Sagradia Famiglia is a architectural masterpiece, a monument to the human spirit. Blowing up Chartres and Notre Dame would crimes against humanity. The Taliban underscored their barbarism when they blow up the Buddhist statutes in Afghanistan. The Hindu fascist goons who destroyed the ancient mosque in India obliterated centuries of history and irreplaceable beauty. You don't have to be religious to regard these as priceless treasures. What would you say about the Protestant hit squads who went through the ex-Catholic churches smashing irreplaceable statues and smashing priceless stained glass windows? Would you approve of a mass assault on the great religious art of the world -- burn The Last Supper and Gruenwald Christs, take jackhammers to Michelangelo's Pieta and St. Peter's, rip up the Cranach and Durer Adam and Eves, and while we are it, shred the Kelmscott Bible, the Book of Kells, any old Vedas that exist? There's a lot wrong with blowing up churches, comrade.
Obviously you are not thinking, Chuck-O -- it's reflexive stupidity like this (there is no other world for it) that gives ideological fanaticism a bad name.
Please notice (a) that I am not a Marxist, much less a Stalinist or Marxist Leninist, (b) I don't give the Bolshevists and Stalinists a pass on their butcheries and didn't here; (c) I agree with whoever it was that said that the relevant comparison point, if you are doing body counts, is before the Bolshies got state power, since the anarchists never wielded real power, and btw didn't wield the power they did in a very nice way, and finally
(d) Let's stop this silly old battles:
1) Stalinism is a dying religion and has been for 50 years, with no more chance at state power than Howard Stassen. Antistalinist Marxism is politically irrelevant and has been historically even more irrelevant than Stalinism.
2) Anarchism stopped being a force in US political life around the time of the Palmer Red Raids. Like the CPers, the anarchists do some good activist/reformist work with some fire-breathing rhetoric, but that' about it.
Consequently it is really quite immaterial whose irrelevant movement is nastier. We are not going to get anywhere until we stop fighting debates that even few of the faithful give a flying fuck about any more.
--- Chuck <chuck at mutualaid.org> wrote:
> andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> > The Spanish anarchists massacred priests and nuns
> > during the Spanish Civil War, burned churches, and
> > tried to burn Gaudi's Sagrada Famiglia, which is
> > fortunately made of concrete. Mankho's partisans
> > carried out programs against the Jews in the
> Russian
> > Civil War. They weren't as a group worse than
> other
> > people, they just weren't better. The Bolsheviks
> and
> > Stalinists were of course guilty of terrible
> crimes on
> > a very grand scale. People in those times often
> act
>
> What is this? Bash anarchists day?
>
> I'll put anything purportedly bad done by anarchists
> against the horrors
> perpetrated by Marxist-Leninist-Maoists in the 20th
> century.
>
> Us anarchists will come out smelling like roses.
>
> Crack a fucking history book.
>
> Chuck "what the hell is wrong with burning
> churches?"
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