[Godstud]

I know. I already posted that. It's disturbing.

It is coercion and victimization.

[ckaihatsu]

I know. I already posted that. It's disturbing.

It is coercion and victimization.

And that was *before* Trump arrived.

(Duh on me -- that's where I got the video from, watched it, and thought this thread would be *perfect* for it -- !)


And:

Western nations have suspended most humanitarian aid to Afghanistan following the Taliban's takeover of the country in August 2021 and the World Bank and International Monetary Fund also halted payments.[234][235] In October 2021, more than half of Afghanistan's 39 million people faced an acute food shortage.[236] On 11 November 2021, the Human Rights Watch reported that Afghanistan was facing widespread famine due to an economic and banking crisis.[237]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghanistan#21st_century

[Mike12]

The Byzantine Iconoclasm (Greek: Εικονομαχία, romanized: Eikonomachía, lit. 'image struggle', 'war on icons') were two periods in the history of the Byzantine Empire when the use of religious images or icons was opposed by religious and imperial authorities within the Orthodox Church and the temporal imperial hierarchy. The First Iconoclasm, as it is sometimes called, occurred between about 726 and 787, while the Second Iconoclasm occurred between 814 and 842.[1] According to the traditional view, Byzantine Iconoclasm was started by a ban on religious images promulgated by the Byzantine Emperor Leo III the Isaurian, and continued under his successors.[2] It was accompanied by widespread destruction of religious images and persecution of supporters of the veneration of images. The Papacy remained firmly in support of the use of religious images throughout the period, and the whole episode widened the growing divergence between the Byzantine and Carolingian traditions in what was still a unified European Church, as well as facilitating the reduction or removal of Byzantine political control over parts of the Italian Peninsula.

Traditional explanations for Byzantine iconoclasm have sometimes focused on the importance of Islamic prohibitions against images influencing Byzantine thought. According to Arnold J. Toynbee,[3] for example, it was the prestige of Islamic military successes in the 7th and 8th centuries that motivated Byzantine Christians to adopt the Islamic position of rejecting and destroying devotional and liturgical images. The role of women and monks in supporting the veneration of images has also been asserted. Social and class-based arguments have been put forward, such as that iconoclasm created political and economic divisions in Byzantine society; that it was generally supported by the Eastern, poorer, non-Greek peoples of the Empire[4] who had to constantly deal with Arab raids. On the other hand, the wealthier Greeks of Constantinople and also the peoples of the Balkan and Italian provinces strongly opposed Iconoclasm.[4] Re-evaluation of the written and material evidence relating to the period of Byzantine Iconoclasm by scholars including John Haldon and Leslie Brubaker has challenged many of the basic assumptions and factual assertions of the traditional account. Byzantine iconoclasm influenced the later Protestant reformation.Christian worship by the sixth century had developed a clear belief in the intercession of saints. This belief was also influenced by a concept of hierarchy of sanctity, with the Trinity at its pinnacle, followed by the Virgin Mary, referred to in Greek as the Theotokos ("birth-giver of God") or Meter Theou ("Mother of God"), the saints, living holy men, women, and spiritual elders, followed by the rest of humanity. Thus, in order to obtain blessings or divine favour, early Christians, like Christians today, would often pray or ask an intermediary, such as the saints or the Theotokos, or living fellow Christians believed to be holy, to intercede on their behalf with Christ. A strong sacramentality and belief in the importance of physical presence also joined the belief in intercession of saints with the use of relics and holy images (or icons) in early Christian practices.On October 13, 787 the Second Council of Nicaea decreed that 'venerable and holy images are to be dedicated in the holy churches of God, namely the image of our Lord and God and Saviour Jesus Christ, of our immaculate Lady the Holy Theotokos, and of the angels and all the saints. They are to be accorded the veneration of honor, not indeed the true worship paid to the divine nature alone, but in the same way, as this is accorded to the life-giving cross, the holy gospels, and other sacred offerings'The period of Iconoclasm decisively ended the so-called Byzantine Papacy under which, since the reign of Justinian I two centuries before, the popes in Rome had been initially nominated by, and later merely confirmed by, the emperor in Constantinople, and many of them had been Greek-speaking. By the end of the controversy the pope had approved the creation of a new emperor in the West, and the old deference of the Western church to Constantinople had gone. Opposition to icons seems to have had little support in the West and Rome took a consistently iconodule position.Iconoclasm (from Greek: εἰκών, eikṓn, 'figure, icon' + κλάω, kláō, 'to break')[i] is the social belief in the importance of the destruction of icons and other images or monuments, most frequently for religious or political reasons. People who engage in or support iconoclasm are called iconoclasts, a term that has come to be figuratively applied to any individual who challenges "cherished beliefs or venerated institutions on the grounds that they are erroneous or pernicious."[4]

Conversely, one who reveres or venerates religious images is called (by iconoclasts) an iconolater; in a Byzantine context, such a person is called an iconodule or iconophile.Protestant Christianity was not uniformly hostile to the use of religious images. Martin Luther taught the "importance of images as tools for instruction and aids to devotion,"[39] stating: "If it is not a sin but good to have the image of Christ in my heart, why should it be a sin to have it in my eyes?"[40] Lutheran churches retained ornate church interiors with a prominent crucifix, reflecting their high view of the real presence of Christ in Eucharist.[41][29] As such, "Lutheran worship became a complex ritual choreography set in a richly furnished church interior."[41] For Lutherans, "the Reformation renewed rather than removed the religious image."[42] During the Reformation in England, which started during the reign of Anglican monarch Henry VIII, and was urged on by reformers such as Hugh Latimer and Thomas Cranmer, limited official action was taken against religious images in churches in the late 1530s.

[Godstud]

@Mike12 What you post is stupid shit unrelated to the topic. Stop, already.

WTF does your stupid song about American traitors have to do with the topic???

[Godstud]

@Mike12 How is your stupid American traitor(Kentucky Battle) song relevant?

It's not.

All your last post is irrelevant and off topic, as well.

[Mike12]

@Mike12 How is your stupid American traitor(Kentucky Battle) song relevant?

It's not.

All your last post is irrelevant and off topic, as well.

Christianity in Afghanistan being irrelevant to Muslim fundamentalists curtailing women's rights today in Afghanistan? How so? And you're all touting the US solution in Afghanistan so far, good. So we've seen that only in very dusty history books would any American public even be up to speed on the Universal communion of the Church or any of its signs or people. Very factually, they're reaching right to these "traitors" and removing all traces of the Universal Church.

[Godstud]

Irrelevant and incoherent, as usual, @Mike12.

How is your stupid Kentucky Battle song relevant?

The South won't rise again!

[Mike12]

Irrelevant and incoherent, as usual, @Mike12.

How is your stupid Kentucky Battle song relevant?

The South won't rise again!

Contrary to popular belief, I think the Nationalism is overstated. I think southern secessionism or independence is right out of Lincoln's mouth in the majority. "this country" , "this 40 states" , "that patriotic us flag", could be Robert E Lee , Stonewall Jackson , Jefferson Davis. All veteran US Soldiers and Generals. Vice President Breckinridge. No intent to cause a war at Fort Sumter 4 months into secession. No limit to the seceding states from Lincoln's grasp, which grew in that period into Kentucky, Missouri, Virginia, Tennessee, Texas.
What is relevant is Lincoln is an atheist along with Ulysses S Grant interred in-state directly copying Napoleon Bonaparte's tomb for Grant's tomb. Yes, in fact any blessings of the Church at all in any orphanage or soup kitchen could soon be raided by the Eisenhower-Reagan crowd. "adherents"

[ckaihatsu]

It's some kind of 'post-politics', I think -- Mike would have us all walking around at rallies with *blank* placards....

[ckaihatsu]

The U.S. govt has created havoc in Afghanistan. Let's oppose what they are doing.

<chicago-anti-war-coalition-cawc@googlegroups.com>


The hunger crisis in Afghanistan is caused by the U.S. imperialist government. We need to denounce and oppose this.

The U.S. government often destroys what it cannot control. That has been and continues to be the case in Afghanistan.

More than 23 million Afghans face acute hunger, including 9 million who are nearly famished according to UNICEF. This is out of a total population of 41 million people in Afghanistan. The reason is the actions of the U.S. imperialist government, including the Biden Administration.

The background, as you may be aware, is that the U.S. government illegally and unjustly and ruthlessly attacked Afghanistan in 2001. This was supposedly in response to the 9/11 attacks, but the U.S. government presented no evidence that it was the Afghan government or the Al-Qaeda forces inside Afghanistan who were responsible.

U.S. government motives for the attack may well have been to set up further military occupation near U.S. competitor China as well as to ensure a fossil fuel pipeline from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to Pakistan and India.

In any case, the result is that huge numbers of the population were killed. The Cost of War project estimated that as of 2015 the number who died through direct causes or indirect causes such as loss of access to food, water, infrastructure, etc. may have been as high as 360,000 at that time. And many more were wounded. Those numbers of course went up in the fighting through 2021.

Then, when the U.S. and its NATO allies decided in 2021 to leave Afghanistan (redeploying the troops elsewhere in Europe and Asia to strengthen combat positions against Russia and China), they froze (stole) $9.5 billion of the money deposited in 2021 at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York by the Afghan Central Bank (www.aljazeera.com/economy /2021/8/18/us-freezes...).

President Biden decided to freeze the money by Executive Order. He decided that $3.5 billion would go to relatives of victims of 9/11, and not back to the Afghan people.
And now the Biden Administration, as a New York Times headline said on Monday, “U.S. Will Not Release $3.5 Billion in Frozen Afghan Funds for Now, Citing Terror Fears.” (U.S. Will Not Release $3.5 Billion in Frozen Afghan Funds for Now, Citing Terror Fears - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

The article goes on to say, “An American official said the United States could not guarantee that the money would not fall into terrorist hands, so it has ruled out releasing it anytime soon.”…

“’We do not see recapitalization of the D.A.B. as a near-term option,’ said Thomas West, the American government’s special representative for Afghanistan, referring to the initials for the central bank. He noted that American officials have engaged for months with the central bank about how to shore up Afghanistan’s economy but have not secured persuasive guarantees that the money would not fall into terrorist hands.”

“We do not have confidence that that institution has the safeguards and monitoring in place to manage assets responsibly,” Mr. West said in a statement, previously reported by The Wall Street Journal. “…

"Ned Price, the State Department spokesman, said the administration was searching for alternative ways to use the money to help Afghans at a time when millions are afflicted by a growing hunger crisis.

“Right now, we’re looking at mechanisms that could be put in place to see to it that these $3.5 billion in preserved assets make their way efficiently and effectively to the people of Afghanistan in a way that doesn’t make them ripe for diversion to terrorist groups or elsewhere,” Mr. Price said….

“The Afghan economy has collapsed in the year since the Taliban takeover, leading to mass starvation and a wave of refugees. In recent days, the United States announced that it would send $80 million to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization to help combat hunger in Afghanistan, as well as $40 million to UNICEF to support educating Afghan children, particularly girls, and $30 million to U.N. Women to aid Afghan women and girls seeking social protection services and running civil society organizations.” --Neal

[Mike12]

It's some kind of 'post-politics', I think -- Mike would have us all walking around at rallies with *blank* placards....

All the trillion is a penny in the bucket next to habits. A trillion dollar penny thrown into the river of Afghanistanian habits. How come I can streetview afghanistan for some medieval market with fatwahs , definitely no tomatoes next to cucumbers in this medieval market in Afghanistan. In Armenia someone's built a mall, their sanskrit language crap everywhere.

[ckaihatsu]

All the trillion is a penny in the bucket next to habits. A trillion dollar penny thrown into the river of Afghanistanian habits. How come I can streetview afghanistan for some medieval market with fatwahs , definitely no tomatoes next to cucumbers in this medieval market in Afghanistan. In Armenia someone's built a mall, their sanskrit language crap everywhere.

Try going *macroscopic*, Mike.


History, Macro-Micro -- politics-logistics-lifestyle

Spoiler: show

[Mike12]

Try going *macroscopic*, Mike.


History, Macro-Micro -- politics-logistics-lifestyle

Spoiler: show

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edme_Gaulle

[ckaihatsu]

(It's like every time I say something, he just says something *different*!)


x D

[Mike12]

Try going *macroscopic*, Mike.


History, Macro-Micro -- politics-logistics-lifestyle

Spoiler: show

Well OK you just said something but think something Macro.
Macro
Communism

Micro
Capitalism

[Mike12]

(It's like every time I say something, he just says something *different*!)


x D

Charles I
Many of his subjects opposed his policies, in particular the levying of taxes without parliamentary consent, and perceived his actions as those of a tyrannical absolute monarch. His religious policies, coupled with his marriage to a Roman Catholic, generated antipathy and mistrust from Reformed religious groups such as the English Puritans and Scottish Covenanters, who thought his views too Catholic. He supported high church Anglican ecclesiastics such as Richard Montagu and William Laud, and failed to aid continental Protestant forces successfully during the Thirty Years' War. His attempts to force the Church of Scotland to adopt high Anglican practices led to the Bishops' Wars, strengthened the position of the English and Scottish parliaments, and helped precipitate his own downfall. Charles was tried, convicted, and executed for high treason in January 1649. The monarchy was abolished and the Commonwealth of England was established as a republic.

[ckaihatsu]

Well OK you just said something but think something Macro.
Macro
Communism

Micro
Capitalism

This would be *relative*, at the 'Mode of Production' 'shelf', I would say.


History, Macro-Micro -- politics-logistics-lifestyle

Spoiler: show

[Mike12]

This would be *relative*, at the 'Mode of Production' 'shelf', I would say.


History, Macro-Micro -- politics-logistics-lifestyle

Spoiler: show

I've never heard of Class Struggle --> Mode of Production ---> Everything else outside of France and Karl Marx and evolving social liberalism perhaps communism.

[ckaihatsu]

I've never heard of Class Struggle --> Mode of Production ---> Everything else outside of France and Karl Marx and evolving social liberalism perhaps communism.

Oh, okay.

I do not pretend to provide a complete account of human history. Missing are many personages and many events which are essential to a detailed history of any period. But you do not need to know about every detail of humanity’s past to understand the general pattern that has led to the present.

It was Karl Marx who provided an insight into this general pattern. He pointed out that human beings have only been able to survive on this planet through cooperative effort to make a livelihood, and that every new way of making such a livelihood has necessitated changes in their wider relationships with each other. Changes in what he called ‘the forces of production’ are associated with changes in ‘the relations of production’, and these eventually transform the wider relationships in society as a whole.

Such changes do not, however, occur in a mechanical way. At each point human beings make choices whether to proceed along one path or another, and fight out these choices in great social conflicts. Beyond a certain point in history, how people make their choices is connected to their class position. The slave is likely to make a different choice to the slave-owner, the feudal artisan to the feudal lord. The great struggles over the future of humanity have involved an element of class struggle. The sequence of these great struggles provides the skeleton round which the rest of history grows.

This approach does not deny the role of individuals or the ideas they propagate. What it does do is insist that the individual or idea can only play a certain role because of the preceding material development of society, of the way people make their livelihoods, and of the structure of classes and states. The skeleton is not the same as the living body. But without the skeleton the body would have no solidity and could not survive. Understanding the material ‘basis’ of history is an essential, but not sufficient, precondition for understanding everything else.

Harman, _People's History of the World_, pp. iii-iv

[Mike12]

In 1843, Marx became co-editor of a new, radical left-wing Parisian newspaper, the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (German-French Annals), then being set up by the German activist Arnold Ruge to bring together German and French radicals.Marx engaged in an intensive study of political economy (Adam Smith, David Ricardo, James Mill, etc.),[80] the French socialists (especially Claude Henri St. Simon and Charles Fourier)[81] and the history of France.[82] The study of, and critique of political economy is a project that Marx would pursue for the rest of his life[83] and would result in his major economic work—the three-volume series called Das Kapital.[84] Marxism is based in large part on three influences: Hegel's dialectics, French utopian socialism and British political economy. Together with his earlier study of Hegel's dialectics, the studying that Marx did during this time in Paris meant that all major components of "Marxism" were in place by the autumn of 1844.
In 1845, after receiving a request from the Prussian king, the French government shut down Vorwärts!, with the interior minister, François Guizot, expelling Marx from France.

The French Revolution of 1848 (French: Révolution française de 1848), also known as the February Revolution (Révolution de février), was a brief period of civil unrest in France, in February 1848, that led to the collapse of the July Monarchy and the foundation of the Second French Republic. It sparked the wave of revolutions of 1848.By 1848 only about one percent of the population held the franchise. Although France had a free press and trial by jury, only landholders were permitted to vote, which alienated the petty bourgeoisie and even the industrial bourgeoisie from the government.

"Class Struggles in France" in Collected Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Volume 10, p. 48.