Dutch lawmaker releases anti-Quran film - Europe- msnbc.com
I've seen this film. It makes many valid points and certainly I'm not going to defend militant Jihadist Islam. I think people need to speak out against the death threats, the violence, etc. But let's also consider that inherent violence in the Jewish Torah. How many times did God supposedly order the Jews to rape and commit genocide against the "unfaithful"? Plenty, actually. But yet, there are no videos denouncing Judaism, and I suspect that is mainly due to lack of Zionists blowing themselves up in public places and issuing death threats against people who jokingly make cartoons of Moses.
Christianity has its faults too. We've committed our share of atrocities against humanity to a degree I am sure Christ would have been aghast and infuriated. Christ, in fact, would probably have disowned Christianity. I personally disown extreme evangelical Christianity. Just watch a movie called Jesus Camp. You'll be frightened. They aren't raising the Christian version of Jihadists, but it's pretty damned close. Those extreme Baptists/Pentacostals/Calvinists/ etc. scare me. They hate human progress, technology and spout off about Satan being everywhere.
I thank God that I'm a progressive Christian. I don't see Satan everywhere, but a flawed humanity. The whole concept of Satan and Hell are old pagan ideas anyway, being mistranslated in the Bible, perhaps for political purposes. But I digress.
Really what I am getting at is that I feel pity for the progressives of their respective religions. Muslims, Jews, and Christians alike. They get grouped in with their idiotic extremist counterparts in their respective religions and the hate and violence continues.
Religion is about Love and the Spirit. Too bad that there are many out there that use Religion for more sinister purposes.
Sunday, March 30, 2008
Nationalism at core of China's reaction to Tibet unrest - International Herald Tribune
Nationalism at core of China's reaction to Tibet unrest - International Herald Tribune
I've understood already some interesting things about Socialism and Communism. As much as the official propaganda machines might deny it and even launch attacks against it, it has just about always been understood that these ideologies are nationalist at the core. Marxist-Leninist followers will always say something to the effect of "nationalism is dangerous and must be stopped"; Yet, they tend to use nationalism quite often.
I can think of all the present communist countries and their ideologies and all of them are nationalist to some degree or another. North Korea has essentially dumped any notion of Marxism from its official ideology in favor of what they call "Juche", an extreme nationalist ideology. Former and present communist parties in Eastern Europe have teamed up with neo-nazi parties in some countries, like Belarus and Slovakia. The Serbian Socialist Party, formerly known as the League of Communists of Serbia, has taken to ultra-nationalism, especially when Croatia and Bosnia attempted to flee former Yugoslavia. The old East German Socialist Unity Party had a bit of a nationalist streak, which Stalin had worried about and even had in its communist-dominated National Front a neo-nazi party called the National Democratic Party - not at all dissimilar to the modern NPD of Germany.
I could go on for hours about the love affair communism has with nationalism, but the point here being that the two don't really oppose each other as official propagandists would have us believe. It's the same deal in the People's Republic of China, that has its own version of a "National Front" with leftist members of the Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party) as part of it. OK, so they still display gigantic portraits of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao all over the place, but this is something the Fascists and National-Socialists did also. In fact, they had good teachers: The Soviets.
Modern mainland China is about nationalism. There is nothing in that society that even resembles communism or socialism other than official propaganda.
What's really sad though, is the number of lives that were lost in these "communist" nations to get this far.
I've understood already some interesting things about Socialism and Communism. As much as the official propaganda machines might deny it and even launch attacks against it, it has just about always been understood that these ideologies are nationalist at the core. Marxist-Leninist followers will always say something to the effect of "nationalism is dangerous and must be stopped"; Yet, they tend to use nationalism quite often.
I can think of all the present communist countries and their ideologies and all of them are nationalist to some degree or another. North Korea has essentially dumped any notion of Marxism from its official ideology in favor of what they call "Juche", an extreme nationalist ideology. Former and present communist parties in Eastern Europe have teamed up with neo-nazi parties in some countries, like Belarus and Slovakia. The Serbian Socialist Party, formerly known as the League of Communists of Serbia, has taken to ultra-nationalism, especially when Croatia and Bosnia attempted to flee former Yugoslavia. The old East German Socialist Unity Party had a bit of a nationalist streak, which Stalin had worried about and even had in its communist-dominated National Front a neo-nazi party called the National Democratic Party - not at all dissimilar to the modern NPD of Germany.
I could go on for hours about the love affair communism has with nationalism, but the point here being that the two don't really oppose each other as official propagandists would have us believe. It's the same deal in the People's Republic of China, that has its own version of a "National Front" with leftist members of the Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party) as part of it. OK, so they still display gigantic portraits of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao all over the place, but this is something the Fascists and National-Socialists did also. In fact, they had good teachers: The Soviets.
Modern mainland China is about nationalism. There is nothing in that society that even resembles communism or socialism other than official propaganda.
What's really sad though, is the number of lives that were lost in these "communist" nations to get this far.
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Absence
Well, after a couple weeks absence, I'm back. I hope to get right back into things with the writing of articles and reporting on news events relevant to monarchy. It's been a busy past two weeks and I haven't had much of a chance to catch up until now. My apologies!
For an occupation, I am a software developer (yes, I write code all day :) ) and things have been getting quite busy with projects.
Look for some new articles in the coming days!
For an occupation, I am a software developer (yes, I write code all day :) ) and things have been getting quite busy with projects.
Look for some new articles in the coming days!
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