[lbo-talk] A Day When Mahdi Army Showed Its Other Side

boddi satva lbo.boddi at gmail.com
Mon Nov 27 14:59:53 PST 2006


On 11/27/06, Yoshie Furuhashi <critical.montages at gmail.com> wrote:
> Doug makes it sound like no one in Iraq has a political program, but
> that is not the case. Sadr does. The Mahdi Army is said to model
> itself on Hizballah, combining mass actions, social services, and
> armed resistance. That is the correct strategy, straight out of the
> Marxist manual for national liberation. In the Middle East, it's
> populist Islamists like Sadr and Nasrallah who are better
> Marxist-Leninists than self-identified secular ones. -- Yoshie

This is complete insanity.

The "Army Of God" is a Marxist organization? The "Army of the Messiah" ("Messiah" being a rough translation of "Mahdi") are Socialists?

What are the Taliban - Anarcho-Syndicalists?

Of course Sadr and Nasrallah have a political program - it is called "Shiite Theocracy".

Unlike Sunni, Shia have a clerical hierarchy - the Persian Shiite clerical hierarchy being the ones who control Iran. While Sunni do not have an official hierarchy, the Wahabi clerics who control Mecca and Medina wield a great deal of influence because they control those holy sites. Similarly, the central, underlying task of the Iranian theocracy is to control and administer 6 of the 12 holy sites of Shia Islam, located in Iran.

Naturally the Arab Shiite clergy in Iraq need to control and administer the 6 of the 12 holy shrines located in their country. They are behaving EXACTLY as one would expect a religious army to behave.

The goal of these groups is clear - Shiite communities should, in their view, be run by Shiite clergy. It's just that simple. There's nothing Marxist about it.

Yoshie, my suggestion to you is that if you want to get these kind of weird views out to the wider world, you go onto right-wing websites. They LOVE to propogandize that leftists are somehow supporters of Islamism and you could be their cherished, token leftist.

boddi



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