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Al Rasool mosque burning in Iran
(hexbear.net)
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this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2026
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The Orthodox clergy worked with the anti communists, they kept working with anti communists after they were marginalised, they kept doing it after they were let back in, they kept doing it for the entire rest of the lifespan of the soviet union, and they didn't stop after the union died.
The Catholic church has 100 years siding with fascism on every level on every continent and repaying every single olive branch from the left with betrayal.
And how did working with the religious powers work out for the Ba'athists and Iranian leftists?
You are eager to learn from the mistakes of maybe being a little too eager to pursue secularisation, but the greater mistake here tends more towards not being more anti religious.
If you won't consider the idea that it's ever possible for an organization to be too anti-religious for a popular movement when there are many places in the world where the large majority of people are deeply religious, I don't think this discussion is going anywhere and I'm going to respectfully agree to disagree with you.
Edit: you removed the portion of your comment I actually replied to, and added the last line.
We're not discussing in a vacuum here, we're talking about someone asserting that protesters should wait until after the revolution to burn down mosques. Your response to this was that there should always be a plan to kill clergy. These assertions are not compatible with building popular movements in parts of the world where most people are religious.
With all due respect, if you totally refuse to acknowledge that the religious institutions have never worked with the revolutionary left in good faith, and have no material reason to do so, and the examples of every single revolutionary movement since the development of socialist thought aren't enough to convince you, then the problem may not be with me being too rigid.
Copying (with some edits to clarify) my edit above replying to your edit above.
I don't know how you could come up with a general formula like offing all the religious leaders, when the current conditions are that most people in MENA are quite religious.
And religiosity increases under war and poverty, the very conditions wherein the contradictions of capital break and make way for communism.
So your greatest point of opportunity coincides with the highest point of religiousity. And you want to pursue the the most heavy handed route against that population?
Read Marx. Just fucking read Marx man. The fact that religion is the opiate of the masses does not justify it holding political power nor does it remove the fact that organised religion has always ended up fucking over the left. Again, how did working with organised religion work out in Iran?
You can fail early by being too weak on religion - as per Iran.
You can fail later by being too hard on religion, drag down your allies with you, and poison-pill the Muslim world - as per Afghanistan.
The death of the USSR is why our world is so miserable and bleak today. And the Afghan failure was a domino in that. I encourage you to learn those lessons as well.
Or you can come up with a more clever, thorough, and calibrated plan than: