The US made the same sort of mistake linking with fundamentalists in Afghan. It is not just the number of divisions. Was Stalin saying he would link with the Pope if he had enough divisions or was he just dismissing the Pope?
Religious thought does not lend itself to Realpolitik, but to absolute truths, real or imagined. Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University michael at ecst.csuchico.edu Chico, CA 95929 530-898-5321 fax 530-898-5901 -----Original Message----- From: PEN-L list [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Yoshie Furuhashi Sent: Sunday, April 29, 2007 3:03 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [PEN-L] EGYPT: Islamic Democrats? On 4/29/07, Perelman, Michael <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I admire the Berrigan brothers for the humanity rather than for their > Catholicism. That is good of you, but I think that people who are interested in the Muslim Brotherhood, from left to liberal, are interested in neither their humanity nor their religion but are motivated by a similar question to the ones that Stalin asked: "The Pope? How many divisions has he got?" (qtd. in Winston Churchill, "The Gathering Storm," Vol. 1, Ch. 8, The Second World War, 1948, <http://www.bartleby.com/66/30/55130.html>); and "If the Pope or you can tell us what armies, artillery, machine-guns tanks and other weapons of war he possesses, let him become our ally. We don't need an ally for talk and incense" (Enver Hoxha, Memoirs from My Meetings with Stalin, 1981 <http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hoxha/works/stalin/meet3.htm> ). For Stalin, the questions were rhetorical, but today they aren't. In other words, people are interested in the Brotherhood and the like first and foremost because they do have many divisions, not necessarily in the literal military sense (though Hizballah and the Iranian state have them in this sense also) but in a political sense of mass membership. -- Yoshie
