Check this out:
Making Marxism relevant in this post-Soviet age of terror might seem like the mother of all struggles, but organizers of a four-day "Festival of Resistance" in Toronto are trying hard to pull it off -- and they've cast their net as widely as possible to do it.
Rather than focus on the evils of capitalism, the unlikely top billing of the opening night of the festival was devoted to a discussion about building unity between Muslims and the left; the keynote speaker was the controversial Islamic thinker Zafar Bangash, director of the Institute of Contemporary Islamic Thought, who is in the news these days because he is in the midst of a heated battle to open a mosque in Newmarket -- not because he wants to see a dictatorship of the proletariat.
Desperate for new brothers in arms, Marxism appears to be doing some serious social networking. If this weekend's series of workshops at the festival is any indication, Marxism has a disparate cadre these days: green activists, the anti-war movement, the transgendered, members of First Nations, traditional Islam.
Inclusiveness is the buzzword here, where the members of this hodge-podge gathering can be overheard calling each other brother and sister. Participants call this membership drive "building unity," a much-repeated mantra throughout the opening night. Self-proclaimed Marxist James Clark, who helped organize the event, said that while there are disparate groups in attendance, they can all still rally around a slogan like "Out of Afghanistan and into Kyoto."
Gatherings like the one this weekend at the University of Toronto are an attempt to get the party restarted. Let's face it: Das Kapital is not selling like hotcakes anymore...
"We're looking at a new beginning," said liberal thinker Stanley Aronowitz, Distinguished Professor of sociology at the Graduate Centre of the City University of New York.
"We're no longer based on the existence of nation states. We must reinvent ourselves."
None of this sounds very Marxist, does it?
Yes, actually, it does.
Multiculturalism, political correctness, and radical environmentalism represent the foundations of an evolving epistemological, ethical and political strategy that the socialist remnants in the world are using to prevent their ideology from entering the dustbin of history and to revive their failing socilist utopian dreams.
As I noted in yesterday's post, these dogmas have been widely disseminated and absorbed at all levels of Western culture in the last two decades and particularly since the end of the Cold War.
And, what is interesting is that, even as todays Marxists and assorted collectivists encourage and enable Islam with suicidal multiculturalism and political correctness (and give them a free pass on the environmental issues); the Islamofascists aid and abet them by legitimizing the use of violence and terror. We can basically thank the political left and their ideology for the rapid, unimpeded advance of the Islamic Jihad in the last two decades.
Wretchard, in a post titled Pyrrhic Victory, looks at the relationship the these 20th century Marxist/socialist/communist remnants are happily forging with the Islamic fanatics and notes that the Islamists are multiculturalism's:
...prime foe at the same time that it is multiculturalism's prime beneficiary. This curious relationship implies that in actuality multiculturalism is playing a losing game with itself; and that the eventual outcome of Western multiculturalism advancing side by side with a confident and ascendant Islam will not be multiculturalism at all but simply a form of Islamic society. The Brussels Journal sees this absurd result and explains that multicultural theorists, having lobotomized themselves have already forgotten their lobotomies.I have heard individuals state point blank that even if Muslims become the majority in our countries in the future, this doesn’t matter because all people are equal and all cultures are just a mix of everything else, anyway. And since religions are just fairy-tales, replacing one fairy-tale, Christianity, with another fairy-tale, Islam, won’t make a big difference. All religions basically say that the same things in different ways.
But there is another dynamic which is perhaps worth exploring. The most disturbing consequence of accepting the analysis that multiculturalism is abetting the advance of a hostile non-Western culture is that it makes one hope, almost perversely, for the whole ludicrous enterprise to come a-cropper. A kind of wishing for the worst in order to better the situation. Conservatism acquires a mirror image of the bizarre relationship between multiculturalism and Islamism, only flipped. Conservatism is Islamism's main foe at the same that it is Islamism's greatest beneficiary. An almost absurd tableau has been set up where the more the Left pushes multiculturalism, the greater the benefit to radical Islam, while simultaneously the more the Left benefits radical Islam, the greater the benefit to conservatism.
The Marxist social networking at the "Festival of Resistance" in Toronto--a gathering that brought together all the losers of the last century--would be laughable if it weren't for the fact that these losers are the suicide bombers of Western civilization.
They are completely indifferent to the fact that they are forming an alliance with something that will destroy them, along with all those hated enemies who advocate freedom, individualism, capitalism, and globalization. What does that matter as long as they can eliminate once and for all the major impediment to their ideology?
And, their essential narcississtic grandiosity encourages them to belive that the homicidal fanatics they are embracing, enabling and networking with are just another special victim group they will get points for championing.
The inability to connect with reality; the ideological blindness for the consequences of their action; the suicidal pursuit of utopia--all this is absolutely typical of Marxism.
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