Time to dust out the old black flag.
Spain's Crisis Reignites an Old Social Conflict:
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Originally Posted by NYTimes
The occupation was a demonstration of the class conflicts that simmer amid complaints about austerity and joblessness in Spain. Such protests have gathered pace in this farm region in Spain’s south in recent weeks, adding a volatile dimension to the country’s economic downturn. They have also pointed to a deeper anger about the shape of Spain’s economy and democracy.
The resentment here over land that has been left uncultivated at a time of deepening recession and record joblessness reaches beyond local politicians and landowners to European Union bureaucrats. Agricultural subsidies are criticized by many here as favoring landed interests, paying them not to grow crops when nearly a third of the work force in Andalusia is unemployed.
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Three years into the crisis, the government of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy has faced protests by miners, students, teachers, legions of jobless workers and any range of others unhappy with his austerity policies. But the protests here in rural Spain, which have tipped increasingly toward lawlessness and civil disobedience, contain the echoes of conflicts that have a special place in Spain’s history. As Spain’s biggest region and farming heartland, Andalusia was the site of many of the confrontations over land ownership leading up to the Spanish Civil War, when a landed elite resisted an agrarian reform meant to give farm hands better work conditions and job security.
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Campesinos! La Tierra es Vuestra! Tierra y Libertad!
This echoes the Greek situation where many of the downtrodden and victimized simply "went home" to the rural areas and started making a living the way their ancestors used to. Of course, I don't think Spain is on the throes of another popular anarchist revolution any time soon. None of the agricultural workers here are quite CNT-FAI militia in the making.
Though I do wonder, aside from the obvious anti-bourgeois anger, how the European Common Agricultural Policy could be responsible for the ruin of these southern farmers, or, perhaps, conversely, how necessary it is in order to not bring ruin to
every European farmer by sheer overproduction.
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Meanwhile, in God-fearing, Bible-Blessed, America the Beautiful...
From Bible-Belt Pastor to Atheist Leader:
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Originally Posted by NYTimes
Not long ago, the atheist movement was the preserve of a few eccentric gadflies like Madalyn Murray O’Hair, whose endless lawsuits helped earn her the title “the most hated woman in America.” But over the past decade it has matured into something much larger and less cranky. In March of this year, some 20,000 people marched through a cold drizzle at the “Reason Rally” in Washington, billed as a political debut for the movement. A string of best-selling atheist polemics by the “four horsemen” — Hitchens and Dawkins, as well as Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett — has provided new intellectual fuel. Secular-themed organizations and clubs have begun to permeate small-town America and college campuses, helping to foot the bill for bus and billboard ad campaigns with messages like “Are You Good Without God? Millions Are.”
The reasons for this secular revival are varied, but it seems clear that the Internet has helped, and many younger atheists cite the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks as a watershed moment of disgust with religious zealotry in any form. It is hard to say how many people are involved; avowed atheists are still a tiny sliver of the population. But people with no religious affiliation are the country’s fastest-growing religious category. When asked about religious affiliation in a Pew poll published this summer, nearly 20 percent of Americans chose “none,” the highest number the center has recorded. Many of those people would not call themselves atheists; “agnostic,” which technically refers to people who believe that the existence of a higher being can’t be known by the human mind, remains the safer option. The godless are now younger and more diverse than in the past, with blacks and Hispanics — once vanishingly rare — starting to appear in the ranks of national groups like the United Coalition of Reason and the Secular Student Alliance.
The movement has also begun cultivating a new breed of guru in men like DeWitt and Nate Phelps, the son of Fred Phelps, the leader of Westboro Baptist Church, which pickets military funerals and gay-pride events with signs declaring “God Hates Fags.”
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A curious social movement. Once an Evangelical, always an Evangelical.
Well, actually I sympathize with them. My experience as an atheist has absolutely nothing to do with the very real struggles of these post-Christian individuals, but that's mostly down to luck, heritage and geography. I think I should be quite extreme with my atheism myself -- or more probably, dead by suicide -- had I been forced to grow up neck deep in Jesus and then lost every single relationship, my career, and the world I had known because I came out of the atheist "closet." Nice of those wonderful Christians by the way with their forgiving, merciful ostracism.
The article is kind of annoying though in failing utterly to acknowledge the vast majority of atheists, those who just don't think very much about religion, as opposed to the driven and the troubled who are compelled to fight back. Nor, for example, that people like Professor Dawkins mostly does actual science and only comes out to do science advocacy once in a while.