The National Party

Socialism predates Marx and Engels who formed one particular model of Socialism - Marxism. Labelling anyone who professes any opinion that could potentially be characterised as socialist as Marxist is an attempt by the intellectually feeble to discredit by association because they dont have the cognitive ability to actually form a coherent argument based on fact

What you are describing is Christianity as constituted probably after Nicea. As described in the Gospels its very much an egalitarian philosophy. Those in power in the early Christian church corrupted the ideals to maintain their power, in much the way fascist parties corrupt reality to persue poser

When people like those in the National Party wrap themselves in the christian flag they are directly insulting "real christians" who follow the ministry set out by Jesus. The fact that the RCC has similarly cleaved to many hard right governments in the past places them in a similar position.

Interesting you label anyone who challenges you points as "far left" without any foundation other that they dont buy into horsh*t talking points.

But of course in the "new" right anything to the left of Atilla the Hun is Marxist of course

I think its more delusional to imagine that socialism was invented by Marx and Engels.

Keep telling you - centerist.

Social Democrat to be more specific.

WTF does any of this have to do with The National Paty?

Oh, I never questioned anything. I called you out on making a very clear and ignorant generalisation that had nothing to do with the post you were replying to. The subject of you claim was "the left" - not the church or the history of religion in Europe.

The filth and their shrills would almost make you want to vote SF.

I think there's a large measure of truth in that. But of course that happened because civil officials were using state power to try to control the church and to control people's religious lives and practice.

In itself, that wasn't a new thing; church had always been closely integrated with state, with kings, e.g., choosing bishops and using state power to enforce religious conformity and exclude dissidents. It was only the the religiously diverse conditions of the Reformation that that approach turned into the foundation for a widespread bloodbath.

You can see how people might think that a solution to this was to establish religion as an area in which the state had no competence — state directs civic matters; churches directs religious matters. Viola! Separation of church and state, and the use of state power to enforce religious conformity becomes illegitimate.

(Of course, they didn't arrive at that solution immediately. The Thirty Years War, you'll recall, was brought to a weary conclusion on the basis of an understanding that (a) the ruler of each state would decide whether the church in that state would be Catholic, Lutheran or Calvinist; (b) rulers would tolerate minority religious groups so long as they were law-abiding and didn't seek to control or take over the established church; (c) rulers of neighbouring states with a different flavour of established church wouldn't seek to interfere. No separation of church and state there, obviously.

That worked reasonably well in Germany. If you were a nonconformist in (say) Hannover, you would be tolerated and not oppressed provided you were well-behaved. And if you found that too restrictive, well, you didn't have to travel far or go anywhere "foreign" to find yourself in a place where your religious preferences were flavour of the month. (And precisely because it was easy for people to relocate rulers had an added incentive not to be mean to religious minorities; it's damaging to the state to drive out its people.) But in big nation-states like France, England and so on it didn't play out the same way; if you were an adherent of a minority religion, going somewhere where that was the established religion was effectively going into exile; the cultural and economic barriers to doing that were very high. And kings in those countries didn't display anything like the same tolerance of minorities.

So I think it was in France, England, etc that what we would recognise as separation of church and state was really worked out. All churches and religious communities should be equally free to pursue their own religious ideals and practices, subject only to compliance with civil laws that were indifferent to religion. The state shouldn't favour any of them to any degree, and there should be no establishment/toleration distinction.

That idea was there from the 18th century onwards, but France didn't actually make it a reality until, I think, 1905, and technically the UK never has, at least in England. But of course the US embraced the idea and ran with it.

But, the point remains; the fundamental goal all along was not to prevent the state from being controlled by churches, but to prevent churches from being controlled by the state.

The bizarre thing is that he imagines that a left leaning communitarian life philosophy didn't exist before Marx and Engels. The reality is that this sort of philosophy was entirely common throughout history and that's because it follows a natural human instinct to build strong and stable communities of social support.
Marx and Engels were only significant in that they projected those principles into a modern industrialized age - a scenario which had never existed before in the history of humanity and showed particular challenges to workers cleaved from their stable social environments and thrust into exploitative urban societies.

Socialism was as common as social conservatism in the past just not quite so easy to point a finger at and say that is "socialism", but both philosophies exist because they are a natural projection of aspects of human nature.

Ah, this again.

It's just the consequence of the "Ireland is a Christian / Catholic country" stuff the NP among many others like to come out with.

Islam isn't part of our heritage, Judaism isn't part of our heritage, Hinduism isn't part of our heritage... When religion gets attacked in Ireland (usually with justification) it's Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular that's going to be in the firing line.

Pointing out a fallacy or weakness in someone's logic in an open debate is not 'moral high ground', and you know this.

This is not your personal.blog, if you post things they are either wrongor vindictive, you're gonna be challenged as you have been by me AND various others.

The National Party is nothing to do with socialism, nor do pretty much any of the posters you're replying to.

According to that logic all human society is socialist.

What's going on here is socialism is being white washed of all the misery and death is has caused over the last century and given a PR make over as the political ideology of Jesus Christ.

This is a thread about a poor excuse for a far right party and the last few pages have been focused on excusing the crimes of the far left by associating socialism with the bloody messiah.

It's a stark warning about the dangers of all extremist ideologies.

Here's a spoiler for you, the far right have the same delusional notions about their own righteousness as well.

If i can just turn your strawman back on you for a second, are you honestly suggesting that the real, stated, explicit intention of Socialism was to enslave all workers to a rigid state corporatism where any deviance was met with punishment and death?

As to your second question, what is the difference, genuinely, between a fascist dictator and a communist dictator, aside from the flavour of their rhetoric?

I doubt any answer would suffice.

I blame American conservative commentary where the words socialist, marxist and communist are used interchangeably to describe anything to the left of the Republican party.

Authoritarian dictators can be very adept at turning popular movements into oppressive regimes. We saw this with Stalin and the "Socialism" of the USSR. A phenomenon which was an antithetical perversion of anything that Marx actually wrote or believed in. In fact, there hasn't ever been a Socialist country, whether they label themselves as such or are labelled that from outside, that has come even remotely close to the Socialist ideals that Marx and Engels laid down in the 19th Century.

Simply put, Marx et al, would have been absolutely appalled at what the USSR became immediately after the revolution and especially when the leadership was taken over by Stalin, a man who was only interested in power for power's sake and retaining that power at any and all costs.

Right there, you have the basis for unravelling all the basic threads of Marx's beliefs, because if there was anything that Marx wrote about it was the need for society to move away from a centralised, authoritarian, power structure of state capitalist monopoly with a fixed figurehead at the helm.

An honest answer would be that any time socialism has been implemented the result has been an overall reduction in quality of life, freedom of expression, freedom of religion all led by, every single time no less, a dictator or ruling elite living high on the hog while the masses suffer and often starve to death.

I'm seeing the old tropes being rolled out now, Stalin was a corruption of Socialism, the USSR was fine until Josef took over, forgetting the crimes of Vladimir Lenin, Marx would be spinning in his grave, blah blah blah.

It boggles the mind how many people are willing to tie themselves up in knots defending an ideology that proven to be ineffective and inhumane decades ago while having a go at its right wing counterpart which incidentally never had as many applications as socialism yet somehow is the only extremist view any of us should be afraid of.

We need to cop on and get away from this extremist crap, currently the political landscape is becoming a lot more polarised in this country, the far left and the far right flinging mud at each other, capturing peoples attention while real issues get ignored at the expense of everyone.

We have had far left politicians in opposition for years, they hav no answers, they only exist to scaremonger and keep themselves relevant.

The answer to the far right isn't the far left, it's to grow up and let common sense dictate, not extreme ideology.

So people who espouse conservatism are responsible for Hitler and Mussolini by your logic.

Surely you see how pathetic your leap of logic is - because a philosophy always leads directly to a murderous dictator.

Socialism is nice and fluffy apparently.

It didn't kill tens of millions of people in the last century, that was just down to people getting socialism wrong again and again, a misunderstanding is all.

Having moderate left and right forces makes a democratic society work. Socialism isn't moderate when left to it's own devices, we all know this to be true but living in a free tolerant capitalist system means not everyone is a success so it must be evil, and socialism must be the answer.

Socialism is the politics of envy, capitalism isn't fair and far from perfect but I'll take it over living in a socialist distopia any day, similarly to how I wouldn't want to live in a far right system.