Some Marxist Cant You'll Agree With

Yes, that's right. You're about to agree wholeheatedly with a Marxist newsletter called "Workers' Liberty:"

The liberal Establishment, including the liberal newspapers, have responded to the still-burning political explosion ignited by the Danish cartoons showing Muhammad in a downright disgraceful way. They have turned tail on the traditions of freedom of religion and freedom to have no religion, of free speech and a free press, which in less demanding times they claim as their own and are ever ready to denounce Marxists for allegedly not accepting or defending.

Very little of the political explosion triggered by the Danish cartoons seems to have been spontaneous, raw religious outrage. It has been fomented, organised, directed by organised political movements and leaders of political Islam, including the Saudi government, and, in Syria and Lebanon, by the quasi-secularised Syrian Ba’thist government.

From Karachi to London, to Baghdad, to Ramallah, the cartoons have been deliberately seized upon and used to organise a gigantic world-wide roll-call of the forces of Islamic reaction. The response has been impressive. And, as it was meant to be, intimidating. It has certainly intimidated the liberals.

The cartoons have been the focus for every grievance, resentment, imaginary insult or real injury which any part of the Muslim world feels against the non-Islamic world - against the modern world of globalised capitalism in general, and against American imperialism in particular.

Despite the presence of many grievances in the general mobilisation, the focus on the cartoons has made it a single movement with one upfront demand - that the non-Muslim world should obey the prohibition of (the majority of) Muslims against portraying (or against insulting) Muhammad.

That people everywhere should obey a rule of a religion they all reject, and some may abhor. That those who refuse to obey the Islamic edit should be punished and penalised by non-Islamic governments.

Western governments who do not want to have their embassies burned down, or their trade with Islamic countries boycotted and ruined, or the lives of their nationals in Muslim countries placed in jeopardy, had better make themselves enforcers for the rules of a religion which their citizens do not accept. That is the demand.

They must curb free speech and free expression. Curb the freedom to criticism and mock and outspokenly denounce religion - the freedom from which over centuries most of our freedoms have been spun and consolidated.

And how have the bourgeois-democratic governments and liberal newspapers and TV systems responded? In the face of an outcry which - whatever energies other than religious feelings have fuelled it - has been a vast outpouring of religious zealotry and bigotry, they have apologised!

They have scurried and run.

Thanks to Craig.

posted by Ace at 09:44 PM

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