by Ramin Mazaheri exclusive for The Saker Blog
So when did you become an epidemiologist? You seem quite willing to shame anyone not sterilising every square inch of every square inch.
And when did you become an economist? “The economy is not important now” must have been a pretty unusual PhD thesis.
We have likely all heard of “internet tough guys” – people who make bold claims or threats online, yet would flee at the sight of conflict – but who knew social media had so many people qualified to tell entire nations what to do regarding Corona?
How much of the Corona crisis has been caused by social media virtue-signallers, hypochondriacs, communications degree-holding intellectuals, helicopter Dads, bossy cows, and sheep who generally follow whatever the herd, management or pop stars tell them to do? That’s an interesting question: would we all be in lockdown prior to the internet and Facebook?
A practical follow-up question is: which nations have leadership which are perhaps even steered by social media, and which nations have leaders who can steer the national boat through choppy waters?
As socialists know and accept, a vanguard party is essential precisely because there are so many choppy waters in life. Choppy waters are doubled for socialist-inspired countries due to imposed wars, sanctions, blockades and endless cold war.
Capitalists and libertarians once again use Orwell against us – the same old, facile “some pigs are more equal than others” of Animal Farm – conflating totalitarianism with socialism, even though the two have entirely different ends and means.
Despite their absurd claims, the vanguard party concept is not anti-democratic. Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel had truly universal support from every Cuban (in Cuba) I asked because he rose level by level by repeatedly showing his competence as a civil servant. The same goes for Xi of China (as I will soon remind). Nobody expected a low-ranking cleric like Khamenei to take over for Khomeini, but he has repeatedly showed his competence and abilities; go tell the tens of millions shouting “Khamenei rahbar” (Khamenei the leader) that socialist-inspired democracy, with both direct and indirect, hasn’t worked out well. In post-1917 countries one rises to the 1% via actual competence, and not just by buying elections, as in the West.
Conversely, Hillary Clinton married the governor of Arkansas, who became president, and then America was stuck with her. Emmanuel Macron did… I don’t even know how he got so far so fast, and I really don’t want to know what went on behind closed doors with him.
Regardless, are some pigs more equal than others, to pose their question?
Certainly, what you won’t hear from such socialist detractors is that China’s President Xi spent years doing hard rural work during the days of the Cultural Revolution, and then teaching illiterate farmers how to read during his Cultural Revolution nights. Now, I suppose it is technically a possibility: none of that was earnestly heartfelt on Xi’s part, and he is secretly amassing a personal fortune because the recesses of his heart are nothing but pure bitterness and hate for the socialist ideal of equality which he was forced to display and teach; he has also spent decades duping everyone in China that he is a competent public servant; Xi has zero warm sentiment for those rural citizens he worked with, and wants only revenge; any moment now Xi will launch a surprise attack of totalitarianism designed solely for his personal benefit and revenge.
These are the very real – yet ALWAYS unsaid – logical extensions of Western arguments made against vanguard parties in general, as well as against Xi. Westerners insist that socialist vanguard parties are corrupt not just at the core but all the way to the periphery.
Another unsaid logical extension is that no vanguard parties informally exist in the West. If, however, there are, it is because such people have risen to the 1% solely on merit. Xi’s supposed “merit”, is not merit at all… unlike theirs. Don’t push Westerners to explain these points – they have no answers.
Much of this applies to Iran as well – their system is based on the idea of the “guardianship of the Islamic jurist”. “Down with those opposed to the guardianship of the Islamic jurist” is always included in the “down withs”, and even before “down with the MKO, England, the US and Israel”. The vanguard party in Iran is obviously the clergy; I have written extensively and objectively about how I believe this is being bureaucratically formalised into the “Basij”, and I have discussed how the structure of the Basij has been clearly modelled on the Chinese Communist Party.
How can that be, Ramin, when Communists are atheists? Firstly, they are not. Maybe Marx was, but to hell with him on this point. Cuba is full of Catholics, but even more prevalent are those who practice Santeria; Vietnam has always constitutionally protected religion; Confucianism and Taoism, it is rarely recognised, are two sides of the same East Asian cosmological coin, and China’s intolerance on this point is being remedied. The USSR never reconciled religion and socialism, and this is a huge reason explaining why they are no more; a reason as big as Krushchevian corruption and capitalist-roading.
However, the structural and political similarities between the Basij and the CCP arise not from cosmological agreement but from the natural similarities of two countries who have had post-1917, socialist-inspired revolutions. The similarities are not “coincidental” at all, though those who misunderstand and reject socialism would surely explain away my comparisons with such sweeping, facile, pseudo-explanations. I’m not sure that you can have a vanguard party without the structures, policies and protections – as well as many of the aims and demands – which are greatly dissimilar from the CCP and the Basij? Few examples exist, sadly, for me to study and compare. Never say never, I suppose.
The idea of a formalised vanguard party – as in Iranian Islamic Socialism and other forms of socialism – does not mean totalitarianism. I suppose it could, but why can it not also mean elite governance performance? Why must we look only at the negative aspects, and not the positive? What are we – capitalist-imperialists?
The Corona crisis is not going to validate the support of formal, socialist-inspired vanguard parties in China, Iran, Cuba and elsewhere – they need no validation among their people; their bones are made.
What it will certainly do is discredit the Western model of “non-vanguardism”, “hidden-vanguardism”, “technocratic vanguardism”, “1%er-vanguardism” or whatever else you want to term their bankocratic, aristocratic, bourgeois oligarchies which govern.
The incredible spanner Western politicians have suicidally thrown into their economies will prove this: they have none of the unity, foresight, determination and especially the political modernity of countries like China and Iran, yet they are adopting similar Corona responses. It simply can’t be done without causing Great Depressions in the Lost Decade II-embarking Eurozone for certain, and also for the US economy, which disastrously combines a finance & service & consumer-based economy with non-Trumpian evangelism for self-harming globalisation.
It will take great pain, but this is what humans often require to make serious change, sadly. It will split apart families, but that is what civil war does.
I don’t know which nation will be the first to see their lower class starting to attack their neoliberal/neoliberal-client systems – and attacking as well the reactionary selfishness of the “first responders” whom they are repeatedly told to adulate – but they will all reach the same place as China and Iran: who is in charge? Who is the vanguard party to lead and staff the bureaucracy, which organises and decides on the logistics, and who needs to spread the night soil so we all can eat?
All workers are valid and equal, of course, but a vanguard party is needed to run a government. The alleged path goes capitalism, socialism, communism, anarchism – the idea that no vanguard parties are needed is anarchism, and Cubans will also correct you when you call them communist: they know they are not that far. The amount of self-empowerment espoused in anarchism may not even be possible on a billions-level? These are questions for a later date….
Allow me to disqualify myself from the vanguard party: I have been passed up for management over and over (of course everyone claims this), so maybe they are right? I am used to being a powerless cog in a machine, and I quite like it now!
The people who deserve to be in vanguard parties are those who evince both the capability for selflessness as well as the capability for superior political thought. After all, some have capabilities for great artistic thought, or great engineering thought, or have great social skills – political policy certainly requires input from all sectors and classes but their bureaucrats do need to have a masterful grasp of modern political ideology, as well as a grasp of what not to do: i.e., the ideologies held by the enemies of modern political ideologies. These qualifications are evinced by people like Xi, Khamenei, Diaz-Canel and France’s Yellow Vests.
The roar that the Yellow Vests will make when France’s lockdown in over… that’s another article.
I don’t think you can find a journalist writing in any Western language who has stood shoulder to shoulder with them more often, and I can promise France: put the Yellow Vests in charge and you’ll have exceptional national governance immediately. Unlike the Iranian clergy, Chinese commies and Cuban socialist-Santeriaists, the Yellow Vests’ actual support is hard to gauge: polls constantly showed over 50% support, yet the Animal Rights Party won 2.2% in the 2019 European Parliament elections, double the Yellow Vests parties combined.
Who is the vanguard party in the US? That I cannot say – I do not think one is apparent. I think Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders and their few public comrades are interesting given the limitations of the US political context, but they are still far from what’s necessary now, and especially far from what will be necessary given the trajectory of Great Depression 2.
The times make the man, as they say.
The West’s vanguard parties seem intent on making times as difficult for the lower classes as they possibly can. Time well spent would be turning of Western MSM, as well as social media, and reflecting on who you think should really be in charge.
Ramin Mazaheri is the chief correspondent in Paris for Press TV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. He is the author of the books ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China’ and the upcoming ‘Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism’.
“Maybe Marx was, but to hell with him on this point.”
I can reassure you that Marx was not an atheist of the Richard Darwkin. He was an atheist in seeing supernaturalism being without merit. He was theist in that ‘man made god’ and hence God is real and he identified this as an expression of our species being. Yes we have a spirit, a meaning to our lives derived from who we are as a species.
Marx is a theist as much as Hegel was; the god in us is in Marx part of us, not so.
It is fine that people present this in analogy as supernatural entities, so long as science does not make such concessions beyond the personal, in this sense science is by necessity godless, but not in the bad sense; its explanations are sans (without) God the very meaning of atheism.
Marx’s atheism was not the modern meaning of being anti-god, it lies in its older meaning of explaining the world without god, in order to apply our god-like powers to the world, without simply importing the supernatural to explain anything and everything (special pleading); making idols, reifying and ideologising thought.
Marx’s atheism was founding within theology, of marking the spiritual from the practical knowledge of the world as twin aspects, not opposed dichotomies.
Insofar as the church did not aid the people but sided with powerful, it was without god, without spirit. Marx was anticlerical on that issue.
Kant more than Hegel placed god within the aesthetic, what I would call the poetic analogies of concept, I believe Marx in his unfinished introduction to capital was outlining this, when he abandoned the task because it led away from the subject at hand, as indeed a general work on methodology must; he decided on practical analysis being the better route to follow in 1857.
The proletarian vantage point cannot embrace Richard Dawkins, cannot reject the human spirit as its own, cannot deny the nature of our species being, of our thought, of concepts that come as revelations clothed in analogy are always mystic in their first appearance, and whether they remain so is the difference been religious and scientific conclusions.
It is a real pity that this aspect of Marx is not better known, but then it hardly fits the mental outlook of professional managerial class, that dominates academia, where everything must be a dichotomy.
Nicely said Greg; You are so right. Marx was asked about religion. His reply; “When it comes to religion I am an atheist.” This is universally misunderstood. It was his way of saying that religion, as he experienced it at the time, was a form of “self estrangement.” That means cutting one’s self off from one’s innate divinity and projecting that innate self onto an external object. Whether a mental conception of a separate god image or money or whatever. Atheism for Marx was a step back from religious self estrangement to an authentic grounding in the truth of Being. He was a self declared Christian humanist.
Karl Marx was actually a Christian spiritual revolutionary who was contributing to the German post enlightenment movement of articulating a more highly evolved understanding of humanity’s relationship with its own innate divinity. This follows on from the Hermetic influence of the philosopher Hegel. A point of view that Marx adapted, but did not reject.
The key concept here, that is still unfolding in our culture, is that religious thoughts about “god” are in the process of being superseded by the concept (and experience) of the “Inner Self.” God is within us. It is our true essence, and our struggle is to “realize” it. According to Carl Jung the Inner Self is the real source of all authentic spiritual experience. This understanding is vital if we are to truly grasp how Marx defined communism. Marx wrote “communism is the transcendence of human self estrangement.” That means communism is collective self realization. The very essence of our aspirations for real democracy.
I don’t see how you can’t get more spiritually enlightened and advanced then that. Marx was aiming at the real and true fulfillment of Christianity. However I have learnt that understanding Marx in this area requires a good grounding in modern depth psychology. How rare is that in political circles!
All of this explains to me why Russia, China, Cuba and Iran, all countries that have been through the baptism of socialist revolutions, now display a rich and growing spiritual cohesion in world affairs. It is most revealing that their opposition is fueled by the fanatical egoism of the real atheists, the capitalists, who transpose a religion of money worship in place of authentic spirited humanism. The rising Satan force (capitalist egoism) is absolutely terrified of authentic spirituality, particularly as it collectively embodies itself. This is the real reason they hate and fear socialism so much. This was all openly admitted, after a fashion, by one of America’s leading capitalist theoreticians. Billy Kristol was asked on TV what American movement does the Republican Right wing fear the most. His answer spoke volumes. “The New Age Movement.” The point being it is this movement that is building towards an American culture of collective self realization. Kristol was astute enough to know who the capitalists must really fear in America. This says a lot about why this movement constantly is trashed in the mass media.
Ramin’s advocacy of a vanguard party cannot be logically refuted. I would just add that any such manifestation in the west of such a concept would, at this stage at least, need an awesome level of built in spiritual protection as the capitalists can be guaranteed to totally annihilate it – driven by their own deep seated unconscious fear. A genuine fear of collective egoism being displaced by the divine Creator unfolding itself inside humanity. Can anyone offer a better definition of political liberation?
Snow Leopard thanks for you kind reply;
I am an old member of the now extinct Communist Party of Australia and worked many years with Christians and other religious people who were in my view 100% communist in all but theory. While the vast majority of my party comrades were likewise, the same cannot be said of the leadership which was neither communist in theory or practice, though this took a long time for me to realize.
The religious dimension of life, which I prefer to refer to as the poetic or aesthetic aspects of the mind and being, became recently more important as I am studying the political economy of Australia in 1788 (before invasion), which turns out to be more complex and sophisticated than is generally acknowledged.
So while this appears miles away from present political concerns, as is often the case, has become more central in this particularly dark time of human history. My problem was establishing where and how Aboriginal society mustered immense conceptual knowledge of natural and social life and used this to design and sculpt a symbiotic technology into the very landscape. Where was the intellectual fora, and the concepts?
Naturally this was found in religion, as analogies, of ancestral beings that lived in the land, were addressed daily, who used human proxies to fight out their battles, and the contemplation of elders to divine their clashing wills; all of which were transformed into practical actions of one sort or another.
To find this I had be without-god in explaining it, that is spiritual sentiments were put aside, I only looked at this from the vantage point of political economy. This is how science must work, it is not how the people in 1788 felt or understood things, but they were not stupid or deluded they achieved things that modern society cannot, a ecologically complimentary instrument of labour that required less effort with more people, and produced greater surplus (a living larder) as it was developed, until smallpox in 1789.
We cannot turn back the clock, nor resurrect the spiritual life of 1788, but we can learn from it.
Lenin once called for a proletarian church, which I interpret literally not as some dressed up political farce, but as a re-founding of a real religiosity unsullied by the cant and empty moralism of modern religion. I don’t care what the beliefs are, as far as I am concerned no religion is actually based on ‘belief systems’ but rather the aesthetic experience of deep immersion in religious sentiment as analogies embraced.
I once taught English literature to high school students, until hunted out of education for failing to conform to stupidity. I often used the Book of Ruth for the beauty of its story (the sting of the begat in the last part being overtly political). Or the creation prayer which has nothing to so with creating the world (an analogy) and everything to do with placing an individual within the greater scheme of things, it was also a good introduction to Darwin’s brilliant prose (the beauty of the poetic and that of science as mirror twins).
“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the
spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium [pain killer] of the people.” [CONTRIBUTION TO THE CRITIQUE OF HEGEL’S PHILOSOPHY OF LAW]
“To be sensuous, that is, to be really existing, means to be an object of sense, to be a sensuous object, and thus to have sensuous objects outside oneself—objects of one’s sensuousness. To be sensuous is to suffer.
“Man as an objective, sensuous being is therefore a suffering being—and because he feels that he suffers, a passionate being. Passion is the essential power of man energetically bent on its object.” [CRITIQUE OF THE HEGEL’s DIALECTIC AND PHILOSOPHY AS A WHOLE]
I agree on several points with Greg Schofield who wrote:
“I once taught English literature to high school students, …often used the Book of Ruth for the beauty of its story…. Or the creation prayer which has nothing to so with creating the world (an analogy) and everything to do with placing an individual within the greater scheme of things, it was also a good introduction to Darwin’s brilliant prose (the beauty of the poetic and that of science as mirror twins).”
From my own reading around, the Book of Ruth is considered to have been written as a gentle reproof to the savage chauvinism of Ezra and Nehemiah. And an extract from “Origin of the Species” appeared in a collection of “Best Prose Writers in English Literature”. And that Marx was a Romantic of the same 1848 Revolutionary generation as Heine and Wagner is known, with the same poetic sensibility. And that the early Christian Church, headed by James brother of Rabbi Yeshuah, were Communists is also well known (it’s in the Bible) — though not widely broadcast in our Capitalist-owned West.
Thanks once again, Ramin, for introducing more readers to Religious Socialism.
“Science, Art and Religion: the triple pillars of History” — Introduction to the poems of Rainer Maria Rilke.
Greg; Do you have any reference source regarding Lenin calling for a proletarian church? I do know that he called for many socialist groups of “friends of Hegel.” That is aiming in a compatible direction. Unfortunately events got in the way of that development.
Snow Leopard and all readers,
I have tracked down the work I read and discussed in the lat 1970s, I have mixed up the logic of Lenin’s position on morality and his critique with the conclusion we came to.
THE TASKS OF THE YOUTH LEAGUES September 1920, Page 294 Collected Works vol 31.
The conclusion we reached, then was that such morality is not a system, but inspired insight, that has always marked actual religious moral acts, as against what Lenin was criticizing in bourgeois morality being external, and the general problem of supernaturalism. This was what Kant saw as super-sensible, and Hegel as mystic aspect of concept. There was what I would call a utilitarian interpretation on Lenin’s view of morality — politically expediency. It was in discussing that difference that proletarian religion, not as god-building, but as a genuine religious sentiment, in that the action was right even if why it was so could not be articulated (the very opposite of functional morality).
Sorry for my mistake, but the area where concept comes forward as inspired self activity, an intervention to do right is not a political calculation, and should be discussed
@Greeg Schofield
@ Snow Leopard
Thank you for putting into articulate speech many of the thought burblings and percolations previously having passed through my mind. I have often reflected on the apparent strangeness (to the perceptions of the leftist leaning political believers in USA) of Eldridge Cleaver’s becoming a born again Christian . But really one could say he sort of came full circle, having come to a recognition in spirit or essence of what Jesus of Nazareth was saying to him as an individual person. That’s kind of interesting.
But really, with the murder of god in the consciousness of “the west” and the present ongoing fall of empire playing out on stage it looks like it’s time to arise from our mortal graves and serve the people in the spirit of the anointed one. And praise to the Chinese people, The Cuban people, and their system which has such capacity and resilience in the face of such U.S. agression. It’s a wonderful lesson in compassion and organization. And look at the Russian contributions. Definite Christian nations yet—-pretty interesting. What a contrast with uncle Satan! Wow!
And Donnie!!Makes a perfect antichrist. I just love it.
And thank you Ramin. I love reading your reports and essays.
Brother Blue Iconoclast
Lots of very fine comments here from people, but I thought I’d just pass on: to Islamic Socialism Marx is essentially atheist (though obviously not as militant as Lenin). What’s certain is that Marx is not Islamic.
And that’s rather a big deal to Muslims and Islamic Socialists:
– so of course was anti-clerical: he had quite the wrong clerics – they reject a huge portion of monotheism and its most wide-reaching prophet.
– of course he saw “supernaturalism” as without merit: he did not know Allah (God), but the Trinity and other polytheisms/incomplete monotheisms
– of course he viewed the Bible as mere stories: he had not accepted the only direct writings of a prophet (Mohammad)
– of course he viewed God as merely an aesthetic: he did not share the social responsibility dictates of Islam; he did not share a love of the one God
– of course he feared religious interference in gov’t and gov’t influence in religion: his religion was not Islam
I could go on and on like this but the point is: to the average Islamic Socialist all this (and much more) makes Marx an atheist in practice. That’s just objective reporting on my part.
What his true personal feelings are, I have no real interest, just like your everyday Muslim. Any discussions of a “watchmaker” God or whatever philosophical contortions Marx made to distill his “spiritual” feeling into/from “religious” feeling – these are mere exercises in logic to Muslims; but constructed on false, absurd premises. Personally, I have other things to do and, crucially, in the time I have to talk about God I’m not going to play these logic games with faith – Marx did not really know God, or at least he did not really know Islam, so he does.
This is why I write that “maybe” Marx is an atheist – in the Islamic view of socialism he obviously is – I just don’t want to get into these points.
These points are totally obvious, totally logical and totally discussed among Islamic Socialists, but I don’t feel like elaborating them in an article or defending them when there are countless Muslims would do it for me in there daily lives and conversations.
Just as Islam bans forced conversions to Islam, no Muslim is forcing anyone to become Islamic Socialist – go be a Christian, Hindu Socialist or whatever you want for all Muslims care – but Westerners keep insisting that Muslims take the Islam out of their socialism; they insist that we cannot take his data and analyses unless we also take on his atheism. It’s logically absurd. They already don’t, haven’t and won’t.
Don’t kill the messenger.
Ramin Mazaheri
Not the intention at all, your opinion was a jumping off point, not a criticism of your position or reportage, which has always been excellent.
There is a problem in the West and where the culture of late capitalism has led it, a deep spiritual crisis, there is a religious path and a nominally non-religious path, that are neither at odds nor incompatible, both deal with what I would call analogies of our species being, but who others would call God. In this IU am not arguing the difference between them, but the unity in them.
In the end we are known by what we do, the difference between a good muslim, jew, christian, hindu, or if you like atheistic Marxist — is zero; as good works and actions are always cut from the same cloth — our shared humanity and whatever is included in that.
I also like your distinction ‘What’s certain is that Marx is not Islamic’ and agree, his critique of religion is from the vantage point of Western Europe when Christianity was integral and corrupted by its own history. I have been using his critique to better understand a religion that was not corrupt in 1788 Australia, but I had to, in a sense, reverse his conclusion. In this we would find a lot of common ground.
When you say “to the average Islamic Socialist all this (and much more) makes Marx an atheist in practice. That’s just objective reporting on my part.” there is no disagreement, the vantage point determines the logic and the relationship as objective, as we do not stand outside, but within the thing that we report upon — historical society as we find it and as we find ourselves.
Finally, I agree whole-heatedly for the imperialist hubris; “Westerners keep insisting that Muslims take the Islam out of their socialism; they insist that we cannot take his data and analyses unless we also take on his atheism. It’s logically absurd.”
However, as a Westerner reading your words, I cannot help but reflect on my own traditions which are in much need of repair and from which whole dimensions that were once basic and in place are now missing. One aspect of this is a level of ignorance, about religion that effectively destroys the connection between western society and its own literature and art. That degeneracy looses people to a void. The westerners who insist on “that Muslims take the Islam out of their socialism” are like the fox that lost its tail, hailing it as the greatest improvement to fox-kind there ever was, when it was actually a loss of the foxes most beautiful adornment.
All the best and keep writing… from a admirer of your work.
Ramin; Thank you for taking the time to respond to these comments. I would never dream of killing you. I love you. Your work is magnificent and it helps me enormously.
In 1982 I was blessed by your God to be driven to read a book by Jose Miranda entitled “Marx Against the Marxists.” Miranda’s extremely well researched central argument is that Marxists advance a conception of Marx and Socialism that is a demonstrably false interpretation of the real Marx and his work. The conventional picture of Marx that is accepted by practically all socialists the world over is a false and in fact quite bourgeois distortion of the real Karl Marx. It is this conventional picture that you are wise to pass on and walk away from.
My point, along with Miranda, is that not even Marxists understand Marx. Which is why your God drove me, through suffering, to read this book. “Marxists” end up undervaluing his spiritual and philosophical integrity and then try and impose that false (unwittingly bourgeois) picture onto Islamic socialists and everyone else. Hence even you can, unintentionally and with good intentions, reject this Marx. What choice would you have? But the good news is that it is a false picture. It is provably a straw man. We all suffer from taking Marxists at their word for who Marx was and what he was about. I was doing the same thing myself until my eyes were opened by this book. Praise be to the one true Creator. If one reads “Marx Against the Marxists” if becomes glaringly obvious that he was a dedicated Christian. So any understanding of his atheism needs to be interpreted in the context of his dedication to the work of Jesus Christ. He actually said so himself. Marx also wrote that the central most important feature of socialism was its spiritual force. Thanks to you it is obvious to me that the people of Iran have very little difficulty understanding that fact.
The problem that we all run into is driven by the fact that the West is going through a major religious and spiritual transformation process, of which the real Marx is a critical component. But the average socialist is by no means qualified to understand this, so they trot out the old conventional (bourgeois) judgements about Marx and then we just get into mutual alienation and misunderstanding. This has an enormous relevance to the fact that the masses no longer have sense of being able to relate to socialism and the various revolutionary movements in the West have subsided.
I must confess that when I read your spiritually inspired Islamic socialist perspective my heart and soul opens up with delight and I seek to respond from my educated conception of the true spiritual power of Marx. All of this, on my part is an attempt to support and reinforce everything that you say and do. Ramin you inspire me. It is as simple as that. Thank You.
Not exactly. We are in God.
Snow Leopard : “God is within us. It is our true essence, and our struggle is to “realize” it.”
It’s a shame not to realize this, but GOD cannot be IN US. For where would GOD be without US?
What or Who is outside of that which all that IS?
Ergo, We are in God; yet we are also, not in our bodies. Our Mind, of which we reside in, is also,”outside of us”. This is fundamentally why, we are safe, at all times and in all instances. Safety relies on knowing where you are. And if we are not in the body. Then, nothing and no one can hurt us.
Jesus did not die because no life exists in the body, just the energy of life, which is not God, it’s merely just an aspect of God, and aspects are not the Light of the Divine, the are shadows of shadows.
Stuart; Let’s not get too confused and overly complicated here. God is in us and we are in God. Both statements are true. One does not refute the other. The Creator made all things including us. We are a manifestation of the essence of the Creator. He/She chooses to emerge within us. This is the Hermetic (ancient Egyptian) view of evolution and human history. A spiritual teacher I know once defined humans as “concentrations of infinity.” Ergo the infinity of God is within us and without us. This is what liberation is all about, both spiritual and political. It is just good quantum physics. Marx’s major revolutionary contribution, (not understood) is that socialism includes the activation of this reality. That is why egoists, who need to miss the point, are so afraid of it.
In the west, we have a very real problem with being able to objectively observe and discern what reality actually is. This is due to the fact that, by and large, we accept deceptions and illusions as if they were fact. I honestly believe that this condition is the manifestation of a disease which infects the consciousness (in both mind and spirit, and so affects the soul to great detriment). This distorts the realities that we create for ourselves to a very great degree. Basically, the root cause of this disease is deception itself, and its acceptance, within ourselves. This acceptance of falsehoods seperates us from ourselves, seperates our consciousness from our natural spiritual origin, seperates us from what Life itself actually is in its natural expression.
To one degree or another, all of the rather continuous series of catastrophies which we are experiencing stem from this.
Absolutely, but first people have to recognize this for their own…and no recognition comes without sacrifice.
“The roar that the Yellow Vests will make when France’s lockdown in over… that’s another article.”
Hope to hear that roar. I heard the roar of communal France at the end of the last century, in a spontaneous sing-song at a French village fete; and have not heard it since, not even from les Gilets Jaunes. Hope to read that article soon. Hope this time the canaille bring not only their songs but their pitchforks.
The USA has given the world much in the form of innovation and technology but ask youself: In the last 60 years has the USA really saved any country from a fate worse than death? Wherein lie all the successful economic and military interventions. Where lies the fallen signpost to all the moral and intellectual leadership successes.
The USA has practically never ‘given’ anything to anyone but sorrow. Go delve through the library of congress and find endless ill deeds toward the rest of the world.
Here a website of someone serious who took the time to study the official historical documentation and uncover the truth. Keep a bucket ready not to soil the rug:
http://mtwsfh.blogspot.com/
Cheers!
Ramin, yet another excellent article. I have had this nasty thought rattling inside my skull:
1. Covid is such a convenient pretext to clamp down on Yellow Vests, who refused to go away.
2. Covid is an excellent cover for non existing economy, all the fake “baloons” and pumping more $trillions intoi the pockets of the 0.1% thieves.
There are many other thoughts, …
As for the atheism and Theism. One of the Greek Philosophers asked those claiming atheism: “Why do you ask gods to save you when your ship is going down during the storm?” Atheism is not a communist invention, I hope you know that. Just like Marx, who simply recycled the Christian ideals, therefore Christianity was there before him. Just saying.
Anonius’s comments sum it all up. “Un Common” sense points to some sort of ” First Cause “. Observing Nature is illustrative of ” Good “. Of course this so called Pandemic is a Head Fake to facilitate the Psychopath’s attempt destroy what is left of social Harmony in the World. Spend less time and effort trying to pick fly poop out of pepper…and focus on basics. The flock of sheep are being scattered again.
There is an interview with a iranian communist, who was in the same jail block as Imam Khamenei before the revolution. Mind you, that the man telling the story is a Godless communist! He explains, that at night the young Imam Khamenei would pray loudly and with such a passion and sincerity, that it affected this communist fellow in the SAVAK prison.
As you know the western colonial powers favor buying politicians and military leaders for propaganda purpuses, as they have done in in Syria too. If I remember correctly the whorehouse of saud even tried to buy the syrian emissary to the un for a very generous sum of cash. I am both sad and glad to say, that some high ranking iranians have also sold their sold for a handful of dollar and a promise of a greencard. Some of these traitors have been very close to our Imam. But you can still find interviews with them regarding Imam Khamenei, where they criticize the western financed anti revolutionary media like the bbc or voa persia for lying about him and his financial situation. The fact of the matter is, that even they have to admit, that he lives in poverty and owns almost nothing in this life!
This is not something new. During the shah era Imam Khomeini chose him as his representative in Mashhad, which is one the most important shia centers in the world and second in Iran. While in Mashhad he meets a shop owner and his son. He begins to take the son under his wings, but the father is more eager to come to him and lets the young boy stay and work at the shop, while he visits the young Imam khamenei. But Imam asks him to let the son visit him instead. The father accepts and the young boy becomes one of our Imams proteges. The young boy became a general, who would walk into minefields with his soldiers and not a single mine would explode. Believe me, I know, what you are thinking, but it is just deed out of many recorded acts of pure conviction. At one points a couple of his soldiers decided, that there was no minefield and tested their theory and were blown to pieces trying. His name was General Burunsi and I have the honor of visiting his grave a few years back. Our Imam recognized in this little boy something and the boy became an exceptional man and martyr. You wouldnt believe the things he did on the battlefield. And it is all documented!
You know, General Soleimani asked to be buried at a specific place besides a specific Martyr too…….!
Our Imam Khamenei is a true man of conviction and believe in God! His heart is pure!
In a talk given at a conference in St. Petersburg 2006, called ‘The Tyranny of Liberalism’ Israel Shamir said these illuminating words at a conference on Religion in International Relations;
“Though it originated in the West, Communism first arose in the society formed by the Russian Orthodox Church, and it had many features one would expect to find in a secularized Orthodoxy. Poets felt it well and Alexander Blok sang of Christ ‘with the blood-red flag, invulnerable to bullets, fleeting foot above the blizzard, in the white crown of roses’ leading his Twelve Red Guards. In the late Soviet days, the Russians proclaimed the Christian principle ‘Man is to Man a Friend, Comrade and Brother.’ The Russian Communists despised material comforts as had their Orthodox predecessors, and placed a sobornost (Catholicity, or togetherness-in-the Church) and solidarity above all virtues. Solidarity and togetherness are features shared by ideologies Liberalism is hostile to.”
http://www.israelshamir.net/English/Eng7.htm
And here it is in their own word:
https://www.bitchute.com/video/er4S0xQzOUNj/
sooner or later everybody will know the truth!
Thomas Binder
https://twitter.com/Thomas_Binder/status/1242939099704709120
The test is the disease, not the virus!
During my entire life we have never tested for any cold virus except when specific therapy was needed.
Then came the sorcerer’s apprentice @c_drosten with his test out of nowhere & turned everything topsy-turvy.
Now the fat is in the fire!
https://twitter.com/Thomas_Binder/status/1242564354152845314
@c_drosten, who co-created this insane disease initiated by a simple corona cold virus but manifested in our brains, and obviously has no idea of almost anything, especiallly not about life, is ALSO an advisor of the German government AND a multimedia star: This MUST go wrong!
https://twitter.com/Thomas_Binder/status/1242495357063286785
My brief history of #COVID19 pandemia (exempted from China and Iran: Not enough insight)
1/8
Q: Who is the vanguard party in the US?
A: Since Pindos are exceptional and indispensable, the entire US population constitutes a de facto vanguard party. But if there’s one person who should be shown deep veneration here, I would suggest Michael Ledeen. He cuts to the chase like few other people do:
Vanguard material at its finest, eh?
Very, very interesting analysis.