Muslims and Stalinists

In one of those classic opinions I have, those weird, extreme, and extremely nuanced compromise positions that manages to get everyone mad for different reasons, I'm going to say that my attitude towards Stalinism is essentially the same as my attitude towards Islam. 

Okay, so here goes.  3 points.  Point #1: I'm not a Stalinist.  Point #2: I'm not a Muslim.  Point #3 - and this is the important point - I think Muslims and Stalinists should both be defended, militantly, against their enemies.

Why? Because Stalinism is a religion.  And I believe in freedom of religion.

But more importantly, because those who attack Stalinism and Islam - especially those well-meaning(?) "liberals" who want to "disprove" Stalinism and Islam through facts and logic - are ignoring, whether deliberately or not, the reality that Stalinism and Islam are not simply abstract ideas that exist in a vacuum.  They exist here in the real world, the world of human social relations, including relationships of power, and, for starters, the reality of global imperialism.  

It's true that Stalinism makes no sense.  It's also true that millions of good people have been killed in the name of Stalinism.  But that doesn't make the persecution of Stalinists okay.  It's not okay to use spies to infiltrate their governments, to intimidate them with nuclear weapons, to run "military exercises" right outside their borders, to send in drones, to drop bombs on them.  It's debatable whether it violates their freedom of religion to use sanctions, trade deals, or investment to try to convert them coercively to a different belief.

After all, millions of people have been killed in the name of Christianity, as well - another doctrine that makes no sense.  Would it be okay to engage in this kind of intimidation towards Vatican City? 

If the people of a Stalinist government or any kind of theocracy choose to overturn their government and create a new one, I will stand up and cheer.  But I won't support a government that tries to forcibly change them from outside.

Self-defense is one thing, and that's fine.  But meddling in the affairs of another country, halfway across the world, in an attempt to spread your ideology and convert people from their own - that's obviously aggression.  A war that is justified in this way is a war of aggression, in the strict legal sense spelled out at Nuremberg after World War II: "It is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."  If this kind of aggression is permissible, then freedom of religion has no meaning.

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