Thomas_More
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” Actually, the Marquis de Sade, a contemporary of the Founding Fathers, who died over 200 years ago in an insane asylum, has better claim to the label socialist. He championed democracy, was opposed to every form of punishment (‘it is far simpler to hang men than to find out why we condemn them’), saw the class-divided nature of society and sided with ‘those who can only get a living by their labour and sweat.’ Indeed, Geoffrey Gorer in The Revolutionary Ideas of the Marquis De Sade (1964) points out that Sade stood in opposition to contemporary philosophers for both his ‘complete and continual denial of the right to property,’ and for viewing the struggle in late 18th century French society as being not between ‘the Crown, the bourgeoisie, the aristocracy or the clergy, or sectional interests of any of these against one another’, but rather all of these ‘more or less united against the proletariat.’ Gorer thus argued, ‘he can with some justice be called the first reasoned socialist.’” (The Socialist Standard).
It is Sade’s political and materialist views which interest socialists. Your attitude is sensationalist and outdated, given that Sade is on the university curricula in France for literature and philosophy, and has been of interest to radical thinkers since the early 20th century, including Simone de Beauvoir, one of his staunchest admirers.
“Not for the first time you have shown an unhealthy obsession with this depraved individual.”
*****
Yep.
Blasphemy, eh?If God is a figment of the imagination, how can he be calumniated?
And if he’s real, how can he be so petty as to be offended by calumny?You cannot possibly tell me anything that’s true that I don’t already know about Sade. I’ve studied him since I was 12.
Boris Weisfeiler, German-American mathematician, was hiking in Chile on holiday in 1985 … too close to Colonia Dignidad!
The Eyes of Birds (1983)
Les Yeux des Oiseaux / The Eyes of the Birds (1983, Switzerland / France)
I keep discovering people and movements I knew nothing of. It’s so true that we continue to learn throughout life.
The scriptural books, and not just the “heretical” ones, but many regarded as orthodox too, which were excluded from the final canon which we call today the Bible, far outnumber the ones which were included.
The New Testament exclusions are of most interest to me. Several, which are still used in the Ethiopian and Coptic churches, have Jesus speaking with other animals and passing his time with them.
Even the fully orthodox St. Basil said that all living beings have a life of their own, which should not be transgressed upon.
As for the canonical New Testament, the Epistle of James was the favourite of the English Levellers and of the Anabaptists and Poor Franciscans too, for its emphasis on good works (poo-pooed by Luther and Calvin): “Faith without works is dead”* – the exact antithesis of Paul, whom Joachim Kahl aptly calls “a neurotic philistine.”
Likewise, following this dichotomy, there have always been socially-conscious clergy, mostly Catholic, who stand apart.
Of course, they are bound to remain utopian socialists at best, being believers in an authority figure of human creation.
*Actually the motto of the Institute for Occitan Studies:
“La fe sens obras morta es.”Yes, it is a brilliant book. I have it.
I wonder why the eastern half of Hispaniola, now the Dominican Republic, is a tourist attraction that has escaped the modern fate of Haiti, which was the slave republic?
I heard also that until a few years ago, Haiti was still paying reparations to France for daring to steal the slaveowners’ plantations!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harald_Edelstam
I did not know about this man, Chile’s Schindler.
There is a movie on DVD: The Black Pimpernel.
