My last two posts didn't get into the list because I forgot the new setting. Reposting them.
Nobody is afraid of identity per se. Everybody should be concerned about identity politics, particularly the kind practiced by Madani. One of the most egregious political developments of recent times is the Islamist-Leftist alliance that has been established on an international as well as local scale. We see Pinarayi speaking at conferences organized by hard core religious fundamentalists. It was really scary to see a person no less than the state home minister attending Madani's reception, considering that the Kerala Police under him have pressed criminal charges against Madani (whatever be the merits of those charges). Author Nick Cohen writes in his What is Left: *The far left had no future-- that had been clear for decades. But if it could downplay Marxism and appeal to Muslim grievance, maybe it could make it as a communalist party exploiting support for political Islam. Their theorists had been saying since the early Nineties that if they got into bed with Islam they could "secretly try to win some of the young people who support it to a very different, independent, revolutionary socialist perspective". Perhaps that daydream consoled them. Perhaps it allowed them to pretend to themselves that they were covertly building up the radical left rather than riding the Islamist tiger. Maybe they no longer believed in their hearts in "independent revolutionary socialist perspectives"-- no one else did-- and just wanted to ally with the real threat to the established order. *However, it is not just the far left, but even the soft left including the 'anti-globalization' activists who enthusiastically embrace radical Islamists. In the recent Cairo conference<http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2007/839/sc1.htm>that brought together the 'anti-imperialist' Left and the Islamists, Ali Fayyad of the Hizbullah opined: "*The differences of Hamas and Hizbullah with the left are minor -- family and social priorities..." *Oh yeah, the right of women to live freely and the right of homosexuals to live at all are small matters. In their quest to destroy their mortal enemies, the Left has sold its soul to the fundamentalists. Best regards, Murali. On 8/2/07, Ranjit Ranjit <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Will Madani explicitly reject his politics of identity and division? Let's > wait and see. > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. - Joseph Stalin To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate. We must create the pedagogy of the paredon (The Wall)! - Che Guevara -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ greenyouth mailinglist is the activist support mailinglist for kerala To post to this group, send email to [email protected] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
