“ERETZ ISRAEL”
See: GREATER ISRAEL
ERFURT PROGRAMME
The programme adopted by the Social-Democratic Party of Germany in October 1891 at its
Congress in Erfurt.
“Underlying the Programme was the Marxist teaching of the inevitable
downfall of the capitalist mode of production and its replacement by the socialist
mode of production. It emphasized the need for the working class to wage a political
struggle, pointed out the role of the party as the organizer of this struggle, and
so on. Lenin remarked that the chief defect of the Erfurt Programme, a cowardly
concession to opportunism, was its silence on the dictatorship of the proletariat.
“A thoroughgoing criticism of
the draft Erfurt Programme was given in Engels’s work ‘A Contribution to the Criticism
of the Draft Social-Democratic Programme of 1891’.” —Note 92, Lenin, SW 3 (1967).
EROSION
“Over the past 500 million years, the rate of erosion on the continents—which ultimately depends on the rate at which tectonic processes lift up new mountains—has been equivalent to the loss of a layer twenty-four metres thick every million years, plus or minus about ten metres. Current rates of loss due to human activity are hard to judge but it seems sure that agricultural land is losing soil at many times that rate, and that the overall rate of sediment loss from the continents is something like three times the long-term average due to geology alone. It has been calculated that the rate at which the crust is reshaped purely for construction purposes is now greater than the average rate of natural erosion over geological time.” —Oliver Morton, Eating the Sun: How Plants Power the Planet (NY: Harper Perennial, 2009), p. 350.
ERRORS ESPIONAGE ACT OF 1917 ESSENCE “ETERNALISM” ETHICAL RELATIVISM And finally there is the view that nothing really makes
anything “right or wrong”, “good or bad”, that these are merely arbitrary biases that
people have, either in different cultures, or even individually. There seem to be
three main motives for holding this view: ETHICS ETHICS — MARXIST-LENINIST-MAOIST ETHNIC CLEANSING “Even if some traditionalists among you do not understand me, I am in
favor of forced migration of the entire Jewish element from Bessarabia and Bukovina;
they must be driven over the border... In all of our history, there has never been a
more appropriate, more complete, more far-reaching, freer moment for total ethnic
liberation, for renewed national self-examination, for a cleaning of our nation... Let
us utilize this historic moment... If need be, use machine guns.” —Mihai Antonescu,
the Foreign Minister of fascist Romania, speaking to his cabinet colleagues on July 8,
1941. Quoted in Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe (2013),
pp. 335-6. [This of course is just one of the almost endless examples of ethnic cleansing
of Jews by anti-Semitic regimes in modern history, which makes the long and ongoing
ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by the Zionist movement and Israel all the more ironic
and disturbing. —Ed.] ETHNICITY / ETHNIC GROUPS “Ethnicity is as much a matter of perception as of reality. It depends on
what is believed to be true, not on what is actually true. As we’ve seen, human groups are
in fact highly fluid. They absorb new members, split into parts, are blurred around the
edges, and eventually change into entirely new entities. Most of the ethnic groups of the
ancient Middle East no longer exist—the Sumerians, Elamites, Amorites, Kassites,
Philistines, and many others. They flared into prominence for a moment in time and then
disappeared. ETYMOLOGICAL FALLACY [Linguistics] Dictionary Home Page and Letter Index
See:
MISTAKES—Attitude Towards,
REASON [Tom Paine quote]
See: WHISTLE-BLOWER
[To be added...]
See also:
APPEARANCE AND ESSENCE,
SUPERFICIAL
See: “BLOCK UNIVERSE”
The ethical theory that there is no objective basis for morality, that different moral
views are simply a matter of custom or convention, and therefore vary from one place to
another, and from one time to another.
1) The argument from
ignorance. (“I can’t figure out what makes human actions right or wrong, so it
must be impossible to say.”)
2) Extreme cynicism about
humanity. (“Everybody tries to justify what they say and do, but at bottom it is all
just excuse making for doing whatever they selfishly want to do.”)
3) Learning about other
cultures which have different ideas about right and wrong.
This third reason is why cultural
anthropologists have been particularly prone to ethical relativism, and why the theory
was first put forward in a systematic way by philosophers such as Edward Westermarck
who were strongly influenced by the rise of modern anthropology. A number of cultural
anthropologists have at various times gone to live with native peoples in various parts
of the world and have found (to their evident surprise) that these peoples have somewhat
different conceptions of morality, conceptions which seem to serve them just as well as
the differing moralities of other cultures serve those societies. Since these
anthropologists had also not thought through the basis for morality in their own society,
they tended to jump to the conclusion that no particular morality is really “better” or
“more valid” than any other, but rather that all of them are merely somewhat arbitrary
conveniences for particular cultures.
More recently, this same sort of
thinking has been generalized and spread to other academic departments, especially to
English faculties at universities, in the form of “post-modernism”, which goes so far as
to claim that the world views of the scientific community are really no better than
those of native peoples living in the Amazon, or those of religious communities such as
Christian fundamentalists who believe the world was created in 4004 B.C.! (Some people
cannot recognize a reductio ad absurdum argument when they see it!)
As with some of the specific
traditional explanations of morality surveyed above, there are no doubt some small and
secondary aspects of truth to the relativist viewpoint. Different societies, with
different ways of living and different levels of social production, do require somewhat
different social norms and moral codes in order to function smoothly. But what the
central core of the relativist viewpoint fails to understand is that there is a deeper
level of analysis which will explain why the moral systems of different societies still
have so much in common, and also explain the differences between them in terms of the
same underlying analytical concepts. Once we have that explanatory analytical framework
in place we will be able to more rationally discuss the differences between moralities
in different forms and stages of society. —S.H., An Introduction to the
Marxist-Leninist-Maoist Class Interest Theory of Ethics, Chapter 1, section 1.2E,
from the draft of 6/14/07 as posted at:
https://www.massline.org/Philosophy/ScottH/MLM-Ethics-Ch1-2.pdf
The branch of philosophy which deals with the theory behind
morality, including its explication and justification, nature and essence, structure
and functions, origin and development.
See:
CLASS INTEREST THEORY OF ETHICS,
“CENTRAL PROBLEM” OF MLM ETHICS
The forcible removal of (and often even genocide against) one group of people by another,
usually also implying the theft of land and possessions of the victimized ethnic group. The
term “ethnic cleansing” is often used as a euphemism for outright genocide. Such horrible
crimes against humanity are often the actions of some rising or expanding bourgeois
nationality against “outsiders” whose lands they covet; that is, it is an extreme expression
of bourgeois nationalism and/or imperialism.
One of the worst examples of ethnic
cleansing in human history is the displacement and extirpation (to a major degree) of the
Native Americans by English and other European colonists in North America over the past
500 years. This was looked on with admiration by Adolf Hitler and inspired his own program
of expanding to the East against the Slavs for more German “Lebensraum” (living space).
This resulted in the Nazi murder of tens of millions of Russians, Poles, Czechs, Serbs,
and others in World War II. The mass murder of millions of Chinese by the invading
Japanese imperialists in the 1930s and 1940s was also in part a conscious attempt at ethnic
cleansing.
However, while not on that same scale,
over the past century there have also been many other examples of ethnic cleansing. This
includes the genocide by the Turkish government against Armenians around World War I; the
mutual attempts at ethnic cleansing by different ethnic groups within the old Yugoslavia
when it fell apart (and to a considerable degree fostered by the U.S. and European
imperialist countries); and the tribal genocide in Rwanda in 1994. Another example of ethnic
cleansing, which is seldom discussed in such terms even though it has been underway for an
entire century and still continues, is the forcible ejection of Palestinians from
their land, and the genocide against them, by the Zionist state of Israel. Here too, as in
so many cases, this is only possible because of outside imperialist support for this ethnic
cleansing from the United States and, especially earlier, Britain. [See also:
NAKBA]
In the modern era, by far the greatest force
leading to these terrible crimes of ethnic cleansing and genocide is capitalist-imperialism
itself. It is almost always behind these horrendous crimes, either directly or indirectly.
Yet ethnic groups have an incontestable
reality in the lives of individuals. They furnish at least part of the social setting in
which people act and make decisions. Through their proscriptions on thought and behavior,
they lend meaning and context to life.” —Steve Olson, Mapping Human History: Genes, Race,
and Our Common Origins (Boston: Mariner, 2003), p. 105.
[Olson connects up perceptions of
ethnicity with ancient compulsions toward tribalism. We might also note the connection with
patriotism and other forms of
“small group thinking”. And while close identification with one ethnic group might well
promote greater appreciation for, and participation in, the culture and “belief system” typical
of that one ethnicity, can it really be viewed as a good thing that people restrict their
knowledge and appreciation of the much larger world of human cultures in this way? Can we
really approve of “proscriptions on thought and behavior” that promote only the culture and
understanding of a single ethnic group, and tend to alienate us from the rest of humanity?
Of course we revolutionaries recognize that most people today have some sort of ethnic
affinities, but instead of just going along with narrow ethnic thinking shouldn’t our goal
be to help broaden everyone’s horizons to all of humanity? —S.H.]
The confusion of the current meaning of a word with the different meaning of a word (often in
another language) from which it arose. Although the English word “person” derives from the Latin
word “persona” for an “actor’s mask”, it would be an example of the etymological fallacy to think
that the word “person” therefore “really means mask”. Words change their meaning over time, and
their current meaning is not necessarily the same as their former meaning, let alone the same as
the words in other languages from which they were long ago originally derived. It is surprisingly
common for people to be unaware of this simple fact, and to therefore commit the etymological
fallacy.