Many Marxists oppose secularism, and stand on the side of radical Islam; hence, for example, their complicity with the murders of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists.
But why? Today, tomorrow and the day after, I provide a few possible reasons.
How many other possible explanations can you provide for the hostility of Marxists towards secularism?
The Trotskyist Sean Matgamna has denounced the the Marxist betrayal of secularism.
He argues that political Islam (Islamism) is not purely the result of Western foreign policy; it also has indigenous religious and cultural roots in the Arab world.
Controversially, he said these words:
Like desert tribes of primitive Muslim simplicity and purity enviously eyeing a rich and decadent walled city and sharpening their knives, or country folk in former Yugoslavia eyeing a city like Dubrovnik, so, now, much of the Islamic world looks with envy, covetousness, religious self-righteousness and active hostility on the rich, decadent, infidel-ridden, sexually sinful advanced capitalist societies.
An article in the Weekly Worker dismissed this (as per the headline) as a ‘chauvinistic tirade.’
Worker’s Power (again, as per the headline), denounced it as a ‘racist article.’
Ultimately, Marxists who believe in Karl Marx’s notion of religion as the ‘opium of the people’ will have a lot of difficulty waking up their intoxicated comrades, drunk on the possibility of a Revolution that will never happen, and perfectly happy to collaborate with religious extremists in the meantime.
Well, provided they are of the right type!
But what’s going on?
Why are so many Marxists taking such a ‘dynamic’ and ‘Blairite’ approach to their religion, and letting rival religious fanatics subvert some of their most sacred tenets?
The subsequent instalments, scheduled for the next twenty minutes, provide some possible explanations of this intriguing and disturbing phenomenon.