[lbo-talk] Bakunin on Marx

[andie nachgeborenen]

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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>
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> 



       
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