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The Forum > Article Comments > Lest we forget > Comments

Lest we forget : Comments

By Greg Byrne, published 7/5/2013

It is tragic that the NCC, so perceptive in analysing the ideology of Marxism and the Greens, is failing to do the same with Islam.

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Santamaria as one of Australia's greatest intellectuals - oh puleez.

I first saw him as a young teenager before I even became interested in politics, on his weekly TV spot "point of view". It was obvious to me that he was very much into the politics of fear and loathing.

During the American war against the people of Vietnam he tried to pressure our government into persuading the USA to use nuclear weapons against the North Vietnamese.
To his credit he was one of the few voices on the right side of the culture wars divide to oppose the then nascent but now firmly in place politics and anti-"culture" of "free"- market fundamentalism.
He also said that he never ever voted for the Liberal party.

And yes it would be a very sorry day for humankind is Islam came to dominate the world.
But how many human beings of either Islamic or Arab origins have been slaughtered by the Christian West in the past decade, as compared to Westerners whether Christian or otherwise by members of Islam.

And of course we dreadfully sane Westerners dont do terror do we. We are "civilized". As an invitable consequence of our dreadful sanity we gave the entire world both World Wars. We do our supposedly non-terrorist killing via silently "efficient" drones. Or via cruise missiles launched from secure bunkers thousands of miles away, or from 30,000 feet via B52 bombers. Or we use petrol bombs, Moab bombs, daisy-cutters, cluster-bombs
Posted by Daffy Duck, Tuesday, 7 May 2013 4:03:41 PM
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Well, Daffy, the fact is that we have the weapons. We have the weapons because we have the science, and we have the science because we have achieved a more or less secular society. We use overwhelming force in our wars because it would be foolish not to, and we kill from a distance because we can. I completely agree with you that we don't always get the enemy right, and we don't always understand their motives for hating us -- which is partly what the article is about.

But don't you agree that it's lunacy to go up against an enemy as well-armed as the US when you could choose to make peace instead, and don't you agree that religious beliefs are contributing to that lunacy? Courageous resistance against a powerful enemy may be brave and noble, but putting up a courageous resistance because you think an invisible magic man wants you to is stark madness.
Posted by Jon J, Tuesday, 7 May 2013 4:16:47 PM
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good also to know that Israel has far more than weapons on its side. It continues to win against all odds and all enemies. Amazing how they have transformed such a tiny plot of desert in a blooming rose garden.
Posted by runner, Tuesday, 7 May 2013 4:30:16 PM
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But the Israeli "rose garden" is essentially a welfare state that has been paid for by the long suffering ordinary every day American taxpayer to the tune of countless billions of dollars.
The same USA taxpayers who are mostly Christians, non-religious or members of non-Semitic faith traditions essentially subsidize or pay for orthodox Jewish males and their families to be parasites on the same Jewish state while being full time students of the Torah (while simultaneously being exempt from military service and demanding that everyone else conform to their strict cultural norms re the sabbath, and gender relations). And who are most often (but not always) in the vanguard of those Jews who demand that ALL of the ancient Old Testament lands be returned to Jewish possession and sovereignty, and thus actively support the "settler" movement and their systematic disposession of the Palestinians.

Some/many USA Christian zionists support this project because it squares with their deluded belief that the restoration of this ancient state of affairs is a prerequisite for the "second coming of 'Jesus'" and as a simultaneous precursor for "armageddon" to occur - and of course even more importantly to them, the "rapture" too. Such a mind-set is deeply psychotic and yet it is subscribed to by tens of millions of dreadfully sane USA Christians steeped in the fantasies of the New York Times best selling Left Behind series of books.

But when it all boils down it is all about access to and control of OIL.
Posted by Daffy Duck, Tuesday, 7 May 2013 6:34:22 PM
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Cohenite,

How to explain this weird coming-together of extreme Catholics, Islamists and some of the Left ? As someone born and raised on the Left, but some time ago, I think it may have something to do with their common belief in a Utopia, a perfectly-scripted, pre-ordained society, into which - from each of their perspectives - eventually everybody must be fitted or - for the good of the rest of society - 'removed', 'subtracted'.

In a word, each of those ideologies is authoritarian. In Isaiah Berlin's dichotomy of positive and negative freedom, they come down on the side of positive society, the ready-made Good Society, which has no place for dissent. In Karl Popper's schema, they each represent, in their horribly different ways, a closed society. Which has no place for dissent.

Maybe every generation has to re-learn the same lessons, over and over again, how to resist the sirens of fascism, in their multitude of names :(

Joe
Posted by Loudmouth, Tuesday, 7 May 2013 6:36:34 PM
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Daffy, the name says it all. Oil! How much Oil does Israel control? It has nothing to do with oil. It has a lot to do with the manipulation of public opinion, and the creation of the myth.
Posted by Jon R, Tuesday, 7 May 2013 6:42:39 PM
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