A spectre is haunting 2035: the spectre of communism

[imomus]

The British Army has been brainstorming about what the world will be like thirty years into the future. They want to plan for the sort of risks, shocks and challenges the army might be facing in Britain in the year 2035.

According to Rear Admiral Chris Parry of the Ministry of Defense's Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre, there'll be inequality, overpopulation in Africa and the Middle East, shanty town-style urbanization, climate change bringing heat and soil erosion to developing countries and a big freeze to Europe, people with computer chips in their brains, and Flash Mobs mobilizing faster than the authorities can respond. Oh, and the return of Marxism.

Yes, even as Vladimir Putin promises a new Cold War, the British Army is foreseeing a 21st century resurgence of communist ideology and preparing to battle, well, not the international proletariat but the middle classes:

"The middle classes could become a revolutionary class, taking the role envisaged for the proletariat by Marx," says the report. The thesis is based on a growing gap between the middle classes and the super-rich on one hand and an urban under-class threatening social order: "The world's middle classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest". Marxism could also be revived, it says, because of global inequality. An increased trend towards moral relativism and pragmatic values will encourage people to seek the "sanctuary provided by more rigid belief systems, including religious orthodoxy and doctrinaire political ideologies, such as popularism and Marxism".



I must say I think the British Army is right. We're all sick of postmodernism, yet we know that there are really only two ways out of it: fundamentalist Islam and communism. I know which side I'm on.

The idea that the British Army is preparing to fight the British middle class does raise the worrying question of who the army is actually for, though. Doesn't the British middle class basically fund the British Army with their taxes? And isn't "the world's middle classes uniting, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest" pretty much a definition of the normal workings of any republic?

But Britain isn't a republic, of course, and the army is still loyal to the royals. It's Her Majesty's Army, loyal, in 2035, to King William, presumably.

A republic is a nation which has had precisely the kind of revolution the army is preparing to quell; a middle class one. America had its middle class revolution in 1776, France in 1789. Britain, then, is scheduled to have its very own in 2035. Guardian readers -- middle class proto-Marxists every last one -- must be quailing to read that what they thought was their own army may well use "unmanned electromagnetic pulses" against their tactical Flash Mob uprisings, knocking out their communication networks and stymying their attempt to foment the kind of revolution other advanced states achieved in the late 18th century.



A child of the American republic, Jeffrey D. Sachs, sketches out a much more sensible vision of the future in the first of the 2007 Reith Lectures, Bursting at the Seams. Director of The Earth Institute, Professor of Sustainable Development at Columbia and a former advisor to Kofi Annan at the UN, Sachs also sees climate change and overpopulation as the major challenges the world faces. But instead of advocating, like the Rear Admiral, giving more money to the army so they can fight the very people who fund them, Sachs wants to take some of it away.

"One day's Pentagon spending could cover every sleeping site in Africa for five years with anti-malaria bed nets," he says.

Comments

[bricology.livejournal.com]

Another tenet is that apostates must be killed, meaning that any Muslim (even nominal ones) who leaves Islam or slanders it, must be placed under fatwa and put to death. This view is fully supported by the Hadiths. Some revisionists try to claim that a few mild passages in the Quran prove that it is "a religion of peace", but invariably these verses are in the earliest texts which are refuted by later verses that trade mildness for militancy. In simple terms, the later writings trump the earlier when there is any conflict between them.

Islam recognizes no separation between church and state; indeed its ideal is a combination of both, with the state being an organ of the church. Sharia law was what Muhammad established, and it is still practiced in many Islamic nations. There, moral infractions are the same as crimes, just as they were in Muhammad's day.

Sura 4, verse 34 of the Qur'an lays down the law on how to treat women: "...As to those women on whose part you fear disloyalty and ill-conduct, first admonish them, next refuse to share their beds, and lastly beat them..."

In 4:16 and 7:80-84, the Qur'an clearly states that same-sex relationships or even inclinations are prohibited by God and that anyone who has them is an apostate. We all know what happens to apostates: they're required to be put to death. Indeed, so against homosexuality is the Qur'an that it retells the story of Lot four times, each with the same message: homosexuals deserve death.

The Qur'an is rife with exhortations of the faithful to conquer nonbelievers.

2:191 says "...slay (the enemies of Islam)
wherever you catch them..."

9:5 says "...slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them captives and besiege them and lie in wait for them in every ambush..."

9:29 says "Fight those who believe neither in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, even if they are of the People of the Book (Christians and Jews), until they pay the ransom with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued."

9:33 says "He it is Who hath sent His messenger with the guidance and the Religion of Truth, that He may cause it to prevail over all religion, however much the idolaters may be averse."

8:12-13 says "Remember thy Lord inspired the angels to give you this message: 'I am with you: give firmness to the Believers: I will instill terror into the hearts of the Unbelievers: therefore, strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them. This because they contend against Allah and His Messenger: if any contend against Allah and His Messenger, Allah is severe in punishment.

47:4 says "So when you meet in battle those who disbelieve, then smite the necks until when you have overcome them, then make them prisoners, and afterwards either set them free as a favor or let them ransom themselves until the war terminates..."

As they say, there's lots more where that came from.

Awesome

[cerulicante.livejournal.com]

Hah hah hah, excellent. A killing intellectual blow, indeed.



But I'm afraid such masterful work is wasted on the dullness of self-imposed ignorance. You can fully expect people to counter your arguments with "CHRISTIANITY HAD THE CRUSADES!" or some other such nonsense. I think the problem isn't that people don't know that Islam is a violent and misogynistic cult, it's that they're laboring under the 60's hippie belief that plugging one's ears and screaming the opposite will somehow make that fantasy come true.

Re: Awesome

[bricology.livejournal.com]

The fundamental disconnect that I see in most Westerners who assert that Islam is a "religion of peace" is the contrast between Islam and every other major religion in its role model. Jesus, the role model for Christians, is depicted in the Bible (with few exceptions) as mild and self-abnegating; a pacifist. The Buddha is depicted approximately the same, and Buddhists try to emulate him and his qualities. Hinduism's saints, likewise, and the same with Jainism.

But the template for behavior for all Muslims is Muhammad, and only Muhammad -- a warrior whose own documents record his killings, his power-grabs, his lust and avarice. How can anyone get a "religion of peace" out of that standard? It simply can never work, no matter how much we try force the fit.

Re: Awesome

[imomus.livejournal.com]

This is ethnocentric rubbish, I'm afraid. The main difference between Christ and Mohammed is that Christ only had 12 people in his gang whereas Mohammed (who began as a shepherd, became a successful businessman, and then became a prophet and military leader) had thousands. Do you think Christ -- a hot-headed fellow who chased the moneylenders out of the temple, withered a fig tree which failed to feed him, and proclaimed that he brought the sword and had come to turn brother against brother and son against father -- wouldn't have mounted military operations against the Roman Empire if he'd had more than 12 followers?

Re: Awesome

[bricology.livejournal.com]

"Ethnocentric"? Muhammad and Jesus were both Semites; as ethnically similar to each other as you and I are to each other. And it's not like I subscribe to one belief system/culture or the other; I dismiss both of them, just as I dismiss every other lot of superstition. Apparently Jesus had a lot more than "12 followers"; if the Sermon on the Mount and the "feeding of the 5,000" incident are any indication, he had thousands of them. The Jews and the Romans wouldn’t’ve bothered with him had he not had enough followers to pose a threat to their power structures. But even in the Garden of Gesthemene incident, when Jesus' Disciples had armed themselves on their own and were ready to fight, Jesus commanded them to not do so. When Peter cut off the ear of the soldier, Jesus allegedly heals it. Can you feature Muhammad doing likewise?

We only know about Jesus from what is in the New Testament; there's no contemporary extra-Biblical information to go on. And I'm aware that the NT is a confection and a harmonization, done by hundreds of people over 1,500 years. I'm also aware of the examples of "non-Christ-like" (so to speak) behavior attributed to Jesus in the Bible, such as when he said "I come not to bring peace, but a sword". The four instances you cited are the same four that I like to mention when I want to show that the recorded Jesus wasn't perfect. However -- and it's a big "however" -- those four examples are anomalous to the majority of not only the recorded actions of Jesus but to his direct teachings. Jesus' single commmandent was "Love God with all your heart and your neighbor as yourself". Muhammad's one commandment was "Submit to God, all peoples of the earth, and live according to His Divinely revealed will". Surely you can see the difference there.

If we take both of these figures at face value (and there's no good reason to take only one and not the other that way), we are still left with the actions attributed to Muhammad as being extremely bloody, and those attributed to Jesus as being predominantly pacifist, just as we're left with the commandments of Muhammad as promoting violence and subjugation in this life, versus the commandments of Jesus as promoting turning the other cheek, selling all you have and giving the money to the poor, etc. It remains irrefutable that Muhammad's alleged life and teachings are consistent in their violence, intolerance and greed. His example is easier for Muslims to emulate today than Jesus' example of harmlessness and asceticism is for Christians to emulate, but such seems to be human nature.

Re: Awesome

[cheapsurrealist.livejournal.com]

stop me if you heard this one (http://www.godhatesfigs.com/)