[lbo-talk] Comrades and Brothers: Islamists and Socialists in Egypt

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On 3/14/07, James Heartfield <Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
> Yoshie writes:
>
> "An ex-Muslim "insurgency" is like an "insurgency" of anticommunists
> who are former Communists. "
>
> Wouldn't it be more true to say 'A Muslim "insurgency" is like an
> "insurgency" of anticommunists who are former Communists.'
>
> I agree with you, though, when you say:
>
> "Much of ambivalent attitude toward Marxist theory, especially in West
> Asia and North Africa, comes from a very mixed legacy of foreign
> policy of Soviet Socialism and nationalist governments to which many
> communist parties have been sometimes attached and by which they have
> been sometimes repressed. "
>
> The situation in the north of Ireland was comparable. Many of the
> provisional Sinn Fein were explicitly anti-Communist, because the
> "Communists" had openly sided with the British occupation forces in their
> suppression.
>
> I was only pointing out that the Islamist ideology that I came across was a
> hodge-podge of radical left ideas dressed up in a bit of Allahu Akbar -
> ignorant of its own debts to the left. I don't see anything authentic about
> it.

Ah, James, since when have you become a Heideggerian?  :->  Who cares
about authenticity?  Hybridity, in worldview as well as internal
combustion engines, may very well be just the thing for our age, the
age of neither here nor there, between the oil economy and the
electricity economy.  :->

Walt Whitman wrote:

     Do I contradict myself?	

     Very well, then, I contradict myself;	

     (I am large -- I contain multitudes.)

That ought to be the motto of any living social movement in the present age.

As for intellectual debts, let us not be creditors in the mold of the
IMF and the World Bank.  I'll forgive their debts, so they can make a
fresh start.

On 3/14/07, Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu> wrote:
> They 'embrace' Islam simply because the establishment rejects it.  It is a
> knee jerk reaction.  I bet that if the White House and business
> establishment officially endorsed Islam tomorrow, these clowns would find
> something else on the fringes and convert to it overnight.

Do you know, Wojtek, that the White House has been holding Iftaar dinners:
<http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/ramadan/2006/>?  :->  Washington
has never been crudely dismissive about Islam as some Western leftists
and "ex-Muslims" are.  The power elite* don't get into and stay in
power by being purist crusaders, but leftists seldom understand this
point.

* The power elite on the opposite end of the ideological spectrum were
also mindful of that -- they, too, issued a call for a "holy war" when
it suited them, just like FDR (cf. "'We the American Holy Warriors
Have Arrived': FDR Addresses the Arabs,"
<http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20070129/001996.html>)!

<http://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/baku/manifesto.htm>
Baku Congress of the Peoples of the East
Manifesto of the Congress to the Peoples of the East

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Britain, the last powerful imperialist predator left in Europe, has
spread its dark wings over the Eastern Moslem countries, and is trying
to turn the peoples of the East into its slaves, into its booty.
Slavery! Frightful slavery, ruin, oppression and exploitation is being
brought by Britain to the peoples of the East. Save yourselves,
peoples of the East!

Arise and fight against this beast of prey! Go forward as one man into
a holy war against the British conquerors! Stand up, Indian exhausted
by hunger and unbearable slave labour! Stand up, Anatolian peasant
crushed by taxes and usury! Stand up, Persian rayat strangled by the
mulkadars! Stand up, Armenian toiler driven out into the barren hills!
Stand up, Arabs and Afghans, lost in sandy deserts and cut off by the
British from all the rest of the world! Stand up and fight against the
common enemy, imperialist Britain!
-- 
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>