Fascism of our times...

"....criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism!"

Here is some more fuel to the fire...
My precious words are at the end ....

NTR
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On International Women's Day: For Hatun

On International Women's Day, we commemorate 23 year old Hatun, murdered in cold blood in Germany by her brothers for 'dishonouring' her family, for divorcing a man she was forced to marry at 16, for unveiling, and for dating German men.

Some boys discussing her death put it clearly: 'She deserved to die; the whore lived like a German.'

To her brothers, Islamists and the political Islamic movement that is all she was.

And that is all Maryam Ayoubi, stoned to death for having sex outside of marriage by the Islamic regime in Iran, was. And all that 16 year old Atefeh Rajabi, hung in a city square in Iran for acts incompatible with chastity, was...

Sometimes it takes a Hatun, Maryam or Atefeh to outrage us and move us into action.

I suppose it is easier to understand one woman – her refusal and resistance, and the barbarity of the Islamic justice meted out against her. Hatun and others like her personify and symbolise the sub-human status of women in Islam-ridden societies like Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan or Islamist communities in Britain and Germany.

Hatun's death outrages us not because her murder is a rare tragedy but because it is so common. There are millions like her living under sexual apartheid, veiled, gagged, bound, burnt, hacked to death, hung, decapitated, stoned... Million like her refusing and resisting and demanding a life worthy of 21st century humanity. Millions like her demanding to live a life of their own choosing.

How simple it sounds and yet how difficult it has become to do so in this day and age - difficult in a New World Order where universal values and standards are under attack. All we hear over and over - as if a sermon over the corpses of innumerable women - is that it is 'their culture and religion'. Respect them; tolerate them; do not offend them... Nowadays, religion and beliefs have more rights and demand more respect than human beings are allowed to.

And if you cry out and say enough, if you say political Islam is reactionary – it must be pushed back; if you demand universal rights and secularism - you are deemed racist and an 'Islamophobe'!?

How many more Hatuns, Maryams, Atefehs before we put women and human beings first?

How can we end honour killings and the slaughter of women by the political Islamic movement?

Certainly not by appeasing, encouraging and maintaining it as western states and the so-called nationalist Left groups are doing.

Not by respecting and tolerating it.

Not by promoting separate rights and standards for different people whether they live in Iran, Iraq or in the West.

Not by chipping away at secularism.

And not by giving religion more access and power over the social sphere.

[Imagine appeasing, encouraging, tolerating and respecting fascism and Nazism and promoting different standards and rights for its victims.]

***

Throughout history, reaction has always been pushed back by standing up to it and confronting it head on.

Political Islam deserves nothing less.

***
http://maryamnamazie.blogspot.com

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I would change the last line to "Political religion deserves nothing less".

Writing from India, it is impossible to restrict one's criticism to merely one religion, Islam. Remember Roop Kanwar who was forced on the funeral pyre of her husband to follow hoary Hindu practices in the same period when Shah Bano was being deprived of alimony in the name of Islam.

Political religion is a contemporary political banner which is competing with socialism, liberalism and other political ideologies. It's manifesto is a compedium of social practices which were the foundation of feudal (pre/anti-modern) social formations and precisely because of that they are able to formally oppose, while at the same instant hide and beautify the dictatorship of capital -- the kaaba to which they all bow.

I for one cannot see the difference between Qureshi, the minister in UP, who publically announced the Rs. 51 crore (US $11 + million) bounty for the head of the "Danish cartoonist" and some-one like Praveen Togadia of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad who is responsible for the killings of thousands of poor ( and not so poor) Muslims. I cannot stand shoulder to shoulder with fascists to protest imperialism.

If George Bush and rampant imperialism is enemy number one, the fascism of our times (political religion) is its twin. How can one ally with one to oppose the other? (and do not forget that they were literally brothers-in-arms till very recently, when the red flag was still flying high). Imperialism is not anti-muslim, not against any religion's stifling control over social relations. Why should it be? Political religion kills democratic ideas by not allowing the democratisation of social practices. By shoring up and glorifying feudal social practices it, at once, divides people into pre-modern social stratifications which are by definition primordial, while it also holds up a false utopia of the "golden past" to precisely those who are beaten daily by the dictatorship of capital.

The continued degradation and oppression of Dalits (former untouchables) in India is merely another equally horrendous legacy of feudal social practices which has seamlessly become part of the manifesto of politial religion in India.

Therefore, the fight against imperialism has perforce to be a fight against political religion. Short sighted alliances with political religion are not only morally wrong but fatal in the medium and long term. Even though I was young then, I haven't forgotten how for most "leftists" in India the overthrow of the Shah of Iran by Khomeni was celebrated as the culmination of a successful anti-imperialist people's movement.

Anti-american it may have been, perhaps even popular, but these fascists then proceeded to kill hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions) of communists, trade unionists, atheists, political opponents, religious non-conformists, etc... haven't we learnt our lesson yet that we would commit the same mistake again...

I thought I would end by a some very relevant quotes some of you may recognise from a distant past...

  "....criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism!"

  "This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d'honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion."

"The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo."

"In the struggle against that state of affairs, criticism is no passion of the head, it is the head of passion. It is not a lancet, it is a weapon. Its object is its enemy, which it wants not to refute but to exterminate. For the spirit of that state of affairs is refuted. In itself, it is no object worthy of thought, it is an existence which is as despicable as it is despised. Criticism does not need to make things clear to itself as regards this object, for it has already settled accounts with it. It no longer assumes the quality of an end-in-itself, but only of a means. Its essential pathos is indignation, its essential work is denunciation."

" What a sight! This infinitely proceeding division of society into the most manifold races opposed to one another by petty antipathies, uneasy consciences, and brutal mediocrity, and which, precisely because of their reciprocal ambiguous and distrustful attitude, are all, without exception although with various formalities, treated by their rulers as conceded existences. And they must recognize and acknowledge as a concession of heaven the very fact that they are mastered, ruled, possessed ! And, on the other side, are the rulers themselves, whose greatness is in inverse proportion to their number!

Criticism dealing with this content is criticism in a hand-to-hand fight, and in such a fight the point is not whether the opponent is a noble, equal, interesting opponent, the point is to strike him. The point is not to let the Germans have a minute for self-deception and resignation. The actual pressure must be made more pressing by adding to it consciousness of pressure, the shame must be made more shameful by publicizing it. Every sphere of German society must be shown as the partie honteuse of German society: these petrified relations must be forced to dance by singing their own tune to them! The people must be taught to be terrified at itself in order to give it courage. This will be fulfilling an imperative need of the German nation, and the needs of the nations are in themselves the ultimate reason for their satisfaction.

This struggle against the limited content of the German status quo cannot be without interest even for the modern nations, for the German status quo is the open completion of the ancien régime and the ancien régime is the concealed deficiency of the modern state. The struggle against the German political present is the struggle against the past of the modern nations, and they are still burdened with reminders of that past."

"It was no longer a case of the layman's struggle against the priest outside himself but of his struggle against his own priest inside himself, his priestly nature. And if the Protestant transformation of the German layman into priests emancipated the lay popes, the princes, with the whole of their priestly clique, the privileged and philistines, the philosophical transformation of priestly Germans into men will emancipate the people. But, secularization will not stop at the confiscation of church estates set in motion mainly by hypocritical Prussia any more than emancipation stops at princes."

(Karl Marx, Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right,  1844)

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The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting!
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