[lbo-talk] Left hand puritanism the lost re-bottle

[James Heartfield]

Making the case for De Sade over the Puritans, Shane Mage cites the 
massacres at Drogheda, the illegal execution of King Charles I as negatives 
and De Sade's pamphlet against capital punishment (a noble against capital 
punishment in revolutionary France - you don't say!) as a positive. 
Following the BDSM thread, it was always nagging in the back of my mind that 
the problem with BDSM was not that it was violent, but that it wasn't. On 
this side of the Atlantic, we radicals still name our children Oliver and 
toast Cromwell for hacking Charles I's head off (Lenin implored the first 
Bolshevik govt. not to give in to sentimentalism by abolisihing the death 
penalty.) As Engels said:

"A revolution is certainly the most violent thing there is: it is the act 
whereby one part of the population imposes its will on the other part by 
means of rifles, bayonets and cannon." Engels, On Authority, Almanaco 
Repubblicano, 1874

Or as Herakleitos put it

"When Homer said that he wished war might disappear from the lives of gods 
and men, he forgot that without opposition all things would cease to exist.

It must be clearly seen that war is the natural state of man. Justice is 
contention. Through contention all things come to be.

War is the father of us all and our king. War discloses who is godlike and 
who is but a man, who is a slave and who is a free man.

Those killed by Ares are honoured by gods and men."

No special safe words, performance or consent there, then.