Your Corbyn/Sultana Party - Discussion thread - Part 2

[fromorbit]

The YP starting conference is in the ACC in Liverpool between 29-30 November so only three weeks off. With competing factions involving Islamic conservatives, every variety of Marxist/Communist, former Labour members, trade union activists, entryists from SWP and SPEW, splitters from the Scottish Greens, trans activists and actual left wing feminists [not the nice kind] it is difficult to underplay how much controversy there is likely to be. So we will need a second thread in advance.

Thus far following the internal drama of the UKs newest left party has taken a whole thread. It has been a wild ride and the party still does not have a name.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5394557-your-corbynsultana-party-discussion-thread

Oh dear, I thought a tankie was a sort of swimsuit, or perhaps a knitted top. I’m not as politically well-informed as I believed.

For all her protestations that socialists are moral and non hypocritical and call out abuses of power wherever she sees them, she's as blind to the evils of the left and Islamism as she sees capitalists facilitating evil.

Some would say that socialists are moral, but she is no socialist.

I do have a bit of sympathy with young politicians/political commentators from all sides.

They were taught that colonialism was unquestionably negative. The left have taken this and said that they arent colonialists - they arent saving people from themselves and taking resourses, they are saving them from capitalism. The right are saying colonialism is bad, therefore foreign issues are none of their business.

Therefore, Iran gets ignored by everyone.

The Omnicause...some causes are less Omni than others.

I suppose Gaza has quieted down for the time being, and they haven't managed to get much mileage out of Trump kidnapping Super Mario, so Stop The War (which has been around since the 1990s and outlived most of the wars it wanted to stop) need a new cause.

Is that going to be the ICE shooting of Renee Good?

Could be. The CNN correspondent in Minneapolis is literally the "fiery but mostly peaceful" guy from the Kenosha riots in 2020, so take that as an omen if you will.

I don't suppose they're interested in the slaughter of Christians in Nigeria or the plight of women in Afghanistan.

Good comment by Joanna Williams in the Times today:
https://www.thetimes.com/article/9e378a30-5d5a-4731-a460-ae1a87d1a0ba?shareToken=839fff0477e0c9c86d5595bf57d9abb9

Yes, and against western appropriation and/or domination of minority cultures..........or something. This is how you end up being supportive of FGM and Islamic terrorism whilst proclaiming progressive credentials.

I think the ' socialists are moral' narrative is a large part of the problem. Too many are of the view that ' socialists are morally correct' so as they are socialists they are morally correct and therefore everything they believe is morally superior. They can tell themselves that everything they do is in order to usher in a better life under socialism for everyone, and everyone who is against them is against the poor and opressed. Unless they are the poor and opressed. In which case they are clearly also not Western Middle class intellectuals so don't understand things their own country.

https://app.independent.co.uk/2026/01/14/2899742/content.html

Also a good article in the Indy

'Our revolutions are not your proxies. They are not America’s movements. They are not the West’s projects. They are ours – rooted in our grief, our courage, our exhaustion and our insistence on a life worth living.

You do not get to confiscate that and hand it back to us with a theory attached.

And you do not get to tell us what we need.'

I believe this is a huge problem. There is a significant group of people that are so convinced that socialism means being good and kind that they are rendered unable to think clearly about their own politics, other peoples policies, or other people in in general.

Definitely. There's a large element of people on the left who are very similar to Jehovah's Witnesses. I'm sure they mean well, but they can't see that a decent and moral person would think differently from them, and they're really not very good at putting themselves in other people's shoes.

Even more narrowly on gender issues, I know at least one fanatical TRA who's a good lawyer, but was genuinely astonished at the Supreme Court ruling. He wouldn't have been astonished if he'd spent an hour listening to Helen Joyce on a podcast explaining our point of view, but he doesn't know the other point of view, doesn't want to know, and though he'd never put it this way, I think he would see listening to Helen's arguments as sinful.

When religion or any kind of spiritual faith or practice was suppressed and rejected by Socialism/Communism as being indicative of 'false consciousness' (and instead political/rational secularism was favoured) the natural tendency in human beings to fervour and fixity of belief was transferred to Socialist ideology.

Any belief system or political ideology can be held to in a religious manner. Repetition and unchanging fixity are characteristics of religion - along with a highly structured view of the world and its events and their meaning. Human beings and societies naturally seek meaning and have a tendency towards visionary imaginings which can inculcate and unite communities into a shared belief and value system.

Anything outside of the established 'church' is sinful and tempting and must be rejected, as adherents grow ever tighter and closer in increasingly stringent cycles of purity and purging. This can lead to cultish and extreme behaviours and attitudes.

I wonder if Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens ever envisaged how the Omnicause off the back of the Great Awokening would be the secular/atheist left replacement for Christianity, and that trans ideology and Islamism would be expected to be a seamless fit?

Even more narrowly on gender issues, I know at least one fanatical TRA who's a good lawyer, but was genuinely astonished at the Supreme Court ruling. He wouldn't have been astonished if he'd spent an hour listening to Helen Joyce on a podcast explaining our point of view
Frankly, he should have just got his Law books out and read the chapter on Statutory Interpretation if he couldnt understand that decision!

For a brief few hours after Kemi Badenoch sacked Robert Jenrick this afternoon I thought he might be on the cusp of joining Your Party for shits and giggles. Alas.

I posted on the Iran thread an essay from a Palestinian British writer about the bizarre fanboy/ fangirl tendency for the self identifying anti imperialists for mullahs. They're essentially seen as "pure revolutionaries", and there's a type of inverted Orientalism at play. On his Twitter he's said he stands in support of the protesters and he's had loads of pro Palestinian activists accusing him of being a zio shill, etc

https://johnaziz.substack.com/p/michel-foucault-and-the-islamic-revolution?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&shareImageVariant=overlay&r=tmdbn&triedRedirect=true

Of a piece with "hang on in there sisters!" Gloating from Yanis Varoufakis when the Taliban returned in Afghanistan.

Only 1 more sleep till Jeremy Corbyn and his faction reveal the slate of candidates for the central committee

I think there is a certain type of atheism that has that same element of moral superiority and intellectualism about it. That people who dont believe in 'sky faries' are rational and sensible whereas people who follow religion are therefore not rational or sensible. They then fall into the same kind of evangelical belief syatem but dont see it as such because it doesnt revolve around a belief in God.

It should be. At least, what happened needs to be looked into in the US. We'll see if it is.

Really weird for Foucault to support that given no regime was more sexually repressive than Khomeini's.

The left wasn't always like this though, and it can change. Left wing people were strong supporters of removing the Taliban in Afghanistan to help women there (which of course didn't work) and of opposing the Pakistan Taliban's repression of women. In the 80s it was the right wing US Reagan government who called the muhajideen 'freedom fighters' because the opposed Russian communism. There definitely is a stupid and dangerous section of the left who have supported & do support Islamism but the whole picture is more complex than that.

If the left were genuinely mainly anti-Islamist as a subset of the Venn Diagram that is intersectional IDentarianism, there would be massive demonstrations on the scale of Gaza in London and other cities, outside universities etc.
The fact that there isn't, nothing on the industrial scale slaughter of Christians in Nigeria etc, Sudan, suggests strongly that the left are very happy to apply all sorts of virtue prioritizing.
Trump and Netanyahou hovering over Tehran? The left would rather not show their visible support for brave Iranians. Because the Ayatollah's enemy is the enemy of Omnicausers everywhere in the West.

No, I agree that the left now clearly have been in large part taken over by pro-Islamists. What I meant was that clearly this was not always the case when you compare to Afghanistan in the 2000s, Pakistan in the early 2010s. The Foucault parallel us relevant and there are other ones, but this full-scale takeover is more recent.

Excellent. Inverted Orientalism is also a good description as in the linked Substack.

Yes, I watched a chilling hard-left Hamas supporting YouTube video recently defending Nick Fuentes. The comments were a smorgasbord of the usual anti Semitic tropes, apparently from a 'decolonial' perspective.
I've noticed similar tropes on heterodox/right wing YouTube comment sections,,even when the video is decent. Why can't YouTube moderate these?