristocracy anyway. It wasn’t apropos of nothing, it was a long time coming. That is the big difference between idealism and materialism. Idealism says “this is how everything works in the universe and eventually ideas pop out” while materialism says that cause and effect in the material world are of, shockingly, material origin.

Identity Politics

So what does this mean for identity politics? The alt-right loves to harp on identity politics, but the truth is that they too, are lovers of identity. They, and the liberal left share that narcissistic need for self validation that comes with identity politics. But in slightly different ways. The petty bourgeois liberal idpol people are obsessed with vague oppression they cannot articulate. The right as well, but theirs is an ethnic reactionary kind of idpol that puts their own ethnic group at the center in a clownish kind of masturbatory love of vaguely defined ethnic and national groups for no other reason that one’s self is a member of it.

The liberal left idpol is centered around identity as oppression. People can choose their identities. “I am a demihemipanromantic asexual genderqueer nonbinary woman with a penis.” Things like that. They claim for example, that gender is sex, not directly, but indirectly. They claim that the word WOMAN means “anyone who identifies as a woman”. And they think that oppression is just people being mean. But that isn’t what oppression is. Oppression is material. To be sure, queer men and women face enormous oppression from homophobia, but not like they used to. At least not in the developed first world the West inhabits. But WHY do they face oppression? Is it just because of IDENTITY, or because people are just mean? No, that is not the way the world has ever worked. Ever. They are oppressed, and have been oppressed because of the fact that the existence of gay men and women, and their refusal to follow the gender binary (gender, not sex) challenged the prevailing ideology of liberal capitalism, with its need of nuclear families. Nuclear families were needed by capitalism for stability in producing and reproducing viable workers for the benefit of the capitalist class. However, capitalism has evolved into late late capitalism and increasingly the nuclear family is going the way of the dodo for most of the industrialized world. At least in the way it used to exist. And so gays and lesbians are no longer outside or a challenge to the system and therefore the big corporations just love to wrap them in their arms and pretend like there was nothing ever wrong in society with being gay.
Women aren’t oppressed because they’re feminine, or because they wear dresses and skirts. That has never been the source of their oppression. Their oppression was never their identity as human beings, their personalities or their visages. It was the very nature of their female bodies that was the reason of oppression. Women were, and indeed still are oppressed because of material reasons. They are needed to produce the next generation. One man can impregnate many, but one woman can only produce about one child every year. Reproductively speaking, women are more valuable than men. But not just childbirth. The woman is needed to take care of the baby, from birth to school age and beyond. The mother washes, cleans, clothes and feeds her family. This is not just because these are things she loves doing, they are things she is required to do. To not do them is to fall out of society, to not do them is to be considered a waste of a life, to be thrown aside. This is the historical material oppression of women.

Black people aren’t oppressed because they identify as Black. They are oppressed because of a long history of using their bodies as the underclass low wage or no wage labor in much of the world. From Africa to the Americas, they have been systematically enslaved and colonized. They have been, as a class of people, disenfranchised, and only recently have things started to improve slightly. From the dawn of the USA, they were that country’s labor force. It built the White House. It planted the crops. It made America very very rich.

Women, black, gay, these aren’t just “identities”. Identity is nothing more than make-believe if not backed up by material reality. Identity is a deeply held understanding of the reality of your existence, and can’t be taken off or put on. You can’t take on the identity of a woman if you are not a woman. You can play dress up, but wearing a cool cap and coat doesn’t make one a captain of a boat. You can’t take on the identity of Black, because it’s a lived material reality. You can wear a gun and a star, but that doesn’t make you a sheriff.

The left needs to come to grips with identity politics. It needs to understand that instead of fighting over labels, who can wear whatever hair dress, and if you’re queer or gay, that we fight the system of oppression that is killing millions of people the world around. We need to unite against racism, homophobia and sexism and unite as a working class against capitalism and fascism.

First and foremost we should unite on class. Workers of the world, UNITE!

 

 

 

 

 

The Dawn of a New Era

The words Dawn of a New Era seem to be ones that inspire hope, confidence, or feelings of renewal. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case. Take the end of the Taisho Era in Japan.This is going to take some explanation.

See, Japan counts years on two parallel calendars, one the western we all know, the one that says it’s 2017 (years since the birth of Christ) and the traditional Japanese year system, which counts it by the year of the reigning emperor. This year is Heisei 29, the 29th year of the reign of Heisei (Heisei is the name that will be the current emperor’s posthumous name), his name while alive is Akihito, although most of the time he’s referred to as “heika Tenno” meaning “his majesty the Emperor”. But I’ll just call him Akihito, because I’m a communist and not at all fond of monarchy.

The era which saw Japan open up to the west (at the point of a gun) was the Meiji era. The era after that was called Taisho. Meiji was long, and saw Japan change from feudal backwater to a modern country that could beat the Russian Empire. Taisho was short. But during the short era, Japan saw a blossoming of intellectualism the likes of which it hadn’t seen in centuries. For one, the Communist Party of Japan was born. The liberal opening of the old autocratic system heralded a new age. But that bright new age soon ended and a new era began. The age of Showa. Showa was better known in the west as Hirohito, and I don’t think I need to tell you what happened next. (lots and lots of war, two atomic bombs and occupation by the US for a long time)

It was just announced in the news that the current emperor, Akihito may step down from his mighty chair o’ Japan, and give power to his son, Prince whatsisface starting in January of 2019, which will literally dawn a new era in Japan. But I am talking about eras for another reason. We sit on the precipice.

At the end of the 1920s, things looked great. Then the stock market crashed, Hitler rose to power and the next 15 years were pretty shit. But now we see a world in flux again. Late capitalism is producing clowns, shadows of fascism and liberals unable to make sense of the world. Automation is taking jobs faster than society can deal with and poverty is rising in what was the unassailable “first world”. The US president elect, a clown of  a man, has handed power directly to the bourgeoisie, the old racist reactionary right and worse. The world, to me, seems sitting, shivering with tense anticipation for the horrors that could be unleashed on the world this year alone with madmen in office and enough weapons to kill a solar system of life.

We sit here at the dawn of a new era. I see the old system crumbling. But this can take two possible roads. The world can either tear itself apart and sit in the ashes, or it can be a creative destruction. It can be a progressive destruction. I implore the left to not be shy, don’t play politics and identity nonsense. Don’t make deals with the devil to get a crumb when you can take the whole damn loaf. The capitalist imperialist system is shuddering and creaking. It’s contradictions are killing it in exactly the way Marx said it would. A new era is dawning. But the left has to unite, and fight against racism, xenophobia and against fear. Back to science, back to materialism, back to preaching hope and working class unity.

Thank you for reading, and don’t worry! I promise the podcast is coming out this week!