This piece from Amfang is worth highlighting.
The Iranian Revolution was supposed to be a victory for the people. In 1979, millions rose up and toppled the Shah, a U.S.-backed monarch who ruled through secret police, torture, and oil profits. It was a mass revolt. Workers shut down industries. Students marched in the streets. Religious leaders called for resistance. Marxist guerrillas fought in the hills. For a brief moment, everyone stood on the same side. But not everyone had the same goal. The revolution was real, but it was not finished. And what came next should haunt us.
The left was there. It helped lead the struggle. The Tudeh Party, the Fedayeen, secular radicals and Marxists all believed that Khomeini was an ally. He hated the Shah. He spoke against imperialism. He had the people behind him. The left told itself it could ride the wave of religious rage and steer it toward socialism. But Khomeini had his own plans. The clerics moved quickly. They created militias. They took control of the narrative. They positioned themselves as the true voice of the people. And when the dust settled, they turned their guns inward. The revolution devoured the very people who sparked it.
Political parties were banned. Leftist organizers were hunted, jailed, and killed. The Tudeh Party, which had cheered Khomeini just months before, was declared treasonous. Its leaders were executed. Its rank and file disappeared.
Remember that the Christian right thinks that everyone who ever participated in an abortion is a murderer. Remember that eliminationist rhetoric is dirt common. Remember that the Nazis didn’t kill Jews or Roma first, they mass murdered the left first, then liquidated ethnicities they didn’t approve of.
The Social Gospel was fundamental to both FDR and Theodore Roosevelt’s power, but that movement is dead. There is no powerful Christian movement in America that the left can cut a deal with. Even the Roman Catholic Church, while it has substantial overlaps on anti-war and social justice issues, must be considered dangerous. Remember that the Supreme Court Justices who are validating Trump’s over-reach and dismantling the Constitution are almost all Catholic. In American Catholicism social justice is important, but it is secondary to social warfare concerns.
The left and the right (the real left, Democrats are not left wing in any meaningful way) are fundamentally in opposition. The Christian right and the left overlap in “we hate the current system” and practically nothing else. And religious fanatics are “fundamentally” OK with mass murder of those they see as against their religion’s principles.
Don’t play patty cake or make alliance with the religious right. They want you dead.
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Purple Library Guy
Well, yeah. Is there anyone currently saying otherwise?
StewartM
PLG
Well, yeah. Is there anyone currently saying otherwise?
This is a bit dated, but yeah, there was a considerable number of the feminist movement who allied with the Christian Righties in the 1980s, about pornography. I saw and heard it happen with local adult bookstores back in my college days. Sad to say that most of those ‘evil pornographers’ they wanted to shut down probably supported women’s rights in the workplace and access to reproductive care including abortion, while the Righties didn’t.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_views_on_pornography
Now of course a lot of pornography is self-produced without the “evil pornographers” being involved at all and men do it just as much as women. What has happened is that the very Christian Right movement these feminists marched with is ascendant and because of that women (particularly poor women) are being hurt.
mago
Of course the Christian Right is toxic and scary. Any true lefty would work against the CR’s agendas. Unfortunately, although they’re a minority, they’re organized and we’re not. They also fit in with the mainstream conventional establishment, which is scary in and of itself. That movement is a real and viable danger.
Joan
Growing up as a queer kid in the American south I know this in my bones.
Mark Level
Yes, this is 100% common sense. The Christian Right indicts Rabbi Yeshua himself, via the wisdom he shared that “By their fruits shall ye know them.” (Lotta closeted fruits in the Christian community generally, also out self-hating gays like the Catholic Rightie, steroid aficionado, and Neocon Andrew Sullivan. “But he was right when he turned against the Iraq War!” after many months doesn’t cut it . . .
When I lived in New Orleans in the 80s I knew some wonderful peacenik Catholic priests and Nuns who opposed Reagan’s genocides (Guatemala most heavily against Indians, abetted by Israel, also the Salvadoran Death Squad gov’t. and of course the rapist-terrorist-crop burning Contras Reagan funded in Nicaragua post-revolution.) I did Planned Parenthood defense with other actual Lefties and had to laugh, bitterly, when I saw some nuns I knew slightly and had previously respected. Sometimes when we were demonstrating against Reagan’s wars and the “good, obedient” religious Lefties would sing “We are Peaceful, Angry People”, me and 2-3 Anarchist friends would sing over them, “We are Angry, Actual Revolutionaries” and instead of “We are Praying, Praying for . . .” we would replace “Fighting.”
Who ran some of the biggest Rat-Lines for Nazi War Criminals to places like Canada, the US, Chile, etc. etc.? The Catholic Church. See the 2 standing ovations for the Waffen-SS’s Yaroslav Hunka in the Canadian Parliament about 18 months ago. He “fought the Russians” 1939–43 by slaughtering poor & Jewish Ukrainians and Poles. The Church believed in the Nazi “Kinder Kuche Kirche” social order, the dirty godless Commies in Russia believed in economic justice (but didn’t implement it at all well) and we couldn’t have that!! Jesus secretly supported capitalism even when he overturned that Money-Changers table, right?
People on the Right sometimes know better than to welcome these hypocritical swine as well. I am not a Barry Goldwater fan on the whole, but when the GOoPers started pulling in Falwell’s “(A)Moral Majority” and the other snake-handlers, he clearly stated that people like this should not be allowed into any serious political role. Also, his statement that “Extremism in the Defense of Liberty is no Vice” stands up pretty well in my eyes, sometimes the Left-Right horseshoe applies in specific conditions. (But never let your skepticism or guard down with the Right “Libertarian” types.)
Khomeini said some excellent things at times, recently I came across some quotes that shocked me wherein he supported the heretical (& executed) Mansur al-Hallaj, who made the famous Shaqq, Ecstatic utterance of Ana-al-Haqq! “I am the Truth/ Real”, identifying directly with God/Dog and thereby a heretical outrage. I’d always heard that he was executed for this (it’s clear he sought martyrdom), but the YTube video here denies this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkRbIwCQ7Q0
I think Khomeini was serious and sincere, he just shared respect for the religiously zealous rather than the lukewarm, boozhie fakes. E.g. the Yeshua quote, “Because thou art lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spew thee out of my mouth!” But I recall some decades ago, Harper’s ran a mid-sized piece on some of Khomeini’s religious rulings, which were just batshit insane, like when/how can you eat a donkey that has been executed for sodomy (the victim of some bestial-oriented rapist.)
Don’t expect any sense from people who debate the # of Angels that can dance on a pinhead, of course, nor those who declare “I believe it BECAUSE it is absurd!”
Interesting trivia fact about Khomeini, per McSweeney’s, in an article about a young man who Nelson Rockefeller set up as the Shah’s fixer when he was in Western Exile after the revolution. When he returned to Tehran from French exile, the article claimed that over 3 million people crammed in to see him, which the author claimed was the biggest combined human crowd ever known in history up to that time (& likely since).
Cant and dogma are to be rigorously refused. People who refuse to think critically tend to be dangerous at some point or another. Stupidity really can’t be fixed, and people who use religious doctrines to stupify themselves are dangerous to be around, even if they imagine themselves harmless.
different clue
Here is a little TikCringe video of a straight-faced reporter-type guy interviewing a loyal Christalibot about “gay” and stuff. Very funny and maybe contains a few general pointers on how to approach members of the Christalibot Layity in the field.
It is titled: ” Trump supporter says joe biden is forcing him to be gay ”
Here is the link.
https://www.reddit.com/r/CringeTikToks/comments/1mezced/trump_supporter_says_joe_biden_is_forcing_him_to/
Jan Wiklund
I readily admit that I don’t know enough about American society in general and the American culture war in particular. But how do you know that you are not overinterpreting the Christian worldview in the same way that some of them are obviously overinterpreting yours?
I may, of course, be wrong. But I don’t think the claim about Catholic judges in the Supreme Court is a particularly convincing argument. It is too reminiscent of the claim about ‘the machinations of the Jews’. There are, I believe, 70 million Catholics in the United States, and they cannot possibly all think the same way about everything. And I would believe that the views of the SC Judges are informed more by their elite status than by anything else.
canopy
Amfang has a real beauty of a website
different clue
@Jan Wiklund,
. . . ” There are, I believe, 70 million Catholics in the United States, and they cannot possibly all think the same way about everything. ” You are correct. They can’t and they don’t. The American Catholic Community runs the gamut from the Maryknoll Sisters to the Salvadoran Death Squad apologists who excused with faint tut-tuts the Salvadoran death squads who raped and killed them. American Catholics run the gamut from Dorothy Day to Opus Dei.
As to . . . ” And I would believe that the views of the SC Judges are informed more by their elite status than by anything else.” . . . that is true for some SC Judges and not others. It may be true for Clarence Thomas who is also motivated by his obscurely personal race-based bitterness. It may be true for that reliable upper-class warrior John Roberts. But some of the others . . . Alito, Kavanaugh, Barett . . . they were specifically vetted and guided into the judicial system by Leonard Leo and his Opus Dei-iform Federalist Society and they are very much Catholic Reactionism motivated, most especially Alito.
Here is a wiki about Leonard Leo.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Leo
Here is an article about the Federalist Society and its long-running conspiracy to infiltrate and subvert the American Judiciary.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalist_Society
Catholicism aside, a European Intellectual, especially a Scandinavian one, is ill-equipped to understand some of the deepest tar pits of American Talibangelical Christalibanianity. The ill-equipped European Intellectual might begin by studying
the New Apostolic Reformation, Seven Mountains Dominionism, Biblical Inerrancy Literalism, etc.
I suspect that very few Canadian understand the darkest tar pits of American militant Christalibangelicalism either. One who did was author Margaret Atwood.
She wrote a novel about it called The Handmaid’s Tale.
Stormcrow
I wish I was surprised that you found it necessary to write this.
But an astonishing proportion of the US population, including many many lefties, seem unable to recognize an existential threat when they see one. For substantiation, I offer the outcome of the US 2024 Presidential election. So, yeah, you had to write this. I just hope the people who really need to read this, actually do so.
Feral Finster
Because everyone knows that all members of the Christian Right are identikit NPCs identical to Khomeni in all relevant particulars.
Conservatives, BTW, come up with similar hysterical pronouncements about anyone to the left of Pinochet.
Ian Welsh
All members doesn’t matter. We’ve already seen what the group does when they get into power. Defunding planned parenthood, mass deportations, ending Roe vs. Wade, masked Gestapo thugs seizing people without showing a badge or warrant, supporting genocide, etc, etc…