The continuing mini-major fracas[ee] of mini-major sectaries....
Reader comment on item: Responding to Joshua Muravchik about "Moderate Islamists"

Submitted by Jascha Kessler (United States), May 4, 2008 at 13:58

This sort of [pseudo-] dialectical quarreling about "i-sts" and "-ates" and "extremes" and shades and tints of faith/belief/action reminds me of the fictions and factions long known in literature and political life in the Left and Zionist organizations, not to mention the murderous divisions familiar in the West since Luther.

The whole house, society/civilization, whatever, is burning, and the tenants keep running about from apartment to apartment, looting, shooting, hooting and throwing either oil or water on new flames, or both at once.

In the 1940s, there were the Trotskyites, still formidable debaters; the Schachtmanites, ferocious debaters, especially Schachtman himself; and a small dangerous sect on the docks, the Cannonites, numbering less than 50 members, to which a good friend belonged , who got pretty beaten-up defending picketers. In Islam, historically, any sort of deviation from what this or that major cleric pronounced was declared heresy, and carried a death penalty...the fatwa.. In the 19th century, the Baha'i band of universal, eclectic love for all worshippers of a single God was formed; and their founders were hounded down and killed, the leader eventually in Haifa, where a mausoleum and great shrine stands today on Mt. Carmel. Certainly protected by Jerusalem, let it be observed.

Marxism, progressed, or devolved, from DAS KAPITAL to Leninism within 75 years, and thence to Stalinism, with Trotskyism formed after the 1936, purges and infamous Moscow trials. All of that logical — and, on the mini-level, personal drama, etc., is well described in one of Joseph Conrad's finest later novels, UNDER WESTERN EYES. Later on, Conrad also made savage comedy in THE SECRET AGENT with its refugee terrorist clique; but especially in NOSTROMO. In the latter novel, in Central America in a place called Costa Guana [feminine form of guano, or seabird shit] we can see the makings of Chavez' Venezuela today a century later.

It would be better for all in discussing our intelligence regarding Islam and its many cultural manifestations at this hour than to have the same old banal — and perhaps humanly inevitable — conflicts of fanatic and entrenched beliefs and faiths — Left, Centrist, Rightist — always expressed as absolutes, and not to be constantly bickering while the fuses are being laid for major catastrophes ... meaning nuclear, in the US and Europe. Pipes is describing the puerile and petty cavils that were so bitter in the last throes of the world Communist movement ... and for that matter in present-day Israel's politics.

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