When ol' Lizzie died, the Archbishop of Canterbury let us all know that God dropped him a message to say the King Charles should succeed to the throne, which worked out awfully lucky with what was already being planned. The Head of State of the United Kingdom is claiming to derive their authority from God (aka Divine Right of Kings), state and church are officially unified and clerics are a required part of the legislature, does that not make it a Theocracy by any reasonable definition?

  • NewsEnjoyer [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    All of the "theocracies" of subsaharan Africa are neo-colonial comprador (bourgeois) dictatorships, Christianity in this context is used extremely cynically to divide and manipulate its population against its own interest and keep it subservient to international capital and their comprador agents. Whereas Iran is not ruled by neo-colonial compradors but has a national bourgeois component (the "Republic") and a theocratic component (the will of the religious body, truly believed to be holy by a portion of the population)

    • CTHlurker [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Pardon my ignorance, but if I'm understanding you right, then for any government to be described as a theocracy, it needs to have it's neo-colonial compradors removed from power? And some sort of religious buy-in from the resident population? Given these parameters, then your argument makes slightly more sense. Still don't really know how many of the rebel groups that claim to want theocracy are actually supported by neo-colonial interests, but I guess that's the fun part of imperialism still having so much sway over multiple continents.

      • NewsEnjoyer [he/him]
        ·
        edit-2
        2 years ago

        My point is that capitalism desecrates and denatures everything it touches into transactional and exploitative mechanisms. It has already killed the Christian god and the Jewish god. Predominantly Muslim areas have historically developed much later and been exposed to full capitalist forces much more recently, so their god is merely dying instead of dead.

        This is a necessary step in the dialectical journey to communism though, as the true worship of god is eradicated by capitalism and then must be re-kindled again by communism, but instead in the form of worshipping humanity as a whole as sacred, and worshipping our ecology as sacred

        • CTHlurker [he/him]
          ·
          2 years ago

          Doesn't capitalism require the populace to actually benefit from the "profaning" of the sacred? Like a population in a historically underdeveloped place, which is now being exposed to capitalism, is not going to abandon faith in god, if capitalism doesn't actually deliver material gains to the population group. For the islamic world specifically, I sort of think that the profaning of the sacred has already happened / begun happening, which is why you see so much weird shit being made in the Gulf States. But in places without massive bounties of exploitable natural ressources, like Indonesia, Pakistan, Egypt, or Morocco, you don't see quite the same level of "disregard" (for lack of a better and more neutral term) for the old traditions that you see in the Gulf.