One Week in April... Three Reasons Why Fundamentalist Islamic Jihad Is NOT Radical—and Is DEFINITELY NOT a Real Answer to Oppression
April 18, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Bringing Forward Another Way is an edited version of a talk by Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, to a group of Party supporters, in 2006. It is must reading for a serious understanding of what the U.S. "war on terror" is really about and how to bring forward a positive force in the world in opposition to both Western imperialism and Islamic Jihad.
The rulers of this capitalist-imperialist system—built on slavery and genocide, operating through vicious exploitation, and perpetuated through unjust wars—declare they bring freedom and progress to the world. They proclaim themselves liberators of women while they enslave half of humanity in a world of sweatshops, forced motherhood (through denial of abortion or other forms of birth control), degrading pornography, and systematic sexual violence and rape. They brand themselves as champions of enlightenment while imposing forced ignorance on the oppressed.
Fundamentalist Islamic jihad poses as an answer to this, one that is lashing back with a vengeance. But look at the reality: In one week in April...
April 13—video emerged of 15 of the young women students kidnapped by Boko Haram while they were taking a physics exam. Two years ago, Boko Haram kidnapped over 300 (276 still in captivity) young women at a school in Northern Nigeria, part of their campaign against women learning science. Since then, hundreds of other women and girls have been abducted by Boko Haram. They have been imprisoned, sold as wives against their will, raped, and sometimes forced to bear the children of their rapists.
What does that serve? The subjugation of women arose with and serves modes of production—ways of organizing how the things people need to survive are produced and distributed—where the wealth of society is violently appropriated by a few from the many. Defining women as property of men, and violently enforcing that, is necessary for the stability and functioning of societies based on exploitation. Fundamentalist Islamic jihad imposes old forms of enslaving women as an “alternative” to new forms of enslaving women. That isn’t radical. That doesn’t get to the root of the problem. Tightening the chains of women’s oppression reinforces all the chains of oppression.
But the world could be a whole other way. Read this.
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April 7, during a raid near Damascus, Syria, ISIS kidnapped hundreds of workers at a cement factory. They publicly murdered those who were Druze—followers of a different religion.
What is radical about this? Everywhere you turn in this imperialist world, one country, nationality, religion, or “race” is oppressing another. And capitalism-imperialism drives the oppressed to kill each other—from the prisons and inner cities of the USA, to the sectarian slaughters in the Middle East.
Does fundamentalist Islamic jihad contribute to oppressed people coming together to throw off the divisions this system imposes and emancipate humanity? Just the opposite: fundamentalist Islamic jihad carries out religiously “justified” ethnic cleansing, fanning the flames of divisions that serve oppression.
But the world could be a whole other way. Read this.
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In the city of Dhaka, Bangladesh, on April 6, Mohammad Nazim Uddin, a law student who frequently posted his atheist views on social media, was publicly attacked and murdered by men who, according to witnesses, shouted “Allah is great!” as they rode off. Fundamentalist Islamic jihad insists on, and enforces with violence and law when they can, fundamentalist Islam as their brand of ignorance, superstition, and Dark Ages mentality. They fear the unfettered search for the truth.
What is radical about this? Under capitalism, science and truth get distorted and twisted, reduced to what is useful in the mad drive for profit. When ideas and discoveries come forward that challenge the legitimacy of the rule of capital or would get in the way of how capitalism functions, these ideas and the people putting them forward get marginalized, mocked, and suppressed, even violently at times.
Who and what does it serve when fundamentalist jihadists terrorize and kill atheists and others who challenge notions that this world of oppression was mandated by “god”? It serves keeping the world as it is. Fundamentalist Islamic jihad is just another force crushing people’s ability to understand and change the world.
But the world could be a whole other way. Read this.
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Fundamentalist Islamic jihad is not in any way an answer to the madness of imperialism. It does not and cannot contribute in any way to humanity getting free of the long night of societies divided into masters and slaves, oppressor and oppressed nations, exploiters and exploited, shrouded in ignorance and superstition. These so-called “radicals” are nothing but wannabe exploiters and oppressors—small-time slavers fighting to get in on the plunder, not to end it—and using horrific oppression all dressed up with religious mystification to cover it over.
NO ONE should want any of this.
There is something else that actually is a radical alternative, another way this world could be—through an ACTUAL REVOLUTION—COMMUNIST REVOLUTION. This answer is found right here.
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