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kuramirocket · 1 year

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Big Lit Meets the Mexican Americans: A Study in White Supremacy

HarperCollins tells us: “We publish content that presents a diversity of voices and speaks to the global community. We promote industry and company initiatives that represent people of all ethnicities, races, genders and gender identities, sexual orientations, ages, classes, religions, national origins and abilities.” The New York Times proclaims its dedication to building a “culture of inclusion,” while the University of Arizona’s MFA program commits itself “to proactively fostering diversity and inclusion throughout its curriculum, admissions, hiring, and day-to-day practices.”

Some of these statements may reflect actual practices while others are simply corporate boilerplate. Whether they are sincere or not, the fact remains that most books agented, sold, reviewed, and distributed are mostly written by white people and are, moreover, mostly agented, sold, reviewed, and distributed by other white people. (In fact, the term “diversity,” as used in such statements, seems to reinforce rather than confront the notion that white, cisgender people are the norm and everyone else is a big, indistinguishable mass of otherness. But that’s a different essay.)

Big Lit is virtually a whites-only country club. Everyone knows this. The lack of racial diversity among the people who populate Big Lit is an open secret. The Big Five — Penguin Random House, Hachette, Macmillan, Simon and Schuster, and HarperCollins — is still where it’s at in terms of getting maximum exposure, resources and mainstream acceptance. Big Lit can consign to near invisibility the work of entire communities of writers it decides not to take up.

This essay is a kind of case study of the Mexican-American literary community, a community whose writers Big Lit rarely takes up. But I don’t mean to offer another lecture about Big Lit’s lack of diversity (well, not entirely). Rather, I want to examine how the ideology of white supremacy works to brand an entire population of nonwhite people — here, Mexican Americans — as inherently inferior to whites, how that message is reinforced by means both legal and extra-legal, how it seeps into literary culture, and, how, ultimately, literary culture (i.e., Big Lit) consciously or unconsciously views this population through the lens of those white-supremacist beliefs.

This ingrained and complex racism can’t be ameliorated by platitudes about diversity or tokenistic representations of “diverse” populations.

Part One

When Donald Trump called Mexican immigrants “rapists” during the announcement of his 2016 presidential bid, he was strumming a very old chord in white America’s consciousness. Since the mid-19th century, the denigration of Mexicans and, by extension, Mexican Americans has been an ongoing project of white America. The pivotal point was the US invasion of 1848 and the forcible appropriation of half the territory that comprised the nascent Mexico. Then as now, Mexico saw the war for what it was: an unprovoked and unprincipled land grab. As a Mexican newspaper at the time thundered: “A government […] that starts a war without a legitimate motive is responsible for all its evils and horrors. The bloodshed, the grief of families, the pillaging, the destruction. […] Such is the case of the U.S. Government, for having initiated the unjust war it is waging against us today.”

Fueled by the almost religious conviction that the United States was destined to occupy the entire North American continent, Anglo America embarked on the near extermination of indigenous people and the conquest of Mexico. From the outset, Manifest Destiny was a racialist doctrine.

As one historian observes:

By 1850 the emphasis was on the American Anglo-Saxons as a separate, innately superior people who were destined to bring good government, commercial prosperity, and Christianity to the American continents and to the world. This was a superior race, and inferior races were doomed to subordinate status or extinction.

America’s true motives were laid bare in a contemporary North American periodical, the American Whig Review: “Mexico was poor, distracted, in anarchy and almost in ruins — what could she do to stay the hand of our power, to impede the march of our greatness? We were Anglo-Saxon Americans; it was our ‘destiny’ to possess and to rule this continent — we were bound to it.” (Mid-19th-century Mexico was a troubled, unstable polity but still: If your neighbor’s house is on fire, is the morally appropriate response to break in and steal everything of value you can lay your hands on?)

At the end of the war, over 100,000 Mexicans were trapped on what was now the American side of the border. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo guaranteed that these captive people would become naturalized American citizens, with all the rights and privileges thereof, and that their property rights would be respected. Those promises evaporated almost as soon as the ink was dry on the treaty. The promised enfranchisement, it turned out, was only federal, not state citizenship. This ploy allowed the states that were carved out of annexed territory to limit citizenship to something called “white Mexicans.” As for the property right guarantee, Mexican property owners became bankrupt in American courts when fighting off American predators and squatters who would trespass and forcefully stay on their private property.

Arising at the same time was Western genre fiction, emerging first in the form of dime novels. This genre provided the most popular and widely distributed representations of Mexicans and Mexican Americans from the mid-19th century well into the 20th. Its practitioners included writers like Zane Gray, O. Henry, and Stephen Crane, as well as countless pulp writers. Film and, later, television perpetuated these representations and gave them even wider currency. Central to the Western genre was the theme of Mexican racial inferiority, which these narratives used to justify the invasion and conquest of Mexico; indeed one author called it, "conquest fiction."

Much of early Western fiction originated or was set in Texas, always a hotbed of particularly virulent anti-Mexican sentiment. Mexico had initially welcomed Anglo settlement in Texas, but the Anglos who arrived tended to be slave-owning Southerners with reactionary views about the purported inferiority of darker-skinned people. Mexico abolished slavery in 1829. This contributed to the Anglo-led secession of Texas from Mexico and the founding of the Texas Republic; basically, the white Texans wanted to maintain slavery.

Their attitudes toward their erstwhile Mexican hosts was summed up by Texas patriot Stephan Austin, who on one occasion described Mexicans as a “mongrel Spanish-Indian and negro race,” and on another as “degraded and vile; the unfortunate race of Spaniard, Indian, and African is so blended that the worst qualities of each predominate.”

Antebellum pulp Westerns with titles like Mexico versus Texas, Bernard Lile: An Historical Romance, and Piney Woods Tavern; or, Sam Slick in Texas created a set of Mexican stereotypes that prevailed well into the 20th century, among them the lazy peon, the evil bandido, and the licentious señorita. In these works most Mexican males are “segregated into two distinctly inferior types: peon servants and mestizo bandidos. As “half-breeds,” the mestizo bandidos are “a cut above the peons,” but “have no moral scruples. […] When the American heroes finally ‘unmask’ these poseur gentlemen and expose their wickedness, they either kill them or hurl them back across the color line into ‘brownness’ and disgrace.” The distaff side is represented by “Mexican woman […] graced with voluptuous figures but burdened by loose moral principles.”

Higher-brow publications like The Atlantic and Scribner’s Magazine were no less derogatory. An 1899 article in The Atlantic entitled “The Greaser” portrayed its Mexican-American subject as “the mestizo, the Greaser, half-blood offspring of the marriage of antiquity and modernity.” A travel piece in an 1894 issue of Scribner’s Magazine described the borderland between Texas and Mexico as “The American Congo”; the piece is a veritable encyclopedia of racist stereotyping, including this Trumpian observation: “The Rio Grande Mexican is not a law-breaker in the American sense of the term; he has never known what law was and he does not care to learn; that’s all there is to it.”

These caricatures of Mexican Americans were amplified and even more widely distributed as early moviemakers discovered the appeal of Westerns. Mexicans were, once again, cast as the dark-skinned foils to upright Anglo heroes as summarized by an author:

[F]ilm titles and advertising made open use of the word greaser, at least up to the 1920’s: The Greaser’s Gauntlet, The Girl and the Greaser, Broncho Bill and the Greaser, The Greaser’s Revenge, Guns and Greasers, or, bluntly, The Greasers. The artistic and cultural sensitivity of these films match their titles. If adventure stories, they feature no-holds-barred struggles between good Americans and bad Mexicans. The cause of the conflict is often vaguely defined. Some greasers meet their fate because they are greasers. Others are on the wrong side of the law. Others violate Saxon moral codes. All of them rob, assault, kidnap, and murder with the same wild abandon as their dime-novel counterparts.

These silent-era representations continued into the talkies.

Brownness, stupidity, laziness, cowardice, lawlessness, and sexual immortality: these became the signifiers of Mexicans in white America’s consciousness, reinforcing the notion that Mexicans are inferior to white people. This inferiority was race-based — that is, Mexicans were presumed to be inherently and in some inchoate sense biologically less intelligent, capable, and moral than white people.So deeply embedded are these cultural images that, after the death of the Western as a popular genre in books, movies, and TV, they simply shape-shifted into more contemporary versions.

Instead of the bandidos of yore, Mexican-American men transformed into gangbangers and drug dealers; the lazy peons became grocery-cart-pushing homeless people and hapless drug addicts; the flashing-eyed señoritas now tottered around suggestively on Fuck Me Pumps uttering heavily accented malapropisms. Often, however, these stereotypes don’t speak at all. In movies and on TV, you see brown people silently pushing laundry carts, pruning rose bushes, or stacking dishes into an industrial dishwasher, a sepia background against which the whiteness — and, thus, the superiority — of the real heroes and heroines gleams all the more brightly.

Part Two

Before Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, there was Mendez v. Westminster in 1946, the first federal court decision striking down school segregation. Let me explain.

California’s Orange County had set up “Mexican schools,” which all children of Mexican descent were required to attend from first to fourth grade. The ostensible reason was that they couldn’t speak English, but all Mexican-American children were forced into these schools regardless of their fluency. By the time the Mendez and five other families sued, these schools had 5,000 students. In the then-prevalent racial binary of black versus white, Mexicans were grudgingly considered “white.” This meant the plaintiffs couldn’t allege racial discrimination. Instead, they argued that the segregation of public schools impermissibly discriminated against their children based on ancestry and presumptive language deficiency.

In short, Orange Country’s segregation scheme wasn’t authorized by state law; thus, by extension, neither were other forms of segregation imposed on Mexican Americans in California by a comprehensive set of statewide Jim Crow–like laws. To summarize the situation: By the 1920s, many Southern California communities had established ‘Mexican schools’ along with segregated public swimming pools, movie theaters, and restaurants.” (On a personal note, I can testify that my mother remembers being turned away from a Sacramento public swimming pool sometime in the late 1940s because she was — and is — undeniably mestiza in appearance.)

From the mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries, whites used a combination of discriminatory legal and terroristic extra-legal tactics against Mexican Americans. Mexican Americans were disenfranchised, faced residential and education segregation, were denied the use of public facilities, and were in danger of being lynched. Yes, lynched — 571 ethnic Mexicans were lynched between 1848 and 1928; in addition, the Texas Rangers summarily executed at least another 500 Mexicans without trial.

As has repeatedly been the case, these discriminatory legal measures and extra-judicial assaults corresponded to high tides of Mexican immigration. In this time of history, Mexican immigration was between 1900 and 1930 - many, like my great-grandparents, refugees. Nativist whites such as Madison Grant, author of the influential The Passing of the Great Race, deplored this invasion by a “mongrel race.” White America’s attitudes toward Mexican immigration have always been both exploitative and ambivalent. On the one hand, these immigrants are useful because they serve as a cheap source of agricultural labor in the West; however, because they are members of an inferior “mongrel race,” they have to be closely monitored and firmly kept in place.

The ease with which bare tolerance could shift to active hostility was dramatically illustrated during the Great Depression. During this period, an estimated 400,000 Mexican Americans, 60 percent of them American citizens by birth or by naturalization, were forcibly repatriated to Mexico. The pretexts given were that Mexican Americans were taking scarce jobs away from white Americans and were a drain on government relief assistance. (Sound familiar?)

In a frenzy of anti-Mexican hysteria, wholesale punitive measures were proposed and taken by government officials at the federal, state, and local levels. Laws were passed depriving Mexicans of jobs in the public and private sectors. Immigration and deportation laws were enacted to restrict emigration and hasten the departure of those already here. Contributing to the brutalizing experience were the mass deportation roundups and reparation drives. […] An incessant cry of “get rid of the Mexicans” swept the country.

Mexican Americans never passively consented to their victimization by white Americans. Following the end of the Mexican-American War, they fought the unlawful seizure of lands guaranteed to them under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in American courts many being unsuccessful and losing their private property and homes to Americans who illegally squatted on their land and protested the decisions by California, Texas, and Arizona to limit citizenship to “white Mexicans.” In the 1930s, long before the establishment of the United Farm Workers, Mexican agricultural workers organized themselves into unions and went on strike in California, Arizona, Idaho, Washington, and Colorado; they were met with brutal suppression. “[w]ith scarcely an exception, every strike in which Mexicans participated in the borderlands in the thirties was broken by the use of violence and followed by deportations. In most of these strikes, Mexican workers stood alone, that is, they were not supported by organized labor.”

The 1960s and ’70s saw the birth of the Chicano Movement — emphasizing racial pride and resistance to racism. That movement also gave birth to a body of literature that is now acknowledged to contain many of the ur-texts that form the basis of Chicano/a and Latinx studies programs.

And now? Who are these Mexican Americans? While their numbers continued to be greatest in the western states, there are Mexican-American communities in every state in the union, with a significant presence in the Midwest and a growing presence in the South. In contrast to the aging white population, a 2007 survey revealed only six percent of “Hispanic Americans” to be 65 or older; the comparable percentage for whites was 15 percent. Thus, a brown workforce increasingly supports white retirees.

Contrary to the stereotype that most Americans of Mexican descent are recent immigrants, the majority of Mexican Americans are native-born. That percentage will only increase because Mexican immigration — even before Obama’s massive deportations and Trump’s war against immigrants — has been steadily decreasing, as a 2015 Pew Research Poll shows. That poll also dispels another stereotype, showing that almost 90 percent of native-born Mexican Americans are proficient in English. Moreover, Pew Research has also established that 83 percent of all Latinos and 91 percent of Latino millennials (including, of course, Mexican Americans) get their news in English.

The Department of Education reported a 126 percent jump in Latino students entering college between 2000 and 2015.

In short, Mexican Americans comprise a youthful, increasingly well-educated, largely native-born and English-proficient, aspirational community.

Yet, despite all this, Mexican-American representation in mainstream American culture, when it appears at all, remains either tokenistic, stereotypical, or both. In film, television, and books this emergent community is still largely ignored.

Part Thee

As part of my research for this essay, I looked at the course syllabi for a half-dozen courses in Latinx or Chicano literature from colleges across the nation, in order to see which Mexican-American works and writers scholars deem canonical. This is the list I came up with (virtually all these books were taught at more than one school):

Americo Paredes, George Washington Gómez (written in mid-’30s; published 1990)

Tomás Rivera, … y no se lo tragó la tierra/and the earth did not devour him (1971)

Rudolfo Anaya, Bless Me, Ultima (1972)

Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street (1984)

Arturo Islas, The Rain God (1984)

Ana Castillo, The Mixquiahuala Letters (1986)

Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987)

Alejandro Morales, The Rag Doll Plagues (1991)

Helena Maria Viramontes, Under the Feet of Jesus (1995)

Norma Elia Cantú, Canícula (1995)

Reyna Grande, Across a Hundred Mountains (2006)

What most of these books have in common is that, with two exceptions, none were published by the Big Five or their predecessors; instead, almost all were originally published by small presses. While some were later picked up by Big Five publishers for paperback editions, most are still being kept in print by independent or university presses. Even The House on Mango Street, now generally recognized as a classic work of American fiction was originally published by Arte Público Press.

What this illustrates is Big Lit’s long history of ignorance or indifference to Mexican-American writers and the Mexican-American experience in this country. Yet to read any of these books is to experience a vision of America at once unique and familiar, for each in its own way tells a quintessentially American story. It’s just not a white American story. Yet very few Mexican-American writers find a place in Big Lit.

Big Lit is a very, very white place. White people overwhelmingly populate the Big Five; as the now-famous publishing diversity study by Lee & Low Books reported, 79 percent of people employed in the industry in 2015 were white and only six percent Latino.

A 2019 salary survey of the publishing industry undertaken by Publishers Weekly put the percentage of white employees at 84 percent.

Librarians, who are crucial to the sale and dissemination of literary texts, are also overwhelmingly white. A February 2013 editorial in The Library Journal entitled “Diversity Never Happens” observed that “Hispanics are some of the strongest supporters of libraries, and yet they continue to be thinly represented among the ranks of librarians.” ”The editorial cites statistics showing that, while Latinos/as are more likely to use libraries on a monthly basis than whites, only eight percent of the 118,666 credentialled librarians were Latino/a. A 2017 statistical study reports that “89 percent of librarians in leadership or administration roles were white and non-Hispanic.”

Similar demographic information for other realms of Big Lit appears to be unavailable. No one seems to be keeping any record of what percentage of the writers who are reviewed — or the reviewers who review — in The New York Times Book Review, Publishers Weekly, or Booklist, for example, are white. In a 2012 study of book reviews published by The New York Times, it was found that 90 percent of the books reviewed in 2011 were by white writers. White writers are vastly and disproportionately overrepresented both as reviewers and subjects of reviews in comparison to writers of color.

There are over 1,300 literary agents in the United States, most of them in New York, but I could find no statistics about their racial demographics. I did find an anecdotal study from the late 1990s, in an article called “Dearth of Hispanic Literary Agents Frustrates Writers.” The asserted that neither the literary agencies canvassed in The Literary Market Place nor the roster of agents in the Association of Authors’ Representatives listed a single Latino/a agent. The number is now likely greater than zero, but I have no doubt that the profession remains at least as white as publishing.

Similarly, there are, to my knowledge, no statistics about the racial composition of students and faculty at the many MFA programs around the country. There are, however, plenty of anecdotal accounts of how students of color are received in these programs. The essay “The Student of Color in the Typical MFA Program” powerfully summarizes these experiences. According to the essay, if a student of color objects to a racist depiction in a work by a white student, she or he risks being accused of censorship, or else the objection is dismissed as a political argument outside the bounds of literary analysis. Moreover, the student’s objection often triggers guilt or anger in white students and teachers because it challenges their cherished beliefs that they are not racist, and so they respond by branding their colleague a troublemaker.

The whiteness of Big Lit has practical consequences for Mexican-American writers. If virtually every agent, editor, book reviewer, and librarian is white, then such writers will have a much harder time finding representation, getting published, being reviewed and recommended. Therefore, there will be fewer Mexican-American voices in the literary culture. And this, in turn, means that there will be fewer counterbalances to the racist depictions of Mexican Americans in mainstream culture — portrayals that allow Trump and other white supremacists to continue to vilify a large segment of the American population.

White progressives in Big Lit may lament this situation, but they take no responsibility for the perpetuation of white privilege, if not white supremacy, in literary culture. Why? Because that privilege benefits them.

Part Four

The obvious issue is this: the white people who make up Big Lit live in a culture whose history and practice enshrines the belief that Mexican Americans are inherently inferior to whites, and fundamentally they’re okay with that.

The standard American university education continues to emphasize the primacy of white writers and their experience. To achieve a literary culture that truly reflects America’s multiracial society first requires an acknowledgment that Big Lit’s views regarding the putative universality of white experience are rooted in the ideology of white supremacy.

Other commentators have noted that the Big Five apply a double standard when acquiring and retaining writers of color. Writers of color aren’t allowed to fail the same way white writers are allowed to. If one book by a white author doesn’t sell, no one at the publishing house says they shouldn’t acquire any books by white authors the next season. But if a book by a Mexican, for example, doesn’t sell, the publisher may take its sweet time in “taking a risk” on another.

But aren’t disappointing sales a good reason to not continue publishing a particular writer or kind of book? That would be an acceptable explanation if the same standard applied across the board. To amplify the point above, however, if a white novelist from Brooklyn fails to make back her advance, that doesn’t mean her publisher won’t acquire other white Brooklyn novelists or even refuse to publish that particular author’s next book. Moreover, and here’s where the argument really falls apart, most books fail to make money, at least initially. The editor-in-chief at One World noted at the LARB/USC publishing workshop in July 2019 that 10 percent of books published by the Big Five support the remaining 90 percent. If most books are a risk, why is that risk disproportionately attributed to work by writers of color?

“Hispanics don’t read.” Whether a Big Five editor ever actually uttered those words, it is widely believed by the Latino/a community to be a sentiment Big Lit harbors about us. According to a nationally syndicated columnist after a day or two after a book's release, she got a call from a New York Times reporter asking her how well the book would sell. The reporter jumped in to the first question: ‘Why don’t Latinos read?’”

The Big Five, like the larger media culture, are not representative of the U.S. but of the limited tastes of the elite of Manhattan and certain areas of Brooklyn. These cultural gatekeepers — publishers, editors, agents — are simply unfamiliar with Latinos. A bias seeps into their decision making, based again on the unwarranted assumption that Latinos don’t read.

The notion that Mexican Americans and other Latinos/as don’t read is clearly rooted in assumptions of racial inferiority — e.g., immigrant, poor, less educated, less intelligent.

In short, the ideology of white supremacy is at the root of Big Lit’s “diversity problem.” The reason Big Lit doesn’t seek out, encourage, publish, and promote Mexican-Americans writers is because the people who work in it don’t really believe that Mexican Americans are the intellectual or creative equals of — or that their stories have the same value as those of — white writers.

Hey Big Lit: You think the Mexican-American experience can be expressed in a handful of stereotypes, most of which emphasize the intellectual and moral inferiority of Mexican Americans. While we’ve had to figure out white people, you’ve never had to think past your stereotypes of us. While we’ve been paddling upstream against the current of your white-supremacist assumptions, you’ve been lazily drifting along in them. You know nothing of our historical experience, while all of us have had the false narrative of white American triumphalism forced down our throats. And while you mouth your support for “diversity,” any such initiatives that you control will be, at best, tokenistic. Indeed, the concept of “diversity” itself may simply be an attempt on your part to deflect attention away from white-supremacist assumptions by turning the issue of race into a discussion about mere representation.

There can be no real diversity without a real and meaningful redistribution of power.

It’s almost impossible to imagine that the white people who compose somewhere north of 79 percent of Big Lit would ever voluntarily and actively agree to — and work toward — an industry where their percentage slipped below 50 percent. When it comes right down to it, Big Lit, you’re much more invested in maintaining your privilege, and passing it down to your white heirs, than in helping to create a literary culture that genuinely represents the fullness of the American project — warts, near-genocides, invasions, lynchings, and all.

Of course, we’ll keep on calling you out, because you do respond sometimes — out of guilt, if nothing else. Maybe you’ll publish a few more Mexican-American writers, review a book or two about the Mexican-Americans experience, hire a Mexican-American writer to teach in your MFA program, highlight the works of Mexican Americans in your bookstore when it’s not “Hispanic Heritage Month.” We will also will continue to remind you that you will find yourself listed among the collaborators, right up there with the Scribner’s Magazine editor who commissioned “The American Congo.”

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koroktree · 2 years

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Antisemitism Education

What does dogwhistle mean?

A dog whistle is the use of coded or suggestive language in political messaging to garner support from a particular group without provoking opposition. The concept is named after dog whistles, which are audible to dogs but not humans

Antisemitism or “anti-semitism”?

The word, “anti-semitism” was coined on the premise of pseudo-scientific race theory, alleging that “Semites” are a race of people, in order to give the hatred of Jews a scientific, rationalistic veneer.

Numerical dogwhistles

1-11

One representing the letter “A” and eleven representing the letter “K”, this is a numerical dog whistle made to refer to the Aryan Knights (AK) which is an Idaho based white supremacist group.

109

May be written as 109/110. This refers to the idea of Jews being exiled from 109 countries. The “110” is typically a direct threat, stating that there is about to be 110 countries.

One representing the letter A and two representing the letter B, these two letters represent the Aryan Brotherhood (AB).

100%

While there are many variations, 100% generally refers to “100% white”, feeding into the “pure white race” belief.

14 (14 words)

Fourteen words refers to a white supremacist slogan coined by the deceased leader of the group “The Order”, David Lane

1488

A numerical dog whistle that joins the “14 words” used by white supremacists in conjunction with “88” which refers to the eighth letter in the alphabet, “H”. “88” - “HH”, meaning Heil Hitler. 1483 may also appear which would instead mean Heil Christ.

6 million/6 gorillion

6 million refers to the number of Jews murdered in the Holocaust. Antisemites will use terms like “gorillion” and other variations to avoid detection as well as to denote exaggeration in reference to their belief that Jews exaggerate the Holocaust.

6MWE

An acronym standing for “Six Million Wasn’t Enough”, signifying that 6 million Jews being murdered in the Holocaust wasn’t enough.

Dogwhistles and Conspiracy Theories

AKIA

Standing for “A Klansman I Am” this allows members to greet each other covertly.

Anglo-Saxon

A term what once was, and still is, used by white supremacists.

In the 1920s, the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America lobbied in favor of segregation and argued for the exclusion of those with even a drop “of any blood other than Caucasian.”

Arbeit Macht Frei

Translating to, “Work will set you free” in English, this phrase was put on the gates of Aushwitz as well as other Nazi concentration camps.

Ashki-nazi

The intentional mispronunciation of Ashkenazi (Correct: Ash-ki-nah-zee. Incorrect: Ash-ki-Natzi) to accuse Ashkenazi Jews of being Nazis.

Ballpoint pen

A form of Holocaust denial in which Neo-Nazi’s claim that Anne Frank’s diary is a falsified or entirely fake document because “ballpoint pens didn’t exist at that time”.

Blood libel

Perpetuated accusation that Jews have murdered non-Jews

(such as Christian children) in order to use their blood in rituals

Cabal

Jews have long been accused of being part of a secret group that controls the economic and political world order. The term cabal originates from the word kabbalah, the Jewish mystical interpretation of the Hebrew Bible.

Cultural marxism

Sometimes also appearing as Cultural Bolshevism, this antisemitic theory believes Jews are trying to overthrow “Western culture” and destroy “White America”.

Delousing

A method of denying the Holocaust by suggesting that the gas chambers used to murder people were actually merely “delousing” facilities.

Dual Loyalty

Alleging that Jewish people are more loyal or only loyal to Israel rather than their own country.

Khazars or Khazar Theory

An antisemitic conspiracy theory that the Ashkenazi Jewish people today come from ancient Khazars and are “not real Jews”.

Khazar Milkers

A term used for sexual harassment towards Jewish women. Alternatively “milkies”.

Lizard people

The conspiracy theory that reptilian humanoids are trying to take over the government and can be government officials or large corporate figureheads.

Oven Dodger

A term for a Jew who antisemites believe should have been murdered in the Holocaust.

Pepe The Frog

While not originating in Nazism or White supremacy, the meme was co-opted by the alt-right along Reddit, 4-Chan, and 8chan.

Protocol of the Elders of Zion

An antisemitic text that spreads the paranoid theory that Jews are planning to dominate the globe.

Swimming Pool

An antisemitic conspiracy that the Holocaust didn’t happen because of the existence of a “swimming pool” at Aushwitz and was instead a “resort”. In actuality, it was an aquifer turned into a swimming pool for SS soldiers and their families.

The Jewish Question/Problem

The problem is the existence of Jews. The “question” being how to deal with the “problem” of Jews. This results in Nazism, for example, with the Final Solution. The full phrase is, “The Final Solution to the Jewish Question”.

WPWW

White Pride/Power World Wide.

You Will Not Replace Us

A phrase popularized in 2017 after the Charlottesville Nazi Riot. Sometimes appearing as Jews will not replace us or YWNRU, this antisemitic theory believes Jews are trying to “over-run the white race”.

ZOG

Meaning “Zionist Occupied Government”, white supremacists curated this phrase to signal a “Jewish controlled government”, most commonly the United States.

(((echo)))

an antisemitic symbol used to highlight the names of Jewish individuals or organizations owned by Jews

#witchblr #jewish #witch #jewitch #jewitches #antisemitism #education #witch community #witchcraft

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brassandblue · 3 years

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‘ HISTORY LESSON ! ’ + Any point you like during Roman Britain.

send me ‘ HISTORY LESSON ! ’ + a year, era, or historical event, and i’ll tell you what my muse was like and what they were doing during that time ! (Accepting!)

These are definitely headcanons I need to solidify a bit more, but I hesitate to do so because I actually like having his earlier years be flexible. Regardless...

During the height of the Roman occupation, Artorius was a child of five or six. He'd spent at least a century in Rome itself being taught Latin and Proper Roman Ways before being returned to the Isles, no longer Arthmael, but Artorius. He was set to reside in what would later become Wessex/the city of Bath, though he frequently would disappear into what is now the Cotswolds because fuck you he does what he wants, he is a feral forest child at heart!!

By the fifth century/during Roman decline, he left town life when it was apparent that a creature like him (read: an immortal ageless child who still liked doing pagan things) was no longer welcome. At some point he went looking for his brothers with the help of the Fae Folk--as a spirit of the isles, though more corporeal and human-based, he was naturally close with them and he'll hold onto that identity for dear life, and into modern day. He learned to hunt (as much as a lad in the body of a five/six year old can do) and trap, fish, forage, and build shelters for himself. The fae folk and the spirits and ghosts of the isles were his companions through this time.

As he grew bit by bit, he traveled from town to town, village to village. He lingered in Londinium for a time and traveled elsewhere too, but always came back to Wessex eventually. During this chaotic transitionary period, he actually reclaimed his name of Arthmael, especially with the onset of the settling Saxons. He began to adopt Saxon customs and culture, and found comfort in the through-lines of Celt culture (pottery, traditions, etc) that Britons had kept and integrated into the Anglo-Saxon way of life.

#.// ruled the waves (arthur)#.// hope perches in the soul (ooc)#.// no frigate like a book (headcanons)#HELLO THERE <3 #I do love when people ask about his history

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things2mustdo · 4 years

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In order for a nation to survive, two critical emotions must be controlled. Contrary to popular belief, these emotions are not fear and greed—although these are very important to control, as well. Rather, it’s masculine aggression and feminine vanity that must be controlled…and we are doing a terrible job at this.

Unfortunately, over the past 70 years, we’ve seen sex roles and gender dynamics completely turned on their heads. Rather than men and women working together to create better relationships, more functional families, and more powerful countries, we’ve been pit against one another by toxic ideologies and ruthless demagogues.

It is not enough to simply know what is happening, however—we must know precisely how it’s happening, step by step, and more importantly, WHY it’s happening. In this article, I will explore why our society has gone so downhill so fast, and potential solutions we can integrate to remedy it (if we can save it, at all).

The Two Forces

As I said previously, there are two very delicate forces which must constantly be counter-balancing one another, and anytime they grow unbalanced, there will be chaos. These two forces are, of course, masculine aggression and feminine vanity. Too much masculine aggression, and a country becomes war-torn, unable to run itself or stay stable long enough to produce any sort of civilization (think the Middle East).

Too much feminine vanity, however, and the opposite occurs. Men become reclusive, because women become far too difficult to deal with. This is why we’ve seen the rise of the sigma male over the past 20 years—men who refuse to attach themselves to any sort of social hierarchy. They’re not alpha, beta, or omega. They just do as they do, without adhering to any sort of social group or workplace hierarchy.

As feminine vanity grows excessive, female hypergamy is given reign to run loose. Rather than men and women developing healthy relationships with one another, women become so conceited that they refuse to “settle” for anyone less than an alpha male Chad Thundercock, and thus we have a surplus of angry, bitter women who hit the wall at 30 and end up childless and alone.

It’s so obvious that it should go without saying, that we are currently in a serious imbalance. For far too long, masculine aggression has been hampered and stomped down by our effeminate school system, our brainwashing devices (aka TV’s), and our mass media control system. All the while, these things have encouraged women to do as they please, without any consequences or thought of their actions on a larger, societal scale.

Restoring the Balance

Balance will be restored, one way or another. There are only two ways for this imbalance to possibly be restored, and most men here will acknowledge, at least implicitly, that this is the case:

Men in OTHER COUNTRIES restore the balance (by coming here en masse)

Men in THIS COUNTRY restore the balance (by not being pussies)

Those are the only two options. There is no third option, where women somehow magically stop giving men 500,000 shit tests a day and step down to become good, faithful girlfriends, wives, and mothers. This will not happen. When a society reaches this critical imbalance, only one of two things can happen.

Of course, we all know what the elites (oy vey!) are pushing for. They want to bring millions of aggressive, young, fighting-age men to this country, to supposedly help combat “population decline.” We all know that this is complete horse shit, and that their true motive is to destroy America.

Even so, with the full force of the elites raining down upon us, there is hope. Over the past two years, we’ve seen more masculine energy emerge and come to the front of our socio-political battlegrounds than arguably any other time in history. For the first time in the past 70 years, men are reclaiming their manhood.

Let me reiterate that this is the only option. There is no magical world where everything just works out great, where we have millions of violent, aggressive 20-something-year-old men come into this country, and we retain our values as an Anglo-Saxon country. No. This will not happen. We either get our acts together, collectively, as men, or we watch our nation burn.

The Path Forward (2018-2020)

The next two years are of critical importance. We have collectively, successfully memed the most brutally alpha and pro-American president into office arguably since Ronald Reagan. This is not an opportunity that we can afford to squander—we must all begin proactively restoring the balance of masculinity in this country, from the top down, otherwise our nation will perish to globalists and their dumb, but useful allies.

There will be resistance, as there is whenever masculinity tries to assert itself. Pay no attention to this resistance. Simply follow the advice which the manosphere advocates for:

Create an income independent of a massive, bureaucratic, globalist corporation

Increase your testosterone levels (start by avoiding foods that kill testosterone)

Lift weights, and become physically able to stand up for yourself

Proactively participate in the upcoming midterms, and the Presidential Election of 2020

Do everything you can to red pill those who are ready (emphasis on them being ready)

If we, collectively, as a group of thousands of like-minded men all across the nation can successfully pull this off, we will see a resurgence of economic, political, and social growth which will have been unprecedented.

If we do not pull it off however, and our nation succumbs to the manipulations of the elite, a far more grim and sinister future will play out.

The Alternative

If we do not successfully reclaim the balance of masculine aggression and feminine vanity in this country, all will be lost, and we will be forced to either live through hell, or leave our homelands. Here’s what to expect over the next decade or so, if a social justice warrior is elected President in 2020, and we lose the culture wars:

Increasing surveillance over the internet

More thought crime policies instituted into law

The figurative castration of men all across the country

Eventual race wars, or religious wars, spurred on primarily by Islamic migrants

This is non-negotiable. If we lose the culture wars to SJW’s over the next several years, we will begin to see lobbying to shut down any and all manosphere websites dedicated to spreading the truth. We have already seen PayPal, YouTube, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, and Google begin to censor people like Roosh, Alex Jones, Donald Trump, and other conservative/red pilled speakers. We cannot afford to stand this any longer.

If we lose these mediums to the globalists, they will easily gain the support of the public to institute thought crime policies into our legal system. You have a book by Bronze Age Pervert, that Amazon can track from your order history? NAZI SCUM! You’re going to prison. It doesn’t matter that you didn’t actually hurt anyone in any way shape or form, because you had an opinion that the globalists dislike.

As this begins to happen, men will self-imprison all over the nation. Some will fight, of course, and maybe win (if we’re lucky). Others will leave and attempt to gain citizenship in more male-friendly countries such as Denmark, Austria, and Poland. The rest will be forced to hang their heads in perpetual shame.

Eventually, as the population of third world migrants explodes, and tribalism is exacerbated by the polarizing media, we will begin to see rampant terrorist attacks, which are already happening in Germany, The UK, and other nations around the cucked European Union. Inevitably, this will end in a civil war.

It’s Our Choice

I have presented to you the only two choices that we have, and to me, the decision is quite simple. We can either sit around passively, and squabble amongst ourselves over stupid theories and philosophies, or we can take action to better ourselves and improve the stance of our nation.

The choice is clear to me. We either succumb to globalist propaganda, see the death of masculinity in the West, and see freedom of speech die as it is destined to do, or we fight back and create a better future. Some may say this is melodramatic. I would say that a mere cursory glance at history will prove otherwise.

Read Next: Cultural Collapse Theory: The 7 Steps That Lead To A Complete Culture Decline

It was Joe’s first date with Mary. He asked her what she wanted in life and she replied, “I want to establish my career. That’s the most important thing to me right now.” Undeterred that she had no need for a man in her life, Joe entertained her with enough funny stories and cocky statements that she soon allowed him to lightly pet her forearm.

At the end of the date, he locked arms with her on the walk to the subway station, when two Middle Eastern men on scooter patrol accosted them and said they were forbidden to touch. “This is Sharia zone,” they said in heavily accented English, in front of a Halal butcher shop. Joe and Mary felt bad that they offended the two men, because they were trained in school to respect all religions but that of their ancestors. One of the first things they learned was that their white skin gave them extra privilege in life which must be consciously restrained at all times. Even if they happened to disagree with the two men, they could not verbally object because of anti-hate laws that would put them in jail for religious discrimination. They unlocked arms and maintained a distance of three feet from each other.

Unfortunately for Joe, Mary did not want to go out with him again, but seven years later he did receive a message from her on Facebook saying hello. She became vice president of a company, but could not find a man equal to her station since women now made 25% more than men on average. Joe had long left the country and moved to Thailand, where he married a young Thai girl and had three children. He had no plans on returning to his country, America.

If cultural collapse occurs in the way I will now describe, the above scenario will be the rule within a few decades. The Western world is being colonized in reverse, not by weapons or hard power, but through a combination of progressivism and low reproductive rates. These two factors will lead to a complete cultural collapse of many Western nations within the next 200 years. This theory will show the most likely mechanism that it will proceed in America, Canada, UK, Scandinavia, and Western Europe.

What Is A Cultural Collapse?

Cultural collapse is the decline, decay, or disappearance of a native population’s rituals, habits, interpersonal communication, relationships, art, and language. It coincides with a relative decline of population compared to outside groups. National identity and group identification will be lost while revisionist history will be applied to demonize or find fault with the native population. Cultural collapse is not to be confused with economic or state collapse. A nation that suffers from a cultural collapse can still be economically productive and have a working government.

First I will share a brief summary of the cultural collapse progression before explaining them in more detail. Then I will discuss where I see many countries along its path.

The Cultural Collapse Progression

1. Removal of religious narrative from people’s lives, replaced by a treadmill of scientific and technological “progress.”

2. Elimination of traditional sex roles through feminism, gender equality, political correctness, cultural Marxism, and socialism.

3. Delay or abstainment of family formation by women to pursue careerist lifestyles while men wait in confused limbo.

4. Decreasing birth rate among native population.

5. Government enactment of open immigration policies to prevent economic collapse.

6. Immigrant refusal to fully acclimate, forcing host culture to adopt external rituals and beliefs while being out-reproduced.

7. Natives becoming marginalized in their own country.

1. Removal of religious narrative

Religion has been a powerful restraint for millennia in preventing humans from pursuing their base desires and narcissistic tendencies so that they satisfy a god. Family formation is the central unit of most religions, possibly because children increase membership at zero marginal cost to the church (i.e. they don’t need to be recruited).

Religion may promote scientific ignorance, but it facilitates reproduction by giving people a narrative that places family near the center of their existence.[1] [2] [3] After the Enlightenment, the rapid advance of science and its logical but nihilistic explanations into the universe have removed the religious narrative and replaced it with an empty narrative of scientific progress, knowledge, and technology, which act as a restraint and hindrance to family formation, allowing people to pursue individual goals of wealth accumulation or hedonistic pleasure seeking.[4] As of now, there has not been a single non-religious population that has been able to reproduce above the death rate.[5]

Even though many people today claim to believe in god, they may not step inside a church but once or twice a year for special holidays. Religion went from being a lifestyle, a manual for living, to something that is thought about in passing.

2. Elimination of traditional sex roles

Once religion no longer plays a role in people’s lives, the stage is set to fracture male-female bonding. It is collectively attacked by several ideologies stemming from the beliefs of Cultural Marxist theory, which serve to accomplish one common end: destruction of the family unit so that citizens are dependent on the state. They achieve this goal through the marginalization of men and their role in society under the banner of “equality.”[6] With feminism pushed to the forefront of this umbrella movement, the drive for equality ends up being a power grab by women.[7] This attack is performed on a range of fronts:

medicating boys from a young age with ADHD drugs to eradicate displays of masculinity[8]

shaming of men for having direct sexual interest in attractive and fertile women

criminalization of normal male behavior by redefining some instances of consensual sex as rape[9]

imprisonment of unemployed fathers for non-payment of child support, rendering them destitute and unable to be a part of their children’s lives[10]

taxation of men at higher rates for redistribution to women[11] [12]

promotion of single mother and homosexual lifestyles over that of the nuclear family[13] [14]

The end result is that men, confused about their identify and averse to state punishment from sexual harassment, “date rape,” and divorce proceedings, make a rational decision to wait on the sidelines.[15] Women, still not happy with the increased power given to them, continue their assault on men by instructing them to “man up” into what has become an unfair deal—marriage. The elevation of women above men is allowed by corporations, which adopt “girl power” marketing to expand their consumer base and increase profits.[16] [17] Governments also allow it because it increases their tax revenue. Because there is money to be made with women working and becoming consumers, there is no effort by the elite to halt this development.

3. Women begin to place career above family

At the same time men are emasculated as mere “sperm donors,” women are encouraged to adopt the career goals, mannerisms, and competitive lifestyles of men, inevitably causing them to delay marriage, often into an age where they can no longer find suitable husbands who have more resources than themselves. [18] [19] [20] [21] The average woman will find it exceedingly difficult to balance career and family, and since she has no concern of getting “fired” from her family, who she may see as a hindrance to her career goals, she will devote an increasing proportion of time into her job.

Female income, in aggregate, will soon match or exceed that of men.[22] [23] [24] A key reason that women historically got married was to be economically provided for, but this reason will no longer persist and women will feel less pressure or motivation to marry. The burgeoning spinster population will simply be a money-making opportunity for corporations to market to an increasing population of lonely women. Cat and small dog sales will rise.

Women succumb to their primal sexual and materialistic urges to live the “Sex and the City” lifestyle full of fine dining, casual sex, technological bliss, and general gluttony without learning traditional household skills or feminine qualities that would make them attractive wives.[25] [26] Men adapt to careerist women in a rational way by doing the following:

to sate their natural sexual desires, men allow their income to lower since economic stability no longer provides a draw to women in their prime[27]

they mimic “alpha male” social behavior to get laid with women who, without having an urgent need for a man’s monetary resources to survive, can choose men based on confidence, aesthetics, and general entertainment value[28]

they withdraw into a world of video games and the internet, satisfying their own base desires for play and simulated hunting[29] [30]

Careerist women who decide to marry will do so in a hurried rush around 30 because they fear growing old alone, but since they are well past their fertility peak[31], they may find it difficult to reproduce. In the event of successful reproduction at such a later age, fewer children can be born before biological infertility, limiting family size compared to the historical past.

4. Birth rates decrease among native population

The stage is now set for the death rate to outstrip the birth rate. This creates a demographic cliff where there is a growing population of non-working elderly relative to able-bodied younger workers. Two problems result:

Not enough tax revenue is supplied by the working population in order to provide for the elderly’s medical and social retirement needs.[32] Borrowing can only temporarily maintain these entitlements.

Decrease of economic activity since more people are dying than buying.[33]

No modern nation has figured out how to substantially raise birth rates among native populations. The most successful effort has been done in France, but that has still kept the birth rate among French-born women just under the replacement rate (2.08 vs 2.1).[34] The easiest and fastest way to solve this double-edged problem is to promote mass immigration of non-elderly individuals who will work, spend, and procreate at rates greater than natives.[35]

A replenishing supply of births are necessary to create taxpayers, workers, entrepreneurs, and consumers in order to maintain the nation’s economic development.[36] While many claim that the planet is suffering from “overpopulation,” an economic collapse is inevitable for those countries who do not increase their population at steady rates.

5. Large influx of immigration

An aging population without youthful refilling will cause a scarcity of labor, increasing that labor’s price. Corporate elites will now lobby governments for immigration reform to relieve this upward pressure on wages.[37] [38] At the same time, the modern mantra of sustained GDP growth puts pressure on politicians for dissemination of favorable economic growth data to aid in their re-elections. The simplest way to increase GDP without innovation or development of industry is to expand the population. Both corporate and political elites now have their goals in alignment where the easiest solution becomes immigration.[39] [40]

While politicians hem and haw about designing permanent immigration policies, immigrants continue to settle within the nation.[41] The national birth rate problem is essentially solved overnight, as it’s much easier to drain third-world nations of its starry-eyed population with enticements of living in the first-world than it is to encourage the native women to reproduce. (Lateral immigration from one first-world nation to another is so relatively insignificant that the niche term ‘expatriation’ has been developed to describe it). Native women will show a stubborn resistance at any suggestion they should create families, much preferring a relatively responsibility-free lifestyle of sexual variety, casual internet dating via mobile apps, consumer excess, and comfortable high-paying jobs in air conditioned offices.[42] [43]

Immigrants will almost always come from societies that are more religious and, in the case of Islam with regard to European immigration, far more scientifically primitive and rigid in its customs.[44]

6. Sanitization of host culture coincides with increase in immigrant power

While many adult immigrants will feel gracious at the opportunity to live in a more prosperous nation, others will soon feel resentment that they are forced to work menial jobs in a country that is far more expensive than their own.[45] [46] [47] [48] [49] The majority of them remain in lower economic classes, living in poor “immigrant communities” where they can speak their own language, find their own homeland foods, and follow their own customs or religion.

Instead of breaking out of their foreigner communities, immigrants seek to expand it by organizing. They form local groups and civic organizations to teach natives better ways to understand and serve immigrant populations. They will be eager to publicize cases where immigrants have been insulted by insensitive natives or treated unfairly by police authorities in the case of petty crime.[50] [51] [52] [53] [54] [55] School curriculums may be changed to promote diversity or multiculturalism, at great expense to the native culture.[56] Concessions will be made not to offend immigrants.[57] A continual stream of outrages will be found and this will feed the power of the organizations and create a state within a state where native elites become fearful of applying laws to immigrants.[58]

7. Destruction of native culture

This step has not yet happened in any first-world nation, so I will predict it based on logically extending known events I have already described.

Local elites will give lip service to immigrant groups for votes but will be slow to give them real state or economic power. Citizenship rules may even be tightened to prevent immigrants from being elected. The elites will be mostly insulated from the cultural crises in their isolated communities, private schools, and social clubs, where they can continue to incubate their own sub-culture without outside influence. At the same time, they will make speeches and enact polices to force native citizens to accept multiculturalism and blind immigration. Anti-hate and anti-discrimination laws will be more vigorously enforced than other more serious crimes. Police will monitor social networking to identify those who make statements against protected classes.

Cultural decline begins in earnest when the natives feel shame or guilt for who they are, their history, their way of life, and where their ancestors came from. They will let immigrant groups criticize their customs without protest, or they simply embrace immigrant customs instead with religious conversion and interethnic marriages. Nationalistic pride will be condemned as a “far-right” phenomenon and popular nationalistic politicians will be compared to Hitler. Natives learn the art of self-censorship, limiting the range of their speech and expressions, and soon only the elderly can speak the truths of the cultural decline while a younger multiculturalist within earshot attributes such frankness to senility or racist nostalgia.

With the already entrenched environment of political correctness (see stage 2), the local culture becomes a sort of “world” culture that can be declared tolerant and progressive as long as there is a lack of criticism against immigrants, multiculturalism, and their combined influence. All cultural identity will eventually be lost, and to be “American” or “British,” for example, will no longer have modern meaning from a sociological perspective. Native traditions will be eradicated and a cultural mixing will take place where citizens from one world nation will be nearly identical in behavior, thought, and consumer tastes to citizens of another. Once a collapse occurs, it cannot be reversed. The nation’s cultural heritage will be forever lost.

I want to now take a brief look at six different countries and see where they are along the cultural collapse progression…

Russia

This is an interesting case because, up to recently, we saw very low birth rates not due to progressive ideals but from a rough transition to capitalism in the 1990’s and a high male mortality from alcoholism.[59] [60] To help sustain its population, Russia is readily accepting immigrants from Central Asian regions, treating them like second-class citizens and refusing to make any accommodations away from the ethnic Russian way of life. Even police authorities turn a blind eye when local skinhead groups attack immigrants.[61] In addition, Russia has also shown no tolerance to homosexual or progressive groups,[62] stunting their negative effects upon the culture. The birth rate has risen in recent years to levels seen in Western Europe but it’s still not above the death rate. Russia will see a population collapse before a cultural one.

Likelihood of 50-year cultural collapse: Very low

Brazil

We’re seeing rapid movement through stages 2 and 3, where progressive ideology based on the American model is becoming adopted and a large poor population ensure progressive politicians will continue to remain in power with promises of economic redistribution.[63] [64] [65] Within 15 years we should see a sharp drop in birth rates and a relaxation of immigration laws.

Likelihood of 50-year cultural collapse: Moderate

America

Some could argue that America is currently experiencing a cultural collapse. It always had a fragile culture because of its immigrant foundings, but immigrants of the past (including my own parents) rapidly acclimated into the host culture to create a sense of national pride around an ethic of hard work and shared democratic values. This is being eroded as a fem-centric culture rises in its place, with its focus on trends, celebrities, homosexuality, multiculturalism, and male-bashing. Natives have become pleasure seekers with little inclination to reproduction during their years of peak fertility.[66]

Likelihood of 50-year cultural collapse: Very high

England

While America always had high amounts of immigration, and therefore a system of integration, England is newer to the game. In the past 20 years, they have massively ramped up their immigration efforts.[67] A visit to London will confirm that the native British are slowly becoming minorities, with their iconic red telephone booths left undisturbed purely for tourist photo opportunities. Approximately 5% of the English population is now Muslim.[68] Instead of acclimatizing, they are achieving early success in creating zones with Sharia law.[69] The English elite, in response, is jailing natives under stringent anti-race laws.[70] England had a highly successful immigration story with Polish immigrants who eagerly acclimated to English culture, but have opened the doors to other peoples who don’t want to integrate.[71]

Likelihood of 50-year cultural collapse: Very high

Sweden

Sweden is experiencing a similar immigration situation to England, but they possess a higher amount of self-shame and white guilt. Instead of allowing immigrants who could work in the Swedish economy, they are encouraging migration of asylum seekers who have been made destitute by war. These immigrants enter Sweden and immediately receive social benefits. In effect, Sweden is welcoming the least economically productive people in the world.[72] The immigrants will produce little or no economic benefit, and may even worsen Sweden’s economy. Immigrants are turning some parts of Sweden, such as the Rosengard area of Malmo, into a ghetto.[73]

Likelihood of 50-year cultural collapse: Very high

Poland

From my one and half years of living in Poland, I have seen a moderate level of progressive ideological creep, careerism among women, hedonism, and idolation of Western values, particularly out of England, where a large percentage of the Polish population have emigrated for work. Younger Poles may not act much different from their Western counterparts in their party lifestyle behavior, but there nonetheless remains a tenuous maintenance of traditional sex roles. Women of fertile age are pursuing relationships over one-night stands, but careerism is causing them to stall family formation. This puts a downward pressure on birth rates, which stems from significant numbers of fertile young women emigrating to countries like the UK and USA, along with continued economic uncertainties faced from transitioning to capitalism[74]. As Europe’s “least multicultural” nation, Poland has long been hesitant to accept immigrants, but this has recently changed and they are encouraging migrants.[75] To its credit, it is seeking first-world entrepreneurs instead of low skilled laborers or asylum seekers. Its cultural fate will be an interesting development in the years to come, but the prognosis will be more negative as long as its young people are eager to leave the homeland.

Likelihood of 50-year cultural collapse: Possible

Poland and Russia show the limitations of Cultural Collapse Theory in that it best applies to first-world nations with highly developed economies. They have low birth rates but not through the mechanism I described, though if they adopt a more Western ideological track like Brazil, I expect to see the same outcome that is befalling England or Sweden.

There can be many paths to cultural destruction, and those nations with the most similarities will gravitate towards the same path, just like how Eastern European nations are suffering low birth rates because of mass emigration due to being introduced into the European Union.

How To Stop Cultural Collapse

Maintaining native birth rates while preventing the elite from allowing immigrant labor is the most effective means at preventing cultural collapse. Since multiculturalism is an experiment with no proven efficacy, a culture can only be maintained by a relatively homogenous group who identify with each other. When that homogeneity breaks down and one citizen looks to the next and does not see a person with the same values as himself, the culture falls in dis-repair as native citizens begin to lose a shared means of communication and identity. Once the percentage of the immigrant population crosses a certain threshold (perhaps 15%), the decline will pick up in pace and cultural breakdown will be readily apparent to all observers.

Current policies to solve low birth rates through immigration is a short-term fix with dire long-term consequences. In effect, it’s a Trojan-horse prescription of irreversible cultural destruction. A state must prevent itself from entering the position where mass immigration is considered a solution by blocking progressive ideologies from taking hold. One way this can be done is through the promotion of a state-sponsored religion which encourages the nuclear family instead of single motherhood and homosexuality. However, introducing religion as a mainstay of citizen life in the post-enlightenment era may be impossible.

We must consider that the scientific era is an evolutionary maladaptive feature of humanity that natural selection will accordingly punish (i.e. those who are anti-religious and pro-science will simply breed less). It must also be considered that with religion in permanent decline, cultural collapse may be a certainty that eventually occurs in all developed nations. Religion, it may turn out, was evolutionary beneficial to the human race.

Another possible solution is to foster a patriarchal society where men serve as strong providers. If you encourage the development of successful men who possess indispensable skills and therefore resources that are lacked by females, there will be women below their station who want to marry and procreate with them, but if strong women are produced instead, marriage and procreation is unlikely to take place at levels above the death rate.

A gap between the sexes should always exist in the favor of men if procreation is to occur at high rates, or else you’ll have something similar to the situation in America where urban professional women cannot find “good men” to begin a family with (i.e., men who are significantly more financially successful than them). They instead remain single and barren, only used occasionally by cads for exciting casual sex.

One issue that I purposefully ignored is the effect of technology and consumerism on lowering birth rates. How much influence does video games, internet, and smartphones contribute to a birth decline? How much of an effect does Western-style consumerism have in delaying marriage? I suspect they have more of an amplification effect than being an outright cause. If a country is proceeding through the cultural collapse model, technology will simply hurry the collapse, but giving internet access to a traditionally religious group of people may not cause them to flip overnight. Research will have to be done in these areas to say for sure.

Conclusion

The first iteration of any theory is sure to create as many questions as answers, but I hope that by proposing this model, it becomes more clear why some cultures seem so quick to degrade while others display a sort of immunity. Some countries may be too far down the wrong path to be saved, but I hope the information presented gives concerned readers ideas on protecting their own culture by allowing them to connect how progressive ideologies that may seem innocent or benign on the surface can eventually lead to an outright collapse of their nation’s culture.

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rauthschild · 4 years

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“RACE” is used as a diversionary war tactic to oppress, suppress, and deprive the Autochthonous people of their land, birthrights, nationality, inheritance, sovereignty, self-governance, and beneficiary trust accounts, all under the umbrella of “WHITE SUPREMACY”. “WHITE SUPREMACY” a person and individual who uses their power, authority, and position, to oppress, suppress, and deprive the Autochthonous people of their land, birthrights, nationality, religion, human rights, inheritance, sovereignty, economic prosperity, self-governance, and beneficiary trust accounts. “WHITE SUPREMACIST” an individual or group of Anglo-Saxon Jews and Anglo-Saxon Nazi-Zionist Jews (> Aryan religious superiority and owes no allegiance > Kol Nidre) who changed their birth surname, for the sole purpose, to infiltrate, impersonate and counterfeit another person’s identity, religion, culture, government, power, authority, and position to oppress, suppress and deprive the Autochthonous people of their land, birthrights, nationality, government, culture, religion, inheritance, sovereignty, economic prosperity, self-governance and beneficiary trust accounts, et. al. To add insult to injury, the White Supremacist, each of them, hijacked the Prime Banks and illegally using the Autochthonous people of North America’s gold assets and global Bank Collateral Accounts (> gold interest and derivatives) exceeding Quadrillions known as the “Toronto and Crown Accounts”, for themselves, thereafter, uses “RACE” as a diversionary economic war tactic to financially oppress, suppress, discriminate and deprive the Preamble Posterity Autochthonous > “original people” > We The People, rights, privileges and immunities as Trust Beneficiaries, and access to grants, medical, loans, education, procurement contracts, and their cestui que trust accounts, by and through, enactment of foreign private for-profit corporate copyrighted laws, codes, regulations, and policies. A Caucasian/Aryan individual, person, and “natural-born subject” who lacks power, position, and authority, that hates another simply because of the color of their skin, is an oxymoron peasant, and not worthy of further discussion. Sincerely, H.E. HRH Ernest Rauthschild

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thelonguepuree · 5 years

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Dickinson’s “items” have been successively and carefully framed to give the impression that something, or someone, is missing. While the recovery of Dickinson’s manuscripts may be supposed to have depended on the death of the subject, on the person who had, by accident or design, composed the scene, the repeated belated “discovery” that her work is yet in need of sorting (and of reading) may also depend upon the absence of the objects that composed it. These objects themselves mark not only the absence of the person who touched them but the presence of what touched that person: of the stationer that made the paper, of the manufacturer and printer and corporation that issued guarantees and advertisements and of the money that changed hands, of the butcher who wrapped the parcel, of the manuals and primers and copybooks that composed individual literacy, of the expanding postal service, of the modern railroad, of modern journalism, of the nineteenth-century taste for continental literary imports. All of these things are the sorts of things left out of a book, since the stories to be told about them open out away from [a] narrative of individual creation or individual reception … This is to say that what is so often said of the grammatical and rhetorical structure of Dickinson’s poems—that, as critics have variously put it, the poetry is “sceneless,” is “a set of riddles” revolving around an “omitted center,” is a poetry of “revoked . . . referentiality”—can more aptly be said of the representation of the poems as such. Once gathered as the previously ungathered, reclaimed as the abandoned, given the recognition they so long awaited, the poems in bound volumes appear both redeemed and revoked from their scenes or referents, from the history that the book, as book, omits. … The argument of Dickinson’s Misery is that the century and a half that spans the circulation of Dickinson’s work as poetry chronicles rather exactly the emergence of the lyric genre as a modern mode of literary interpretation. To put briefly what I will unfold at length in the pages that follow: from the mid-nineteenth through the beginning of the twenty-first century, to be lyric is to be read as lyric—and to be read as a lyric is to be printed and framed as a lyric. While it is beyond the scope of this book to trace the lyricization of poetry that began in the eighteenth century, the exemplary story of the composition, recovery, and publication of Dickinson’s writing begins one chapter, at least, in what is so far a largely unwritten history. As we have already begun to see, Dickinson’s enduring role in that history depends on the ephemeral quality of the texts she left behind. By a modern lyric logic that will become familiar in the pages that follow, the (only) apparently contextless or sceneless, even evanescent nature of Dickinson’s writing attracted an increasingly professionalized attempt to secure and contextualize it as a certain kind (or genre) of literature—as what we might call, after Charles Taylor, a lyric social imaginary. Think of the modern imaginary construction of the lyric as what allows the term to move from adjectival to nominal status and back again. Whereas other poetic genres (epic, poems on affairs of state, georgic, pastoral, verse epistle, epitaph, elegy, satire) may remain embedded in specific historical occasions or narratives, and thus depend upon some description of those occasions and narratives for their interpretation (it is hard to understand “The Dunciad,” for example, if one does not know the characters involved or have access to lots of handy footnotes), the poetry that comes to be understood as lyric after the eighteenth century is thought to require as its context only the occasion of its reading. This is not to say that there were not ancient Greek and Roman, Anglo-Saxon, medieval, Provençal, Renaissance, metaphysical, Colonial, Republican, Augustan—even romantic and modern!—lyrics. It is simply to propose that the riddles, papyrae, epigrams, songs, sonnets, blasons, Lieder, elegies, dialogues, conceits, ballads, hymns and odes considered lyrical in the Western tradition before the early nineteenth century were lyric in a very different sense than was or will be the poetry that the mediating hands of editors, reviewers, critics, teachers, and poets have rendered as lyric in the last century and a half. As my syntax indicates, that shift in genre definition is primarily a shift in temporality; as variously mimetic poetic subgenres collapsed into the expressive romantic lyric of the nineteenth century, the various modes of poetic circulation—scrolls, manuscript books, song cycles, miscellanies, broadsides, hornbooks, libretti, quartos, chapbooks, recitation manuals, annuals, gift books, newspapers, anthologies—tended to disappear behind an idealized scene of reading progressively identified with an idealized moment of expression. While other modes—dramatic genres, the essay, the novel—may have been seen to be historically contingent, the lyric emerged as the one genre indisputably literary and independent of social contingency, perhaps not intended for public reading at all. By the early nineteenth century, poetry had never before been so dependent on the mediating hands of the editors and reviewers who managed the print public sphere, yet in this period an idea of the lyric as ideally unmediated by those hands or those readers began to emerge and is still very much with us. Susan Stewart has dubbed the late eighteenth century’s highly mediated manufacture of the illusion of unmediated genres a case of “distressed genres,” or “new antiques.” Her terms allude to modern print culture’s attempts “to author a context as well as an artifact,” and thus to imitate older forms—such as the epic, the fable, the proverb, the ballad—while creating the impression that our access to those forms is as immediate as it was in the imaginary modern versions of oral and collective culture to which those forms originally belonged. Stewart does not include the lyric as a “distressed genre,” but her suggestion that old genres were made in new ways could be extended to include the idea that the lyric is— or was—a genre in the first place. As Gérard Genette has argued, “the relatively recent theory of the ‘three major genres’ not only lays claim to ancientness, and thus to an appearance or presumption of being eternal and therefore self-evident,” but is itself the effect of “projecting onto the founding text of classical poetics a fundamental tenet of ‘modern’ poetics (which actually . . . means romantic poetics).” Yet even if the lyric (especially in its broadly defined difference from narrative and drama) is a larger version of the new antique, a retroprojection of modernity, a new concept artificially treated to appear old, the fact that it is a figment of modern poetics does not prevent it from becoming a creature of modern poetry. The interesting part of the story lies in the twists and turns of the plot through which the lyric imaginary takes historical form. But what plot is that? My argument here is that the lyric takes form through the development of reading practices in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that become the practice of literary criticism. As Mark Jeffreys eloquently describes the process I am calling lyricization, “lyric did not conquer poetry: poetry was reduced to lyric. Lyric became the dominant form of poetry only as poetry’s authority was reduced to the cramped margins of culture.” This is to say that the notion of lyric enlarged in direct proportion to the diminution of the varieties of poetry—or at least that became the ratio as the idea of the lyric was itself produced by a critical culture that imagined itself on the definitive margins of culture. Thus by the early twenty-first century it became possible for Mary Poovey to describe “the lyricization of literary criticism” as the dependence of all postromantic professional literary reading on “the genre of the romantic lyric.” The conceptual problem is that if the lyric is the creation of print and critical mediation, and if that creation then produces the very versions of interpretive mediation that in turn produce it, any attempt to trace the historical situation of the lyric will end in tautology. Or that might be the critical predicament if the retrospective definition and inflation of the lyric were either as historically linear or as hermeneutically circular as much recent criticism, whether historicist or formalist, would lead us to believe. What has been left out of most thinking about the process of lyricization is that it is an uneven series of negotiations of many different forms of circulation and address. To take one prominent example, the preface to Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) describes the “ancient foliums in the Editor’s possession,” claims to have subjected the excerpts from these manuscripts to the judgment of “several learned and ingenious friends” as well as to the approval of “the author of The Rambler and the late Mr. Shenstone,” and concludes that “the names of so many men of learning and character the Editor hopes will serve as amulet, to guard him from every unfavourable censure for having bestowed any attention on a parcel of Old Ballads.” Not only does Percy not claim that historical genres of verse are directly addressed to contemporary readers (and each of his “relics” is prefaced by a historical sketch and description of its manuscript context in order to emphasize the excerpt’s distance from the reader), but he also acknowledges the role of the critical climate to which the poems in his edition were addressed. Yet by 1833, John Stuart Mill, in what has become the most influentially misread essay in the history of Anglo-American poetics, could write that “the peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet’s utter unconsciousness of a listener. Poetry is feeling confessing itself to itself, in moments of solitude.” As Anne Janowitz has written, “in Mill’s theory . . . the social setting is benignly severed from poetic intentions.” What happened between 1765 and 1833 was not that editors and printers and critics lost influence over how poetry was presented to the public; on the contrary, as Matthew Rowlinson has remarked, in the nineteenth century “lyric appears as a genre newly totalized in print.” And it is also not true that the social setting of the lyric is less important in the nineteenth than it was in the eighteenth century. On the contrary, because of the explosion of popular print, by the early nineteenth century in England, as Stuart Curran has put it, “the most eccentric feature of [the] entire culture [was] that it was simply mad for poetry”—and as Janowitz has trenchantly argued, such madness extended from the public poetry of the eighteenth century through an enormously popular range of individualist, socialist, and variously political and personal poems. In nineteenth-century U.S. culture, the circulation of many poetic genres in newspapers and the popular press and the crucial significance of political and public poetry to the culture as a whole is yet to be appreciated in later criticism (or, if it is, it is likely to be given as the reason that so little enduring poetry was produced in the United States in the nineteenth century, with the routine exception of Whitman and Dickinson, who are also routinely mischaracterized as unrecognized by their own century). At the risk of making a long story short, it is fair to say that the progressive idealization of what was a much livelier, more explicitly mediated, historically contingent and public context for many varieties of poetry had culminated by the middle of the twentieth century (around the time Dickinson began to be published in “complete” editions) in an idea of the lyric as temporally self-present or unmediated. This is the idea aptly expressed in the first edition of Brooks and Warren’s Understanding Poetry in 1938: “classifications such as ‘lyrics of meditation,’ and ‘religious lyrics,’ and ‘poems of patriotism,’ or ‘the sonnet,’ ‘the Ode,’ ‘the song,’ etc.” are, according to the editors, “arbitrary and irrational classifications” that should give way to a present-tense presentation of “poetry as a thing in itself worthy of study.” Not accidentally, as we shall see, the shift in definition accompanied the migration of lyric from the popular press to the classroom—but for now we should note that by the time that Emily Dickinson’s poetry became available in scholarly editions and university anthologies, the history of various genres of poetry was read as simply lyric, and lyrics were read as poems one could understand without reference to that history or those genres.

Virginia Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (2005)

#virginia jackson #dickinson's misery #emily dickinson #lyric poetry #lyric theory #literary history #literary genre #literary criticism

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sciatu · 5 years

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PALERMO ARENELLA - I QUATTRO PIZZI (CASA FLORIO)

Subentrato a suo padre, Ignazio Florio Jr. si trovò impreparato a gestire l’enorme patrimonio familiare ed i relativi debiti delle sue società che incominciavano ad aumentare esponenzialmente. Alcune scelte aziendali, come la fusione della banca di famiglia con la Società Generale di Credito Mobiliare che presto si riveleranno scelte errate. La Società Generale è infatti sull’orlo del fallimento e trascina le deboli finanze familiari in un baratro senza fine. Alle scelte non adeguate si aggiungeva un livello di vita che non considerava i problemi finanziari che la famiglia doveva affrontare (come ad esempio l’acquisto di 6 yacht in quattro anni). Ignazio Jr. vede presto crollare quell’impero che il padre e il nonno avevano costruito. Piano piano, le tonnare, le miniere, le navi e i relativi arsenali in cui erano state costruite e l’enorme patrimonio immobiliare passò in altre mani. Deluso e sconfitto, Ignazio Jr. si ritirò con la famiglia nell villino dei Quattro Pizzi, all’Arenella, ad est di Palermo. Il villino era un piccolo gioiello fatto costruire durante la ristrutturazione della loro Tonnara all’Arenella in stile Romantic Gothic di moda a metà del 1800. Vicenzo Florio, nonno dell’ Ignazio Jr. scelse quello stile influenzato dai numerosi contatti con che aveva con imprenditori anglosassoni, per cui nella facciata si riprendono temi e forme molto inglesi, ma nella gran sala del primo piano ecco ritornare i temi siciliani dei mosaici a sfondo dorato voluti da re Ruggero per le sue chiese e palazzi. Un ribadire ancora una volta come pur adottando forme e culture non dell’isola, il cuore restava solo e comunque, siciliano.

Ignazio Florio Jr. took over from his father and found himself unprepared to manage the enormous family wealth and the debts of his companies that were beginning to increase exponentially. Some corporate choices, such as the merger of the family bank with the Società Generale di Credito Mobiliare that will soon prove to be wrong choices. The General Society is indeed on the brink of bankruptcy and drags the weak family finances into an endless abyss. To the inadequate choices was added a level of life that did not consider the financial problems that the family had to face (such as the purchase of 6 yachts in four years). Ignazio Jr. soon sees that empire that his father and grandfather had built collapse. Slowly, the tonnare, the mines, the ships and the relative arsenals in which they had been built and the enormous real estate passed in other hands. Disappointed and defeated, Ignazio Jr. retired with his family in the villa of the Quattro Pizzi, at Arenella, east of Palermo. The cottage was a small jewel built during the renovation of their Tonnara at Arenella in a Romantic Gothic fashion style in the mid-1800s. Vicenzo Florio, Ignazio Jr.'s grandfather chose that style influenced by the numerous contacts he had with Anglo-Saxon entrepreneurs , for which very English themes and forms are reproduced in the façade, but in the large room on the first floor we return to the Sicilian themes of the golden background mosaics commissioned by King Roger for his churches and palaces. Once again, as though adopting forms and cultures not of the island, the heart remained only, and in any case, Sicilian.

#Sicilia #Sicily #Palermo #Florio

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collapsedsquid · 5 years

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As the WASPs declined, the topic spawned a mini-genre all its own. Peter Schrag’s 1971 contribution (an early version of which appeared as an essay in the April 1970 issue of this magazine) quotes H. L. Mencken dating the decline to 1924, which Schrag deemed premature (recall that Baltzell had dated the beginning of the decline just five years later, with the stock market crash). Schrag catalogues some of the prominent artists and intellectuals of the time—most were Jewish, a few were immigrants, and some were even black people and American Indians. Foreign Affairs remained soundly Waspish, but gone was the day when “American” meant “WASP” (forgetting enslaved people and their descendants); the native stock had gotten complacent and outnumbered. Sounding like a contemporary celebrant of the internet-driven demise of the cultural and political gatekeepers, Schrag cheered “the vacuum left by the old arbiters of the single standard—Establishment intellectuals, literary critics, English professors, museum directors, and all the rest” as “a sort of cultural prison break.” He did, however, worry that if “the WASP’s mediating function . . . were to be seriously eroded,” chaos could ensue.

Almost two decades later, Robert Christopher’s Crashing the Gates noted all the non-Anglo-Saxons penetrating the corporate elite, some of whom affected the WASP manner—such as Pete Peterson, the private equity mogul who made a second career of trying to eviscerate Social Security and Medicare—and others who didn’t, such as Lee Iacocca, who rescued Chrysler in the 1980s. (Both were sons of immigrant restaurant owners—Peterson of Greeks who owned a diner in Nebraska, Iacocca of Italians who owned a hot dog joint in Pennsylvania.) The gatekeepers didn’t give up without a fight, though. A friend of mine who grew up in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, home to the Fords and other old-line auto execs, told me that when Iacocca tried to buy a house in an über-Waspy enclave of the town, it was taken off the market. When he made an offer on another, it, too, was taken off the market. That is caste discipline.

The Decline of the WASP and Crashing the Gates were serious chronicles that largely approved of WASP decline in the name of diversity, but 1991 brought a lament from the right: Richard Brookhiser’s The Way of the WASP: How It Made America, and How It Can Save It . . . So to Speak. (“So to speak” is admittedly a nice touch.) Brookhiser found no virtue in diversification. To him, what came after WASPdom was not a culture but a product of decay. Gone were the days when virtues like conscience, industry, civic-mindedness, and anti-sensuality commanded respect and deference. (Anti-sensuality indeed: comfort is scorned. Thermostats are kept low in the winter, and when I suggested to my WASP mother-in-law that I might get an air conditioner for the room we sleep in at the family summer retreat, I got a look like I’d proposed turning the place into a bordello.) For Brookhiser, part of what killed the old order was modernism—meaning characters like Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche, the instigators of what the French philosopher Paul Ricœur called the hermeneutics of suspicion. In the case of the WASPs, one might suspiciously regard their high-mindedness as a cover for self-interest. But what really did them in, in Brookhiser’s eyes, was not history, not immigration, not their insularity, not massive economic transformations, but a loss of nerve. They got liberal and soft and lost all self-discipline. And that has deprived society of its “immune system” against bad thoughts, bad politics, and bad behavior. If only the WASPs would recover their lost virtues and offer themselves as leaders, “they will be accepted” by a society craving proper leadership.

That seems a stretch, but he has a point about the loss of nerve. In tracing the history of the right’s takeover of the G.O.P., Geoffrey Kabaservice pointed to John Hay Whitney’s shutting down the New York Herald Tribune, a voice of posh, liberal Republicanism, in 1966, because it was losing around $5 million a year (the equivalent of almost $40 million today). Right-wing plutocrats have endured far greater losses to promote their cause: the Rupert Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff estimates that the Rupe has lost over a billion in the nearly four decades he’s owned the New York Post. Kabaservice concludes, “The Tribune’s disappearance was further testimony that moderates were simply less willing than conservatives to suffer and sacrifice for their cause.” Those WASP virtues of discretion and thrift don’t equip you for an ideological war—especially if you don’t think of yourself as having an ideology.

Contrary to Baltzell’s fears that they were hardening into a caste, unable to admit fresh blood, the WASPs encouraged their own supplanting. In the 1960s, the Ivies began opening up to the products of public schools. Under President Kingman Brewster Jr. and the admissions director R. Inslee “Inky” Clark, also a junior, Yale began rejecting legacy WASP applicants in favor of the upwardly mobile. In 1966, the university’s governing body, the Yale Corporation, summoned Clark to explain the sorts he was admitting to the class of 1970. He argued that in a changing America, Jews, minorities, even women might be appropriate Yale material. This didn’t sit well with one corporation member, who pointed to his posh colleagues and said, “You’re talking about Jews and public school graduates as leaders. Look around you at this table. These are America’s leaders. There are no Jews here. There are no public school graduates here.” Inky won that battle, which is why I found myself at Yale five years later—and the same is likely true for Brookhiser, right after me, given his modest origins in suburban Rochester. The transformation of Yale, along with the other Ivies and the prep schools, marked the ceding of power from a hereditary aristocracy to something that likes to think of itself as a meritocracy.

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diarrheaworldstarhiphop · 6 years

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there's not a snowball's chance in hell that the US ever stops being an imperialist intervention machine is there? short of the collapse of the federal government and a redirection to regional politics for the individual States (and/or american regional successor states) the ride doesn't stop until uncle sam is dead right?

That’s exactly right peach.

The idea of a perpetual american ethnic identity ended when the original colonies expanded westward and accepted the mass immigration of other yuropoor groups. You can tell when the concept of American went from “anglo-saxon” to an arbitrary idea of skin colour regardless of culture. Additionally, it’s so VAST ( continental USA bigger than yurop) and diverse that it’s destiny is almost certainly to come apart once the continent-wide money train grinds to a halt (or is ridiculously imbalanced). One can at least begin to see that with the coasts and interior radically polarizing.. The only bipartisan agreement is to perpetuate empire for corporate wealth. Just like Rome, which in it’s twilight years, was being beset by waves of foreign refugees from the north who wanted a slice of the roman life before tearing it down in protest of persistent mistreatment by Romans - The USA too will fall to the whims of betrayal and desire to be… or continuously redefine what constitutes as “american.”

And fittingly, the USA is a republic modeled after rome. But I think a fissure of the USA is necessary and will benefit ALL ethnic groups and nations within the country (compartmentalizing the fact it makes each individual successor state radically more susceptible to the influence of foreign powers). But yeah. Especially once the Meme borders settle into ethnic or religious ones. I’m a firm believer that elective political structures like democracy work best with smaller, more tangible regions where the distance between polis and polity is reduced. I mean yes, we laud the Greeks for their various ideas including democracy, but it was a system produced for the function of a city state, not a continent spanning bureaucracy, let alone one thats engaged in the business of EVERYONE, EverYWHERE.

At some point it gets so byzantine and far detached from the needs of the people by the layers of stratification, from us to the highest branch of the executive wing, that the only people who do get to the top, are merely well-behaved psycho or sociopaths. It’s a system that selects for, conditions toward and rewards them. The real power lays in the so-called deepstate, what we see and thing of as a 4 year cycle of leaders is a circus to placate our fantasy in feeling that we actually alter anything. That manner of, i guess deep state, relies on the Cathedral to manipulate most people, those subject to the grand herd moralities, toward policies that serve to prop it up. That’s why you now see the Trump administration justifying a goal toward regime change in Iran in order to protect LGBT people. The same administration that just spent the past couple years throttling LGBT rights in it’s own homeland. And yet, Republicans AND Democrats will uncritically support this.

We are coming into an era where the great powers have increasingly lower tolerance or respect toward the theatre of democracy. China has established the 21st’s standard for economy and governance. While the USA and Russia were deadlocked against each other in the twilight of the 20th century, it was China which revolutionized everything with the synthesis of both ideologies thru Deng Xiaoping‘s reforms. And maybe revolutionized isn’t the right word for it, because it’s more a return to despotism, albeit one that is dressed up by technology. World War 2 was not a victory over totalitarianism, but rather a brief escape from it.

But the truly despondent fact of this is that the USA has little to do against this, but actually it has to keep up with it’s trajectory or spin apart. Now it’s an act of delaying that fate. It HAS to be an aggressive power that wields hegemony over competitors. The USA has to do this to prop up stability, growth and living standards at home because it’s people won’t allow it to, left or right. Empire to the United States is like Oil was to Venezuela. When the empire bubble bursts, when the US dollar loses it’s primacy, the Americans will soon find themselves in a spiral that’s now all too familiar to those of us who watch the failed states of the 3rd world and WHY we exact sanctions on these countries, knowing that the populace will dutifully follow through on the obliteration of their state. Americans won’t be prepared for or really want to stomach the hangover and crash, so they too will tear the country asunder from within. Especially so, now that the USA isn’t a homogenous ethnic state. Which is why a Confucius China is still around after several thousand years and Zoroaster isn’t.

And to walk back to what I mentioned about the ideologies of Greek city states..

Athens and Sparta represent two poles of an ideal. Sparta is extremely conservative while Athens, extremely…. progressive, lets say. Conservative Sparta starves to death, brittle from it’s rugged valour and Iron stubbornness toward maintaining tradition. It remains static, stagnates, becomes irrelevant and is eventually swallowed by other, more flexible, actively imperialistic states. Progressive Athens drinks deep the power of empire from it’s democratic flexibility that changes and grows. On this path, two outcomes: Eventually it loses it’s sense of identity in this drunken stupor and flexibility (Rome). Or it is promptly obliterated by it’s enemies, of which it has plenty from this process of empire (Assyria). The USA is on the Roman path.

I mean, it’s a gross simplification, but you figuratively sell your soul for power, and that’s what the USA did a long time ago. When the USA does collapse, it’s going to be completely unrecognizable, with most parts of it essentially preoccupied with a separatist trajectory indifferent to the maintenance of something that no longer functionally matters as it used to. A different time and people.

I can’t wait for 1000 years of successor states competing to become the NEW USA.The Holy American Empire

Which won’t be Holy, which won’t be American and which won’t be empire either.

#effortpost #geopolitics

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pamphletstoinspire · 6 years

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Let Us Follow The Road To Jerusalem

The Biblical Significance and Reflection Concerning Ash Wednesday

While making the sign of the cross on each persons forehead with ashes the priests says…

“Remember, man, you are dust and to dust you will return” - Genesis 3:19

Biblical Significance

The liturgical imposition of ashes on Ash Wednesday is a sacramental, not a sacrament, and in the Roman Catholic understanding of the term the ashes themselves are also a sacramental. The ashes are blessed according to various rites proper to each liturgical tradition, sometimes involving the use of Holy Water. In most liturgies for Ash Wednesday, the penitential psalms are read; Psalm 50 is especially associated with this day.

The service also often includes a corporate confession rite. Being a sacramental in the Roman Catholic Church, ashes may be given to anyone who wishes to receive them. The day is observed by fasting, abstinence from meat, and repentance-a day of contemplating one’s transgressions. The day before Ash Wednesday is known as Shrove Tuesday or Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday), the last day of the Carnival season.

Originally Ash Wednesday was called dies cinerum (day of ashes) and is mentioned in the earliest copies of the Gregorian Sacramentary, and it probably dates from at least the 8th Century. One of the earliest descriptions of Ash Wednesday is found in the writings of the Anglo-Saxon abbot Aelfric (955-1020). In his Lives of the Saints, he writes, “We read in the books both in the Old Law and in the New that men who repented of their sins bestrewed themselves with ashes and clothed their bodies with sackcloth…”

Aelfric suggests the pouring of ashes on one’s body and the dressing in sackcloth was an outer manifestation of inner repentance or mourning. This distinctive worship can first be traced back to the days of Job, who having been rebuked by God, confesses, “Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes (Job 42:6).

Ashes (and “sackcloth,” or rough, plain clothing, usually of camel’s hair) traditionally represents mourning (2 Sam. 13:19; Gen. 37:34), repentance (Job 42:6; Matt. 11:21; Dan. 9:3; Joel 1:8, 13;), and the judgment of God (Rev. 6:12). When King Ahasuerus ordered all Jews to be killed, Mordecai “tore his clothes and put on sackcloth and ashes, and… cried out with a loud and bitter cry.” The Jews throughout the land prayed “with great mourning... with fasting, weeping, and wailing; and many lay in sackcloth and ashes” (Esther 4:1-3).

This was for the dual purpose of mourning for their coming death and of demonstrating their repentance to God, pleading with Him to spare them from his judgment. When Jonah preached God’s coming judgment against Nineveh, the pagan king of Nineveh and his subjects understood that if a nation repents from its evil ways, God may withhold His Judgment (Jer. 18:7-10), so they repented and prayed that God would spare them.

So the people of Nineveh believed God, proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth, from the greatest to the least of them. Then word came to the king of Nineveh; and he arose from his throne and laid aside his robe and covered himself with sackcloth and sat in ashes. He caused it to be proclaimed and published throughout Nineveh by the decree of the king and his nobles, saying, “Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste anything; do not let them eat, or drink water.

Let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, and cry mightily to God; yes, let everyone turn from his evil way and from the violence that is in his hands. Who can tell if God will turn and relent, and turn away from his fierce anger, so that we may not perish?” Then God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God relented from the disaster that He had said He would bring upon them, and He did not do it (Jonah 3:5-10).

Reflection On Ash Wednesday

The general audience of Pope Benedict XVI on Wednesday, Feb.17, 2010 (Ash Wednesday) began by saying that Ash Wednesday is the beginning of the Lenten Journey, a journey that takes 40 days and brings us to the joy of the Lord’s Pasch. On this spiritual journey we are not alone because the Church accompanies and supports us from the outset with the word of God, which contains a programme of spiritual life and penitential commitment, and with the grace of the sacraments... the first appeal is for conversion, a word to be understood with its extraordinary gravity, grasping the surprising newness it releases. The appeal to conversion, in fact, lays bare and denounces the facile superficiality that all too often marks our lives. To repent (or convert) is to change direction in the journey of life; not, however, by means of a small adjustment, but with a true and proper about turn. Conversion means swimming against the tide, where the “tide” is the superficial lifestyle, inconsistent and deceptive, that often sweeps us along, overwhelms us and makes us slaves to evil or at any rate prisoners of moral mediocrity. With conversion, on the other hand we are aiming for the high standard of Christian living, we entrust ourselves to the living and personal Gospel which is Jesus Christ. He is our final goal and the profound meaning of conversion, He is the path on which all are called to walk through life, letting themselves be illumined by His light and sustained by his power which moves our steps. In this way conversion expresses his most splendid and fascinating Face: it is not a mere moral decision that rectifies our conduct in life, but rather a choice of faith that wholly involves us in close communion with Jesus as a real and living Person. To repent and to believe in the Gospel are not to different things or in some way only juxtaposed, but express the same reality. Repentance is the total “Yes” of those who consign their whole life to the Gospel responding freely to Christ who first offers himself to mankind as the Way, the Truth, and the Life, as the only One who sets us free and saves us. This is the precise meaning with which, according to the Evangelist Mark, Jesus begins preaching the “Gospel of God”: The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the Gospel” (Mark 1:15).

The “Repent, and believe in the Gospel” is not only the beginning of Christian life but accompanies it throughout, endures, is renewed and spreads, branching out into all its expressions. Every day is a favorable moment of grace because everyday presses us to give ourselves to Jesus, to trust in Him, to abide in Him, to share his lifestyle, to learn true love from Him, to follow Him in the daily fulfillment of the Father’s Will, the one great law of life. Everyday, even when it is fraught with difficulties and toil, weariness and setbacks, even when we are tempted to leave the path of the following of Christ and withdraw into ourselves, into our selfishness, without realizing our need to open ourselves to the love of God in Christ…

The favorable moment of grace in Lent also reveals its spiritual significance to us in the ancient formula: “Remember, man, you are dust and to dust you will return” which the priest says as he places a little ash on our foreheads. Thus we are referred back to the dawn of human history when the Lord told Adam, after the original sin: “In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return” (Gen. 3:19). Here, the word of God reminds us of our frailty, indeed, of our death, which is the extreme form. Before the innate fear of the end and even sooner in the context of a culture which in so many ways tends to censure the reality and the human experience of death, the Lenten Liturgy, on the one hand, reminds us of death, inviting us to realism and wisdom; but, on the other, impels above all to understand the unexpected newness that the Christian faith releases from the reality of death itself.

Man is dust and to dust he shall return, but dust is precious in God’s eyes because God created man, destining him to immortality. Hence the Liturgical formula, “Remember, man, you are dust and to dust you will return”, finds the fullness of its meaning in reference to the new Adam, Christ. The Lord Jesus also chose freely to share with every human being the destiny of weakness, in particular through His death on the cross; but this very death the culmination of His love for the Father and for humanity, was the way to the glorious Resurrection, through which Christ became a source of grace given to all who believe in Him, who are made to share in divine life itself. This life that will have no end had already begun in the earthly faze of our existence but it will be brought to completion after “the resurrection of the flesh”. The little action of the imposition of ashes reveals to us the unique riches of its meaning. It is an invitation to spend the Lenten season as a more conscious and intense immersion in Christ’s Paschal Mystery in His death and Resurrection, through participation in the Eucharist and in the life of charity, which is born from the Eucharist in which it also finds its fulfillment. With the imposition of ashes we renew our commitment to following Jesus, to letting ourselves be transformed by His Paschal Mystery, to overcoming evil and to doing good, in order to make our former self, linked to sin die and to give birth to our “new nature”, transformed by God’s Grace.

From: www.pamphletstoinspire.com

#road to jerusalem

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history429jess · 3 years

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Chocolate & Advertisements

Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-22/nestle-pulls-beso-de-negra-candy-reviews-portfolio-for-racism

Chocolate was reinvented as a middle-class treat in the 19th century. Coming into the 20th century big corporations enticed their consumers through an advertising industry that pushed ideologies thought for centuries: that the indigenous peoples who consumed chocolate before were hedonistic. They also pushed the ideology that romanticized colonial exploitation too. Advertisements like these reflect the racist stereotypes common during this time period.

Even though the Mexica and Mayan civilizations are widely credited as the inventors of chocolate, it is common knowledge the Europeans swooped in and ultimately prided themselves on removing chocolate from its heathen brethren and turning it into what it is today. These ideologies were pushed through advertisements in commercials. Corporations stereotyped Mayans as inferior and exotic. The JELL-O Mayan commercial illustrates the “exoticness” of Mayans by playing the flute in the background, something that one would think is an ode of admiration but instead a common stereotype that alludes to the wilderness. Although the commercial correctly describes how Mayans sought protection from their gods by paying tribute to them in form of gifts such as cacao beans, corn, and potatoes, the narrator of the commercial belittles these traditional foods by calling them “boring” and “lame” (MarketwiredNewsVideo, 00:00:08 – 00:00:15). The commercial belittles Mayan culture and promotes the notion that they were inferior.

The Mayans were not the only ones attacked. The Conguitos advertisement specifically dehumanizes African Americans by characterizing them as savages that lived in straw huts and carried spears. The advertisement's simplistic figures only focused on the difference in features between African Americans and Anglo-Saxons and focuses on characteristics like larger eyes and lips. One part of the commercial is the transformation of a group of black human bodies turning into chocolate balls that would be later picked-up for the consumption of a white woman. (Conquitos TV, 00:00:01 – 00:00:27). Unfortunately, this advertisement is not far from the truth. Europeans scrambled for Africa in the second half of the 1800s and (no so) coincidentally, large chocolate corporations began to extract cacao from these areas. Throughout this process, cacao farms continuously kidnapped children. Even though the main goal of the ad was solely to sell Conguitos’ chocolate, there is definitely an underlying message; suggesting that African Americans are submissive and happy to be colonial subjects. In addition, this ad allows consumers to believe that a colonizing mentality is natural and logical and most importantly acceptable.

The industrial revolution allowed chocolate to become mass produced and have a middle-class price point. However, it also birthed an era were big chocolate companies were promoting any and all ideologies they saw fit through their advertisements, essentially brainwashing anyone who came across them. Through these advertisements, the chocolate industry both shaped and reinforced racial stereotypes.

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ephillipsresearch · 4 years

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BLOC PROJETCS HARSH LIGHT- NOTES The concluding webinar of our December installment will welcome artists Verity Birt and Una Hamilton, and researcher Dr Edwin Coomasaru in conversation. Variously working on gender, British identity, folklore and the occult, the speakers will be reflecting on the “E” of ACE—Arts Council England—and that which constitutes “Englishness”. The conversation will self-reflexively think through these English textures and their adoption in sub cultural contexts, including white supremacist narratives of “blood and soil” nativism, as well as feminist and black metal re-inscriptions of a more ecologically entangled landscape.

Question – how the occult has shaped their respective ideas of myth landscape and English identity

Verity Birt - reading ridley walker- inspiration, novel written by russel hoborn, imagining post apocalyptic future in the dark ages, written in phonetic language, returning to an oral history- did a residency in Newcastle with newbridge project, running experimental workshops at prehistoric sites with a community choir – thinking about how features of the landscape impact improvisation – what can happen when you allow for more imaginative and experimental exchange with these sites installation at black tower projects mapped through memory, dream space, tracing the contour lines of the space, exploring the notion of giving/receiving from the landscape - ceramic offerings – recreated the channel in ceramic, vaginal shape references strong feminine energy- workshop not directly documented. – choreographed performances in space in the summer equinox 2019 performance looking at deep time/ fragments of lineages, evolution, how they are continued and transmitted, questioning enlightenment, theory of time as progress – battersea pleasure gardens – live improvised performance to text piece a mash of feminist theory, myth, fiction, archeology uncommon ground – attempt to confront dark side of mythology within the English psyche – white horse stone kent- during research came across white supremacist group that used to guard the site- 2 chanel video – follows icon of the white horse and its relation to alt white narratives and history in mythology – also included fragments of conversions with ethan d white about alt right pagan rituals and beliefs at these sites – anglo saxon mythology Una Hamilton helle - 2009/10 – makes work in landscape, place, nature and how we encode them with our own theories and experiences – the lay archive, ‘after math’ or ‘trauma’ photography- events can linger on in places and can you capture this through camera, looking at political troubles in Ireland. Attempt to explore what could be captured on camera, lay lines connecting places of worship etc, energy lines, ufo sightings, can you capture any of this in images? Short film the return from Annwn, 2015, inspired by sci-fi and the English landscape. Sacred sites, mound burials, paces of energy, becoming the forest- long term art project interrogating sense of belonging what is heritage, connecting with the landscape - looked to black metal genre that uses landscapes/ Nordic aesthetics – looking at how topography and environments influence people – short stories about black metalists worshipping spruce trees - zine , becoming the forest to explore those ideas more critically, - commissioned essays about the topic from different political, cultural and scientific perspectives commissioned by waltham and epping forest to do installation that looked at epping forest as the peoples forest, and how human narratives have shaped the forest – workshops, performance

Dr Edwin coomasaru Complicated relationship to concept of Englishness 2018 – research driven by questions of ‘why has occult imagery become so importanct for feminist art and activism? What might this renewed interest in the supernatural from across the political spectrum tell us about the current crisis of British identity, shaped by colonial narratives, enlightened Europeans spreading rational modernity while committing oppression murder and theft 18/19 – courtold project on politics of gender and race in brexit visual culture – interested in the way artists responded to issue of irish border in eu negotiations – rita duffy collabed with women of both sides of irish border to create installation that straddled the border – knitted votive figures on the black line bridge – image above from derry 10 exhibition Kerry powell Williams on tarot, held supernatural performance on walker plinth, looked at history of somerset house – building once hq for royal navy and hmrc, all implicated in histories of empire increased interest in supernaturalism a response to corporate wellness culture, welfare state cutbacks and precarious employment – as feminist and anti racist activism surged in 2010, so did far right extremist, brexit articulated and exacerbate crisis of British identity, colonial/rational/modern narratives against those considered supernatural, other or primitive, created conceptual binary between magic and science 1876,eng traveler William h Dixon –‘ if we wish to see order and freedom , science and civilization preserved, we should give first thought to what improves the white mans growth and increase the white man’s strength - gina rippons gendered brain – challenged idea that science was ever neutral or objective, it s all implicated with power and projection feminist and anti racist artists are turning to the occult to reclaim/ challenge the myths that underpin patriarchal white supremacy

How do materials beings and sites become co-opted into story and myth? what stories and myths can artists today extract from the land that will forge a path for post Brexit Britain that is inclusive healing and open and how does this approach include a celebration of Englishness.

VB -Turned to the supernatural and tarot as a way of generating hope in a very hopeless situation- the 2008 recession – allows for mystery, imagination and nuance – using tarot to guide the work, relinquish control – don’t see it as a supernatural things, it’s a way of connecting with natural forces, seeing it in a post modern, materialist light

UH – mysticism as opposition to the narratives the nation tells themselves – also retaining a sense of imagination, not buying into protestant work ethic – productivity is everything – found this is in occult theories – trying to understand what we are actually listening to in occult stories and myths- who’s histories are these? DC- family interested in se Asian forms of spirituality , became interested aspects of activist that used the occult as an insult and those that were interested din magic – bbc article ‘brexit leads to resurgence in tarot’ intense uncertainty about the future and finding ways to narrate a story to the self – there is nobody NOT engaging in magical thinking – storytelling and the ability of narratives to conceptually present the world to us in different ways Vb storytelling – critical awareness of the falsehood of truths, hierarchy of belief and value we assign to certain myths over other revisiting feminist myth making trajectory – how it has shifted between waves, changing ideas of gender, how gender and myth are intertwined, etc how myths have sedimented in the body – whiteness embodiment - how can we excavate that? Romanticism of neo paganism – grey areas between liberal left and alt white spaces

Englishness, an important part of brexit is the tensions between Englishness and brutishness – England drove the vote but Wales also voted leave

VB- looking for line of flight from Englishness- stuck with facing own white Englishness – (not proud of heritage?) coming from rural working class land based peasantry – most family were brexiteers, ideas of people living in different worlds – respective the world view but navigating conversations of black lives matter. Huge disconnect between rural and urban landscape – trying to reconfigure clashes in own identity rural/urban recent work ‘crossings’ about encountering rural landscape after being urbanized

UH– myth of the nation state – disconnect with place? Disenfranchisement – enclosures, uprooting, urbanization, industries disappears – possibilities for community eroded at every corner for a hundred years – what does place/ local place mean? Nobody has that deep rooted relationship with the land anymore?

DC – anxiety about living off the land – spells about butter,- sense of powerlessness and feeling out of control -the occult has very specific histories and its consciously appropriated

mass displacement in the industrial revolution -

are myths just replaced with others? Everything is myth – there is no objective reality

VB – counter myth making, everything is myth, these are imaginative worlds, capitalism is a shared belief – counter myths – opens up new potentials

the enlightenment was created to enable imperialism and capitalism - how can we generate new worlds that cater to non-conforming folk –modern myths have been generate to support the cis white able man

#bookmark

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ithisatanytime · 4 years

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Cyberpunk 2077 is a game created by the people cyberpunk was created to mock. soulless corporate consumers, and it shows. i watched a streamer play it for 2 hours and it crashed four times, which i could forgive, i expected that, what i did not expect was them to fuck up the cyberpunk aesthetic. the art direction is fucking trash, everything is grungy, while simultaneously being like a fucking apple store. its hard to explain but it just looks like shit. there are big fat lady npc’s which would fit right into a cyberpunk game as a critique of consumer excess, but they arent represented that way, they have COOL CYBER EYES so big fat girls can feel COOL, it just doesn’t work. its not cyberpunk, what they failed to realize is that cyber punk is NOIR more than punk, the punk aspect is the anti corporate edge and some superficial components, good cyberpunk fiction reads exactly like noir set in the future. also the creators of the game clearly share the same views as literally all western megacorps, there is some mild satire elements with the in universe commercials but they even fuck that up, heavily criticizing the fucking SECOND AMENDMENT, the citizens should not be allowed to arm themselves against the establishment, very fucking cyberpunk.

of course it will win game of the year as the last of us 2 won this year despite being possibly the most hated game maybe of all time. not saying it was the worst game, but i struggle to think of another title more known for being hated. triple A games and all other forms of establishment media (including game journalism) exist solely to subvert western culture, and to demoralize non jews. it not even about profit as no one but a very small minority of college aged girls and the most profoundly retarded people knowingly buy this kind of garbage, and it doesnt take a fucking masters i business to figure that out. the themes of cyberpunk 2077 may have worked back in the eighties, but they dont work now, for the same reason standup comedy is a dead medium, they only work when you are criticizing the establishment, and the establishment hasnt been white anglo-saxon protestants for decades AND most people now intuit that quite easily. they are kicking a dead horse. the establishment is jewish, the establishment is anti-christ, the establishment is is anti-white. the establishment has never been easier to satirize in america because its never been so authoritarian and openly hypocritical, but the moment a stand up comedian says anything not approved by the party (establishment jews) they are canceled, not for lack of ratings but by force. this is why they are losing, the masses would rather watch some ugly bastard talk into his cell phone in the bathroom of his mothers house than a mutimillion dollar lie, because its funnier, its more compelling. none of this applies to women, they will forever watch garbage tv because they are highly social animals with low critical thinking skills. love em though.

as a side note, everything in cyberpunk looks FAT. everything is chunky looking and i despise that aesthetic. think world of warcraft, fat chunky models. shit at least shadowrun for the sega genesis is still fucking good. also the witcher series is fucking shit, its barely a notch above the assassins creed series which is irredeemable trash. throw god of war in their as well, all these games are the marvel movies of video games, they are the pinnacle of entertainment if you have the mind of a child.

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glittergummicandypeach · 4 years

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It’s the Catholic Bishops, Not Those Who Toppled Junipero Serra Statues, Who Have Failed the Test of History | Religion Dispatches

Apologies are not enough. As protesters have taken to the streets throughout the world in opposition to anti-Black racism, they’ve also attacked statues symbolizing dominating violence, precisely because so many statues present in city centers represent the continuation of structures of racial violence even when verbal apologies have been issued. In the US, this refusal to be satisfied by empty statements has manifested in protesters removing multiple Confederate monuments, most of which were erected in the era of Jim Crow which renders them symbols of white supremacist domination.

Most recently, on July 4, Christopher Columbus’ statue was toppled in Baltimore as part of a more expansive attack on colonizing symbols. Last month, In California, protesters targeted a symbol of anti-Indigenous and anti-Mexican violence (bearing in mind that these can be both distinct and overlapping forms of racism and ethnic discrimination), toppling a statue of St. Junípero Serra in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. The next day, activists shouting, “this is for our ancestors,” pulled down another iconic Serra statue, this time in the heart of Los Angeles at Placita Olvera.

The California Catholic Conference of Bishops (CCCB) responded with more empty support of anti-racist movements, yet they refuse to grapple with the ways that racism and colonial violence have structured Catholic history (let alone its current structures, and its material wealth). The Bishops accused the protesters of failing the test of history because protesters did not “discern carefully the entire contribution that the historical figure in question [Serra] made to American life.”

Archbishop Gómez responded more thoughtfully at the end of June though he also chided protesters and described many criticisms launched against Serra as “revisionist.” Yet, it’s the bishops, not the protesters, who have failed the test of history. Their statement misconstrues historical “entirety” by focusing on intention and origins instead of reckoning with consequences and reception.

The colonial focus on intention

The CCCB argued that Serra was “a man ahead of his times” because he made sacrifices to protect indigenous peoples from colonial abuse. St. Junípero Serra came to colonial Mexico in 1749 and, upon arriving in California, helped to found mission San Diego in 1769. During that time, he believed himself to be fulfilling the will of God by bringing the gospel to peoples in California who had not yet heard it.

Compared to some of his contemporaries, certainly, Serra fought to protect indigenous peoples. For instance, as Archbishop Gómez underscored, Serra responded sympathetically to a Kumeyaay rebellion in 1775, asking that the rebels’ lives be spared. Serra was certainly not comparable to Hitler, as Archbishop Gómez underscores, but being better than Hitler seems a rather low bar for a saint or someone whose memory we celebrate with a statue. As I’ve argued before on RD, comparing Serra favorably to his colonial-era peers or to the United States’ conquest of the nineteenth century, isn’t saying much. Serra wasn’t even the most radical voice among his peers advocating for human rights.

Even though Serra wanted to help Native Californians, good intentions are never enough. As Jace Weaver has described, these good intentions were already enmeshed within a racist structure. Although Serra didn’t intend to physically kill Native peoples, there’s no denying the statistical evidence that Robert Jackson and Edward Castillo have well delineated. Spanish colonization precipitated a steep decline in California’s indigenous population, and mission-based converts often suffered higher mortality rates than people living outside the missions. Do Serra’s intentions truly matter more than the reality of tragic and unnecessary death?

Additionally, Serra assumed that evangelizing Native Christians also meant dismantling their culture, what George Tinker dubs “attempted cultural genocide.” Serra viewed Native Californians through the lens of racism, which is to say, paternalistically. He saw himself as a father and indigenous peoples (converts and non-Christians alike) as children, incapable of making adult decisions equal to his own.

Once evangelized, Native Californians were locked inside missions to prevent them from escaping. Those who ran away were captured and publicly flogged, a form of corporal punishment never applied to European and mixed-race colonizers. The presidio or fortress may have been at a distance, but there was still a small military contingent at missions policing converts.

Today’s protesters understand the entirety of Serra’s historical contribution, and they’ve found it insufficient to justify his heroic portrayal. To attend to the whole of Serra’s contribution is to attend to the racist and violent consequences of his actions. At the very least, Catholics should reframe notions and practices of sainthood so as to incorporate a borderlands memory, one that always remembers Serra’s human failings, and the mistakes of the California missions, alongside his greatest aspirations. Confronting Serra, we could all confront the necessity of redefining our very notions of the human. Yet statues of Serra cannot stand so long as they represent a desire to forget histories of colonial domination. The CCCB’s response, ironically, merely reinforces the justification for Serra’s removal.

Focusing on origins over reception

Part of the problem here is how the bishops approach Serra’s sainthood as hinging on good intentions, without reckoning with how racism shaped those intentions. But the bishops also refuse to grapple with how and why Serra became valorized and rose to enough prominence to be made a saint in the first place. Like Confederate monuments, these Serra statues were manufactured in the era of Jim Crow in order to remind people that racial hierarchies are violently policed. The Knights of Columbus installed the Serra statue in downtown Los Angeles in 1932 where he served as a symbol of the United States’ conquest of Mexican and Native populations.

As Roberto Ramón Lint Sagarena outlines in Aztlán and Arcadia, recuperation of Spanish mission pasts in the late nineteenth-century was an effort at racist myth-making. Mission memory revival justified the genocidal disappearing of Indigenous peoples even as it sought to erase California’s Mexican history by focusing on the Spanish era.

For instance, in his 1929 “Address at the Dedication of the Junípero Serra Museum,” James A. Blaisdell underscored how the racial logics of whiteness shaped Anglo-US interests in Serra. Blaisdell saw the museum as signaling a reunification of a “common Aryan family,” a rejoining of Spanish and Anglo-Saxon cultures “here reunited in this new community of interest and effort.” Given the era, one cannot miss the many forms of racism structuring this articulation of a hegemonic Christian white supremacy based on anti-Semitism as well as anti-Indigenous and anti-Black racism alongside explicit anti-Mexican ethnic sentiment.

The bishops’ version of Serra’s heroic story has been passed to us through racist histories and structures. Anti-racism requires that we confront the very nature of how we build institutions that relate to the past only in particular ways, and it demands that we reimagine our relationships to the past. Yet, here again, the bishops refused to attend to the fullness of history.

Words aren’t enough

This isn’t the first time the Catholic Church has issued empty words of apology that were then followed by racist actions. Under the first pope to hail from the global South, the Catholic Church did something remarkable when, in July 2015, Pope Francis asked for forgiveness for the Church and “for crimes committed against the native peoples during the so-called conquest of America.” Yet, Pope Francis demonstrated the emptiness of these words when, just 2 months later, he made Serra a saint despite generations of protests against his canonization.

The problem isn’t just the statues or the saints themselves. It’s what they represent. I’ve already suggested that those, including Latina/o/xs, who supported Serra’s canonization as if he were “a Hispanic saint” often perpetuate a racism that has structured Latino/a/x histories where European voices are elevated, while African, Asian, and Native voices are erased. In the case of California that means canonizing Serra but forgetting Native Christians such as Regina Josepha/Toypurina or Pablo Tac. Serra’s statues are a reminder of whose culture is supposed to remain dominant, regardless of the human lives lost to that domination.

In this moment, it’s not enough to de-romanticize Serra. Remembering colonial violence isn’t enough. As Ibram X. Kendi argues, we must build specifically anti-racist policies and structures instead. If churches really want to be anti-racist, they have to dismantle racist beliefs and practices and create new, explicitly anti-racist relationships with the saints, scriptures, and histories they deem holy. I suspect the bishops know that future generations will judge them for their own historical failures to build an anti-racist Church.

This content was originally published here.

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