#but it is indeed a colonial power that still enforces rule over other people

[learnwithmearticles]

French Politics Update

Since the 2024 French elections earlier this year, we left off with a more balanced National Assembly. Left-wing politicians became the highest population at 188 seats with centrist Emmanuel Macron still the president. The centrist party is not far behind with 161 seats and the right-wing party with 142.

Many networks at the time discussed the expectation of a hung parliament, as no one party holds the 289-seat majority.

Some things stay the same. In July, the National Assembly voted to keep centrist party member Yaël Braun-Pivet as speaker, winning by 13 votes. Additionally, many people have called for Macron to step down as President, but he will likely stay for the rest of his term until 2027. 

New PM

On the other hand, there have been major changes. Prime Minister Gabriel Attal resigned in July, and was replaced by Michel Barnier in September. He is a conservative, the leader of the 2016-2019 Brexit negotiation, and his appointment was met with much criticism from the left-wing parties.

Days after his appointment, over 100,000 people participated in protests across France. Many people view President Macron’s PM choice as disruptive to democracy, as the PM is most often chosen from the dominant National Assembly party.

Macron states that he made this choice based on the belief that Barnier seemed the most capable of dealing with political deadlocks, as is expected of the Parliament with no party holding majority.

I have to wonder, though, if this was also out of spite for the left-wing parties winning more seats than his centrist party. Barnier’s politics are expected to rely on joint support from the centrist and conservative parties. If the right or center opposes him on anything, he almost certainly will face loss after loss with his proposed policies. Will this lead France backward after the left finally gained some political power?

Barnier’s Address

Barnier delivered his first parliamentary address on Tuesday, October 1st. Summarily, he emphasized the hazard of French finances and debts, and the environment.

France is more than 3 trillion euros in public and environmental debt, which Barnier addresses first. His goal is to bring the deficit down from 6% of the national GDP to 5% in 2025, with the goal of under 3% by 2029.

His outline for achieving this is reducing spending, being more efficient in government spending (addressing corruption and unjustified spending), and taxes. He phrases higher taxes as a temporary measure, and states that large companies as well as the richest and wealthiest French people will be asked for exceptional contributions.

Barnier also addresses environmental debt. He plans to continue reducing GHG emissions, and for France to be more active in the EU and in the Paris Agreements, which push for countries to collectively act against climate change. He also mentions encouraging industry transitions in energy and recycling, encouraging nuclear energy development, and developing renewable resources of energy more, like biofuels and solar energy.

He has also conceived of a large national conference to act on the matter of water, the scarcity of which is an imminent issue for France.

Additionally, he plans to propose a yearly day of citizens consultations. In his idea, doors will be open for citizens for people of all levels of government to ask questions and start discussions and debates on various topics.

Another noteworthy statement from Barnier is that the pension reform bill voted on in 2023 might have to be changed, which received a loud reply from the audience.

As someone living in a country where an entire political party is built on denying factual evidence and realities, it is surprising to hear someone who does not deny climate change, and calls for equitable taxes to address debt.

About 30 minutes into his address, though, New Caledonia comes up. This is more in line with expectations of conservatives. New Caledonia is still a colonized territory of France, and a recent bill from Macron was going to disadvantage native Kanak people for the advancement of French loyalists on the archipelago. After fatal protests, the bill has been suspended before ratification, likely to be readdressed in 2025.

Also in conservative spirit, Barnier calls for stricter immigration policies in effort to meet “integration objectives”. France faces a cost-of-living crisis and an affordable housing shortage that has buttressed the right’s stance on needing stricter border measures.

Le Pen Trial

Also straining politics, especially for right-wing support, is recent news about popular right-wing figure Marine Le Pen.

On September 30th, Le Pen faced charges of embezzling European Parliament money. The right-wing party Rassemblement National is accused of filing false employee records in order to improperly use funds to pay members of the party. Le Pen is one of many senior party members involved in the alleged embezzlement.

This trial is expected to go on for seven to nine weeks, so the final outcome is some time away. But for now we can expect this will have negative impacts if Le Pen still vies for presidential election in 2027. It will likely also decrease citizen’s trust in the conservative party’s ability to make responsible economic decisions.

If found guilty, Le Pen and the other defendants could face up to ten years in prison and lose the eligibility to run for office.

After the 2024 shock vote instigated by President Macron, the French National assembly gained a left-leaning majority, though not enough for an automatic 289-vote majority. In most cases, this would mean a left-wing Prime Minister as well as a left-wing president, though that’s because the presidential vote is usually shortly after that of the national assembly.

Contrarily, Macron went with a conservative candidate that he believed to be stronger for the job. This increases the political unrest in the country, and increases the likelihood of delays and blockages in legislation development.

While the conservative Prime Minister has stated many intentions that people in the U.S.A. might call left-leaning, regarding climate change and tax targets, his appointment has upset many. His views on immigration, especially, contrast with most left-wing groups who want integration and safety for others. Overall, this decision from Macron calls into question his loyalty and dedication to the wants of the French people.

Additional Resources

1. New Prime Minister

2. Barnier on Borrowed Time

3. Le Pen on Trial

4. Barnier Address

5. Barnier Address Summary

[max1461]

Just read Scott Alexander’s post on “conflict theorists” vs. “mistake theorists” and, hmm. I have several thoughts. First, to summarize the concept for anyone who hasn’t seen it before: Alexander links to a reddit post by user u/no_bear_so_low, who originated the idea, saying

There is a way of carving up politics in which there are two basic political meta-theories, that is to say theories about why different political ideologies and political conflict exist. The first theory is that political disagreements exist because politics is complex and people make mistakes, if we all understood the evidence better, we’d agree on a great deal more. We’ll call this the mistake theory of politics. For the mistake theorist, politics is not a zero-sum game, but a matter of growing the pie so there is more for everyone. The second theory is that political disagreements reflect differences in interests which are largely irreconcilable. We’ll call this the conflict theory of politics. According to the conflict theory of politics, politics is full of zero-sum games.

u/no_bear_so_low claims that both the far left and far right are more amenable to conflict theory than liberals are, who lean more towards mistake theory. Alexander seems to agree, though in his own post he’s speaking mainly about Marxists in particular. He summarizes the concept as follows:

To massively oversimplify:

Mistake theorists treat politics as science, engineering, or medicine. The State is diseased. We’re all doctors, standing around arguing over the best diagnosis and cure. Some of us have good ideas, others have bad ideas that wouldn’t help, or that would cause too many side effects.

Conflict theorists treat politics as war. Different blocs with different interests are forever fighting to determine whether the State exists to enrich the Elites or to help the People.

In addition, Alexander subdivides the categories further into “hard” and “soft” versions:

Consider a further distinction between easy and hard mistake theorists. Easy mistake theorists think that all our problems come from very stupid people making very simple mistakes; dumb people deny the evidence about global warming; smart people don’t. Hard mistake theorists think that the questions involved are really complicated and require more evidence than we’ve been able to collect so far [...]

Maybe there’s a further distinction between easy and hard conflict theorists. Easy conflict theorists think that all our problems come from cartoon-villain caricatures wanting very evil things; bad people want to kill brown people and steal their oil, good people want world peace and tolerance. Hard conflict theorists think that our problems come from clashes between differing but comprehensible worldviews.

So what do I think about all this?

Well, it seems to me that this framework is (a) a fairly reasonable descriptive dichotomy, in the sense that, yes, a lot of people do genuinely seem to fall into one of these two camps, and (b) a horrible dichotomy on which to base any prescriptions about political meta-theory, in that these are both awful (and obviously wrong) ways to think about the world. Now, Alexander doesn’t explicitly give any such prescriptions, but he does describe SCC as “hard mistake theorist central”, and generally speaks of mistake theory in approving terms, while speaking of conflict theory in disapproving ones. I think this is bad.

At a base level, my problem with both these “theories” is that they’re, in some sense, just too optimistic.

I agree, for example, with the hard mistake theorist sentiment that the world is full of extremely challenging technical problems, that these problems can be the source of real human suffering, and that the only way to address these problems is through data collection and empirical analysis and hard technical work. And I agree that this will often produce unintuitive conclusions, that run against people’s gut sense of what the right policy might look like. I agree that the state is diseased. I do not agree that “[w]e’re all doctors, standing around arguing over the best diagnosis and cure.” People, it turns out, often do have genuinely different and irreconcilable values, and genuinely do envision different ideal worlds. In addition to that fairly mundane observation, there genuinely are a lot of bad actors, who are just in the game for their own benefit. The world is full of grifters, schemers, and petty (or not so petty) tyrants; on an empirical level that’s just not something you can deny.

On the other hand, I agree with the easy conflict theorist sentiment that, e.g., “bad people want to kill brown people and steal their oil.” There’s plenty of pretty immediate proof of that to be found if you look into the history of colonialism¹, or the slave trade, or US foreign election interference in the twentieth century. Actually, just so I’m not pissing anybody off by only mentioning “western” examples, I’ll include the Khmer Rouge and the Holodomor and comfort women and uh, you get the picture. For god’s sake, the Nazis really existed, and yeah, they really believed all that Nazi shit. In retrospect they may seem like implausibly evil cartoon villains, but in fact they were real flesh and blood humans, just like the rest of us. You think that was just a one-off?

And on a much more mundane note, sometimes (actually, very very often), ordinary people just have incompatible ethical axioms. Sometimes people have genuinely different values, and there are no rational means to sort out which value-set to choose. I suspect this is at least part of the reason for the rationalist community’s skew towards mistake theorizers, in that their favored intellectual tool has more-or-less nothing to offer when it comes to selecting your values (=ethical axioms, =terminal goals, etc). I mean, of course rationality is good for diagnosing contradictions in your value set, but it can’t tell you how to resolve those contradictions. That’s the domain of intuition, empathy, and aesthetics, were data cannot light your way.

However, I do not agree with the conflict theorists’ underlying sentiment that if “the good people” were just in charge, everything would be better. After all, there are all those pesky technical problems with unintuitive solutions getting in the way, requiring all kinds of expertise and thorough empirical study and uh, plenty of them might not even be solvable.² This is a huge deal. It’s incredibly easy to have the best of intentions and still make horrible mistakes by virtue of just... happening to have the facts wrong. Not through malice, or self-interest, or even some nicely-explainable sociological bias like white fragility or whatever. Just because problems are hard, and sometime you will fail to solve them. Even when people’s lives and livelihoods are at stake.

Here’s a handy latex-formatted table for your comprehending pleasure:

lol, we live there.

So this all sounds a bit pessimistic and, well, I suppose it is. I think we have a responsibility to acknowledge the gravity of our situation. We could, conceivably, live in a world that was structured according to either the conflict theorist’s vision or the mistake theorist’s vision, but we don’t. We live in a much scarier world, and if we don’t face that terrifying reality head-on, we’re not going to be able to overcome it.

Now, in general, I’d say I spend a lot of my internet-argument-energy-allowance trying to persuade [what I perceive to be] overly conflict-theorizing leftists in the direction of a greater recognition of the genuine technical difficulty of the problems we face. It's probably worth making a separate post about why I think a “denial of unintuitive solutions” is so common on the left, but I’ll just mention here that I think it relates to what I once jokingly called the “Humanistic gaze”. That is, the bias to view everything quite narrowly through the lens of the humanities, and to view all problems as fundamentally sociological in nature. When the world is constructed entirely by humans and human social relations, there’s a level at which nothing can be unintuitive. After all, an intersubjective world must ultimately be grounded in subjective experience, and subjective experience is literally made of intuition.

I usually don’t spend much time pursuing the dual activity (trying to argue liberals out of [what I perceive to be] an overly mistake-theorizing perspective). This is largely because, well, I think the optimistic assumption that mistake theorists make —that most people have basically compatible goals, and that relatively few people are working out of abject self-interest or hatred or whatever— is so obviously false that it doesn’t warrant as much genuine critique as it warrants responding with memes about US war crimes. The principal of charity is best extended to ideas, not people or institutions. You can take the neocons’ arguments seriously without extending charity to the neocons as agents.

The post concludes with Alexander writing

But overall I’m less sure of myself than before and think this deserves more treatment as a hard case that needs to be argued in more specific situations. Certainly “everyone in government is already a good person, and just has to be convinced of the right facts” is looking less plausible these days.

And uh, yeah. Indeed.

So, in conclusion: is politics medicine, or is it war? No, it’s politics.

There are disagreements, and conflicts of interest, and coalition building, and policy-wonkery, and logistics. There is, as with anything involving the state, the implicit threat of violence. (That’s where the state’s power comes from, remember? Whether it’s their power to tax, or their power to enforce individual property rights to begin with. Their power to regulate or build infrastructure or legally construct corporate personhood or whatever. There’s more than a bit of game theory involved, sure, but the rules of the game are set through the armory.) Every scholarly technocrat with double-blind peer reviewed policy suggestions still ultimately just decides who the guns get pointed at, if at several layers of abstraction. Every righteous people’s vanguard is still bound by the mathematics of production and the dynamics of a chaotic world. There are no easy solution, not conceptually easy nor practically easy. And unless we recognize that on a very deep level, we have no chance of fixing anything.

[1] I’d quote my go-to example here, of the truly ghastly stories relayed to linguist R. M. Dixon by the Dyirbal people of Australia about their subjugation at the hands of white settlers, but unfortunately I don’t have his book with me at the moment. Also this post would require several additional trigger warnings.

[2] I mean, after all, there are only countably many Turing machines, and the set of all languages with finitely many symbols has cardinality 2^(aleph_0)!

[peirates]

‘Did the Romans and ancient Greeks ... ?’

Google autocomplete is a gem and a curse. Inspired by @todayintokyo’s post on questions about Japan, I thought I’d have a look at what people are asking about Rome and classical Greece and, wow...

Christmas holidays leave a lot of time for milling around, so I’ll answer them in case anyone’s interested. (Please forgive me if any of this is incorrect/incoherent, it’s nearly 11pm as I’m writing this lol)

Did the Romans speak Latin?

Yes, Latin was Rome’s (and the Roman Empire’s) official language! Of course, many Romans or foreigners in Rome spoke other languages for the sake of communication, trade and education - Greek was particularly popular among the nobility - but Latin was what they all had in common.

Did the Romans invade Scotland?

Long story short, no. They tried, failed, and built Hadrian’s Wall to keep the ‘barbarian’ Gaels out - southern Britain was already too cold and muddy for the temperate Romans, not much point in losing more lives over more mud. 

(Hadrian’s Wall was what inspired Game of Thrones’ The Wall, as confirmed by G.R.R. Martin himself, but Hadrian’s was nowhere near as high, thick or long.)

Did the Romans have glass?

Absolutely! In fact, their skill with it was much more artistic and masterful than the average glassmaker today, just search ‘roman glassware’ here on Tumblr or on Google images to see what I mean.

Did the Romans invent concrete?

Yep! It’s famed for its durability, which is due to its contents of volcanic ash (Pompeii flashbacks), lime and seawater. The seawater reacted with the ash over time to give it its strength and anti-cracking nature.

In fact, the Roman method was so effective that it lasts for far longer than modern concrete (modernity/Westernisation =/= progression, it seems) and scientists today are trying to find ways to revitalise it.

Did the Romans eat pizza? / Did the Romans eat pasta?

Sadly not, only later Italians did. Their empire deserved to crumble for not inventing either smh.

Did the Romans invade Britain? / Did the Romans invade England?

They did indeed in AD 43 under Emperor Claudius, and they only began to withdraw in the late 300s when the city of Rome was being threatened by a Germanic tribe called the Visigoths.

Did the Romans invade Ireland?

No. Even now, archaeologists have no idea to what extent they communicated or even knew of each other.

Did the Romans celebrate Christmas?

Emperor Constantine only began converting the empire to Christianity from AD 313 (they had been pagan previously), and the earliest evidence we have of Romans celebrating Christmas was in 336 AD, very late in Roman history. Throughout most of Roman history, therefore, no they did not celebrate Christmas.

(They did have a festival which was similarly important and similarly timed (mid-December) called the Saturnalia. It also involved communal partying, gift exchanges and a general spirit of liberty (e.g. slaves could order around and punish their masters) - it was one of the most anticipated festivals of the Roman calendar. However, the purpose was very different: it was to worship the pagan god Saturn, the father of god-king Jupiter and the previous ruler of the world before its occupation by humanity. Namely, the festival marked a return to the ancient ‘Golden Age’ in which nature was dominant, peaceful and uncorrupted.)

Did ancient Greece have emperors? / Did ancient Greece have kings?

No emperors, traditionally Greece was comprised of city-states ruled by kings (or theoretically by the dēmos, the people, if you were Athens). Under Roman occupation it did answer to Rome’s leaders (consuls, then later emperors), but the idea of emperors was much more late-Roman than Greek.

Did ancient Greece celebrate Christmas?

Nope. It was originally pagan and did not celebrate any Christian holidays until a) it was conquered by Rome b) Rome later converted to Christianity, thus enforcing it on the rest of the empire. However, this conversion point was so long after the ‘heroic’ and ‘classical’ periods of Greece that by the time it did become mostly Christian, it was no longer ‘ancient Greece’ in the same sense.

Did ancient Greece have electricity?

Y’all are asking the real questions out here, that’s for sure lmao. 

Nope, electricity wasn’t used anywhere as a power source until Thomas Edison’s studies about two thousand years later.

God though, a good ol’ GPS would have saved Odysseus a lot of trouble.

Did ancient Greece and Rome overlap?

Oh, nelly...

Greece predated Rome by at nearly a thousand years, but Greece’s and Rome’s histories together lasted for centuries, even before the latter conquered the former. It’s why they are studied together as one field of academia. Many Italian settlements were in fact Greek colonies. Classical Greek helped shape Latin. Much of Roman religion was inspired by that of the Greeks. Many Greeks could speak Latin and many Romans could speak Greek. Roman art, philosophy and architecture was particularly fascinated by that which was Greek - to put it in meme format, the crab is Roman culture and the crocodile is Greek culture. And these are just the absolute basics, entire tomes have been written on Greece’s and Rome’s somewhat symbiotic relationship.

TLDR hell yes they did.

Did ancient Greece have a flag? / Did ancient Greece have a constitution?

Nah. Although history often refers to Greece as one country, one culture, it was more a collection of independent city-states with their own identities and constitutions. 

They all had three things in common: religion (+ the moral/social codes which came along with it), language, and (in most cases) enemies from abroad -  therefore in later centuries, as well as their city-based nationalities, they did all call themselves the Hellenes. If you were a fellow Hellenic, you’d be able to work and live in other Greek cities with less trouble than if you were to try, say, in a ‘barbarian’ land such as Persia. Greeks were civilised; everyone else was an uncultured brute. Hence, their sense of unity was more from fear of the outside, from xenophobia, than from internal harmony.

Because of this, there was never an altogether complete sense of assimilation. Different cities had distinct dialects, favoured different gods/cults within the wider Pantheon, often warred against each other (especially Athens and Sparta, whew), fed their own specific cultures and law-sets and reputations. Nationality and citizenship in that age were not really about country or region, the world was just too small for that. You wouldn’t say ‘Hi I’m Phoebe and I’m Greek’, you’d say ‘Hi I’m Phoebe and I’m from the city of Halicarnassus.’ The closest analogy I can really think of is the cities in the dystopian series, Mortal Engines.

So no, they didn’t have a single flag or constitution. There was just not enough unity between them all.

Did ancient Greece trade?

Initially I was going to wave this off as a silly question because ‘hurr durr everyone trades’ but ACTUALLY. 

Along with the rest of the eastern Mediterranean, Greece had its own Dark Ages between the fall of its early society (aka Mycenaean Greece) and the rise of Homeric-style poetry and culture, i.e. between the 1100s and 700s BC. Communication in general was absolutely awful: there were no great armies, no great cultural progressions, and yes, no substantial trade. The fact that Greece was then feeling down in the dumps also discouraged foreign trade. 

It took the bard Homer’s influence to get people to start thinking, creating, travelling and thus mass-trading again - this sudden surge in activity eventually led to Greece’s Classical Period, i.e. 4th century BC, you’ll probably imagine gleaming Athenian pillars. Increased thinking and culture led to increased politics/nationalism, increased p/n led to increased warring and military action, increased warring improved transport and communication, and WHOOSH suddenly trade took off.

So basically, Mycenaean Greek trade was good (as far as we can tell), Dark Ages Greek trade was shocking, Classical Greek trade was quite literally revolutionary.

Did ancient Greece have lions?

Yep! However, they weren’t like the sub-Saharan lions you’re probably imagining right now - those are Panthera leo, but the Eurasian lions that would have been in Greece were Panthera spelaea.

Nevertheless there were indeed lions and they played a huge role in Greek mythology and literature. The Nemean Lion was the first of Hercules’ Twelve Labours; Homer, the trendsetting legendary lad that he was, created a trope of comparing something innocent and vulnerable to something vicious and savage and desperate by using the analogy of a lamb and a hungry lion.

Did ancient Greece have a democracy?

Nope, only one city named Athens did. Don’t get me wrong, it was at the time and still is a big deal considering it hadn’t been done before, BUT there are three important things to note:

It was ONLY Athens which had a democracy - every other Greek city kept their kingships.

The Athenian democracy wasn’t what we’d call democracy. Only free, Athenian-on-both-sides men could vote and participate in local politics - this left out all slaves, all women (even if they were Athenian), and all foreigners or residents of foreign descent (no longer how long you and your family had lived in and worked in and contributed to the city and community).

It wasn’t foolproof considering it eventually got overthrown by power-seeking tyrants.

i.e. a part of ancient Greece had a democracy.

[statistical-improbabilities]

OCtober Day 2: Mercy

Thanks again to @oc-growth-and-development!

Ulla Teru is a siren with the power to conjure illusions to trick the five senses, but great power comes with a great price, and for Ulla this takes the form of headaches and hallucinations. She’s just recently taken over the siren kingdom and has made some interesting reforms as queen. She’s a charismatic leader, but a villain in the end, and well into an insanity arc that’s been pretty fun to write.

CW: emotional abuse, physical abuse (implied), hallucinations, fictional politics

Being a queen of a kingdom was a deceptively simple thing. It was being a queen of the people, Ulla had found, that was a challenge.

In an effort to convey her dedication to Kraseux to her citizens, one of her first measures enacted upon taking the throne was to hold open sessions for petitioners to come to the palace and air their grievances with the kingdom. The previous king had been absent frequently, and grossly out of touch with the people he dared call his, when in actuality, he had no clue what his subjects thought or demanded of him as a ruler.

Ulla would not rule like him. She would open her doors to her subjects, greet them from her throne with decorum and a charismatic smile as they knelt before her and poured out their hearts in hopes of some small mercy. And she would listen. She would promise nothing else, but she would listen, and often the illusion of a compassionate ear was enough, and they would go on their way feeling satisfied, approving of her methods and policy with unwavering loyalty. It was rather exhausting, but necessary.

The latest batch of petitioners were much like those from the day before, and every day before that: miserable, desperate, and forgettable. Each face blended into the next, an endless stream of flashing scales and tear-filled eyes as they begged for an extension on a loan payment, or an exemption from military service, or whatever else it was. Ulla listened attentively to each one, and had her attendants take note when it seemed appropriate. If she was feeling particularly generous, she might review the notes later that night before discarding them, but she wasn’t feeling generous often.

She called forward a Renegade who stood at the front of the line, noting the way he glanced back at the guards at the entrance to her throne room before kneeling. He looked as if he’d been turned shortly before becoming a grandfather, yet he wouldn’t meet her eyes. Ulla’s smile curled just a bit wider at that. She knew she looked young for a queen, even younger for a siren, but she commanded respect all the same. The illusion of maturity she wove over her true features only amplified it.

She let the silence hang in the air between them for a moment, then spoke in a soft tone, each word rippling with a smoothness like refined silk. “Rise, and state your business.”

The Renegade swallowed nervously, but drew himself up from his position. “Your Majesty, I’ve come to request compensation for an injury received while serving the kingdom. My superiors… they promised to file the request, but that was six months ago, and escalating the issue has done no good.”

Ulla raised a brow. “May I inquire as to the specifics of this… injury?” she questioned, leaning forward ever so slightly.

“The alignment in my tail is damaged,” he confessed, and indeed, Ulla could see where one fin lagged behind the other, even as he held himself in place. “I was hit by debris from the sinking of a human ship.”

A tense quiet persisted between them for a few moments, and Ulla tapped one finger against her chin in thought, flicking her own tail lazily. “Marianne,” she said, beckoning one of her attendants over, “please escort this gentleman to the proper offices in the military division to file his request and have it sent off.” The attendant hurried over and took the Renegade by the elbow, and Ulla’s demure smile briefly reappeared when he flinched. He was escorted away quickly, and she motioned for her scribe to record the details of their interaction before calling the next petitioner.

“Next.”

The black scales of a Deceptor came into view, and Ulla inclined her head ever so briefly as the woman knelt. She looked older than the Renegade before her, but no less respectful. The majority of Ulla’s own divining had been supportive of her reign since she was merely the Deceptor monarch, and they had reaped the rewards once she’d become queen. The days of Deceptors being reviled for their illusionary powers were soon coming to a close, and she was doing what she could to uplift their status as the superior divining of sirens. No longer would they be second-class citizens—not in Ulla’s Kraseux. “Rise,” she said.

“Your Majesty, I—I’ve noticed that more people in the capital are wearing Veritium jewelry,” the Deceptor woman began haltingly. Ulla sat up a little straighter, and conceded a small nod.

“Yes, I’ve noticed the same.” The cursed metal had fallen back into vogue when she’d assumed the role of queen, though Adonis had long since been a proponent of its illusion-breaking abilities. Not only did it stifle any Deceptor’s power who was too near to withstand it, it also bestowed adverse side effects that took any number of forms, depending on length and intensity of exposure. Ulla’s head began to ache just at the thought of it, even though her Deceptor guards strictly enforced her new policy forbidding the wearing of Veritium to these meetings.

The woman nodded vigorously. “I’ve heard tell that you plan on introducing legislation restricting the sale of Veritium in the capital. I came to request that you extend the boundary of that legislation to include the outskirts of the kingdom and the nearest colony as well. Some of my close friends find it hard to leave their homes without becoming ill. It’s harmful to our livelihoods. We can’t keep living like this, Your Majesty.”

“No,” Ulla mused, “you certainly can’t. Did you get that?” Her scribe paused to give her a short nod, then returned to writing frantically. Ulla smiled, watching the tension ease from the woman’s face as she received a tentative smile in return. “I’ll take that into consideration. You are dismissed.”

That woman’s obvious relief was quickly replaced as the next petitioner entered, an Auxilia man who appeared close to tears as he all but collapsed before her throne. Ulla’s smile vanished. “State your business.”

“Please, Your Majesty,” he begged, glancing fearfully at the guards, then back up to Ulla. He seemed quite intimidated. “The—the property taxes that you raised—I’ve been late on my rent for three months. If I can’t pay this time, I’ll get evicted—”

She held up one hand, and he fell silent. “Those taxes are necessary for repairing the infrastructure of our kingdom,” she said, exceedingly careful to keep her tone diplomatic and measured. “On the west end of the kingdom, correct? Your taxes have been raised to allow for maintenance of transportation currents in your area. Surely you knew this when you signed the contract for your lease?”

“I—I did, but… Your Majesty. It’s not just me. Other Auxilia in the area are struggling too, and—and Harmonia… we don’t need maintenance on transportation currents, we need to be able to live in our homes. I can’t make enough money to get by, there’s no jobs anywhere nearby because I don’t have the right qualifications. Please, Your Majesty—have mercy, or we’ll all be out on the streets, please have mercy…”

Ulla watched impassively as the Auxilia man worked in vain to conceal his desperation, his distress that was bringing him closer and closer to tears. Slowly, she lifted her gaze to meet the eyes of a guard, and inclined her head, motioning them over. To the man, she murmured, “Your concerns are not unwarranted, but rest assured, I and my fellow monarchs will find a solution for not just a few Auxilia, but the betterment of the entire kingdom. Now, if you would kindly compose yourself, I’ll have you escorted out.” She left no room for argument. It would do her public image no good for him to dissolve into a sobbing mess in her throne room.

Who was he to demand mercy from his queen?

~

She’d only heard a few more petitioners before closing requests for the afternoon, instructing her attendants to say that she had a great deal of work to attend to if anyone asked. They would assume that she’d taken many sirens’ requests to heart and was already beginning to process them, and she would allow them to think that for as long as they desired.

Ulla held no trust in her attendants. Only enough to know they would convey the message she told them to, nothing more, which was why she told no one the reason she’d retired to her rooms after the sessions was that a pounding headache was beginning to return. They were becoming easier to stave off now that Veritium was forbidden from most instances where it might come in close contact with her, but it was never completely avoidable. Adonis had always been paranoid, and some of the petitioners had worn scale implants that could not be removed for a short meeting. If her hallucinations were to arrive, Ulla wanted them to stay private.

The kingdom would never approve of a queen gone insane, no matter how much expertise she had taken in weaving her mask.

When Ulla reached her chambers, she locked the door behind her so no attendants could trail in her wake, then removed the crown that had sat upon her head and set it aside. There were no mirrors in her rooms, as there never had been. Her illusions could trick a mirror, but if the hallucinations so commanded it, the illusions could fall just as easily.

She drifted over to a window and clasped her hands behind her back. The Auxilia man was not yet out of sight, swimming far slower than the sirens around him due to his lack of a true tail. After a moment, she turned away from the window, but she could still hear his voice in the back of her mind, growing louder and more desperate until it filled the room.

“Please, have mercy… have mercy, or we’ll all be out on the streets… please have mercy…”

At some point, his voice had become her own. She wasn’t sure when.

Her father stood over her, the room distorted and rippling around them. Mercy, Ulla? he murmured, saccharine and dangerous, and she shrank away. Her tail was made of lead with the iridescent glint of Veritium, and it pulled her to the ground.

“No, please… I didn’t mean to, Father,” she whispered as her leaden tail gave way to leaden legs, short and spindly and unable to support the weight of her pleas. “I don’t—I don’t know what I did…”

Why, you’ve killed that man, the hallucination said with a wicked, sharp-toothed grin, and Ulla shook her head violently.

“I didn’t, it’s not my fault!”

Oh, but it is, her father said. You’ve killed that man as sure as you’ve killed your own mother. She’d be disgusted if she saw you like this—but she can’t, because she’s not alive to see it. The hallucination stepped closer, and Ulla shrank away again. It was no use crying for her mother—she never came when her father did. She’d died minutes after Ulla was born. Ulla’s mind could only conjure the dead she had known, because to be known was to never truly die.

Do you really wish to test me, Ulla? You look like your mother did at that age, you know. It would be a shame if you were to force me to change that.

“No, please,” she begged, loathing every word that fell from her tongue and yet being powerless to stop them. “Have mercy, please have mercy…”

The hallucination raised its ghostly hand, and the fingers elongated into jagged talons. Shadows around the edge of the room pressed in closer, piling heavy onto her chest and wrapping around her legs and arms and mouth. Her father brought his talons down. Ulla closed her eyes and screamed.

 ~

When Ulla opened her eyes, she was the only one in the room. The side of her face stung, but when she raised a shaking finger to probe for injury, nothing was there. A stream of bubbles rose up towards the ceiling, but no figures stood looming over her where she lay crumpled on her side on the floor.

Slowly, she sat up. The pain was an illusion, and it would go away when she regained control. She’d lost control for far too long that time. Her hallucinogenic episodes were lasting longer and becoming more frequent, but nobody had witnessed it. No one had been around when she’d lost control of her mind and her powers, and it would stay that way.

The streetlamps outside her window were beginning to glow, betraying the time that had passed. They’d be expecting her for a state dinner soon. Carefully, Ulla began to weave her illusions over her face once more, and only when the painstaking process was finished did she allow herself to breathe.

No one knew what happened when Ulla’s illusions fell.

A queen did not beg for mercy.

No one would ever know.

[elbiotipo]

América Invicta

The Capaq Inka still rules the Four Regions. The great temples still cast their shadow over Lake Texoco. About three centuries ago, conquerors from overseas tried, and failed, to impose their rule over these lands.

It is the year 1800 -or so- on the Christian calendar. Much has happened since then.

Tawantinsuyu, the great empire of the Andes, lays claim to the whole of Septentrional America. Its wealth and power unmatched, millions of people of all creeds and nations live on its golden cities. The great city of Qusqu, the Navel Of The World, is the center of culture and trade for the entire continent, its surrounding terraces grow food from all over the empire. Warriors clad in golden armor bearing muskets ride Megatheriums to the farthest reaches of the empire to enforce the will of the Capaq Inka.

Yet the many peoples of the Americas do not bow easily. For the trading cities of the living jungle of the Paranaguazú, the Muisca kingdoms from the highlands of the north, the Carib towns on the warm shores of the Atlantic Ocean, the thousand tribes of the dry forests of Chaqu, the horse riders of windy Patagonia, the Gauchos of the Pampas, the rebellious former colonies of Buen Ayre, Nueva Granada and Recife, the monasteries of the Jesuits, the free Quilombos of former slaves, the mysterious kingdoms of Xingú and the defiant Tamoio Confederation, the rule of the Inka is more of a formality than anything concrete. Roads and tambos made by the great Inkanate connect millions and are full of merchants, explorers, soldiers, wizards, priests and adventurers at the service of many powers (or none), trying to make their fortune in this land.

They are not the only ones on this continent. Up North, the Obsidian Alliance, the successors of the fallen Triple Alliance of the Mexica, try to keep together the disparate city-states of Mesoamerica. The Mayan principalities expand into the volcanic rainforests of the south. The paradisiacal Caribbean Sea is a place of intrigue for Taíno war canoes, European galleons, and African caravels who compete for the rich trade routes. ‘Pirates’ free slaves and raid plantations on the coasts, and their sons and daughters make new lives in freedom. Refugees from the European Wars of Religion inmigrate to the New World to find a place to begin anew. Gauchos and Llaneros herd the giant herds of cattle in the plains, and face off against bizarre spirits and creatures. Grand Treasure Ships from the East (or is it West?) come to the seaports to trade with the rich empires. Jesuit priests roam the imperial roads, preaching the word of Christ and teaching the sciences. Muslim traders call to prayer from miranets rising above the tropical shores. Up the Missisippi grow the cities of the Mound Builders and beyond the heartland of the Obsidian Alliance the dry deserts bloom with powerful civilizations. Uncanny wandering sorcerers travel through the land, full of wisdom and powers so strong that many serve the empires of the continent; others are comfortable tending to the needs of the common people or enhancing their knowledge.

And much remains unknown. Herds of giant animals, supposedly long-extinct, roam the plains of the continent and sleep under its hidden swamps; armored mammals, giant reptiles, elephants completely unlike those in Africa or Asia, majestic feathered serpents… The forests are alive with a thousand spirits, who resist the attempts of greedy men to tame them. The winds seem to talk with their own voice, and old men and women claim to speak for the land itself. Giant sea ‘monsters’ roam the cold seas of the South. Christians testify of great miracles, and many saints, recognized or not, are venerated all over the land. Many tribes, maybe even entire civilizations, are still unknown, hidden by mountains, jungle, or uncanny fog. Explorers hear legends about animal-people and powerful sorcerers, and there is reason to believe them. Sunk treasure galleons are sought by pirates and adventurers. Mysterious books and relics are lost in libraries and palaces.

And in the great cities of the continent, from Qusqu to Tenochtitlán, Maracaibo to Palmares, Quito to Rio de Janeiro, Recife to Buen Ayre, smoky chimneys and glass buildings rise over the old temples and cabildos, powered by strange machines operating by a stranger combination of magic and science, heralding the start of a new era.

It is, indeed, a New World.

...

The mighty Paraná River slowly made way besides the little port town of Corrientes. Winter was ending; the muddy, narriw streets were decorated by a thousand flowers falling from the lapacho trees, every little breeze tinted by pink, yellow and white.

The first sunday of spring slowly winded down.

In the cabildo, the governor of the Argentine Confederation and the curaca of the Four Regions loudly debated about tribute and power and who had most of it, like they always did. The bells of the churches announced the evening service. Fishermen brought the fruits of a long afternoon in the waters shadowed by the riparian forests. The patrol cutters of the Confederation sailed into the port. The stalls on the central plaza were closing down, farmhands heading with their cattle back home to the fields.

In a tiny pulpería above the river cliffs -not very tall, but still giving a nice view of the sleeping sun above the forests on the other side of the river- the Witch and the Gaucho fought back the early heat of spring with a cold beer.

"...So, " the Witch continued explaining, excitedly, "the book says there's this point, somewhere. The beginning of it all. Or maybe the end. Most probably both, or perhaps all what it's in between."

"Uh huh. I see." Answered the Gaucho. Despite his tone of voice, he was geniunely interested. If a little confused.

"And we could see through it. It, somehow, reflects all the universe. Maybe more." Just to even think about other universes, dreamed the Witch! "But it's very confusing to look at it. It's too much for us to percieve. Because I mean, surely you can hear and smell and feel too. But you can't process it. It's like, like..."

"Like looking through a glass marble near your eye, with all those strange scratches and... things. Only it's the entire universe." Affirmed the Gaucho, drinking another sip from the beer.

He wasn't sure if the alcohol made him a better philosopher or it just made him remember his childhood days playing with marbles.

"YES! That's right! You get me! I KNEW buying you a beer was worth it."

"It was worth for me, at least..." He smiled. She smiled back.

"Now, when you see through a marble," she continued "you see all that weird stuff because your eyes only can see through a single... size so to speak."

A horn blared.

Parrots flew away from the palm trees. The very wind seemed to stop still.

The Witch, though, continued.

"...but imagine if we could see with different eyes. If we could..."

"Che... What the hell is that noise?"

They looked at the great Paraná, which was suddenly covered by foamy waves.

It was a boat.

It wasn't, though, one of the Guaraní fishing canoes that always sailed up and down the Paraná. Neither it was one of the proud sailboats of the Confederation, or the golden arks of the Capaq Inka.

It was a huge metal monolith, like some kind of iron bathtub uncannily floating in the water. Two chimneys vomited black smoke into the golden skies, and chains of... magical? light illuminated the ship. Shipmen dressed in white marched through the deck as the vessel made way through the river, with no sails, with no oars, with no magic, apparently propelled by hubris itself.

And while neither the Witch or the Gaucho were very familiar with ships, they could certainly see that those big metal boxes with cannons pointing from them were inmensely powerful weapons.

In the back, in golden, exquisitely craved letters, the name of the vessel read:

'HMS Dreadnought'

[ayittey1]

The Role of Women In Traditional African Societies

One area where the traditional societies were well advanced than their Western counterparts was in the area of women’s rights. Women in non-Western traditional societies were long “liberated” before those in the West. In fact, the Western feminist movement drew a lot of inspiration from the role women played in traditional Iroquois society. According to Jacobsen (2009),

 An aspect of Native American life that alternately intrigued, perplexed, and sometimes alarmed European and European-American observers, most of whom were male, during the 17th and 18th centuries, was the influential role of women. In many cases they hold pivotal positions in Native political systems. Iroquois women, for example, nominate men to positions of leadership and can “dehorn,” or impeach, them for misconduct. Women often have veto power over men’s plans for war. In a matrilineal society — and nearly all the confederacies that bordered the colonies were matrilineal — women owned all household goods except the men’s clothes, weapons, and hunting implements. They also were the primary conduits of culture from generation to generation.

 The role of women in Iroquois society inspired some of the most influential advocates of modern feminism in the United States. The Iroquois example figures importantly in a seminal book in what Sally R. Wagner calls “the first wave of feminism,” Matilda Joslyn Gage’s Woman, Church, and State (1893). In that book, Gage acknowledges, according to Wagner’s research, that “the modern world [is] indebted [to the Iroquois] for its first conception of inherent rights, natural equality of condition, and the establishment of a civilized government upon this basis.”

Gage was one of the 19th century’s three most influential American feminists, with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Gage herself was admitted to the Iroquois Council of Matrons and was adopted into the Wolf Clan, with the name Karonienhawi, “she who holds [up] the sky.” (Jacobsen, 2009).

 It is not just in the Iroquois nation that women held important political positions. As we have shown above, most traditional societies have Clan or Queen Mothers with the power to appoint and depose a chief.  Her role is to scold, reprimand and rebuke an erring chief since a bad chief brings shame to the royal family.  If the chief continues in his errant ways, the Queen Mother has the power to recall and depose the chief.

 In other traditional; systems, women even played a more visible political role:

 ·        Women ruled the Mongol Empire (Weatherford, 2005).

 ·        Quen Nzinga of the Mbundu people of Angola put up a ferocious resistance against Portuguese colonial rule (http://www.blackpast.org/?q=gah/queen-nzinga-1583-1663).

 ·        The kings of Dahomey were assisted by a cabinet which consisted of the migan (prime minister); the meu (finance minister) created by Tegbesu; yovo-gan (viceroy of Whydah); the to-no-num (the chief eunuch and minister in charge of protocol); the tokpo (minister of agriculture); the agan (general of the army); and the adjaho (minister of the king's palace and the chief of police). The most interesting and unique feature of the cabinet was that each of these posts had a female counterpart who complemented him but reported independently to the king (Ayittey, 2006: 243).

 ·        During his reign, Gezo increased the number of the full-time soldiers from about 5,000 in 1840 to 12,000 by 1845. This army consisted not only of men but also of women, the famous Amazons `devoted to the person of the king and valorous in war.' This unique female section was created and organized by Gezo and consisted of 2,500 female soldiers divided into three brigades. Commanders of this army were also top cabinet ministers in charge of the central government thus enhancing the position of the army in decision making (Boahen, 1986; p.86).

 ·        In the Yoruba Kingdom (Nigeria) in early times it was not necessarily a male who was chosen as ruler, and the traditions of Oyo, Sabe, Ondo, and Ilesa record the reigns of female oba (kings) (Smith, 1969: 13).

 ·        In Asante, the British captured and exiled the king to Sierra Leone in January 1897. But to the Asante, it was the golden stool, not the king, was the symbol and soul of their nation. When the British made a vain attempt to capture the golden stool in April 1900, they met a stiff and humiliating defeat at the hands of an Asante woman, Yaa Asantewa, the Queen Mother of Edweso. Though this rebellion was finally crushed, the British never gained possession of the golden stool. Of course, British historians rarely mention this defeat, much less at the hands of a woman!

 Needless to say, there were bad women rulers too. One was Dode Akabi, whose accession to power constituted the first major female figure in Gá, and indeed Gold Coast. But in her long reign, 1610-1635, she cast aside the practice of rule by consensus and issued a series of brutal decrees which displeased her people. She was f killed after she had ordered her subjects to sink a well at a place called Akabikenke (Ayittey, 2006: 232)

 Women In The Traditional Economic System

 With the exception of Islamic countries in the Middle East, women also played a much more visible and important role in the traditional economy – especially in agriculture and market trading. Most traditional societies practice sexual division of labor. In early times, activities considered dangerous and physically strenuous such as waging wars, hunting, fishing, manufacturing (cloth weaving, pottery, leatherworks, iron smelting, sculpturing, etc) and building were male occupations. Food cultivation and processing were traditionally reserved for women. Since the family's entire needs could not be produced on the farm, a surplus was necessary to exchange for those items. It was only natural that trade in foodstuffs and vending came to be handled by women and for market governance to lie in their hands. Indeed in many localities, market rules were generally laid down and enforced by "Market Queens", usually selected from the women traders.

 Women still play this role today since agriculture continues to account for a higher share of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of developing countries. For example, three out of four Africans are engaged in agriculture, with women making the most significant contribution. They perform “some 90 percent of the work of food processing, 80 percent of food storage tasks, 90 percent of hoeing and weeding, and 60 percent of harvesting and marketing, besides load carrying and transport services” (FAO, 1985, Chapter 7).[i] Rural markets and trade are also largely handled by women. Local farm produce ‑ either cash crops or food crops ‑ are marketed at the local market, almost invariably by women.

 In West Africa, for example, market activity has been dominated by women for centuries:

 ·        In 1879, Governor Rowe of Sierra Leone expressed his admiration of these women:  “The genius of the Sierra Leone people is commercial; from babyhood the Aku girl is a trader, and as she grows up she carries her small wares wherever she can go with safety. The further she goes from the European trading depots the better is her market” (White, 1987; p.27).

 ·        The market in every Ga town is run entirely by women. No trading, except that initiated by foreigners is ever carried on by men...Many of the women are very shrewd and ingenious in their trading. One day when good catches of fish were coming in I saw a woman, who had no fishing men‑folk, exchange a bowlful of fried akpiti cakes for a panful of fresh fish, and then hastily sell the fish to a `stranger' who was trying to make up a load to take away. The sale of the fish brought her three shillings and four pence. The sale of the cakes would have brought her one and sixpence. The materials out of which she made the cakes probably cost less than sixpence (Field, 1940: 64).

 ·        The market place among the Akan of Ghana is largely a woman's world. Except for the small percentage of traders who are men, the processes of trade are said to be mysteries to men. Men often seem uncomfortable in the market; they prefer to send a woman or a child to make purchases for them, and avoid entering it if possible. For women, the market place is not only a place of business but of leisure as well. Sales are sometimes slow and women chat and josh with each other” (McCall, 1962).

 ·        In South Dahomey, commercial gains are a woman's own property and she spends her money free of all control...Trade gives to women a partial economic independence and if their business is profitable they might even be able to lend some money ‑ a few thousand francs ‑ to their husbands against their future crops (Tardits and Tardits, 1962).

 The object in trading was to make a profit. The Yoruba women "trade for profit, bargaining with both the producer and the consumer in order to obtain as large a margin of profit as possible" (Bascom, 1984; p.26). And profits made from trading were kept by the women in almost all of the West African countries.

 Though the amount of profit was often small by today’s standards, many women traders were able to accumulate enough for a variety of purposes: to reinvest and expand their trading activities, to cover domestic and personal expenses since spouses have to keep the house in good condition, to replace old cooking utensils, to buy their own clothes and to educate their children. The case of Abi Jones was earlier cited where profits from her trading were used to educate her sons. Indeed, many of the post‑colonial leaders of Africa were similarly educated ‑ with funds accumulated from trading profits.

 Another important use of trade profits was the financing of political activity. As Herskovits and Harwitz  (1964) put it: "Support for the nationalist movements that were the instruments of political independence came in considerable measure from the donations of the market women" (p.7).

 To start trading, women often looked to their husbands for support or borrowed from the extended family pot. For example,

As soon as he is married the Ga husband is expected to set his wife up in trade (`ewo le dzra' ‑ he puts her in the market). It is part of every woman's normal occupation to engage in some sort of trade and every reasonable husband is expected to start her off...When she is unlucky in her trading and loses her capital her husband is expected to set her up again, but if she loses her capital three times she is a bad manager and he has no further obligation in the matter (Field, 1940:55).

 Market trading generally made African women economically independent. Chatting at the market place also provided an important social release for pent‑up emotions.  Of course, today, much of this market activity has spilled over into the informal sector, where women still play an important role in food-related activities, such as, food vending by the roadside.

 [i] Perhaps this gender characteristic explains why Africa’s agriculture revolution never materialized. In many countries, it was crafted with the help of Western agricultural experts who tended to prescribe “mechanization” with the importation of male-driven agricultural machinery.

References Ayittey, George B.N. (2006) Indigenous African Institutions. Dobbs Ferry, NY: Transnational Publishers.

Bascom, William (1984). The Yoruba Of Southwestern Nigeria. Prospect Heights: Waveland Press, Inc.

Boahen, A.A. (1986). Topics in West African History. New York: Longman.

 Bohannan, Paul and George Dalton eds. (1962). Markets In Africa. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Field, M. J. (1940). Social Organization of the Ga People. Accra: Government of the Gold Coast Printing

Herskovits, M.J. and Harwitz, M. eds. (1964). Economic Transition In Africa. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

 Jacobsen, E. (2009) The Iroquois Constitutionhttps://ca01001129.schoolwires.net/cms/lib7/ca01001129/centricity/domain/221/the_iroquois_constitution.pdf

Johansen, Bruce E. (1990). “Native American Societies and the Evolution of Democracy in

America, 1600-1800,” Ethnohistory, Vol. 37, No. 3 (Summer, 1990): pp. 279-290.

______________ “Native American Ideas of Governance and U.S. Constitution

http://www.america.gov/st/peopleplace-english/2009/June/20090617110824wrybakcuh0.5986096.html

McCall, Daniel F. (1962). "The Koforidua Market," in Bohannan and Dalton, eds. (1962).

 Smith, Robert S. (1969).  Kingdoms of The Yoruba. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd

 Tardits Claudine and Claude (1962). "Traditional Market Economy in South Dahomey" in  Bohannan and Dalton (1962).

 Weatherford, Jack (1989). Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas transformed the  World. New York: Ballantine, 1989.

_______"The Women Who Ruled the Mongol Empire", Globalist Document - Global History, June 20, 2005

 White, E. Frances (1987). Sierra Leone's Settler Women Traders. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

[arcticdementor]

Can you believe ...?

Perhaps no question has been repeated more times in reaction to more events this year than that one.

The most recent major outrage in the Jewish community, now several news cycles behind us, came on the Shabbat before Yom Kippur—the holiest day in the Jewish calendar—when many American Jews seemed dumbfounded by what was to me predictable news: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, progressive superstar, had pulled out of an event honoring Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister assassinated because of his efforts to make peace with the Palestinians. Rabin was, as Bill Clinton said at his funeral, “a martyr for his nation’s peace.”

…

But it wasn’t AOC who was mixed up. The savvy politician had read the room and was sending a clear signal about who belongs in the new progressive coalition and who does not. The confusion—and there seems to be a good deal of it these days—is among American Jews who think that by submitting to ever-changing loyalty tests they can somehow maintain the old status quo and their place inside of it.

Did you see that the Ethical Culture Fieldston School hosted a speaker that equated Israelis with Nazis? Did you know that Brearley is now asking families to write a statement demonstrating their commitment to “anti-racism”? Did you see that Chelsea Handler tweeted a clip of Louis Farrakhan? Did you see that protesters tagged a synagogue in Kenosha with “Free Palestine” graffiti? Did you hear about the march in D.C. where they chanted “Israel, we know you, you murder children too”? Did you hear that the Biden campaign apologized to Linda Sarsour after initially disavowing her? Did you see that Twitter suspended Bret Weinstein’s civic organization but still allows the Iranian ayatollah to openly promote genocide of the Jewish people? Did you see that Mayor Bill de Blasio scapegoated “the Jewish community” for the spread of COVID in New York, while defending mass protests on the grounds that this is a “historic moment of change”?

Listen, it’s been a hell of a year. We all have a lot going on, much of it unnerving and some of it dire. Moreover, many of these stories only surface on places like Twitter; they don’t make it into the pages of The New York Times or your friends’ Facebook feeds, which is where most Americans get their news these days. Reporters don’t cover these stories adequately, contextualizing them, telling readers which ones are true and which ones aren’t, which ones matter and which ones don't.

So it makes sense that many smart, well-intentioned people are confused. Or rather: Looking for someone to explain why an emerging movement that purports to advance the ideals they have always supported—fairness, justice, righting historical wrongs—feels like it is doing the opposite.

…

To understand the enormity of the change we are now living through, take a moment to understand America as the overwhelming majority of its Jews believed it was—and perhaps as we always assumed it would be.

It was liberal.

Not liberal in the narrow, partisan sense, but liberal in the most capacious and distinctly American sense of that word: the belief that everyone is equal because everyone is created in the image of God. The belief in the sacredness of the individual over the group or the tribe. The belief that the rule of law—and equality under that law—is the foundation of a free society. The belief that due process and the presumption of innocence are good and that mob violence is bad. The belief that pluralism is a source of our strength; that tolerance is a reason for pride; and that liberty of thought, faith, and speech are the bedrocks of democracy.

The liberal worldview was one that recognized that there were things—indeed, the most important things—in life that were located outside of the realm of politics: friendships, art, music, family, love. This was a world in which Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg could be close friends. Because, as Scalia once said, some things are more important than votes.

Crucially, this liberalism relied on the view that the Enlightenment tools of reason and the scientific method might have been designed by dead white guys, but they belonged to everyone, and they were the best tools for human progress that have ever been devised.

Racism was evil because it contradicted the foundations of this worldview, since it judged people not based on the content of their character, but on the color of their skin. And while America’s founders were guilty of undeniable hypocrisy, their own moral failings did not invalidate their transformational project. The founding documents were not evil to the core but “magnificent,” as Martin Luther King Jr. put it, because they were “a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.” In other words: The founders themselves planted the seeds of slavery’s destruction. And our second founding fathers—abolitionists like Frederick Douglass—made it so. America would never be perfect, but we could always strive toward building a more perfect union.

I didn’t even know that this worldview had a name because it was baked into everything I came into contact with—my parents’ worldviews, the schools they sent me to, the synagogues we attended, the magazines and newspapers we read, and so on.

…

No longer. American liberalism is under siege. There is a new ideology vying to replace it.

No one has yet decided on the name for the force that has come to unseat liberalism. Some say it’s “Social Justice.” The author Rod Dreher has called it “therapeutic totalitarianism.” The writer Wesley Yang refers to it as “the successor ideology”—as in, the successor to liberalism.

…

The new creed’s premise goes something like this: We are in a war in which the forces of justice and progress are arrayed against the forces of backwardness and oppression. And in a war, the normal rules of the game—due process; political compromise; the presumption of innocence; free speech; even reason itself—must be suspended. Indeed, those rules themselves were corrupt to begin with—designed, as they were, by dead white males in order to uphold their own power.

…

Critical race theory says there is no such thing as neutrality, not even in the law, which is why the very notion of colorblindness—the Kingian dream of judging people not based on the color of their skin but by the content of their character—must itself be deemed racist. Racism is no longer about individual discrimination. It is about systems that allow for disparate outcomes among racial groups. If everyone doesn’t finish the race at the same time, then the course must have been flawed and should be dismantled.

…

In fact, any feature of human existence that creates disparity of outcomes must be eradicated: The nuclear family, politeness, even rationality itself can be defined as inherently racist or evidence of white supremacy, as a Smithsonian institution suggested this summer. The KIPP charter schools recently eliminated the phrase “work hard” from its famous motto “Work Hard. Be Nice.” because the idea of working hard “supports the illusion of meritocracy.” Denise Young Smith, one of the first Black people to reach Apple’s executive team, left her job in the wake of asserting that skin color wasn’t the only legitimate marker of diversity—the victim of a “diversity culture” that, as the writer Zaid Jilani has noted, is spreading “across the entire corporate world and is enforced by a highly educated activist class.”

The most powerful exponent of this worldview is Ibram X. Kendi. His book “How to Be an Antiracist” is on the top of every bestseller list; his photograph graces GQ; he is on Time’s most influential people of the year; and his outfit at Boston University was recently awarded $10 million from Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.

…

And just in case moral suasion is ineffective, Kendi has backup: Use the power of the federal government to make it so. “To fix the original sin of racism,” he wrote in Politico, “Americans should pass an anti-racist amendment to the U.S. Constitution that enshrines two guiding anti-racist principals [sic]: Racial inequity is evidence of racist policy and the different racial groups are equals.” To back up the amendment, he proposes a Department of Anti-Racism. This department would have the power to investigate not just local governments but private businesses and would punish those “who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.” Imagine how such a department would view a Jewish day school, which suggests that the Jews are God’s chosen people, let alone one that teaches Zionism.

Kendi—who, it should be noted, now holds Elie Wiesel’s old chair at Boston University—believes that “to be antiracist is to see all cultures in their differences as on the same level, as equals.” He writes: “When we see cultural difference we are seeing cultural difference—nothing more, nothing less.” It’s hard to imagine that anyone could believe that cultures that condone honor killings of unchaste young women are “nothing more, nothing less” than culturally different from our own. But whether he believes it or not, it’s obvious that embracing such relativism is a highly effective tool for ascension and seizing power.

It should go without saying that, for Jews, an ideology that contends that there are no meaningful differences between cultures is not simply ridiculous—we have an obviously distinct history, tradition and religion that has been the source of both enormous tragedy as well as boundless gifts—but is also, as history has shown, lethal.

By simply existing as ourselves, Jews undermine the vision of a world without difference. And so the things about us that make us different must be demonized, so that they can be erased or destroyed: Zionism is refashioned as colonialism; government officials justify the murder of innocent Jews in Jersey City; Jewish businesses can be looted because Jews “are the face of capital.” Jews are flattened into “white people,” our living history obliterated, so that someone with a straight face can suggest that the Holocaust was merely “white on white crime.”

This is no longer a fringe view. As the philosopher Peter Boghossian has noted: “This ideology is the dominant moral orthodoxy in our universities, and has seeped out and spread to every facet of American life— publishing houses, tech, arts, theater, newspapers, media,” and, increasingly, corporations. It has not grabbed power by dictates from above, but by seizing the means of sense-making from below.

Over the past few decades and with increasing velocity over the last several years, a determined young cohort has captured nearly all of the institutions that produce American cultural and intellectual life. Rather than the institutions shaping them, they have reshaped the institutions. You don’t need the majority inside an institution to espouse these views. You only need them to remain silent, cowed by a fearless and zealous minority who can smear them as racists if they dare disagree.

It is why California attempted to pass an ethnic studies curriculum whose only mention of Jews was to explain how they, along with Irish immigrants, were invited into whiteness.

It is why those who claim to care about diversity and inclusion don’t seem to care about the deep-seated racism against Asian Americans at schools like Harvard.

It is why a young Jewish woman named Rose Ritch was recently run out of the USC student government. Ms. Ritch stood accused of complicity in racism because, following the Soviet lie, to be a Zionist is to be nothing less than a racist. Her fellow students waged a campaign to hound her out of her position: “Impeach her Zionist ass,” they insisted.

It is why the Democratic Socialists of America, the emerging power center of the Democratic Party in New York, sent a questionnaire to New York City Council candidates that included a pledge not to travel to Israel.

It is why Tamika Mallory, an outspoken fan of Louis Farrakhan, gets the glamour treatment in a photoshoot for Vogue.

And this is why AOC, the standard bearer of America’s new left, didn’t think Yitzhak Rabin was worth the political capital, but goes out of her way, a few days later, to praise the Black Panthers. She is the harbinger of a political reality in which Jews will have little power.

It does not matter how progressive you are, how vegan or how gay, how much you want universal health care and pre-K and to end the drug war. To believe in the justness of the existence of the Jewish state—to believe in Jewish particularism at all—is to make yourself an enemy of this movement.

…

If you’re nearing the end of the essay wondering why this hasn’t been explained to you before, the answer is because, yet again, we find ourselves in another moment in Jewish history at a time of great need and urgency with communal leadership who, with rare exception, will not address the danger.

I understand why people have been blind to this. Life has been good—exceedingly good—for American Jews for half a century. Many older communal leaders seem to lack the moral imagination to see this threat. It’s also hard for anyone to hear the words: They’re just not that into you.

So when I try to discuss this with many Jews in leadership positions, what I face is either boomer-esque entitlement—a sense that the way the world worked for them must be the way it will always work—or outright resistance. Oh please, wokeness isn’t important anywhere but in silly Twitter microclimates. When you explain that no, in fact, this ideology has taken over universities, publishing houses, the media, museums and is now making quick work of corporate America, you hit another roadblock: Isn’t this just righting some historical injustices? What could go wrong? You then have to explain what could go wrong—what is already going wrong—is that it is ruining the lives of regular, good people, and the more institutions and companies fall prey to it, the more lives it will ruin.

…

Last month, I participated in a Zoom event attended by several major Jewish philanthropists. After briefly talking about my experience at The New York Times, I noted that if they wanted to understand what happened to me, they needed to appreciate the power of that new, still-nameless creed that has hijacked the paper and so many other institutions essential to American life. I’ve been thinking about what happened next ever since.

One of the funders on the call launched into me, explaining that Ibram X. Kendi’s work was vital, and portrayed me as retrograde and uncool for opposing the ideology du jour. Because this person is prominent and powerful enough to send signals that others in the Jewish world follow, the comments managed to both sideline me and stun almost everyone else into silence.

These people may be the most enraging: those with the financial security to oppose this ideology and demur, so desperate to be seen as hip; for their children to keep their spots at the right prep schools; so that they can be seated at the right tables at the right benefits; so that they are honored at Brown or Harvard; so that business does well enough that they can renovate their house in Aspen or East Hampton. Desperate to remain in good odor with the right people, they are willing to close their eyes to what is coming for the rest of us.

Young Jews who grasp the scope of this problem and want to fight it thus find themselves up against two fronts: their ideological enemies and their own communal leadership. But it is among this group—people with no social or political capital to hoard, some of them not even out of college—that I find our community’s seers. The dynamic reminds me of the one Theodor Herzl faced: The communal establishment of his time was deeply opposed to his Zionist project. It was the poorer, younger Jews—especially those from Russia—who first saw the necessity of Zionism’s lifesaving vision.

Funders and communal leaders who are falling over themselves to make alliances with fashionable activists and ideas enjoy a decadent indulgence that these young proud Jews cannot afford. They live far from the violence that affects Jews in places like Crown Heights and Borough Park. If things go south in one city, they can take refuge in a second home. It may be cost-free for the wealthy to flirt with an ideology that suggests abolishing the police or the nuclear family or capitalism. But for most Jews and most Americans, losing those ideas comes with a heavy price.

[mrsq8geek]

Advice for an aspiring author hoping to write lgbt muslim characters?

Hi, thanks for your question!  This is quite the rabbit hole, so I can't cover everything, but I did my best.  Some general guidelines and then my own view:

1. Do not write this story unless it is from personal experience or with the direct express written permission from the person it’s based on, and I hesitate with that second one.  Like many other experiences, this story hasn’t been told all that often, so unless you’re one of the above, you don’t have many points of reference and will probably get it wrong and, I suspect, as ‘exotic’.

That said:

2.  Start by examining yourself. One of my favourite resources is @writingwithcolor​, which has many great references for this.  At this point, we're asking questions such as "Why do you not want to represent us?" and "Why do you need to tell this story right now?" among others.  Do check it out.

3.  Please, please don't write an apologetic acceptably assimilated model minority.  I don't know where you're from, or where you intend to set the story, but we're all influenced by American media, so I feel it's important to mention.  We generally don't have positive feelings towards those characters, let alone relating to them, at least not to the aspects where they're supposed to represent us.

(My personal pet peeve example is Abed Nadir from Community, a Muslim enamoured with Christmas and is an all-around Acceptable Arab... played by an Indian actor.  It's extra irking because the show was touted as being Better Than Big Bang Theory, and it seemed okay addressing many other nuances, but when it came to this? Think of it this way: why didn't they cast an Asian actress to play Britta or Annie and called her white? Or, indeed, an Indian actress to play Shirley and called her black? Because clearly they believe the audience can't tell the difference? Arabs are black or white but not brown, guys.  Not all Arabs are Muslims and vice versa.  Some Muslims are (gasp!) white.)

Anyway, the point is Abed, and others like him, are non-threatening.  They reject their own identity and are desperate to be Just Like Us Default White People.  While this is definitely the case for some people, 1. it's not the case for most people, 2. it's just a really tired trope especially in current times, and 3. the other side of this trope’s coin is that in order to be acceptable for The West, they have to rebel against their character’s original identity, which is just as tired.

But I digress.  You already know by asking this question that it’s controversial.  Why not play it straight instead?  Pun unintended.  Do your research, whatever way you choose to go. 

4.  Speaking of doing your research, do. your. research! Muslims are a diverse group of about 2 billion people*.  There are two major sects and many smaller ones.  In the major ones, homosexuality (etc) is a sin, haram, full stop, end of sentence.  Any level of presenting like the opposite gender is not only haram, it’s cursed.  Yes, there are many people coming up with exceptions and loopholes, or just doing what they want regardless, and if you want to write about them, that's your prerogative, but:

* so Kamala Khan, for example, is completely unrelatable to me. (See: 9)

5.  You know what else is considered haram in majority Islam? Extra-marital sex.  Pork.  Alcohol.  Drugs, yes including cannabis, in fact even nutmeg.  People do all that anyway! Especially in non-Muslim-majority countries where the laws don’t make it harder for them, or in poorer Muslim-majority countries where people don’t get educated in religious matters, or indeed all over everywhere because not all people of any religion actively practice that religion.  It's a non-issue by this point. 

5A. The only reason LGBT Muslims is An Issue, and it’s An Issue Now, is because America’s making it one.  It’s no different than, say, modern white feminism.  They stir the pot, we deal with the mess.

5B. Muslims are people, and people aren't perfect. We know this, and we've addressed it as nauseam… and that’s just it, we’re allowed* to talk about these things because we know ourselves and our experiences.  It’s more acceptable coming from us to us because we have a common ground to start discussing things.

* I wrote allowed, but it really depends on the situation. Sometimes you’re not allowed simply because you don’t want to make it an issue, and that’s okay too.

5C. Since you’re asking, I’m assuming you’re not a Muslim yourself, and that puts a layer on scrutiny on you.  We don’t know where to begin to talk to you, and it’s worse if you represent us in any controversial way or in any way less than perfect.  Less than perfect by whose standards? It depends. Nobody knows! (See: 3)

5D. Examine yourself, research the topic, and know just what you’re trying to say.

6.  That said, here’s my personal take on it that I’d love to see someone do, but haven’t so far.  I don’t know how people arrive at their sexuality, whether it’s by nature or nurture, but they do end up there one way or another.  When it comes to Islam, you’re highly encouraged to (heterosexually, to be clear) marry and reproduce.  You’re discouraged from sex outside that framework.  If you are unable to marry for whatever reason, you’re supposed to find a way to deal with it. Fasting is often recommended.

And the way I see it, finding yourself not being attracted to the opposite gender is just one reason to not marry.  “So I NEVER get to have sex?” Yes, just like your straight brothers and sisters who realize they can never marry for their own reasons. Maybe their health prevents them. Maybe they have family depending on them, especially financially, and they realize can’t add a husband or wife into the mix. Maybe they’re incompatible with the person they wanted.  

The West worships Romantic Love (also money, but that’s another thing), but it really isn’t everything in life*.  Just see any post here on tumblr dot com discussing the different kinds of love the Romans acknowledged and wrote about extensively.  Yes, it’s a powerful drive, but again, it’s not the only thing in life, and coming to that realization is its own journey.

* (Something something Harry Potter)

I am so, so sick and tired of characters who don’t practice their religion (“hi, I’m Muslim/Jewish/Christian/Hindu/Buddhist/whatever, but I will have that pork, that beef cheeseburger, whatever”*), and equally tired of characters who are the personification of their religion (“hi, I’m religious, hear me act out my stereotypes”). Don’t get me started on characters who exist just so the authors can bash that religion.  

* a recent disappointing example was the show Crazy Ex Girlfriend.  When Rebecca is first introduced, I was excited to learn the show was about a Jewish character, finally a religious character portrayed as practicing!  But it was quickly revealed they were focusing on the cultural aspects, and not only is she non-practicing, she doesn’t even believe any god exists.  Snore. In contrast, see: Shepherd Book from the show Firefly.  Not just a practicing Christian, an actually interesting character in his own right.  Not a perfect person by far, but someone who’s doing his utmost to live his life and still maintain his faith. 

I want a Muslim character who finds themselves attracted to whomever, someone from the same gender or whatever you want, or feeling like they want to present as not their birth gender, and then proceeds to do what so many of us real-life Muslims do: find ways to deal with it and come to terms with it.  Acknowledge it and make peace with it.  Make the choice, the conscious decision, to remain faithful to their beliefs and maybe not pursue a romantic relationship with the other person… and instead interact with them like a human being they care about.  Help them reach a goal or achieve a dream, keep them safe from harm, something.  Maybe focus on the traits of the other gender that are accessible, or fight the toxic effects of the patriarchy, something.  Writing like “a happy ending == they end up together”, and any and all other outcomes are Bad and Tragic and Void, is boring and unrealistic.

Just as a black woman being soft and feminine is a rebellion against the mainstream, a religious character sticking to their faith above all else is way more interesting than yet another character breaking the rules.

Addendums:

7. “But Islam is homophobic?” No, Islam has rules against intentionally engaging in specific behaviors.  You’re not faulted for having low alcohol tolerance, you’re faulted for the act of consumption. You’re not faulted for being addicted to drugs, you’re faulted for making the decision to try it the first time, or if you were tricked into it, for not trying to get clean once you’re there.  However!  People, all people, hashtag not just Muslims, often try to enforce rules by creating fear and hatred around them.  It’s a convenient societal shorthand, even if the consequences can be different than intended.  It’s the same mechanism that leads to “abstinence = zero sex ed” in the US.  Abstinence isn’t the issue, people trying to enforce it by making information around sex opaque are the ones causing problems.

So some Muslim people end up homophobic, and some Muslim people go all in the other direction, because the balance is delicate and difficult to find.  

8. “LGBT stories aren’t just about sex, what about asexuals, transsexuals, etc?” True, but most LGBT stories tend to go in that direction, and I’m keeping it as broad as I can here.

9. Even if your character is Muslim but not Arab, it’s probably going to come up, in your research if not in your story.  Although the most populous Muslim nation is Indonesia and the most famous “Muslim” terrorists are Afghani, the most prominent Muslim sites are in Saudi Arabia and Palestine.  The branding is there.  With that in mind, required reading is the film Reel Bad Arabs, and any primers you can find on Orientalism, Colonialism, and Imperialism.

***

Honourable mentions:

Check out the Saudi series Masameer by Myrkott on YouTube, many episodes have subtitles. They recently made a movie and it's on Netflix internationally!  You can't escape American Imperialism any more than you can escape British Colonialism*, but we're all way past being enamoured by them.  The Emirati series Freej is also in Youtube, sans subtitles, though the DVDs have them, and I’ll leave it at that.  Hashtag quarantine let us catch up on shows?  Stay safe, stay home.

* she said, in English.

[arabfanon]

The debate over Afghan women’s miniskirts have become the latest salvo in the War on Terror.

Last month, Donald Trump announced that the US would be extending its military occupation of Afghanistan, reversing a stance he has held for years demanding a rapid pull-out. Instead, the country will see a continuation of the endless war, a war that has left tens of thousands dead but which has failed miserably to achieve any of its goals – like securing peace for the Afghan people.

Now, it looks like the war could be increasingly privatized – and Trump has shown interest in persuading Afghanistan’s government to clear the way for US mining companies to exploit the country’s untapped mineral deposits – valued at $1 trillion – as payment. Like the Iraqi oil lootseized after the 2003 US invasion, it is hard to imagine a more brazen form of armed robbery.

How do miniskirts play into this picture?

US national security adviser McMaster showed Donald Trump 1970s-era photos of Afghan women wearing miniskirts in order to convince him to maintain the 16-year-long US military presence in the country, the Washington Post reported this week.

“Kabul, Before the Taliban.”

This isn’t the first time Afghan women’s clothing has been used to justify war. Back in 2001, Republicans took up the blue burqa worn by many Afghan women – and enforced as law by the Taliban, then in power – as a symbol of women’s oppression. Continuing a long history of complicity with imperialism, some feminists began to rally around US guns and missiles as the best hope of “freeing” Afghan women – apparently not considering that bombing a country and killing thousands of people hardly creates much of a path to freedom.

Like the Europeans who supported the “civilizing mission” of colonialism before them, this new generation of colonial feminists jumped on the bandwagon to “free” Afghanistan’s women without considering what liberation at gunpoint would deliver.

Sixteen years later, the US is still occupying Afghanistan, and women are hardly freer. Indeed, heavy-handed US tactics have isolated large segments of the population and fueled the Taliban insurgency, which is now accompanied by an ISIS insurgency as well. While there are bright spots of progress across the country, these are often in spite of the US occupation and its support for the corrupt central government.

So what do photos of Afghan women’s miniskirts have to do with all of this?

In recent years, photo essays purporting to “reveal” how was Afghanistan was before the war have circulated widely, showing women and men in trendy 1970s outfits studying on the campus of universities in Kabul, taking trips to mountains and rivers, and generally wandering the streets happily.

Often, these essays are accompanied by descriptions of how Afghan women prospered during the 1960s and 70s under the rule of Ahmed Zahir Shah or his cousin who took power in a 1973 coup, or following the triumph of the socialist Saur Revolution in 1978, especially before the Soviet invasion in 1980 engendered militant resistance to the new leaders and the US started supporting the Afghan mujahedeen against the USSR’s military. Sometimes, a point is made about how the US sent money, expertise, and weapons to the groups that would eventually come to comprise the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, noting how these interventionist policies led to a cycle of violence that has not ended since.

For Afghans, these articles are an important way to remember a past when the future ahead seemed promising. In the photos, Afghanistan appears on a path toward a future of modernity, secularism, and development, a path that was interrupted by revolution, war, repression, and occupation. These albums are a way to consider an alternative future, how things could have turned out, if it had not been for the foreign interventions, wars, the rise of militias, the triumph of the Taliban, and so on.

Given the myriad problems facing modern Afghanistan, it is not surprising that for many Afghans these photo essays offer a sense of pride and hope. Sharing these photos is a way to remember an oft-forgotten past, a time before war changed the country beyond recognition. For Afghans, this is not just about nostalgia; it’s about remembering that just as Afghanistan hosted dreams of a better tomorrow in the past, it can host those dreams today. It’s about remaining optimistic and envisioning a future where the pain of war has receded far into the past.

As Mohammad Qayoumi, who published a book of old photogaphs explained: “Remembering Afghanistan’s hopeful past only makes its present misery seem more tragic. But it is important to know that disorder, terrorism, and violence against schools that educate girls are not inevitable. I want to show Afghanistan’s youth of today how their parents and grandparents really lived.”

Defining ‘Freedom’

But for the broader English-speaking public, the point of these articles is often not reducible to dreams of a better future, nostalgia nor historical learning – especially when one considers how few other articles about Afghanistan on any other topic manage to go viral. Why is it that non-Afghans only care to learn about Afghanistan when there are pictures of women in miniskirts involved?

The point of these essays is to suggest that before 1980, Afghanistan was on its way to becoming a “westernized” society. Some even note that if the US hadn’t supported Islamist extremists, it might have remained one. This appears to be how the images were explained to Trump, to suggest he shouldn’t give up on Afghanistan because Afghans could, essentially, be “civilized” again.

The idea that these photos reveal a time when “women were free” seems to equate “women’s freedom” with miniskirts. This is essentially the same standard, albeit in reverse, used by those who measure women’s freedom in terms of how covered women are.

Instead of defining women’s freedom in terms of social, political, and economic rights – like literacy, access to healthcare, and so on – both positions reduce “freedom” to how much skin is showing or not showing. A photograph becomes all it takes to decide that women are free or not free.

The problem is not that these images are inaccurate. Indeed, some people in Afghanistan did live the lives of those pictures. But this was a tiny segment of the population, comprising a Kabul middle class that enjoyed the support and patronage of a King who built a bubble of prosperity in Kabul but kept the rest of the country in utter poverty – part of the reason for the 1973 coup and the 1978 Revolution.

In the 1979 – at the end of Afghanistan’s “Golden Age“ – only 18% of Afghans were literate – and average life expectancy was only just above 40, meaning that half of Afghans died before that age.

The average Afghan was certainly not wearing miniskirts and attending Kabul University, nor were they taking fashionably-dressed vacations to the mountains in imported cars. This was a very small urban elite and middle-class segment of society shown in the pictures of Kabul in the 1970s, and one that did not reflect the conditions of the majority of Afghans.

The pervasiveness of these photos and their spectacularly misleading claims to be representative of Afghan life in the 1970s contribute to the idea that only when women have thrown off their hijabs can they truly be free, that an Afghanistan without burqas is an Afghanistan where everything is good and free.

Few of these articles mention that veils were widespread in Afghan society outside of that tiny elite – or that, since 2001, many Afghan women wearing veils have attended schools, universities, and become gainfully employed.

These articles simplify the slippery realities of the past – that pre-1978 Afghanistan was a largely impoverished place and that Soviet warfare as well as US-backed mujahedeen warfare were both violent and had negative consequences for women – and instead present a narrative suggesting that Afghan society was once hijab-free and could (and should!) return to that reality.

This narrative, however, is not only misleading – it is also extremely dangerous, as shown most clearly by its use to convince Trump of the justness of endless warfare. This narrative suggests that the despair that continues to overwhelm Afghan society is rooted not in the widespread corruption, lack of economic opportunity, obliteration of large swathes of the built and natural environment, drone warfare that has left thousands of innocents dead, or anything else that is related to the political, economic, and social realities that confront 35 million Afghans trying to live their lives – but instead in the lack of miniskirts that fail to grace Kabul’s streets.

No one asks why the Americans have failed to even rebuild those streets in the background in these sixteen years. By refocusing the debate on women’s clothing yet again, broader questions around the problems facing Afghanistan become elided – and the discussion returns to a simplistic dichotomy between Islam and secular modernity.

It’s useful to note that the weaponization of nostalgia is not limited to Afghanistan, but is common in countries across the region.

Consider photographs from Iran from before the Islamic Revolution, which are often used to depict a time when women were free to wear miniskirts – and thus supposedly “free” in the broadest sense of the word. In Iran, as well, these pictures tend to show an extremely distorted and limited view of Iranian society. In 1979, a small minority of Iranian women attended college – compared to 55% today – and while there certainly were bars and clubs in big cities like Tehran, the majority of Iranians lived in rural areas, did not wear miniskirts, and did not regularly attend cabarets.

Same goes for Iraq. Photographs of the 1970s are frequently passed around to show a time before Saddam Hussein, war, sanctions, and US invasion. But the photographs of women in miniskirts in Baghdad hardly speak to a broader reality for the majority of Iraqi people, who were living in agricultural areas at the time. Nor do they speak to the repressive policies of the Baathist state, which were in full swing at the time.

But these photo essays are not concerned about these kinds of statistic or messy details. These essays rarely offer statistics about education, employment, or much else. The main point is the visuals: the miniskirt, the free walking around. And we are thus offered a past that is reducible to the length of a woman’s skirt – and not any of the context or conditions in which the vast majority of women (or men) actually lived.

So were women “freer” back in the 1970s in these countries? It depends how you measure it, of course. But the point is that miniskirts or lack thereof do not prove the existence of women’s freedom or civilization in a country. Their use to convince Trump to continue the occupation of Afghanistan reveals the continuing dangers of these facile equation of women’s dress with freedom as well as the weaponization of nostalgia.

This nostalgia is dangerous because it erases the very real material and social inequalities that existed in the past and that need our attention in the present. These photo essays too often present a misleading view of the past that takes elite history as if it represented the nation as a whole, thus obscuring the reality of most people’s memories of the past and instead replacing them with a narrative that equates freedom with clothing and nothing more.

[rillensora]

I was tagged by @ice-creamforbreakfast to:

Post your lock screen, home screen and most recent song you’ve listened to. Then tag others.

My home screen is just one of the default backgrounds that shipped with my iPhone. In general, I don’t like to have a personalized image for my home screen, because I feel the app icons just cover it up anyway. The last song I listened to is “Green Bird”, from Cowboy Bebop.

However, what I really wanted to talk about (since it’s timely at the moment) is my lock screen, which I’ve had since last April. As you may be able to tell even without the benefit of any context, it’s quite a politically charged piece of art, and I have selected it as my home screen for precisely this reason.

I don’t often talk about politics on Tumblr, and still less about specifically Korean politics. But since today is an important national holiday, and since recent developments have been bringing these issues to the fore for a lot of Koreans including myself, I thought talking about this image would be a good chance to shine a light on the political history behind our current situation that people from other countries are often not aware of.

I know the prompt asks that I tag people, but as the rest of this post gets rather political, and I don’t want to risk dragging people unwillingly into that, I’ll skip that part of the exercise this time.

(Like I ever really tag anyone in these things.)

Lengthier explanation below the jump for those who actually want the politics:

For the past four months, my phone home screen has been a piece of art commissioned by the South Korean government to commemorate the 100th-year anniversary of the March 1st Movements. At the center top of the composition is depicted Ryu Gwansun, who was one of the main organizers of the protests that day. She was martyred by the Japanese colonial government, and subsequently, both she and the date of the events that led to her capture and execution became an ongoing symbol of resistance and Korean identity.

Due to the significance of her role, she is given a focal position in this painting, but she is not the only figure shown. Behind her are ranged the common people who joined her in the protests on that day in 1919 (many of whom shared her fate or worse).

Before her, the foreground is mainly occupied by figures who are instantly recognizable from major Korean leftist / grassroots resistance movements that established themselves during the years after independence, all the way up to the present day:

The April revolution was spearheaded by students (who are recognizable by their retro school uniforms and rather unflattering haircuts.) The movement arose in protest of the elections by which Syngman Rhee ⁠— an autocrat who was “president” only in name ⁠— attempted to illegally consolidate his power, and ended with his removal from power and the installation of a democratically elected president (who sadly did not last long in that position).

The resistance against Park Chung-Hee’s dictatorship in the 1970s was also driven in part by university students, many of whom were imprisoned, kidnapped, tortured, and killed for their “dissident” beliefs. However, for the first time, the leftist movement incorporated vast numbers of laborers and factory workers, most of whom had had few opportunities for education, and who were becoming increasingly exploited and marginalized under Park’s economic policies. The young man depicted holding the book reading “Labor Law” (Hangul: 노동법, Hanja: 勞動法) is most likely a homage to Jeon Tae-il, a young labor rights activist (who himself was a laborer coming from an impoverished background) who self-immolated as an act of protest against the government’s failure to enforce even the labor rights laws that were already on the books.

Resistance expanded among an increasingly more educated social class during the 80s, incorporating urban professionals, intellectuals, and during the final days of the resistance, ordinary citizens from all walks of life, including housewives, shopkeepers, and the elderly. Growing unrest and particularly anger over new revelations of the imprisonment, torture, and murder of dissidents and vulnerable groups, culminated in the June Democratic Uprisings that directly led to the fall of Chun Doo-hwan, our last military dictator, and transition into a liberal democratic government in 1988.

This is not to say that Korean politics after 1988 has been free from turmoil: transition into a democracy was only the beginning of a very long and arduous process that continues to this day, and indeed Korean leftists have always been very aware that the fight against inequality and injustice is an ongoing one. This is why the figure of the young girl, in a modern school uniform, is placed at the very front and center of the composition: the struggle will one day be hers.

Today is another important day commemorating a key event in modern Korean history August 15th, the armistice of World War II. (Most Western sources have the date as August 14th, but because of time zones, it’s the 15th for us.) Since it was the moment that marked the end of a brutal colonial regime, and the moment at which freedom and the possibility of self-determination was most tantalizingly within the grasp of ordinary Koreans, it’s obviously a date of high significance, and a national holiday here in Korea.

But here’s the thing: most Korean historians do not count the beginning of Korean nationhood from this date, nor from the same date in 1948 that marks the founding of the modern Korean government. Instead, it is the 1st of March 1919 that we count as the date of the founding of the Korean nation, that day when the Korean Resistance made its first stand against colonial rule, and the day when the people stood with them.

On the other hand, Korean right wingers vastly prefer the 1945 or 1948 date, because it places the foundation of Korean statehood within the framework of liberation by an external foreign power, and therefore is a convenient line of rhetoric by which they may erase the actions of the wartime provisional Korean government, the resistance forces that fought for Korean independence, and most importantly, the Korean people who supported these movements.

To whom I say: Never again.

[turtle-in-the-mums]

OOC: Postwar Cybertron Headcanon

In my head, the majority of Cybertron's population are the descendants of bots who for one reason and another ended up living on colony worlds scattered all over the galaxy. Some of those colonies had lost touch with the ancestral home planet long before the war started, and the rest shed their ties around the time Iacon fell.

Those who heard about the end of the war and the very attractive opportunities being offered to those of Cybertronian descent willing to move to Cybertron and help rebuild it didn't necessarily know or care much about the war. A lot of them disparage it and those who fought in it as uncivilized and pointlessly destructive.

Megatron had the Machiavellian (in the sense of "able to look at the ugliest and most brutal political realities and do the ugly and brutal things necessary to counter the worst of the side effects of human (Cybertronian) power politics") good sense and intestinal fortitude to keep his near-absolute power. He has a circle of allies and advisers, and a lot of the day-to-day business of governing is handled by district or neighborhood-level officials and councils, but on matters of top-level policy decisions his word is law. The rules of living in his Protectorate aren't necessarily kind, but they are crystal-clear and freely available to anyone who wants to know about them, and they're backed up by Megs' own treatises on politics and government. One is free to challenge the laws or request guidance regarding how they apply to this or that person or situation--Megs has been known to reconsider or revise some of his decisions when the argument was well-reasoned enough--but if you violate the rules you'll find out how very, very cruel Megatron's regime can be.

Because Megs isn't a sentimentalist or at all prone to idealism, he set up an admissions/immigration system that investigates and thoroughly questions every would-be immigrant about everything, then rejects anyone whose ideology/politics/intentions don't fit with the society the Lord Protector has in mind. Stuff like Functionist beliefs, prejudice against cold-forged bots, cultural grudges, crusading or imperialist mentalities--you either leave it at the orbital Immigration Station or you don't get your entry authorization. Those who were found to be harboring such ideas after being allowed in have their authorizations/citizenship summarily revoked and are either put through a prolonged period of indoctrination and probation or given exactly one day to pack up and get outside the borders of the Protectorate--when the time limit's up there's an automatic bounty put on the head of the offender, and it's sizable enough to guarantee plenty of interest from the citizenry.

Guess where the rejects end up.

Optimus never wanted the Primacy. Orion Pax had serious objections to the corruption and hypocrisies of his society, but he was high enough in the hierarchy not to be as unbearably crushed by them as Megatron and his followers. Reading Megatron's speeches and writings metaphorically opened Orion's optics to a lot of injustices he'd never thought about--like a fish that isn't aware of water until it's taken out of it, Orion just hadn't been aware of the real nature of his world until Megatron pulled him out of it. Still, Orion was for reform rather than revolution. He was a young, naive idealist. Committed to his beliefs and possessed of a fundamentally noble and gentle Spark, but dangerously flawed because he has such a hard time when the world fails to accept and conform to his vision. The ruthless pragmatism of the Matrix mitigated the ill effects of Op's idealism to a degree, and Prowl countered some of the rest, but once the war was over Op let himself believe he could stop compromising and doing the crueler things rulers have to do. He insisted that the natural goodness of the Cybertronian Spark would prevail if it was just given the freedom to do so...and he yielded power to a series of democratically-elected bodies with only the barest of restrictions or restraints.

It's perfectly understandable--Op carried a heavy burden (largely of his own making, but still a massive burden) throughout the war and he was looking forward to a semi-retirement of being an elder statesman. (He wasn't looking forward to remaining a quasi-religious figure, but that's not his decision.) It was nonetheless a massive mistake. Op's ideals aren't nearly as natural and self-evident to the average bot as he so firmly believed they are, and those who came to resettle Cybertron weren't as eager to adopt his vision and live according to his principles as he expected they would be. He failed to account for the tendency of sapient minds to resist large-scale changes of any sort regardless of the circumstances.

As a result, the population of Op's territory is highly fractious, the various levels of government and bureaucracy not under his direct influence are legion and full of pockets of flagrant corruption, the laws and social mores are either oppressive or selectively enforced or both...and he lacks the power to unilaterally correct it. He really, really hates the bitter fact that Megatron's way has actually turned out to be the better option, but he's been consulting with Megs and working with Prowl and the others of his old command to correct his mistakes before he dies.

Megatron's way, of course, has the Achilles' heel of being dependent on the judgement and intentions of whoever has absolute power. Megatron, for all his faults, doesn't seem to care much about the trappings of power or being loved. Starscream likes things like crowns and throne rooms and adulation. Megatron has a goal in mind and he'll do whatever he thinks is necessary to achieve that goal--he'll sit on a throne if that's what will get him closer to his goal, but he won't throw a fit if there isn't a throne available. He'll stand and give orders and make sure they're obeyed. Since his goal is a society that doesn't tolerate functionism, slavery, corruption, or any of the myriad other pernicious habits and ideas his people have used against each other in the past, his tyranny is better than Op's democracy. The problem is that as soon as Megs either gives in to temptation or is replaced by someone else, there's nothing to prevent a new dictator from engaging in the most appalling of abuses of power. Op's preference for spreading power around is a good protection against that sort of thing, but it relies on the general population to decide and enforce a just moral and ethical code...which means the rules are set by the lowest common denominator, and that can be very low indeed.

(I wrote a treatise on post-war Cybertron that casts Megatron as the wise and good mech and Optimus Prime as a willfully-blind fool. I think I've committed some form of fandom heresy.)

[showmethemon3y]

What Black History Month means to me - guest post by Pauline Mayers

So it’s October,  and as usual I’m having a lot of thoughts about Black History Month. In advance of my conversation with the wonderful Pauline Mayers tonight for Real Talk, we got talking on the subject. When she told me about this piece she had written, I wanted to read it. And then when I read it, I wanted to pos it. So thank you Pauline for the gift of your words and experience. I will post the rest verbatim from her text here. 

----

What Black History Month Means To Me by Pauline Mayers

Originally written 1st March 2019

The furore over the apparent rebranding of Black History Month (BHM) to Diversity Month by some London boroughs last year (2018) is of no surprise to me.

I remember when the idea and subsequent rolling out of BHM across the UK began in 1987. The following year, I began my dance training at the internationally known dance conservatoire, the Rambert School of Ballet and Contemporary Dance. Being a young Hackney girl and just turning 18 at the end of the 1980’s this was a big deal for me. I decided to specifically audition for the school as I had watched the associated Rambert Dance company and noticed there were no dancers in the company that looked like me. Without really thinking about it, my audition and subsequent training at the school was a challenge to the status quo. Much like BHM in its very beginnings. 

BHM was a challenge to the UK perception that black people were muggers, thieves and rioters, not to trusted and certainly not to be tolerated. Not that I noticed any of this at the time. My awareness of BHM was consigned to a footnote accentuated by seeing Diane Abbott and Bernie Grant every so often on the news. My attention was very firmly placed on becoming a dancer.

In hindsight, my training was the real beginning of being othered. At the school, I wasn’t seen as a pioneer from Hackney, the first cockney girl (to my knowledge) to attend the school. I was viewed by some of the staff as simply a ‘black body’ who was attempting the impossible. ‘Black People don’t do ballet or dance’ was a mantra that was very definitely felt by me. It’s a mantra that Cassa Pancho MBE, creative director of British ballet company, Ballet Black has spoken of recently. And one that still exists today despite the presence of the extraordinary Dance Theatre of Harlem who were a company of twenty years standing at the point I was in training. This was a fact that school staff at the time seemed to have ignored. For teachers who in theory were experts in the ballet world, this omission is rather startling. Indeed, thirty years after I had begun my training, Ballet Black working with Freed of London have launched ballet shoes for darker skin tones. Which tells me by the omission happened.

Given I had begun my training at a local youth centre and went on to train at the Weekend Arts College I had up until this point always been around people who looked and sounded like me. Being a British black girl at a world renowned ballet school was not the ‘Fame’ experience I was expecting.

I never imagined for a second, the colour of my skin would have such a impact on my every day experience at the school. Born and raised in Hackney, it never occurred to me that being British and black would become a serious bone of contention. A couple of teachers seemed to take some sort of exception to my presence at the school. It certainly wasn’t ALL of the teachers... sounds familiar...

There were however, two teachers who made a massive difference to my experience at the school. With staff that had no POC representation, and students predominantly white European, with some students as far afield as Japan, Canada and the US, seeing examples of black excellence in dance was challenging. I needed to see people who looked like me succeed in the arena I had chosen to live my life, to keep going, to be inspired, so that I didn’t falter. Thankfully the director of the school had cottoned on to how I was feeling and gave me a gift, one I have treasured to this day. The biography of African American performer, activist and French resistance agent Josephine Baker called Jazz Cleopatra. It was about how she who took Europe by storm at a point when the idea of a famous black woman seemed impossible. I read the book until it fell apart. And then bought it several times more.

In much the same way, BHM was a way of celebrating Britain’s black community and its contributions to the U.K., which is a home from home. The reach of what was once the British Empire has morphed into the Commonwealth countries, extending to the Caribbean, where the British had ruled for centuries, leaving it’s mark through the Privy Council which various parts of the Caribbean still adhere to today. West Indian citizens had been told through their educational, legal, and political systems for 400 years that they were British. A fact seemingly denied upon independence from and entry into the U.K. during the 1960’s. The British decided that being black and from the Caribbean meant you were not of Britain but something else entirely, “no Blacks, no Irish, no dogs”. And this way of thinking remains to this day as we have seen with last year’s breaking of the Windrush Scandal. Make no mistake, the illegal deporting of Black British citizens had been going on for decades before The Guardian newspaper shed a light on it.

BHM came after the race riots of the beginning of the 1980’s when the black community railed against the overuse by the police of the SUS laws on young black men around the country. In my recollection BHM was a way to build bridges that had been burnt by shining a positive light on the contributions of the UK black community. The recent return of such rudimentary and abusive laws now come in the form of stop and search which has shown, yet again, to disproportionally target the black community… sounds familiar?

My awareness of BHM really came into being as my dance career took off. Cool Britannia was in, as was Suede, the Gallagher Brothers, etc. Soul to Soul, the Young Disciples and Mark Morrison were showing the world that black music didn’t only come from America it was a part of British culture, the MOBO’s were in its infancy and the U.K. perceived itself to be multi-cultural. Everyone was welcome and could be whoever they wanted to be. Britain was in effect was open to all.

My first offers of working on BHM projects came in 2001 at a point of unemployment. Theatres and venues I didn’t know somehow managed to find my details, making enquiries about my availability for October with a view to making collaborations with Black History as a focus. The only downside was there was very little preparation time (enquiries began in August) and not much money. However, I believed it was worth it, considering the opportunity to work with such established organisation could foster new lucrative relationships. I felt at the time the opportunity to work during BHM was a chance for organisations to see the way I worked and witness the success of my projects. They were opportunities that couldn’t be passed up…. or so I thought.

After three years of repeated promises to work in a more sustainable way across the year instead of the one month lead up to BHM and then working across the month for very little money, I decided this particular avenue was like a parasite. BHM was feeding off my very presence. It began to signal to me Whiteness’ attempt to validate its existence by delivering BHM as a means to an end. The idea to working longer term with me would literally disappear into the shadows for the following 10 months without even so much as a thank you for some of the frankly Herculean efforts I was making for such low wages. I know I’m not the only one, this was and is being replicated across the country. At the time, BHM seemed to be nothing more than a way to service the system and give the illusion of a non-existent cohesion. Besides, I was growing tired of the slave narrative that seemed to dominate BHM.

It’s the same slave narrative that keeps being brought up as ‘black history’. Contrary to popular belief, it’s not. It’s history. British history to be exact. 

The slave trade is the history of colonial white European domination inflicted on the world. It’s the story of how the British along with the French, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese amongst many others fed and gorged themselves until bloated with gout upon the profits made from enforced “free’ labour entwined with the horrors of enslaving millions of africans for centuries, and how the accrued wealth turned turned Britain into a super power, gifting it an empire which ruled over 23% of the world’s population at it’s height. It’s the continuing narrative of how Britain’s educational, legal, political, financial and social systems were aided by the profits of the slave trade, indeed the rise of the industrial revolution could not have happened without the slave trade. None of this is ‘black history’.

The black history I want to understand speaks of kings and queens, education and empire on the African continent, a time before the europeans enslaved Africans on a mass scale. The black history I’ve come to understand speaks of Bussa, Nanny Maroon, the Haitian Revolution, as well as many other uprisings by the enslaved which continued throughout the entire period of the slave trade against the colonisers who refused to see human beings. It speaks of the British Civil Rights movement (not American) with events like the Bristol Bus Boycott, and hear the stories of activists like Olive Morris. This is the black history I want to see. Others agree with me, indeed Jeremy Corbyn’s announcement for Labour’s proposals to change the way Black history is taught in the U.K. shows there is indeed some sort of a will to do things differently. I want to see such history embedded in the British education system. But this I believe will never happen in my lifetime, not least because it disproves the notion of black people being knife-wielding, uneducated, service providers who should be grateful for being here in the UK. And if a black person doesn’t like how they are being treated then they, and I quote “have the means to leave the country’ as Piers Morgan told Dr. Kehinde Andrews. This insipid ‘othering’ is the thing whiteness always does to protect itself. And too many people racialised as white fall into this diatribe with wild abandonment when faced with accusations of racism. I say this with a vague hope that I’ll be proved wrong… although I doubt it.

But, I digress. 

As a black woman, I am constantly called to justify my presence in the U.K. to white people who literally don’t know the history of how the black community came to be in the U.K. Every single day, I’m faced with a continual barrage of micro aggressions, pictures and articles from a media hell bent on demonising people who look like me and constantly triggering of racial trauma. In order to navigate my daily existence, as well as having artistic expertise which is frankly outstanding (you can’t say that as a black woman… yeah, I can) I’ve had to become part historian, psychologist and social scientist simply so I can defend myself against the daily assaults of whiteness. Funny how I feel I have no choice but to become a sort of collector of facts whilst all whiteness needs to question my valid criticisms of the U.K.’s continuous attacks on blackness and the on-going racial injustice in general is a ferocity of opinion. I think it’s fair to say that in the thirty years since BHM came into being, the U.K.’s relationship with the black community has at this point fallen to an all time low. BHM has been become a silo, a mouthpiece to keep black people placated. And given the contexts I’ve given, my thinking is being born out by the facts.

The current and blatant attempts to rebrand BHM to Diversity Month seeks to both service whiteness’ wish to erase black people from the British historical canon and maintain the negative perception of the U.K. black community whilst at the same time, promoting through the back door a heightened sense of whiteness’ diversity as proof that we are ‘all in this together’. From the notion of White Jesus right up to the lack of acknowledgement by the U.K. of the West Indies effort in fighting in the armed forces in both World Wars on behalf of Britain, whiteness merely seeks to maintain itself as top of the food chain. White supremacy has been going on for at least three centuries.

My criticism of BHM is not about denigrating the efforts of the many in the black community who year in, year out are called upon to deliver a programme of work, and depending on where you are in the country, for not much money. Working BHM is a thankless task which is not seen as a very necessary and integral way to celebrating a community whose efforts over the centuries have directly contributed not only to the development of the U.K., but to the world. My criticism is about the response whiteness has to BHM. A response which I feel will always typify how the dominate white culture in the U.K will always see the black community. The systems in place demands there is no alternative to the fake narrative.

BHM to me has become a series of wasted opportunities for discussions around how UK society wishes to view itself in the 21st Century. In my experience, it’s a severely under-resourced month of a string of broken promises. And it serves as yet a further reminder that the system of whiteness will do anything it can to protect itself. U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May’s statement October 2018 about the importance of BHM to U.K. does nothing more than give lip service in a vain attempt to deflect criticism. 

My feeling is it’s time to do away with this farce. In the face of Brexit, Britain needs to face up to and confront it’s colonial past with honesty and bravery. 

I won’t be holding my breath.

[earlyandoftenpodcast]

(John Winthrop, an early governor of Massachusetts)

In this episode we look at the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, as well as its early struggles over the proper role of popular participation in government.

>>>Direct audio link<<<

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Transcript and Sources:

Hello, and welcome to Early and Often: The History of Elections in America. Episode 10: The Pig Who Invented Bicameralism.

Last time, we followed the Pilgrims as they established a small colony at Plymouth Bay in what is now Massachusetts in 1620. The Pilgrims proved quite disruptive to the fragile balance of power in the region, but even after 10 years Plymouth’s population was only about 300. But although Plymouth wasn’t too successful, its presence paved the way for bigger things.

In 1629, just a few years before the founding of Maryland, Puritans began streaming into Massachusetts, totally swamping everything and everyone that had been there before. Within a decade over 20,000 settlers would arrive. This was the real founding of New England, much as the real foundations for Virginia were only laid a decade after the settlement of Jamestown.

Back when the Separatists had left England for the Netherlands in the early 1600s, their rejection of the Anglican Church was very much a minority position. The Church of England hadn’t adopted too many Puritan ideas, but it was close enough to their beliefs, and it had taken a live-and-let-live attitude for the most part. There were plenty of Puritan ministers and Puritan sympathizers within the Church. But James I had proven less sympathetic to the Puritans than his predecessor Elizabeth had. And his son Charles I was even less sympathetic than his father. Charles, remember, was married to a French Catholic.

So throughout the 1620s and ‘30s the Church clamped down on dissent and more rigorously enforced Anglican orthodoxy. Puritan-sympathizing ministers were removed from their posts and Catholic-style practices were reintroduced. All of which goes a long way towards explaining why, during the English Civil War in the next decade, Puritans so resolutely sided with Parliament, and why when Parliament won, it was in large part a Puritan victory.

In the face of this official pressure, it was only natural that true believers might start considering immigration. The fringe beliefs of the Pilgrims started to seem more sensible to mainstream Puritans. And tens of thousands of Puritans did in fact pour out of England. Some went to the Netherlands, some went to the Caribbean or to Central America. Those migrations would be largely forgotten in time. But a large minority followed the Pilgrims to New England, where they managed to create for themselves an entire culture of their own that would last for centuries.

In the late 1620s a group of men, mostly prominent and wealthy Puritans or at least Puritan-sympathizers, began meeting to plan out a new colonization effort in New England. Things came together quickly, and in 1629 they secured approval from King Charles for the creation of the Massachusetts Bay Company, a joint stock company like in Virginia. Indeed, the document was modeled on one of the Virginia Company’s charters. This new company absorbed all the preexisting land claims in the region, with the exception of Plymouth Colony.

The Company’s charter gave them the right to create a government for their colony and to administer it as they saw fit. The inhabitants were to retain all the rights of Englishmen. The same sorts of things I mentioned for Virginia back in Episode 2. In principle, legally this was very similar to other past colonization efforts. But while the Company’s official goal was to turn a profit, for the most part religious concerns were the actual motivation. Although I’m sure they didn’t make that clear to the King, nor did they talk about just how independent they wanted to be from his control.

While the legal wrangling was going on, in 1628 they had sent John Endecott to New England to prepare the way for a larger colonization effort. Endecott would go on to become governor of Massachusetts for 16 years, but very little is known of his life before this period. Personality-wise, Endecott was typical of the Puritan leadership, zealous and uncompromising. He was certainly willing to persecute Indians and religious dissenters when called on to do so.

Endecott arrived at what was soon named Salem, Massachusetts, of later Salem witch trial fame. This was the site of a previous failed colony, but there were still a few settlers eking out a living. Endecott and the other new arrivals took over and began constructing buildings to prepare for the coming migration.

After Endecott had been there a few months, in April 1629 the main fleet set off for Massachusetts. There were five ships carrying maybe 300 passengers. This expedition was far better equipped and better prepared than any previous one to date. No doubt learning from past failures helped. At least they sent an advance party instead of just showing up and hoping for the best.

The Puritans who were traveling to Massachusetts resembled the Pilgrims in many ways. A very large majority were coming in family groups rather than as individuals. Even the servants who came, came as part of a household rather than being unattached. Forty percent were female, and according to David Hackett Fischer, “nearly half were children under sixteen.”

They were somewhat better off economically than the Pilgrims had been, and much better off than the average indentured servant in Virginia. The Puritan immigrants were generally what we’d call middle class. And basically no aristocrats went, so the top of the social hierarchy was missing as well. They were artisans and merchants, as well as farmers who owned their own land. But farmers were a minority. Instead, the migration was very disproportionately urban. They were unusually well-educated too. Two thirds of men were at least literate enough to sign their own names. And there was a large group of highly educated ministers as well.

So the Puritans were educated, egalitarian, middle-class, and hyper religious. And that was what New England would be, for a long time to come.

After an easy voyage, the Puritans arrived at Salem that summer and were met by Endecott. There were no moments of big drama like in Jamestown or Plymouth. They just got to work. Thanks to the healthy climate and adequate preparations, there was no big die off that first year. Everything went well, for once.

The success was encouraging. The next year an even larger fleet of eleven ships carrying a thousand passengers set sail. This fleet was led by John Winthrop, aged about 42, who would go on to be governor of Massachusetts for 12 years. He’s important, so let me give you some background.

John Winthrop was born in 1587, the son of a prosperous lawyer/landowner. As a young man, Winthrop followed his father to Cambridge University. By the time he was in his early 20s, he was becoming extremely devout and concerned for the state of his soul. He soon became a staunch Calvinist. He held various minor offices and basically behaved as someone with his status was expected to. He was by disposition inegalitarian. Social inequality was part of God’s will, after all. In his words, “in all times some must be rich some poore, some highe and eminent in power and dignitie; others meane and in [subjection].” Great men were to show mercy to their inferiors, and lesser men were to show obedience to their betters.

The laws of the state should be based on those found in the Bible, though with additions as needed. The common people were incapable of self-government. He didn’t believe in natural rights or liberty or anything like that. Rather, he instead believed that men submitted themselves to a divinely ordained central authority, and then that central authority could grant its subjects rights on a case by case basis. The authorities themselves shouldn’t have too many constraints on their power, other than their individual consciences and their devotion to God. This was a rather Hobbesian view, although he was writing decades before Thomas Hobbes penned Leviathan.

But Winthrop had more immediate concerns than political philosophy. He was facing financial problems, and Charles had just stopped calling Parliaments and was trying to rule on his own. The Puritan cause seemed weak. So Winthrop, disheartened both personally and politically, contacted the Massachusetts Bay Company and helped organize a fleet. Thanks to his status and his drive, he immediately became an important figure in the project, and was soon elected as the next governor of Massachusetts.

He also helped come up with a clever idea to secure greater Puritan control over the colony. It was proposed that, basically, the Puritans in Massachusetts buy out the investors in the Company who were in England and transfer the entire Company from London to America. That would transfer almost total control to the Puritans. This was questionable legally, and certainly against the intention of the colony’s charter. But they did it anyway. Now, with the Company nothing more than a legal formality, Massachusetts would have almost total independence, and almost no duties or obligations toward England. The Company was fast becoming just a government.

Winthrop’s fleet of eleven ships set sail in the summer of 1630. While at sea Winthrop gave the famous “City Upon A Hill Speech”, where he said that “The eies of all people are uppon us. Soe that if wee shall deale falsely with our God in this worke wee haue undertaken, and soe cause him to withdrawe his present help from us, wee shall be made a story and a by-word through the world. Wee shall open the mouthes of enemies to speake evill of the wayes of God, and all professors for God's sake.” In other words, Massachusetts was to be a model for right Christian living, and its failure would damage true Christianity the world over.

Winthrop arrived at Salem, but the Puritans found the town to be too small for their needs, so settlers spread out quickly along the coast, founding a number of new towns including Boston, which soon became the capital, thanks to its advantageous harbor. Two hundred colonists died that winter, though that was about the worst of it. Conditions improved rapidly and the Puritans set out building their new society.

As far as the economy goes, from an early date, the New England colonies were engaged in trades such as fishing and shipping. Shipyards were opened in the 1640s, and a small commercial culture began to grow as soon as the initial settlement phase was over. Boston in particular became relatively cosmopolitan.

But of course most New Englanders were still just farmers living in small towns scattered throughout the region. In the more northerly climate of New England, it was much harder to profitably grow cash crops like in the Chesapeake, so big plantations never emerged. Family farms were the norm, and these tended to be similar enough in size. In a typical town the largest farm might be no more than a few times bigger than the average one. There were no landowners who had orders of magnitude more than their neighbors. In fact, in some towns, plots of land were given out at random, with each family drawing lots.

Some families were wealthier than others, of course, but there were few poor and few rich. Indeed, the poor and to a lesser extent the aristocracy were actively discouraged from migrating. There were still ranks, but the top and bottom were closer than usual. Cities and ports were less egalitarian, but they were just a small part of New England’s social fabric.

Another important difference with the Chesapeake is that there was less fertile soil, and there were fewer navigable rivers. These factors encouraged the settlers to live in towns, rather than spread out across far-flung plantations. These small towns became the religious and political centers of New England life.

By far the most important building in any town was the church. Puritan churches, or “meetinghouses”, were tremendously ascetic, made of unpainted wood and entirely undecorated inside, other than a single, staring eye painted on the pulpit to remind them of God’s omnipresence. Each Sunday parishioners sat through two separate hours-long sermons, each analyzing some fragment of the Bible. They were a very, very grim people, paranoid about their spiritual health and about unnaturalness. According to Fischer, “90 percent of executions for witchcraft in British America occurred in the Puritan colonies.”

From the very first church in Salem onwards, the Puritans followed a Congregational model, where each community had an independent compact with God and was largely in charge of its own affairs. They hired their own ministers, and admitted new members themselves. (Just to clarify, people who weren’t members of their local church would have still attended church, they just weren’t official members, that’s all.) There was some overarching authority, of course, but nothing like you’d find in the Church of England. The government could call for synods to be held, meetings that would keep the various churches on the same track, but they were still all ultimately independent. They weren’t totally breaking away from Anglican authority, at least not officially, but they were coming pretty close.

Of course, not everyone in Massachusetts was a Puritan. But two thirds or more of the colonists were, and half of the remainder were servants of the Puritans anyway, so that was still the dominant way of thinking. And this overwhelming religiosity permeated the government as much as it did everything else.

There were distinctions between civil and religious authority. In fact, the separation between religious and civil officials was much greater than in England, where the positions often overlapped. In England, a minister might also have a role in town government, but not in New England. Puritans of course saw this as a return to the original church, before it had been corrupted by involvement in politics. But still, government officials saw it as their duty to enforce Puritan beliefs with the full force of the law. Religious dissenters were sometimes executed. Quakers, who were heretics in Puritan eyes, had their faces branded or their ears cut off.

And there were plenty of laws that may not have been religious per se, but were certainly grounded in a desire to enforce the community’s sense of upright behavior. The Puritans strictly regulated how people lived. Nobody was allowed to live on their own. Single men in their own houses were forced to move in with families. The profits of businessmen were curtailed and idleness was strictly punished. These weren’t all unusual. Other societies were opposed to excessive profits and idleness, but the Puritans were far more rigorous in their control. Punishments went all the way up to being burned alive, though hanging was more usual. Not for idleness, of course. For lesser crimes, public humiliation was common. But although these laws were strict, they didn’t need to be enforced all that frequently since lawbreaking was relatively uncommon. Life in Massachusetts wasn’t actually an endless parade of punishment or anything.

Interestingly, because of their strict reading of the Bible, marriage was seen as a civil matter rather than a religious one, and divorce was relatively easier than elsewhere at the time. So as you can see, the fact that the Puritans were so religious didn’t always mean that everything was subordinated to the church. There were separate sources of authority, even if those separate sources were still ultimately secondary to the will of God.

Despite the presence of elections, the goal of a Puritan government was not to follow the will of the people, or to ensure individual liberty. What “liberty” there was, was the liberty to be a proper Puritan. Popular participation in government was a means to an end, the establishment of a Godly regime. They didn’t consider themselves democratic, although they did believe that power in society came from the bottom up rather than the top down. But that bottom up power meant different things to different people. To Governor Winthrop, it meant that the people surrendered themselves to a rather absolute authority. To others, it meant genuine popular control. The fight between those two views was played out in the fight over the colony’s charter.

Massachusetts’s charter was a de facto constitution which detailed how the government was supposed to operate. Overall, it was somewhat similar to that in Virginia, at least structurally. There was to be a governor, a deputy governor, and 18 Assistants or magistrates, who had a somewhat similar role to the Councilors in Virginia, forming a sort of executive council. Unlike in the Chesapeake, all of these positions were to be filled by annual elections, with the freemen of the colony voting each spring, unlike the irregularly scheduled elections for just the Burgesses in Virginia.

Additionally, there was to be a General Court, which was the equivalent of the General Assembly. This was a unicameral body consisting of the Governor, Deputy Governor, Magistrates, and the freemen of the colony, or at least their representatives, although the exact nature of that representation was kept vague in the charter. The General Court was to meet four times a year and it had the power to pass laws and appoint men to various offices.

So like I said, this was similar enough to Virginia at the time. But of course the fact that all of these offices were all to be elected was a quite significant departure. However, the colony’s leaders weren’t always willing to adhere to the charter’s generous provisions.

In the colony’s first few years, things were simply too unsettled for the charter to be followed. Endecott, since he was the leader on site, served as governor, but there was no real formal structure beyond that. And the arrival of Winthrop upended things yet again.

Winthrop became governor, but his first term was irregular. He was appointed in England, rather than elected, and his term both began before it was supposed to begin, and ended after it was supposed to end. In other words, they were winging it. In fact, when Winthrop got to Massachusetts, the earliest meetings of the government were simply held under a tree.

But although things in the colony soon settled down and moved indoors, that didn’t mean that the charter was now going to be followed. None of these earliest officials were elected, and frankly Governor Winthrop would have been happy to keep it that way. Democracy was, in the words of Winthrop, “the meanest and worst of all formes of Government”, and more importantly democracy lacked Biblical sanction, unlike monarchy. He sure didn’t believe in representative government and so he tried to limit the representative nature of government as much as possible. In his mind, and in the minds of many leaders of the colony, at most elections were there for the leaders merely to affirm their positions. Representation existed to justify a de facto oligarchy. Elections weren’t supposed to be a real outlet for popular opinion or anything like that. At least, that was the idea according to some.

Now, the charter called for a General Court to be held four times a year to represent the freemen. But “freemen” was, as always, a vague term, especially in a colony with so few servants. So the very earliest General Courts that first year in 1630 were, I think, just meetings of whichever colonists showed up. Obviously this would not do.

So in 1631 Governor Winthrop decided that “noe man shalbe admitted to the freedom of this body polliticke, but such as are members of some of the churches within the limitts of the same." Political participation was being limited to men who were members of their local church. In other words, to just the Puritans of the colony, since they were the ones setting up the churches. This religious test was in quite flagrant violation of the rights that had been given to all freemen, but who was going to stop it?

Also contrary to the charter was the decision to cut meetings of the General Court from four times a year down to one. Many of the eighteen Magistrate positions were left vacant. They also ended the direct elections of the governor and deputy governor. Instead, the Magistrates were to pick governors from among themselves. And the ability to create laws was taken away from the General Court and given to just the governor and his Magistrates. Winthrop raised taxes without popular consent, which of course raised fears of Stuart despotism. The Governor and his allies were moving hard and fast against elections, and breaking the law to do so. If he’d had his way, elections would have had no real connection to any actual power.

However, all of these arbitrary and illegal limits on popular government got pushback from the colonists and even from the deputy governor, and so many of Winthrop’s changes had to be rolled back within a few years. The direct elections of governor and deputy governor were restored in 1632, though not completely. Voters were still limited to choosing men who had also been elected as Magistrates. And lawmaking was returned to the General Court, which was additionally given the exclusive power to raise taxes, as with any good English legislature. Two years later the General Assembly was again called to meet four times a year.

In this modified system, the freemen of each town were to send two or three men to meet in three General Courts a year, while the freemen themselves would all meet together for the fourth General Court, to vote for the Governor and Magistrates.

So some, but not all, of the changes were successfully reversed. Most importantly, the restriction of voting rights to church members was kept in place. Although most colonists were Puritans, that didn’t mean that they were all formally members of their local church, since gaining membership was an arduous process involving lengthy interviews where you had to prove your religious sincerity. And of those who were church members, not all bothered to formally become freemen, either, since that could mean more work with little benefit. But maybe half of all adult men were freemen in those first few decades, though estimates vary. Very high by the standards of the day at least. Plus towns often had looser requirements for voting than the Court did, which I’ll talk about in a few episodes.

Women could and did send petitions to the Court, but that was the extent of their formal participation.

Moving on to the elections themselves. Officials in the first few years of Massachusetts history weren’t elected the way officials are today, with voters showing up to the precinct nearest them to cast their ballots, which are then all counted up. Instead, voters had to actually be in Boston on election day to cast their votes. This was called the Court of Election. Of course this system meant that the well-to-do and those who lived in Boston had an advantage over everyone else, thanks to their simple ability to show up. So this system was modified quickly, in 1634. Now, the men of a town could write their votes on paper ballots and send a deputy to Boston to deliver their votes to be counted. If no candidate received a majority, the election was decided by the General Court. This was a practice distinctive to the region. England and the other American colonies all still voted by voice or by show of hands.

Although voting was now done with ballots, this system was still, at best, semi-anonymous. Certainly anonymity wasn’t a goal anyone had in mind at the time. You didn’t have to sign your name on your ballot generally, but you still would have had to hand it in, visible for all to see. There were no special precautions for privacy yet.

Actually, for a few decades people voted for the magistrates not with a paper ballot but with kernels of corn. If you wished to approve of someone’s nomination as a magistrate, you would drop a white kernel of corn in a hat. If you disapproved, you would drop in a black kernel. The deputy from your town would then take the corn to Boston to be counted, avoiding as many birds as possible I assume.

But as Massachusetts grew, so did the number of deputies, until even this system proved unwieldy. There were multiple attempts to cut back on the number of deputies, but the towns would have none of it. It seems to me like it would have been simpler to just tabulate the votes in each town and send those totals to Boston instead of this more elaborate procedure, but perhaps there were concerns about fraud. Or perhaps it was just traditional and no one thought to change it. But in any case, similar systems of paper ballots (and corn) would be adopted by several other of the New England Colonies.

Elections in Massachusetts began at 8 AM with a no-doubt rousing election day sermon. Soon election day in the towns became a festive holiday, with the serving of “election cakes” and “election beer”, a tradition sadly forgotten today. I actually found a recipe for election cake, though it’s from over a century later and may have been different from what was served in these first few decades. The recipe, for one extremely large fruitcake, reads as follows:

“Thirty quarts flour, ten pounds butter, fourteen pounds sugar, twelve pounds raisins, three dozen eggs, one pint wine, one quart brandy, four ounces cinnamon, four ounces fine colander seed, three ounces ground alspice; wet the flour with the milk to the consistency of bread over night, adding one quart yeast, the next morning work the butter and sugar together for half an hour, which will render the cake much lighter and whiter; when it has risen light, work in every other ingredient except the plumbs, which [you] work in when going into the oven.”

Sounds like quite a production! You can find modernized recipes for smaller election cakes online if you just Google “election cake”. Let me know if you make one.

Given all the effort that went into them, it's clear that New Englanders cared a great deal about elections. Remember, they did all that each and every year. It wasn’t just for show. There were in fact some contested elections and changes in power. For instance, after Governor Winthrop’s attempts to limit popular participation were rebuffed he lost the next election to one of his rivals and was out of power for a few years, though he’d be back.

But elections were still much less partisan than today, and the turnover of officials wasn’t that rapid either, apart from the first decade. Officials were more likely to step down of their own accord than to lose reelection. I mean, the governorship was held by a rotating group of just four men for 41 of the next 43 years. So stability was pretty high.

There’s one other early political development to discuss: the division of the General Court into an upper and lower house. In Virginia and Maryland, the split was due to the division between the unelected Councilors and the elected representatives. In Massachusetts both the Deputies and the Magistrates were elected, but there was still a split. The Delegates were more in tune with popular opinion while the Magistrates were a bit more elite.

It didn’t take long for the two groups to become irrevocably at odds, and it was all thanks to a completely minor disagreement over a single pig. More specifically, a lawsuit over a sow. In 1636 there was a stray pig wandering around Boston. No one else claimed it, so it was taken by

Robert Keayne, a wealthy moneylender. When a year went by and still no one had claimed the sow, Keayne had it slaughtered. But after the pig was dead, a lawsuit was brought against Keayne by Goodwife Sherman on behalf of her husband, who was in England at the time. Sherman claimed that they had lost a pig of their own and that it was the same one which Keayne had unjustly taken and killed.

The evidence was apparently against her, and she lost her suit. However, popular sympathy was with Sherman, since she was from a poorer, but well known and well liked family, while Keayne was rich and unpopular. Keayne brought a countersuit for defamation which went before the General Court, which at this time also sometimes acted like a real court, not just a legislature.

The case split the Court in two. Most Magistrates found for Keayne, but most Deputies found for Sherman. There were more Deputies than Magistrates so Sherman got the most support, but unfortunately for her, just getting a majority was insufficient. You also had to get the approval of the Magistrates specifically, since they could on their own block any action from the Delegates, just like how in Virginia the Council could veto laws passed by the Burgesses. This Negative Vote, as it was called, was a way for the Magistrates to keep the Deputies in check. It gave the elite a way to negate popular power. This led to a quite acrimonious dispute between the Deputies and the Magistrates, over whether this Negative Vote should be kept. This was basically a continuation of the disagreement between Winthrop and the Deputies over the powers of the legislature, with the Deputies still pushing to increase their own power.

Relations between the two factions got pretty acrimonious and in 1644 the dispute was finally resolved by dividing the General Court into an upper and lower house, both of which had to approve all legislation. Now, both the Magistrates and the Deputies could block laws. This was right about at the same time as when Governor Berkeley probably split the General Assembly, and just six years before Maryland’s Assembly became bicameral.

But the running dispute between the Deputies and the Magistrates continued, over various constitutional issues like who should be in charge when the General Court was out of session.

And there were further attempts to place some officials beyond the reach of elections altogether. For instance, some of the Magistrates tried to form a new body where a few of them could just serve for life, but that attempt was blocked. Winthrop even tried to block the Court from writing a law code, since he thought that would impinge upon the freedom of the magistrates to do as they wished. He argued that there was no need for a law code, since the magistrates’ oath of office pledging to protect the well-being of the state was sufficient to keep them from behaving tyrannically, even without any formal limits on their power. That argument was rejected, but the disputes were such that it took some 15 years for a satisfactory law code to be passed.

But eventually things settled down after both sides had reached a compromise position. In essence, elections remained the ultimate source of authority, but the governor and magistrates remained powerful in their own right. And voting was still limited to church members. The colony’s charter wasn’t being precisely followed, but neither had it been thrown out completely.

As its form of government was being worked out, Massachusetts was developing in other ways. During the 1630s some 200 ships carrying some 20,000 colonists came to New England. By 1647 there were 33 different towns in Massachusetts.

Laws were passed in the New England colonies mandating that all children be taught to read. According to Fischer, another law “compelled every town of fifty families to hire a schoolmaster, and every town of one hundred families to keep a grammar school which offered instruction in Latin and Greek”. And children in Massachusetts got twice as much schooling as those in Virginia. This was mostly to teach kids the Bible, but of course literacy has many other benefits.

Harvard University was established in 1636, while the first college in Virginia, William and Mary, would only be founded in 1693. Now, Harvard at the time wasn’t a prestigious and world renowned university like it is today. It was mainly just a school for the training of ministers, but the difference is still striking. And the first printing press in New England was set up in 1638, a full 90 years before the first one in Virginia.

Perhaps partly because of this focus on education, the Puritans proved to be financially successful. The colonies wasn’t profitable in the way that the plantations of the Caribbean were, but the colonists themselves were able to live quite well by the standards of the day. The Puritan migrants had been middle class in England and they remained middle class in New England.

They were allowed to do all this, to build their own quite distinct society, without any real interference from the Crown. Which may seem surprising, given Charles’s obvious hostility to the Puritans. Why did he let this happen? After all, it’s not like Massachusetts was totally cut off. People went back and forth and word certainly got out about what kind of society the Puritans were building, and how hostile it was to the English establishment. I mean, they acknowledged the King’s authority only grudgingly and their churches had completely broken away from the Anglican bishops. Well, there were concerns raised, but there was only so much that could be done. Remember, this is the decade when King Charles was ruling without Parliament, so he was busy just keeping everything together in England, and by the end of the decade he was sucked into a war in Scotland. And of course after that, the English Civil War hit, and no one at all in England cared about the colonies. And in any case, the Puritans were less of a threat over there than at home. So despite various worries, New England was mostly left to do its own thing, at least for the time being.

Next episode, we’ll talk about the other colonies of New England, Maine, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, and how they built upon the Massachusetts way of doing things while making significant innovations of their own. So join me next time on Early and Often: The History of Elections in America.

If you like the podcast, please rate it on iTunes. You can also keep track of Early and Often on Twitter, at earlyoftenpod, or read transcripts of every episode at the blog, at earlyandoftenpodcast.wordpress.com. Thanks for listening.

Sources:

The Colonial Period of American History Volume I by Charles M. Andrews

History of Elections in the American Colonies by Cortlandt F. Bishop

Puritanism: A Very Short Introduction by Francis J. Bremer

The Charter of Massachusetts Bay

Saints and Strangers: New England in British North America by Joseph A. Conforti

Albion’s Seed by David Hackett Fischer

The Political Thought of John Winthrop by Stanley Gray

A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New England by David D. Hall

A History Of Election Cake And Why Bakers Want To #MakeAmericaCakeAgain

The Reformation by Diarmaid MacCulloch

'Election Cake' Makes a Modern Day Resurgence by Keia Mastrianni

Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick

A Model of Christian Charity by John Winthrop

[joshuacagar]

The avid readers of this blog of mine had been willing me for ages to provide the continuation to my series Indolence of the Filipinos in the 21st century. It may seem to those readers that I have ironically succumbed to the tendencies of being indolent as discussed in the previous chapters.

To give some sort of an explanation, I, the seemingly undisciplined author, have already written what I thought was a third of the 4th chapter already. Those who were my intimate friends can attest that I already wrote that as early as mid-2017.

Draft of the 4th chapter

I tended to read Rizal’s works and letters when I prepared into writing a chapter. I stopped midway for I have felt that Rizal’s spirit “within me” left me back then in grievance into seeing the rational and moral descent of the Filipino race that he once defended with his martyrdom. That descent was mainly attributed to the misappropriation and misinterpretation of one of the main virtues that were being discussed in the chapter that had long been pending in the stockpile of this seemingly exhausted and undisciplined writer.

Discipline has been one of the most rhetorically employed concept in the Filipino society of today. It was such an enticing concept for within that frequently abused concept laid a promise to the grandeur of harmonious order. It was often perceived as the noble counterpart to the perceived unrest in the Filipino society, whether real or imagined. Discipline gave assurance amidst the misery looming in the uncertainty of chaos, as if it could fully extinguish the flaming turmoil brought by chaos.

However, the laws of the universe would slap those who longed for such thing with the futility of such notion. Chaos was inherent in the universe for chaos was what has brought the universe its very existence. No chaos meant nothing existed in the first place. The absence of chaos IS the absence of existence. With its law of entropy, as with the flow of time, one could not reverse the existence and even the increase in chaos. It IS a never-ending state. Even warmth, in the first place, was brought upon by the chaos within molecules as the chaos within signified movement, like in life, where there’s always uncertainty. Ultimately, the absence of chaos also signified the certainty of the absence of life.

If that was the case, then where did discipline situate itself in the realm of thought?

The desire for certainty mainly stems from the individual’s desire to control. So if the absolute certainty is only of the impossibility of absolutely controlling the uncertainty of chaos, then for the individual, discipline turned out to be their attempt to contain that chaos.

The containment imposed by discipline always started with the nearest thing within the individual’s grasp: the self. In the imposition of that containment, the individual bound himself to a set of rules that the individual supposed to follow. Those rules were determined based on the containment the individual had imposed upon himself. The desire to control where the containment originated from was for the purpose of harnessing the flow of the uncertainty mentioned into a direction on which the individual could most expect situations and challenges that he could handle.

Understandably, the natural impulses of an individual would set that direction into the most rudimentary of natural binaries: what benefits and doesn’t. In evaluating those things, the individual developed interests and biases based on what the individual solely perceived. The selection and evaluation were series of trials and errors that served as the backbone to the individual’s experience which would then in turn constantly test the worthiness of the rules that he imposed upon himself, admitting new ones while also furloughing non-beneficial ones.

However, those rules, since they were primarily result from the individual’s own experience, could only apply to the individual himself. Those rules were only imposed upon oneself, not upon others. Attempting to extend the containment beyond personal realms would result to conflict, the same conflict tackled in the draft that I attached in this piece.

Conflicts exemplified the uncertainty brought by chaos. In the middle of this turmoil of human discord emerged the concept of politics and social contract theories. Politics, according to Andrew Heywood – who authored the textbook that we used in our political science classes – defined politics into four ways: (1) politics as the art of government, (2) politics as conflict and cooperation, (3) politics as consensus and compromise, and (4) politics as power and authority.

In quelling the chaos brought by the conflict of the rules and interests, individuals began to cooperate as they flocked together into forming communities with a culture and norms determined through a convention where compromises were made as the agreed-upon rules were established in pursuit of societal harmony.

Morality became a by-product of that convention where the sense of what was right and what was wrong was established. The established binary distinguished itself from the rudimentary binary mentioned earlier (what benefits vs what doesn’t) by the replacement of the personal with the rational and logical stemming from the empathy and compassion that arose from the formation of such communities.

Through a social contract, the community delegated an institution which would look after then in exchange of the authority that was bestowed upon them. That institution would see to it that the rules were enforced fairly. That institution would also introduce new rules and repeal old ones on the basis of the common good. And that institution would interpret and adjudicate those rules on the basis of rationality and morality.

Through the social contract and the formation of laws and institutions that followed, the community also developed discipline in its own. There’s conformity as long as there’s convenience. Discipline ultimately fell under those two prerequisites. Take one of the two out, then it’s not longer discipline.

Discipline is indeed a committal aspect. The abidance to those roles and the results that such act would reap mainly depended on the individual’s effort and probity in abiding to those set of rules.

Such lapses on effort and the subsequent indolence resulted into the distortion and corruption of the things that society had built up to.

Like the booze distracting the citadel guards from the incoming pillagers, indolence impaired the community’s functions as the watchdog as the people in authority began to no longer act on the basis of the common good but on the basis on their personal interest. Indolence of the mind proliferated ignorance as the people in power made the people in the community forget the social contract itself and the vox populi within them.

Ignorance gave way to fanaticism. (Which of course was brought by the complication brought by another aspect).

Little by little, sometimes with the concerted efforts of some people of interest who benefited from keeping the Filipinos preoccupied, Filipinos began spiraling into the pitfall of ignorance. It started with the initial state with the lapses on discernment, then followed forgetfulness, and in the bottom, laid docility.

First, with ignorance, the individual would lose the discernment on morality, on which the spiral would gravitate the individual in as the control over the direction was stripped away. Then as darkness would creep in, rendering vision useless, the individual would lose his perception and his sense of history. And in the bottom of the seemingly bottomless pit, the darkness would strip away the individual’s discernment of the self and his dignity as a human being as he began to stare mindlessly to that dark, the deathly still of docility.

As the building blocks began to fall apart, the society held on to the concept of discipline as it attempted to pull itself together. However, the prerequisite of convenience became maligned as was omitted out of it. As a result, the discipline became a mere call for conformity. To whose convenience, may I ask? Quoting Joaquin’s Phoenix’s Joker – whose descent to the destructive chaos of anarchy served as a grim reminder to the oppressive conformism that pushed him to the edge: “…expecting you to behave as if you don’t.”

Indeed, with docility, the chaos died out and people mindlessly followed the whims and wills of others, just like the lion who seemingly behaved. Was the lion commended into being well-behaved by acknowledging the individual and his education? Nope, he was rather well-trained, just programmed to be beware of the whips…ergo… inconveniences.

I begged to differ, with the reason and the logic innate within ourselves which distinguished us from the animals.

The dissent  over that moral descent was often hushed by those who put the dissenters down to their submission with their rhetoric of calling for “unity” and “discipline”. In fact, it was not a call for discipline, but rather a call for docility. Along with conformity, the “discipline” in their rhetoric had become rather a call into being driven cattle. It was only upon the adamance into not being part of the driven cattle that an individual could in fact distinguish discipline from docility.

The key thing that separated discipline from docility was WILLPOWER. In discipline, the individual asserted his will, while in docility, the individual surrendered it.

The Filipino consciousness and soul stemmed from the willpower that asserted itself against colonialism, oppression, and tyranny. The one who exemplified the virtue of willpower the most was the very person who asserted the existence of the Filipino Soul before the world, Jose Rizal. Rizal’s probity, willpower, and honesty were admired even by his contemporaries who saw Rizal’s discipline which operated with a precision of a machine.

Most of Rizal’s efforts were not in vain as the fruition of his advocacies and aspirations led into waking up the lethargic blood of Filipinos who then struggled and championed their cause towards freedom against the chains of tyranny and the whims of the colonizers. His efforts were not forgotten as he was commemorated in every aspect of Filipino life like laws, the continuous printing of his works, the compulsory courses about him, the Philippine peso, his National Shrine in Luneta, and various slogans that interpreted his virtues.

The one that is most notable is that of the Capital City on it’s campaign to impose discipline. The city is correct in associating Rizal with confidence to the virtue of discipline. However, the city’s notion and understanding of discipline is gravely different to that of Rizal, to the point that it has become a sad irony as the City’s desire for its greater grandeur has heartlessly displaced many of its citizens and their livelihoods without even providing viable alternative when in fact that these citizens have been driven into a corner.

This streak of hubris, showmanship, and oppression provided normalcy to the plight of many of the disadvantaged as the colonial mentality has resurged into making those Filipinos love their state of being their own respective tragic heroines and heroes. However, the heroes of history proved to be having none of those. Their willpower, channeled by their discipline, has exalted themselves into achieving their dreams of a better tomorrow.

Discipline, for the Filipino heroes that blazed a trail before us, was a tool for the individuals into becoming better selves and asserting themselves against the forces that threaten to strip their dignity as thinking persons with dignity.

Pertaining to Discipline The avid readers of this blog of mine had been willing me for ages to provide the continuation to my series…

[loudlytransparenttrash]

Time To Reform Black America

A big reason why the black communities today are failing to progress and keep up is not because of racism, it is not because ‘the legacy of slavery,’ it’s not because of white people or Donald Trump, it’s because they are brought up as if the year is still 1917 and they can’t let go. It’s a symbol of black empowerment to teach the kids about their history which is great, but it’s also important to seperate history from present day which so many fail to do. Black children are coaxed into watching old newsreels of black civil rights protesters being hosed, beaten, and dragged off to prison. They watch Norman Lear-like sitcoms and get told stories and read accounts of black America before the civil rights movement and the assassination of MLK. Such things would fill any child with horror. Yet you would imagine it would also encourage them to feel grateful and excited to live in times of equal rights and treatment and liberty for all, as it does with any other race or civilization looking back on its tragic and troubling past.

Yet most blacks who do realize this are usually the odd one out among other black Americans. In every race-related debate, whether it’s Black Lives Matter, any of the police shootings, the Million Man March, Ebonics or affirmative action, most blacks start every conversation with fierce conviction that even 150 years after slavery and decades after the Civil Rights Act, the white man’s foot remains pressed upon all black Americans’ necks. Challenging this idea is called racist, we are told to just “shut up and listen.” For most black Americans, the rapid increase of the black middle class, of interracial relationships and marriages, and of blacks in prestigious positions including our President for the past eight years, has no bearing on the real state of black America. Further, they believe, whites’ inability to grasp the unmistakable reality of oppression is itself proof of savage racism, while blacks who question this claim are called self-deluded uncle toms. Individuality is rare in black America. 

Black leaders and movements mouth the ideology of victimhood for political advantage, “Confrontation works,” as Al Sharpton has calculatingly observed. But most rank-and-file exponents of the “racism forever” worldview really mean it. Their conviction rests on several core excuses, carefully passed from person to person, generation to generation at all levels of the black community. These myths and severe distortions of truth are the biggest obstacle to further black progress in today’s America, adding up to a deeply felt cult of victimology that refuses to be held accountable and move on with the times. Some subscribe to it fiercely, most accept it as a valid point of view. The black leaders and the voices of black lives matter, who launches into a tirade about the War on Blacks, receive nodding heads all over as they absorb this indoctrination.

You’d think that a group committed to advancement would find empowerment in fighting new challenges such as the ones plaguing their own communities but instead they focus on challenges that have already been fought and won decades ago or ones that simply do not exist. But many blacks, inevitably, suffer from a classic post-colonial inferiority complex. Like insecure people everywhere, they are driven by a private sense of personal inadequacy to seeing imaginary obstacles to their success supposedly planted by others. Once the 1968 Kerner Commission report fueled that tendency by positing that American racism was an institutional, systemic matter rather than a merely personal one, black leaders and thinkers gripped on tight and black Americans still hold onto this idea as if their lives depend on it being real.

In the grip of this seductive ideology, blacks have made the immobilizing assumption that individual initiative can lead only to failure, with only a few exceptionally lucky exceptions. Yet many groups have triumphed over similar or worse obstacles, including millions of Caribbean and African immigrants in America, from Colin Powell to the thousands of Caribbean children succeeding in precisely the crumbling schools where black American kids fail. Indeed, thinkers such as Thomas Sowell and Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom argue that American blacks could have advanced, and were advancing, even without the civil rights legislation of the sixties and the racial preferences of the seventies, since black unemployment was at an all-time low in the mid-sixties, and the black middle class was already growing fast. But these facts can’t outweigh the almost narcotic pleasure that underdoggism provides a race plagued by self-doubt. The victimology cult has in turn engendered a cult of black separatism. Inspired by the Black Power movement of the 1960s, which violently rejected whites as terminally evil, today’s separatism, in the same vein, flirts disastrously with the idea that, because white racism ineluctably drives black people outside the bounds of civic virtue, blacks shouldn’t be seriously punished or morally condemned for criminal behavior. If they call their violence a reaction against racism, anything goes, regardless of any other factor such as the truth. The consequences of this are rising all throughout the country today, as they have done in the past and it’s a real concern.

The worst result of black America keeping themselves in a separate realm to its “oppressors,” is the widespread cult of anti-intellectualism. Consider even in middle-class suburbs, increasing numbers of middle-class black students tend to cluster at the bottom of their schools in grades and test scores. Black students whose parents earn $70,000 a year or more make median SAT scores lower than impoverished white students whose parents make $6,000 a year or less, while black students whose parents both have graduate degrees make mean SAT scores lower than white students whose parents only completed high school. Why? All through modern black American culture, even throughout black academia, the belief prevails that learning for learning’s sake is a white affair, spelling properly and talking properly is a white thing and therefore inherently disloyal to a proper black identity. Studying black-related issues is okay, because learning about oneself is authentic. But this impulse also implicitly classifies higher education as irrelevant, which is the direct cause of the underrepresentation of minorities in the hard sciences and other major fields. But hey, it’s okay, affirmative action resolves that, we can just hand out some scholarships and lower the bar to the ground, enforce racial quotas and hey presto, we have equal representation to keep the race baiters happy. 

The sense that the properly “black” person only delves into topics related to himself is also why you can count on one hand the number of books by black Americans that are not on racial topics. The belief that blacks and school don’t go together gained strength in the mid-1960s, when black panther separatists rejected traits associated with whites as alien, and black students, in this spirit, began teasing their fellows who strove to excel in school as “acting white,” a much harsher taunt than merely dismissing them as nerds and this trend has continued well into today. The “acting white” charge, which implies that you think yourself different from and better than your peers, is the prime reason that blacks do poorly in school and why the drop out rates are so high. The gifted black student quickly faces a choice between peer group acceptance and intellectual achievement. Most, out of an utterly human impulse, choose the former. Even if they open themselves to schooling in college or later, their performance all too often permanently suffers from the message they long ago internalized that “the school thing” is an add-on, not a mix-in.

The prevailing orthodoxy lays the blame on other factors, of course, but none of them withstands scrutiny. The fact that the children of working poor immigrants, including Asian and Indian and many other non-whites, who often do well in school and actually do far, far better economically and academically than whites, disproves the claim that their working-class roots deny today’s newly middle-class blacks to teach their children to excel in school. The success of Southeast Asian immigrants’ children particular in the same terrible inner-city schools in which black students fail disproves the Jonathan Kozol gospel that it is the “savage inequality” of school funding that makes black kids fail. Claude Steele at one point made the famous and influential argument that middle-class black students only underachieve in school because fear of confirming the stereotype of black mental inferiority makes them choke up on tests. There may be a grain of truth to this but again, all accountability and blame is shifted onto somebody else while the convenience and safety of victimhood is indulged in. 

Victimology, separatism, and anti-intellectualism underlie the general black community’s response to all race-related issues. The response to affirmative action is a case in point. Blacks see it as a policy that appropriately bends the rules for a group of people who believe are owed something, a notion that today, when middle-class blacks are a massive and thriving group in American society, can only seem plausible through the lens of victimology. The defense of affirmative action on the grounds of “diversity” is an expression of separatism. Since there are not enough black students to be admitted to selective schools on the same merits as the other students, beyond a certain cut-off point blacks are being valued for their skin color rather than their academic accomplishments, everything MLK was against. This is a state of affairs, moreover, that requires a strong dose of anti-intellectualism to accept without discomfort. And the same anti-intellectualism rests content with the flimsy reasoning behind all defenses of affirmative action: that it is immoral for colleges to require a top-quality dossier from the black child of a doctor and a corporate manager simply because he’s black.

Today, these three thought patterns impede black advancement much more than racism and the dysfunctional inner cities, the broken families and black on black crime and black educational underachievement will persist until such thinking disappears. In my experience, trying to show many black Americans how mistaken and counterproductive these ideas are is like trying to convince a religious person that God does not exist: the sentiments are beyond the reach of rational, civil discourse and I get that, it’s almost impossible to overcome but just as we reform religions, I think the black narrative is also in much need of reformation as well, it is severely outdated. There was a time when fighting and decrying institutional racism was the main task at hand, and blacks of today’s generation owe gratitude to those who did it, their comfortable and privileged lives would be impossible without the sacrifices and efforts made by everyone who was a part of the revolution. Today, though, these people are well-intentioned relics of another era, an era they in their moment helped us to get past. Our main concern must be with new generations, who can fulfill their potential only in an America where victimology, separatism, and anti-intellectualism don’t flourish among black Americans. There are two main paths to this goal.

First, it’s time for well-intentioned whites to stop pardoning “understandable” the worst of human nature whenever black people exhibit it. The person one pities is a person one may like but does not truly respect. Second, it’s time for our selective educational institutions to eliminate affirmative action in admissions. This policy may have been useful in the 1960s in creating a black middle class. Today, however, it can only be classed as discriminatory. To achieve in any endeavor, people need incentives. As long as top colleges exempt black students of all classes from serious competition, their admissions officers shouldn’t wonder why so few black students submit top-class dossiers. Only without such a policy will parents, teachers, and school boards, genuinely alarmed at drop-offs in “diversity” in institutions of higher learning, start to help black children become truly competitive for selective schools. What happened after California ended legalized racial preferences in 1995 is a case in point. Programs exploded throughout the state to prepare minorities to be competitive and to eliminate their financial barriers to college.

Eliminating affirmative action will also help dispel black college students’ resentment-tinged anxiety that their white classmates dismiss them as affirmative action picks. It will promote richer interracial contact among students poised to become the nation’s leaders as they will then all be truly on an equal playing field. The black student who can confidently claim to be on campus for the exact same reasons that white and Asian students are, they would be less likely to feel defensive and indulge in victimhood and less likely to be paranoid about their white classmates being covert racists. I believe the time has come for such changes. Sure, these ideas will be condemned, branded racist and repulsive but I also know it has to be said. There was a crucial and damaging change in black ideology in the mid-1960s which we are at risk of not only repeating but making even worse today. 

Perhaps twenty years from now mainstream black thought won’t be such a taboo and more blacks will stress individual initiative and integration. And perhaps the national media will get on the bandwagon too. Let’s hope by then, we won’t feel that any talk of black personal responsibility needs to be balanced by victimology and blaming others. That’s when we will know that we are past the coded fraud that passes for interracial discourse today and have made the kind of progress that yesterday’s civil rights’ leaders would recognize and applaud.

[the10dollar-blog]

A Small Post About Domestic Abuse and Marital Rape in the 18th-19th Centuries

[Note: Feel free to reblog this if you'd like. Please include content/trigger warnings.]

My purpose for making this post is not drama; it's academic disagreement. I think I've made it pretty clear on this blog that I'm passionate about history and accuracy, and that accuracy requires citation. The reasons I think we should be wary of making historical claims without citations are:

1) You run the risk of spreading misinformation about historical truths which still affect society today; and in this case historical truths which are widely under attack by people with An Agenda.

2) It's easy to make points based on historical outliers instead of societal norms without looking at the wider context.

3) You may fall into the trap of making seemingly logical arguments without actual substance, making the misinformation more believable to your audience.

This post, like those I'm responding to, is focusing mostly on the US and the UK. Also, this post will focus mostly on white women, because I'm attempting to keep the scope of the information as narrow as the posts to which I'm responding. The subjects of the abuse of black women, Native American women, Asian women, and others deserve their own posts. There are different issues at play for all of those groups, and I don’t want to present this post as if it could cover all of their experiences.

The following statements are ones which I believe are supported by my sources and accurately depict the state of domestic violence in 18th/19th century (and sometimes beyond) in the United States and the United Kingdom:

1) Violence on the part of the husband against his wife was socially acceptable for upper, middle, and lower classes, although upper and middle classes might employ less visible abuse for the sake of appearances.

2) Violence on the part of the husband was blamed on the wife's behavior, and courts favored reconciliation regardless of the wife's safety within the marriage.

3) Although there were laws against domestic violence, they were seldom enforced, and because the courts favored reconciliation, it was dangerous for women to file claims.

4) Martial rape was considered part of a husband's rights. Domestic violence which did not cause permanent damage was considered part of a husband's rights to punish his wife for "misbehaving."

5) The treatment of wives by their husbands was part of a larger system which dehumanized and infantalized women.

In the United States:

In early America, English law greatly affected the decisions of the colonial courts. The Puritans openly banned family violence. The laws, however, lacked strict enforcement. It was not until the 1870's that the first states banned a man's right to beat his family. The laws were moderately enforced until the feminist movement of the 1960's started bringing the problems of domestic abuse to the attention of the media. By the 1980's most states had adopted legislation regarding domestic violence. (Violence Against Women 1994).  [source]

Yet the Puritan-era courts intervened in only the most severe instances of abuse and “invariably chose to preserve the male-dominated family,” said Pleck. They were “reluctant to separate wives from husbands, and infrequently granted divorce, attempting instead to reconcile unhappy and quarrelsome couples.” Courts appeared to believe that wives provoked their husbands into beating them and sometimes ordered runaway wives to return to their abusive spouses. [source]

Also, the effect of these laws was largely symbolic, defining acceptable conduct and not often enforced by the public floggings or the other more draconian criminal justice punishments in vogue. In fact, it appears that from 1633 to 1802 (169 years), only 12 cases of wife abuse were ever brought in Plymouth Colony (Pleck, 1989).

[...] During the period between the late 1700s through the 1850s, there were virtually no initiatives by the criminal justice system to control domestic violence, and a legislative vacuum existed (Pleck, 1989). In fact, in the early 1800s, judges commonly dismissed infrequent criminal charges because a husband was legally permitted to chastise his wife without being prosecuted for assault and battery (Lerman, 1981).

[...] One court clearly focused on how the wife brought punishment down on herself (Hirschel, Hutchison, Deal, Mills, 1992): "The law gives the husband power to use such a degree of force as is necessary to make the wife behave herself and know her place (p. 251). The same court made it clear that it was even immaterial whether the husband used a whip or another weapon on his wife "if she deserved it," and this gave her no authority to abandon her husband, an offense for which she could be prosecuted (Hirschel et al., 1992, pp. 252-253).

[...] In Openheimer v. Kridel (1923), the court abridged this right, noting that in the past in New York State:

"The marriage contract vested in husbands a limited property interest in the wife's body with the concomitant right to "the personal enjoyment" of his wife. Consequently, in exchange for shelter and protection from external forms of violence, the wife gave over her body. If wives refused coveyance of the self, husbands enforced compliance by force. Marital status conferred upon husbands the right to violate the bodily integrity of their wives (Miccio, 2000, p. 157) [source (Pages 62-63)]

In 1824 the Mississippi Supreme Court upheld in Bradley v. State the English common law principle that a husband may beat his wife “with a rod no thicker than his thumb.” In 1868, the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled in State v. Rhodes that a husband could not be prosecuted for assault and battery as long as his wife's injuries were not permanent. It is better to “shut out the public gaze, and leave the parties to forget and forgive,” said the court.

[...] Specialized family courts, which handled complaints such as domestic assault and nonpayment of child support, began to emerge, with the first established in Buffalo, N.Y., in 1910. By the 1920s, most large cities had followed Buffalo's lead. “Family court judges believed they were helping to decriminalize family violence,” wrote Pleck, and their official policy was to discourage divorce and urge reconciliation whenever possible in the belief that each partner was equally at fault. As a result, women would return home, where they might be beaten for having filed a complaint. [source]

These narratives of the nineteenth-century woman's rights movement stress the passage of the married women's property acts in a number of state legislatures, starting in the 1840s. [...] All of this legislation, however, focused on questions of property distribution between husbands and wives that were of immediate practical concern to relatively few women: Only a small subset of wives in the nineteenth century either owned real property or worked outside the home.  

[...] The history of the struggle over marital rape complicates this picture. It reveals that the legal demands of the nineteenth-century feminist movement were not limited to suffrage and the marginal property reforms at stake in the married women's property acts. The first organized woman's rights movement offered a much more systematic critique of women's legal status in marriage. Indeed, feminists repeatedly identified a woman's right to control the terms of marital intercourse as the predicate condition for women's equality, without which full property rights and even suffrage would be meaningless. Nevertheless, the law's treatment of marital rape hardly changed over the course of the nineteenth century, and the modest reform that did occur was limited to divorce law. The history of women's legal status in the nineteenth century did not follow just one path, of gradual progress and consistent success. Lawmakers willing to enact the married women's property acts or to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment apparently thought there was too much at stake in changing the marital rape exemption. The exemption's survival into the modem era is not evidence that the rule was never contested. The rule was maintained despite decades of feminist objection, because the exemption's defenders were far more powerful than its critics. [source]

In the United Kingdom:

Frances Power Cobbe, champion of the rights of working-class women, wrote in 1878: “Wifebeating exists in the upper and middle classes rather more, I fear, than is generally recognized; but it rarely extends to anything beyond an occasional blow or two not of a dangerous kind” (225). While physical violence may have been rarer outside the working class, Cobbe has neglected to consider the emotional abuse that many saw as an inherent product of middle-class gender structure. This is chiefly because emotional abuse was not considered “abuse” as it is today. As A. James Hammerton has noted, “a woman who chose [her husband] wisely…still had to navigate a treacherous conjugal path, for even the noblest men had faults.” Contemporary authors of prescriptive literature such as Sarah Stickney Ellis“seem to have concluded that for women….the crux of the problem [was] the failure of women to practice the kind of deference that would pacify their selfish husbands” (76). The wisdom of such behavior is born out in the evidence, if we consider the testimony of husbands. Wives' "extravagant habits," "disregard of remonstrances thereon" (84), and disagreement with husbands' executive decisionson important matters such as emigration (90) all served as pretexts for violent punishment. By justifying their actions on alleged lapses by their wives, these men insisted that they were acting within the bounds of their husbandly rights. By administering a “box to the ears” of a wife who had not lived up to her responsibilities, an abusive husband professed to enforce the existing social order.

[...] The idea that domestic strife results when the patriarchal ideal of control and entitlement is taken too far is not unique to modern scholarship; many Victorians, including John Stuart Mill, recognized an indissoluble link between the existing system and its abuses. [...] Cobbe asserts that men of the lower classes were “proverbial for their unparalleled brutality”(223), describing the abuses sustained by victims in shocking detail. This brutality was not, however, uniquely lower-class, but practiced by “respectable” middle-class men as well. Claims that wives provoked attacks by their husbands were common to both classes. Nancy Tomes observes, “Husbands rarely blamed themselves for a beating; they felt that their wives had brought it on themselves” (334). Lower-class reprisals differed perhaps only in their overt brutality and social sanction

[...] Cobbe herself recognized the possibility that the average Englishman's reputation as “exceptionally humane and considerate to women” (223) may have been a result only of social inhibition, suggesting that “in his apparently most ungovernable rage, the gentleman or tradesman somehow manages to bear in mind the disgrace he will incur if his outbreak be betrayed by his wife's black eye or broken arm” (225). In a society as highly dependent on social approval as that of the Victorian middle and upper classes, all but the most vicious of husbands would be keenly aware of the pretension that wives were husbands' mates and to be treated with dignity. In the tightly packed lower-class districts, however, where no action was private, a different status quo reigned. “All the evidence we have on domestic violence in this era,” writes Ellen Ross, “suggests that its social meaning was different from today's….Because men's and women's competing desires were an acknowledged part of their culture, it was to be expected that men might use violent means to secure their wives' obedience” (86). While physical violence was generally accepted and expected among the working class, it had the unexpectedly positive side effect of providing the victim with a built-in support network her social superiors lacked. It was improper for neighbors to intervene in an altercation between husband and wife, which was regarded as a natural part of marriage, but female neighbors tended to a battered wife's wounds, offering her a safe haven if she saw fit to flee her husband's temper (Tomes 336).  

[...] The openness of community in working-class neighborhoods and minimum of privacy surely contributed to the greater degree of activism dedicated to eradicating violence among the poorest segments of society. The threat of public embarrassment to which Cobbe attributes the comparative mildness of middle-class abuse could itself become a form of abuse. While the physically abusive husband feared lest his actions should be made public, the psychological abuser could avail himself of the public eye as a tool for humiliating his wife. James Kelly, a minister, forbade his wife, Frances, from visiting a doctor lest she complain about her ill treatment, yet invited his fellow clergymen to their home to lecture his wife on obeying her husband. On another occasion, when Frances left church services early, he “dragged her in the street” back to church, announcing to the congregation that she was “a woman possessed by the Devil…resisting her husband who wished to prevent her going to some low place” (99). Through such public declarations of his wife's incompetence, and by denying her power within the home, James Kelly stripped his wife of the few benefits to which women of her station were entitled. [source]

Drawing on Scottish judicial sources and media reports on wife-beating this article will highlight how, the ‘civilising process’ as it relates to violence against Scottish wives was moderated by the discursive messages wife-beaters received from the Scotland’s judiciary and the press in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Indeed, the relative legitimisation of wife-beating was evident in the minimal risk of punishment for wife-beating and in continuities in older practices of masculinity. It is also apparent in the Scottish press and the judiciary’s discourses and in their backlash against feminists who demanded greater protection for wives. Violent men were identified as ‘non-criminals’ who were victims of the women they assaulted. By the late nineteenth century the discursive and legal framework was also influenced by the judiciary’s concern to reconcile wives with their violent husbands, or what has been identified as ‘marriage mending’ and this was further facilitated by the introduction and extension of welfare sanctions, in particular the probation services. Probation provided the judiciary with the means of dea­l­ing with wife-beaters without criminalizing them and of promoting reconciliation between violent men and their wives rather than punishing men for their violent conduct. The lack of condemnation attached to wife-beating in the Scottish courts and media indicates the continuation of older attitudes to wife-beating both discursively and in legal practice rather than significant change. [source]

A Few Modern Implications (just on the topic of the normalization of marital rape):

Wife Rape in the United Kingdom (1991):

The survey found that marital rape was the commonest type of rape. On average, 1 in 7 women who were, or had been, married said they had been raped by their husband or ex-husband; that is if the legal definition of rape as `sexual intercourse without consent' applied to them. Thus, a total of 140 women out of the sample of 1,007 (14%) were able to disclose an incident that met the three narrow definitions of rape used in the survey (Table 1).

[...] Since marriage is the only relationship in which a woman surrenders her sexual autonomy and because wife rape is sanctioned by law it is likely that some women may interpret unwanted, even forced, sexual intercourse, as normal male behaviour. As already mentioned, defining an act as rape is difficult and in fact 1 in 7 women believed it was their duty to accede to their husbands sexual demands whenever he made them. The Victorian attitude that wives should accommodate to their husbands sexual desires at all times was thus, shared by a significant minority of women (14%). But there were also indications that the borderline between rape and unwanted sex was difficult to define. And, though incidents of unwilling sex were not defined by women as `rape' it seemed that much rape-like behaviour occurred within marriage. The following comments (all from women who had sex when `they did not really want to' but did not define this as `rape') reflect a continuum of unwanted sexual experiences with husbands.

Marital Rape in India (2015):

In the case of marital rape, India still adheres to British common law, which states that the contract of marriage includes a husband’s “right to sex.” According to a clause in Section 375 of the country’s Penal Code, “sexual intercourse by a man with his own wife, the wife not being under fifteen years of age, is not rape.”

Donald Trump’s Lawyer: Marital Rape Cannot Be Rape (2015):

Michael Cohen, special counsel at The Trump Organization, defended his boss, saying, “You’re talking about the front-runner for the GOP, presidential candidate, as well as private individual who never raped anybody. And, of course, understand that by the very definition, you can’t rape your spouse.”

“It is true,” Cohen added. “You cannot rape your spouse. And there’s very clear case law.”

Sources about domestic abuse in 18th/19th century fiction:

Domestic violence in Victorian and Edwardian fiction (This is only a sample.)

Bleak Houses: Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction

Battered, bruised, and abused women: domestic violence in nineteenth-cnetury British fiction

The Marked Body: Domestic Violence in Ninteenth-Century Literature

"Let me go, Mr. Thorpe; Isabella, do not hold me!": Northanger Abbey and the Domestic Gothic

"My name was Isabella Linton": Coverture, Domestic Violence, and Mrs. Heathcliff's Narrative in Wuthering Heights