MARX AND MOHAMMED

[This week’s Archive was first published on September 1, 2005. The current wave of genocidal fanaticism of Hamas and Mullah Iran, together with its Islamic and woke-left supporters in the US shows all too clearly the relevance on this analysis written 18 years ago. Today, however, the burden for being responsible for the death knell of Jihadism has shifted from Iraqis in 2005 to Palestinians.]

TTP, September 1, 2005

I was recently asked what might be the common ground between the Radical Left and Radical Islam. Let’s expand on that and discuss with you the extraordinary extent to which Marx and Mohammed are ideological brothers.

In fact, they are much more than that. Marx and Mohammed are metaphysical brothers. They share the same view on the nature of reality. Their fundamental bond is a denial of the Law of Non-Contradiction.

Far more than a rule of logic, this is a basic statement of the way reality works. It was first put into words by Aristotle:

“It is impossible for the same attribute at once to belong and not to belong to the same thing and in the same relation.” Metaphysics 1005b20.

Contradictions exist only between thoughts, not in the world. This is also known as “common sense.” Both Marx and Mohammed disagree.

That reality is contradictory is the basic tenet of Dialectical Materialism – the philosophy of Marx, Engels, and Lenin – and of philosophical Islam, for which it is blasphemous to claim Allah is subject to the Law of Non-Contradiction as that would limit and bind him in the chains of logic.

If reality is contradictory and logic is an illusion, then you are left with only one way to resolve conflicts and disagreements: violently.

For Marxists and Moslems, change in the world consists of contradictory opposing forces – exploiters and exploited, believers and infidels – overcoming or being overcome.

Thus both Marx and Mohammed are advocates of apocalyptic totalitarianism.

For both, “nothing is private,” as in Lenin’s famous dictum. The state, whether under the Communist “dictatorship of the proletariat” or Islamic Shari’a law, has the moral right and duty to control every aspect of an individual’s life.

For both, there are no moral absolutes: morality is whatever serves to further the interests of the exploited over the exploiters, the believers over the infidels. To assert the end does not justify the means is “bourgeois morality” for Marxists, a perverse denial of the Will of Allah for Moslems.

For both, the only moral question is: Who conquers whom? Kto-Kovo? as Lenin asked, Who-Whom? For both, reality is zero-sum with no compromise, no mutual cooperation between proletariat and bourgeois or believers and infidels to mutual benefit. For one to win, the other must lose. There can be no other way.

For both, peace means submission. The very word Islam means “submission” in Arabic: submission of infidels to the God of Mohammed. For us, peace means the absence of violence. For Marx and Mohammed, peace means the absence of disobedience.

As the Soviet Military Encyclopedia states it:

“Peace is impossible without Soviet socialism… A truly lasting peace is impossible and cannot be achieved without a proletarian revolution.”

As the Koran states it:

“O Unbelievers! We renounce you. Enmity and hatred will reign between us until you believe in Allah alone.” (Sura 60:4)

For both Marx and Mohammed, terrorism and jihad are hard-wired into their souls. Marx claimed that “revolutionary terrorism” was “the only means of shortening the lethal death agony of the old society and the bloody birth of the new,” and Mohammed commanded his followers to spread Islam by the sword:

“Allah will instill terror into the hearts of the infidels. Strike off their heads then, and strike off them every finger-tip” (Sura 8:12).

Both Marxism and Mohammedanism (a previously common and now very un-PC term for Islam) are ideologies of war and hate, dividing the world into bourgeois exploiters vs. proletariat exploited, the Dar al Islam (the world of believers) vs. the Dar al Harb (literally the Land of War, the world of infidels).

Peace can only come until the contradiction between them is resolved by force, and the latter compelled by the former to believe in Allah and Marx alone. For both Marx and Mohammed, peace and justice can only be achieved through an Apocalypse.

They and their fanatical followers, like all apocalyptic totalitarians, claim to be suffused with love, compassion, and mercy for their fellow man. The promise is always the same:

That once the evil scum of the world – the infidel, the heretic, the Jew, the rich, the bourgeois, the exploiter, the follower of Satan – are burned at the stake, put to the sword, gassed in ovens, starved to death in the Gulag, shot and heaped in mass graves, or blown up and slaughtered by martyrs, the sins of man will be washed away, society cleansed and purified by the apocalyptic fire of revolutionary justice, the world will be saved, and there will be heaven on earth for all those who believe and obey.

It matters not a whit whether Marx was an “atheist,” for that only meant he wanted to supplant other religions with his own.

Or whether Mohammed believed in a “god” named Allah, for “Allah” was only the name of the voice he heard in his head – or rather a voice named Gabriel claiming to speak for Allah – dictating a “Recitation” (that’s what “Koran” means in Arabic).

“Allah” is just as much a figment of Mohammed’s imagination as the “New Socialist Man” (the different species of humanity that will come into being with the triumph of The Proletarian Revolution) was of Marx’s. Both are delusions of tyranny.

It was only when a forthright unblinking effort was made to discard all totalitarian aspects of Marxism was a peaceful alternative possible – transforming Communism into the sort of Democratic Socialism you see in Sweden.

This same effort is the task we must place upon “moderate” Moslems. To expunge Islam of totalitarianism and create an Islamic society wherein everyone, women and non-Moslems in particular, possesses democratic rights and freedoms, is what history now requires them to do.

This task is first being attempted in Iraq. Iraq has become the battleground for the soul of Islam. If the Iraqis succeed in reinventing Islam and reinterpreting Mohammed, it is the death knell for Jihadism. Thus the Jihadis are desperate for them to fail – and thus we must be equally so for them to prevail.