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nevermindirah · 4 years ago

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Non-Jewish friends, y’all might be wondering right now: Israel is doing clearly unacceptable shit to Palestinians. So, why are some Jews ardent Zionists, and why do some Jews seem to feel personally attacked by criticism of Israel?

A lot of (non-Palestinian) non-Jews have asked me where I stand on Israel/Palestine over the years, apropos of nothing, just because I’m Jewish. For the longest time I felt so stuck because I just didn’t know much about Israel/Palestine and what little I did know turned out to be largely misinformation and I felt so much pressure to say The Correct Thing That All Jews Should Say About This Issue. Obviously the violence Israel is committing against Palestinians is horrific and the interpersonal weirdness individual Jews might experience as people discuss Israel’s horrific violence doesn’t compare. I’m making this post as a small supplement to the important conversations going on about what Israel is doing to Palestinians in East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank, as well as Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinian refugees and their descendants living outside land Israel controls. I’m making this post because non-Jews might be feeling confused by conflicting messages about Zionism as either settler colonialism or Jewish self-determination. It sucks feeling like you have to choose only one oppressed group or another. It’s possible to support Palestinian liberation and Jewish liberation at the same time! Here’s some context that might help.

Palestinian friends will probably want to ignore this post, y’all shouldn’t have to deal with your oppressors’ feelings, and especially not right now.

Zionism is the ideology behind the devastating violence Israel is committing against Palestinians right now and has been committing against Palestinians since 1947-48. It’s heartbreaking and messy to talk about this reality, because Zionism originated as a strategy to protect Jews from antisemitism.

Any oppressed group can turn into oppressors under enough pressure, because humans are flawed. Jews fleeing antisemitism turning into Israelis ethnically cleansing Palestinians happened because Zionism is profoundly influenced by its time and place of origin: 19th century Europe.

Europe invented antisemitism, and basically every European country has done at least one very very bad structural antisemitism, like expelling all the country's Jews (the monarch and/or the church then stole all the wealth the expelled people had to leave behind), looking the other way when peasants murdered a bunch of Jews as an outlet for their frustration with the actual (non-Jewish) ruling class, banning Jews from owning property or holding certain jobs or being members of guilds etc, and of course the big horrific state-sponsored mass-murder operations the Inquisition and the Holocaust. From the 1790s through the 19th century different European governments emancipated their Jews, ie removed legal barriers to full citizenship and economic participation. But this didn't end antisemitism. Just like the legal improvements of the 19th and 20th centuries didn't end antiblackness in the United States.

Also happening in this time: nationalism swept Europe. From the French Revolution through the end of World War I, Europe’s predominant form of government transformed from multiethnic empires to nation-states, countries led by and for a particular ethnic group.

So this Austro-Hungarian dude Theodor Herzl came up with this idea for Jewish nationalism. Every other European ethnic group is getting their own country, so why not Jews? Maybe this is the solution to antisemitism! Maybe we’ll finally be safe if we just all move en masse out of Europe to a place that will take all of us and never expel us!

But also also happening in Europe and around the world in this time: European imperialism and white supremacist settler colonialism. Chattel slavery saw its height and then its end (legally, at least) during this era, but white supremacy entrenched itself across the planet in post-slavery economic practices and cultural imperialism as well as national and international laws.

I believe countries have a moral obligation to take in as many refugees as they can squeeze in. International law protecting refugees has evolved a lot over the past century, but we’re still devastatingly far from every refugee getting a safe place to call home, and the main reason for that is white supremacy. The Biden administration didn’t undo the Trump administration’s horrifically low cap on refugees until like last week and it’s because Democratic party leaders treat centrist white people as more valuable voters than the huge and growing numbers of people of color, immigrants, LGBT people, unmarried women, and working class people who want to vote for elected leaders who get that nobody’s free until we’re all free. Ahem. Back to the topic at hand, the US and many other countries turned away untold numbers of refugees fleeing the fucking Holocaust, so odds are slim they’d be more welcoming in less desperate times. Moving from places where Jews are an unwanted minority to places where Jews are still a minority and either still unwanted or little understood and unlikely to win revolutionary levels of support from a largely non-Jewish public seems like a bad plan.

In the mid to late 19th century, lots of Jews took the kernel of Zionism and ran with it in different directions. Maybe this ideology could mean Jewish cultural flourishing alongside stronger political/economic integration into the societies where we’re already living! Maybe it could mean a particular kind of socialism that advocates for the liberation of Jews both as Jews and as workers! Maybe it could mean a revitalization of Jewish religious practice both in Jerusalem where we have important heritage sites and everywhere we live across the world!

Eventually Herzl’s vision of Zionism won out over the others: Jewish nationalism in the sense of a Jewish nation-state, a country that has a Jewish demographic majority and/or that legally privileges Jews over non-Jews.

Problem is, if you want to do that, you have to find a piece of land on which to do it, and Earth was already a pretty crowded place a hundred years ago. Many locations were considered, and the one that ended up winning that debate was Palestine. Where a shit ton of people, mostly non-Jews, were already living. They were forming their own nationalist movement at the time: in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire they began to organize for local self-determination in Palestine.

The Herzl types who developed Zionism as an ideology and built institutions to advocate for and create a Jewish ethnostate in Palestine were a small subset of European Jews, mostly men, mostly with significant economic privilege within what Jews were able to achieve in their particular societies at the time. They were just as Orientalist as the non-Jews around them, just as antiblack, just as racist generally for all that Jews were (and sometimes still are) considered non-white in much of Europe. They had a cool idea (put a lot of effort into something that could protect Jews from antisemitism) floating in a bathtub full of shit, and they did practically nothing to protect the cool idea from absorbing that shit. Results of this include thinking about the millions of people already living in Palestine as if they were either like the rocks and the trees that will go with the flow and accept a new ruling class, or indistinct Arabs who would just leave for other Arab countries because what could be the difference — in the staggeringly small amount of time they considered the existing residents of Palestine at all.

This racist hand-waving extended to Zionist leaders’ attitudes about Jews outside Europe as well. White Jews in settler colonies like the US were largely anti-Zionist at the time (not wanting their own countries to accuse them of dual loyalty was a common reason) but European Zionist leaders took what help they could get from Jews in the US, South Africa, Australia, etc. Jews across the Middle East and North Africa, however, barely heard from Zionist leaders about any of this until Zionist militias had removed enough Palestinians from the land and it was time to repopulate it with whichever Jewish bodies were convenient. You might have heard "all the Arab countries expelled their Jews in 1948" but lots of first-person accounts tell a different story of Israel coercing Jews who’d lived securely for a long time in places like Morocco to immigrate to Israel and then confiscating their passports and forcing them to live on less-fertile land with fewer resources while serving as a buffer between Palestinians and European Jewish immigrants. Ella Shohat is the best-known writer on Israeli racism against non-European Jews and I strongly recommend Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Perspective of Its Jewish Victims as a starting point to learn more about this.

Which brings us to today. We still haven’t eradicated antisemitism, several European governments that did a lot of structural antisemitism they still haven’t made meaningful reparations for get to feel good about themselves for “giving the Jews a state” as if carving up the former Ottoman Empire was up to them and not the people who lived there, and millions of people across the world who previously either lived peacefully enough alongside Jews or hadn’t really thought about us much at all now have very valid reasons to be pissed at this country that claims it represents all of us.

Zionism was supposed to protect Jews from antisemitism. And Israel has saved Jewish lives! But if we hadn’t sunk the past 70+ years into an ethnostate we could’ve been putting that energy into other political and economic activity to create adequate international support for refugees while we work on ending root causes of refugee crises, like antisemitism, racism, climate change, and capitalism. Meanwhile Zionism has killed, maimed, incarcerated, stolen from, traumatized, and erased the history of millions of Palestinians just because they happened to be living on land that some dudes who had a lot more in common with Thomas Jefferson and Donald Trump than with you or me decided needed to be cleansed for a Jewish ethnostate.

White nationalists in the US love Israel because they want American Jews to go away. Fascist leaders across Europe love Israel for the same reason, so much so that Israel’s prime minister is buddy-buddy with Trump and the equivalent shitstains of several European far-right parties. And I don’t know what it’s like in other white supremacist countries that are close allies of Israel, but the overwhelming majority of Zionist lobbying that pushes the US to give so much aid to Israel comes from Evangelical Christians, because they believe all the Jews have to be in the Holy Land for Jesus to come back. No thanks.

This whole thing fucking sucks. Jews and Palestinians, like all human beings, deserve to be free. Many Jews are understandably afraid of what might happen next if Israel decided to give up on ethnonationalism, allow Palestinian refugees to return, make reparations, and establish a pluralistic democracy that represents and protects all its residents — will some Palestinians murder Jews in revenge? That’s genuinely fucking scary. And it’s genuinely fucking scary to be a Palestinian in Israel/Palestine, and has been for over 70 years. We’ve gotta do something different. I say that as a white person sitting on land stolen from Piscataway people who has thought in detail about what portion of my income would be reasonable for my government to tax in order to fund reparations for the descendants of enslaved people.

Ok. One final piece of context before I wrap this up.

Most Jewish institutions in the US are explicitly Zionist, teach children that Zionism is THE way to ensure Jewish safety, and increasingly tell non-Zionist Jews that we're unwelcome or even that we’re not “real” Jews. This comes in a context where it’s only been 76 years since the latest and most gruesome of several attempts to wipe our entire people off the face of the planet. If you grew up in that environment, you, too, might be jumpy about even hearing the words Zionism or Israel, let alone considering the devastation this ideology and country have caused Palestinians.

Jews have a right to exist. Jews have a millennia-old connection to this scrap of land in the Levant, and we have a right to access religiously and culturally important geographic landmarks. What we don't have a right to is murdering or expelling other people in order to make an ethnostate, on that land or any other. Zionism is settler colonialism, but it’s settler colonialism by and for people who have a valid need for protection from structural antisemitism, which means that it’s going to take a lot of messy empathy to undo. The members of my extended family who voted for Trump (non-Jews in my case, though Jared Kushner isn’t the only Jewish Trumpite) are afraid that ending white supremacy will demote them from a privileged class to equal footing with everyone else — that’s the kind of fear individuals work on in therapy, not the kind that’s reasonable for a whole society to prevent from happening. I and millions of Jews do deserve for whole societies to work hard to end antisemitism.

I would never and will never ask a Palestinian to gently request their liberation. But if you’re not Palestinian, and you’ve got a little extra empathy to spare this week, I ask you to remember what I’ve shared here when interacting with Jews about Israel/Palestine.

If you’re a fellow Jew reading this and you feel like Israel is the only way to guarantee our safety, all I ask of you is to sit with the idea that what Israel is doing to Palestinians is too high a cost for safety that’s still not guaranteed, and start to imagine real-world ways we can protect our people from antisemitism without an ethnostate.

I made this post for people who know me (or know of me I guess?) in Old Guard and Cap fandom, despite my better judgment, because talking about Jewish Booker and Jewish Bucky and Jewish Natasha makes me so happy and I think some of the people I love on these characters with might appreciate this perspective. I didn’t provide any links in this post on purpose (to decrease its usefulness, so fewer people will reblog it) because the risk of anon hate when talking about Zionism outside my immediate fandom circles is so high. You’re welcome to reblog this post if you find it helpful! Unless you’re not within a few concentric circles of me, in which case, maybe don’t? If seeing this post makes you want to send me anon hate, no need: many people who share your perspective have already done so on Twitter.

Reliable sources on all this info are a few googles away, and I apologize for the things I know I oversimplified as well as any things I might have misremembered. I’m an American who’s never lived in Israel/Palestine who is posting this on my fandom blog.

TL;DR: This is a short ‘n pithy post about the same idea.

TL;DR, fandom edition: The shortest distillation of this anti-Zionist Jew’s feelings on the matter can be found in segment 4 of Five Times Booker Got Wasted on Purim and One Time He Didn’t.

#palestinian liberation #hi i'm an antizionist jew no i don't really want to talk about it #and yet #here we are #long post #mine #antisemitism #settler colonialism #racism #european imperialism #genocide cw

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antoine-roquentin · 5 years ago

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I think one of the major problems with the modern left is a focus on cultural analysis instead of economics. When I say culture I EXPLICITLY DON'T MEAN racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and Indigenous rights/decolonization.

Stupidpol and their ilk are reactionaries and should be treated as such. What I'm talking about is the focus on things like analyzing TV shows or picking over the latest issues of the NYT op-ed column, the sort a caricatures you see on Chapo.

Zizek is emblematic of this syndrome. He's a theorist of ideology, a film critic, a Lacanian psychoanalyst and complete reactionary on gender and immigration issues, and he's widely considered to be one of preeminent Marxist scholars alive. And, and this is important, Zizek does fuck all actual economic material analysis. Mark Fisher, who was an excellent Marxist theorist, covers almost exactly the same ground from a different perspective, and you can repeat this across academia.

Inside academia the problem has gotten so bad that the best economic analysis is being carried out by the fucking post-humanists. Take, for example, Anna Tsing's excellent Supply Chains and the Human Condition. Tsing is a brilliant theorist but she spends most of her time writing about multi-species interactions between humans and mushrooms. Carbon Democracy, one of the best theories of the carbon economy ever written, is by a left-Foucaldian.

There are some exceptions to this, Andreas Malm's Carbon Capital is wonderful, Riot Strike Riot is great and I have to mention the group I call The Other Chicago School, Endnotes, whose infrequent analysis is a breath of fresh air. But Endnotes isn't particularly well read even inside the academy, which takes back outside the ivory tower in the dismal mess that is what passes for popular left "economics."

I want to go back to Occupy for a second because what happened there is indicative of the problem. Occupy, at least technically, actually had a theory of economics that went beyond "neoliberalism bad, welfare state good." And it's really not as bad as its critics have since accused it of being. Graeber's "the 1% meme" was supposed to be part of an MMT analysis of the ability of banks to create money out of nothing, see Richard A. Werner. The theory then goes with the ability to create money out of nothing the question becomes who should actually have that power. The 1% are the people who control that power and use that it to gain wealth and their wealth to gain power.

This is essentially what happened after 2008 and it relates to an entire analysis of the politics of debt and war that's captured really well in the last chapter of Debt, The First 5000 Years, drawing from Hudson's excellent Super Imperialism. Again, not bad, and not the disaster it became in Liberal hands. But note two things:

1, His work is intentionally detached from the production process- Graeber uses a value theory of labor about the social reproduction of human beings. That theory is really interesting and I'll leave a link to his It is Value that Brings Universes into Being here. But Graeber is an anthropologist, not an economist, and his recent work is mostly composed of a set of theories of bureaucracy.

And, don't get me wrong, I really like Utopia of Rules and Bullshit Jobs, and it's possible to build an economic theory out of them, but almost no one actually does. And this gets us back to my second point about Occupy and economics.

2, Not a single other person I have ever met, including people who were in Occupy, have ever actually heard the theory behind the 1%. Part of this has to do with Graeber’s rather admirable desire to not become an intellectual vanguardist. But, I cannot overemphasize how much of this is a result of the left's retreat into an analysis of consumerism instead of capitalism and its further insistence that the entire fucking global economy can be explained by chapters 1-3 of Capital and this just isn't a "read more theory" rant, it's not like reading the rest of Capital is going to help you here. But even that's better than what's actually happened, which is people reading Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism and the Communist Manifesto and trying to derive economic theory from that, or getting lost in a Gramscian or psychoanalytic miasma trying to explain why revolution didn't happen. But we can't keep fucking doing this.

If we do we're just going to keep getting stuck in endless fucking inane arguments, one of which is about which countries are Imperialist or not based on trying to read the minds of world leaders, and the other of which is a bunch of racists trying to argue that they're actually "class-first" Marxists and that if we don't say slurs and be mean to disabled people we're going to lose the "real working class," which is somehow composed only of construction workers banging steel bars.

So let's stop letting them do that. One of the reasons Supply Chains and the Human Condition is so great is that it describes how the performance of gender and racial roles creates the self super-exploitation at the heart of global capitalism. Race and gender cannot be ignored in favor of some kind of "class-first" faux-leftist bullshit. THEY ARE LITERALLY THE DRIVER OF CAPITAL ACCUMULATION.

Most of the global supply chain has been transformed into entrepreneurs and wannabe entrepreneurs (see the countless accounts of Chinese garment factory workers who dream of getting into the fashion industry and who attempt to supplement their meager income by setting up stalls in local marketplaces to sell watches and clothes).

The fact that global supply chains have reverted to the kind of small family firms that Marx and Engels thought would disappear is a MASSIVE problem for any kind of global workers movement, because it means that the normal wage relation that is supposed to form the basis of the proletariat isn't actually the governing social experience of a large swath of what should be the proletariat, either because they're the owners of small firms contracted by larger firms like Nike who would, in an older period of capitalism, have just been workers or because the people who work for those firms are incapable of actually demanding wage increases from the capitalists because they're separated by a layer from the firms who control real capital, and thus are essentially unable to make the kind of wage demands that would normally constitute class consciousness because the contractors they work for really don't have any money. These contractors are in no way independent.

Multinational corporations set everything from their buying prices to their labor conditions to what their workers say to lie to labor inspectors. The effect of replacing much of the proletariat with micro-entrepreneurs is devastating.

The class-for-itself that's supposed to serve as the basis of social revolution has decomposed entirely. Endnotes has a great analysis of how this happened covering more time, but the unified working class is dead. In its place have come a series of incoherent struggles: The Arab Spring, the Movement of the Squares, the current wave of revolutions and riots stretching from Sudan to Peru to Puerto Rico- all of them share an economic basis translated into demands on the state. We see housing struggles, anti-police riots, occupations, climate strikes, and a thousand other forms of struggle that don't seem to cohere into a traditional social revolution and WE HAVE NO ANSWER.

I don't have one either, but we're not going to get out of this mess by trying to read the tea leaves of the CCP or analyzing how Endgame is the ruling class inculcating us into accepting Malthusian Ecofascism.

I want to emphasize YOU DON'T NEED TO SHARE MY ECONOMIC ANALYSIS to develop one, I'm obviously wrong on a lot of things and so is everyone else. The point is that we need to start somewhere.

There are other benefits to reading economics stuff even if it can be boring sometimes, like being able to dunk on nerd shitlibs and reactionaries who do the "take Econ-101" meme by being able to prove that their entire discipline is bunk. Steve Keen's Debunking Economics is absolutely hilarious for this, he literally proves that perfect competition relies on the same math that you use to "prove" that the earth is flat.

Or learning that the notion that markets distribute goods optimally is based on the assumption that what is basically a form of fucking state socialism exists, and that the supply demand curve is fucking bullshit. Here's a page from Debunking Economics looking at the socialism claim, it fucking rules, and it's the result of the fact that neo-classical economics and central planning were developed together. Kantorovich and Koopmans shared a Nobel Prize.

But wait, there's more! We can PROVE that THE MARKET PLACE OF IDEAS DOESN'T EXIST. Do you have any idea how hard you can own libs with facts and logic if you can demonstrate that THE MARKET PLACE OF IDEAS DOESN'T EXIST?

But seriously, if you go outside of the Marxist tradition there are all sorts of fun and useful things you can find in post-Keyensian circles and so on and so forth. I'm a huge fan of Karen Ho's Liquidated, an Ethnography of Wall Street/Liquidated_%20An%20Ethnography%20of%20Wall%20Street%20-%20Karen%20Ho.pdf) which looks at how the people at banks and investment firms actually behave and, oh boy, is it bad news (they're literally incapable of making long-term decisions which is wonderful in the face of climate change).

Oh, and also, all of the bankers are essentially indoctrinated into thinking they're the smartest people in the world, so that's fun.

This may sound like I'm shitting on Marxism, and I sort of am, but there's Marxist stuff coming out that I absolutely love! @chuangcn is a good example of what I think the benchmark for leftist economics and historical analysis should be.

Chuang responded to the call put out by Endnotes to cut "The Red Thread of History," or essentially to stop fucking arguing about 1917, 1936, 1968 and so forth and look at material conditions instead of trying to find our favorite faction and accuse literally everyone else of betraying the revolution, and then imagining what we would have done in their shoes. The present is different from the past and we need to organize for this economic and social reality, not 1917's.

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Chuang produced an incredibly statically and sociologically detailed account of the Chinese socialist period in issue 1 and the transition to capitalism in the soon to be put online issue 2 that focuses on shifts in production and investment and shifts in China's class-structure and how urban workers, peasants, factory mangers, technicians, and cadre members reacted to those movements and shaped each others decisions and mobilizations. They largely avoid discussions of factional battles of the upper level of the CCP, which dominate liberal and communist accounts of the period and produce, in supposed communists from David Harvey to Ajit Singh, a Great Man theory of history.

Instead, they trace how strikes and peasant protests shaped the CCP's decision making and how the choices of people like Mao and Deng Xiaoping were limited by material conditions, in this case by their production bottleneck.

What's great about Chuang is that their work is so rich in sociological detail that you don't need to agree with them at all about what communism is and so on for their account to be useful, and they force us to think about the world from the perspective of competing classes bound by economic reality, instead of the black-and-white "good state/bad state," "good ruler/bad ruler," discourse that dominates our understanding of both imperialism and the global economy.

I'm just going to end this with a TL;DR: Cut the read thread of history and stop fucking arguing about 1917, use economic theory to dunk on Stupidpol and shitlibs. When you talk about "material conditions" talk about the production process, supply chains, capital movements and so on, not which states are good and bad (the bourgeoisie is a global class friends), recognize that strategies need to be built around current economic and social conditions, WHICH ARE INSEPARABLE FROM RACE AND GENDER, climate change is more complicated than the 100 companies meme (I only touched on this but please read Fossil Capital and Carbon Democracy), and in general try to learn more about different schools of economics and social theory, I swear reading something that wasn't written in 1848 isn't going to kill you.

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bullet-proof-gay · 5 months ago

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I read another one of their articles on it and it was borderline sympathetic to the "thugs". Started out with the same sort of headline/intro on counterprotestors and then the rest of the article was entirely focussed on the few far-right protestors that turned up and how sad they were about the immigrants :(( this poor man fought for our country* (*killed a bunch of arabs) and now he "barely recognises it" because there are immigrants :((((. They also called the protestors "anti-immigrant" throughout most of the article as opposed to calling them racist/far-right

It was so fucking infuriating the way they were simultaneously trying to go "oh look how good it was that there were counterprotests" AND "well maybe we should hear out the racists anti-inmigrants..."

this level of hypocrisy is actually unfathomable

#southport riots #my hatred for the Mail and its ilk grows stronger every day.#hell island

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justamusicpodcast · 4 years ago

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Sup, I’m Laura Cousineau and welcome to Just A Music Podcast, where I, Laura Cousineau, tell you about some music history, how it relates to the world around us, and hopefully, introduce you to some new tunes. This show is theoretically for everyone but I will swear and when it comes down to it and sometimes we may need to talk about some sensitive topics so ur weeuns might wanna sit this one out.

Folk music! What a fucking blanket of a genre title isn’t it? We got 1960s folk in america, we got different folk genres in terms of mixed genres like folk metal, we got folk music as sort of an interchangeable term for ethnic musics, it’s all fuckin folk from here on out folks! But what is folk music where does it come from, what are we talking about when we talk about folk music? Well that’s what we’re going to talk about this week to kick off our North American music genre analysis with North American folk musics! Truth be told I did wanna start out with an episode on North American Native musics but as I’m whiter than sour cream on rice and there isn’t as much scholarship on it as I would like to confidently do a whole episode on it without input from actual native peoples. That all being said, if anyone listening is native and would like to give me some input on their musics, I would be more than happy to cover it.

But for now folk. North American folk musics. You notice I mention musics, it’s because north American folk music can be defined as a lot of things. So what are we talking about when we talk about the genre of folk musics. Well that’s gonna change depending on who you ask from what I explained before, we have some kind of mish mosh, multiple definition, popular idea of what folk music is and that’s not surprising given how that definition has grown and changed over time. Some of you will be surprised to hear that when we talk about north American folk music’s we’re actually talking about A BUNCH of different musical genres, not just one. Sure we have what people would usually associate with North American folk, the very Appalachian sounding bluegrass, country and then of course western, but we also have native musics (which again, I promise I will talk about at some point), and Maritime Canadian folk musics, we have cajun and creole musics, we have a bunch of racist shit too unfortunately but like legit we have so much stuff to talk about this episode I might have to break it up into two episodes.

Like all other musics, it all started from somewhere… I know, that’s the take of the century isn’t it. I mean it would be so much cooler if all folk music started cause some little gnome hopped out of the ground and was like imma invent music, but like that gnome would also be incredibly racist so I dunno, gnome theory sucks. So where did North American folk music come from? Well that’s a matter of looking at the mostly euro populations that colonized North America and this will change depending on the regions that we’re looking at. So WE need a SHORT HISTORY of the beginning of exploration.

So, there’s some debate as to who we should credit with the “discovery” of north america, cause on one hand we have the Viking settlements in eastern Canada in the year 1000, there’s some speculation that there were even other visitors before then, and of course we have the populations of native people’s who have lived here for forever, but in terms of the European colonial pattern we’re looking for, for our needs we’re looking at Christopher Columbus. So as y’all know Christopher Columbus, Portuguese adventurer, getting permission from Queen Isabella of Castille in 1492 set sail across the Atlantic to try and find a passage to India to get some of them good ass spices everyone was raving about. Though he didn’t find India he managed to find the Caribbean also known as Central America. Now I know in the news for a little bit with the ever increasing prevalence of the Black Lives Matter movement y’all been hearing about people tearing down Christopher Columbus statues in the news and there is a very good reason for that.

So as I’ve already told you Chris didn’t discover North america but he also was, and this is gonna be a massive understatement, but the dude was a massive asshole, like take the biggest asshole you can imagine and times that by about 10. It’s estimated that his colonization of the Caribbean resulted in the deaths of over 8 million people, or or about the entire population of Switzerland. You can’t even use the product of his time excuse because even Queen Isabella, the person in charge of the Spanish Inquisition, which famously saw hte torture and death of tonnes of people under the guise of religious purity, was even like yo dude you need to slow down. I will talk about him more once we reach central American music genres but just for now yeah he existed, yeah he kinda started the wave of north American exploration, but he was also an absolute asshat and there should never have been a statue let alone a day to commemorate the shitheel of a man.

So we get the start of this wave of immigration into what will become northern South america, Central America, and southern north America by Portuguese populations who mainly speak, well, Portuguese, bringing music from the Iberian peninsula. But we’re more concerned with what’s happening up north and for that we’re gonna have to look at later waves of immigration that started with Roanoake starting in the 1520s.

So the start of British colonization started with Roanoake and Newfoundland (which, yes, for our non canadian listeners it’s pronounced newfinland not new found land like the name would suggest, which to be fair would also be cool, I’ll welcome the Fins in my land anytime, they do fantastic music). One of these settlements was infinitely more successful than the other with Newfoundland becoming what we know now to be the east most province of Canada and while Roanoake is still there it failed so hard that a population of 112 people disappeared without a trace. Like legit we still don’t know what precisely happened to them. Some assume they integrated into the local native populations, some assume they were all murdered, some assume cannibals, essentially it was a bad time for all involved.

What this means for newfoundland though and other English colonies is that musically we hear a very British folk song base to the music that’s being established here, with newfoundland being very much established as a fishing colony the musical style echoes that. Since we’re talking about the Kingdom of England more broadly this meant that there was an absolute tonne of Irish and Scottish influence to the music. This is why when you listen to the folk musics of Newfoundland (established in 1583), Virginia (established in 1607), and Parts of the Carolinas (established in 1712), you hear it sounds very similar to that of their colonial forefathers. This means that there was commonly a lot of fiddle, flute, English guitar, a string instrument with a long handle, rounded body and ten strings that was a version of a Renaissance cittern, simple stringed banjos; zithers, which were flat, shallow boxes with strings running the length of the body that were plucked by the fingers and and hammered dulcimers, various shaped (like trapezoidal and peanut shaped) sound boxes with strings across them that were hit with small hammers, Much like this!

So we have all these people coming into the area, and with that too you’re also going to get jigs and reels too. Jigs and reels are both types of dance music widely enjoyed across the British Isles but are most associated with Scottish and Irish dancing musics. The difference between the two is mostly the time signature as the instruments used to play both of them are roughly the same, that being said Scottish musics tend to have more pipes and irish does traditionally use a type of handdrum which are both excellent. Jigs are in compound duple time meaning that there are 12 8th notes in a bar of music and reels are played in simple time like 2/2 (two half notes per bar) or 4/4 (4 quarter notes in a bar). They sound like this.

Its important to note here too that when we talk about all of these peoples from the British Isles that we don’t unintentionally assume that they were all nice and cozy with one another. Many of the Scottish and Irish parties, often referred to simply as the scotch irish or scotts irish came to america as a form of Religious punishmen because they didn’t precisely fit in with the church of England, some of my ancestors were scotts-irish and came to what would eventually become America because they were Quakers.

It is from these traditions that the music then evolves into something different over time and actually we’re gonna take a quick detour into linguistics for a second because it will be particularly helpful in demonstrating my point and y’all will be able to hear something way cool. So for those who are not aware, linguistics is the study of, well, language. (big brain moment right?) But what does that mean? Whereas when you take English, Igbo, Japanese, Arabic, or any other established language in an academic setting (so like learning in school when you’re growing up) the emphasis is on spelling, grammar, how to write and speak your language in the way that it has been determined is the best way to speak it (which isn’t always ACTUALLY the best way to speak it but we’ll get into that in a second.) Linguistics is the study of pretty much every other component of the language. So linguists study the phonemes or the sounds that comprise the word and how they change based on the dialect that a person is speaking (a dialect being a regional difference of a language such as how someone from Scotland speaks English and how I as a Canadian speak English), they study how languages become standard languages and why (spoiler alert there’s a lot of elitism involved), they study meaning and why we put certain words in the order that we do (for Example in English we put adjectives (or the words that describe things) in very specific order being quantity, quality, size, age shape, color, proper adjective and purpose or qualifier so describing a thing could be a shitty old triangular purple metal pair of shoes, but if you were like the triangular purples old shitty pair of shoes you would lose your gourd.)

But why does linguistics matter? Well language actually acts a lot like music in the ways that it travels and changes over time which makes sense doesn’t it? When a people move around and interact with other cultures or are even just are separated from a larger group, over time their language will change! One change that is easy for us to see in our life-time is in word usage, for example, you use different phrases and slang that your parents and your grandparents didn’t use. The same goes for accents this means that your accent is going to be different than your parents and their parents. In some cases this will smooth it out or ramp it up, it will accentuate features, or drop features entirely. And actually this is where I’m going to give you over to a linguist to better explain this because where I do know about some linguistic shift they will definitely explain it better.

Why this is important is BECAUSE music functions similarly in terms of drift. Though musical drift doesn’t happen as FAST as language because language you use everyday with incredibly intensity and music you do not, it does still happen. Even more helpful in the tracing of language is how and where it moves over time. Because language is contingent on people speaking it and music is also contingent on those who play it, you can track how music and language changes and who it interacts with based on the stylistic attributes and or instruments that it acquires over time. If we wanna think about this in a real practical sense come with me into the theater of ur brainhole for a second. Imagine for a second there is a group of people who live in lets say India in like the 500s C.E for some reason or another they’re pushed out of India and into the west where they met like Turks and hung out with them for a couple hundred years. So they pick up some Turkish words, incorporate some of their musical elements and then move farther west. Then they meet the Greeks! The Greeks are pretty rad, they got some good shit going for them, so they stay for another couple hundred years! Again, they pick up some Greek words, some Greek musical elements. After that let’s say some of the people from this group were captured and held as indentured workers in a country forcing them to integrate into the culture of the majority but another portion of the population was fortunate enough to be able to get away and keep moving west into the Balkans where they also picked up a bunch of words and musical elements. You see where I’m going with this? Cultures are all contingent on how often or how little they come in contact with other cultures, this goes for music, this goes for language, hell this pretty much goes for all sorts of art. For the sake of our example I used the Roma who also just serve as a crazy good example for this because we didn’t really even know their history until one scholar was “like hey they got some Indian words in here” and launched a whole study into it which is rad as hell but we’re gonna save that for another episode. BUT YES CULTURE IS CONTINGENT ON THE INTERACTION OR LACK OF INTERACTION WITH OTHER CULTURES, THIS IS A THING AND WE’RE GONNA BE TALKING ABOUT IT A LOT.

SO we were with settlers from the British Isles and they came to north america and then their music changed!

In Canada and Louisianna we also have the addition of the French colonies which make our music a little different. In Canada those colonies would be Acadia in what is now the province of Nova Scotia (established in 1604), Montreal (established in 1642), Quebec (established in 1608), and Trois Riviers (established in 1634) along the Saint Lawrence River with the voyageurs or courier de bois who were fur traders dealing primarily in beaver. In the southern US it’s the colony of Louisianna in the states which is much larger than what is currently the state of Louisianna. All of these colonies together formed one mega colony commonly referred to as New France. Differences between the musics performed by French colonists vs. English colonists was, well first of all the language, obviously French colonists sang more often in French, due to them being… French. But there were also differences in content too. In Canada especially many settlements were originally set up with the intention of converting native populations to Christianity which is a form of cultural genocide by the way. Thus, Jesuit populations often brough a lot of religious music into the area. Sometimes it would be mixed with musical and cultural traditions of the native populations but often it would just be very Christian. An example from the area I grew up in would be the Huron carol which blends native cultural heritage from the area with Christianity. It sounds something like this.

As French populations began intermarrying into native populations this became a more common sonic combination to hear. In Canada we also have a larger amount of music based on or around or deriving from sea shanties due to the fishing populations that settles in East originally as fishing colonies. As I plan to do a whole episode on sea shanties one day I don’t want to go too much into them but quickly speaking sea shanties tend to be broken down into categories based on the task they were performed around. So there were three principal types of shanties: short-haul shanties, which were simple songs sung for short tasks where only a little work was needed, halyard shanties, for jobs such as hoisting sail, in which a certain rhythm was required to signal when it was time to exert effort and when it was time to rest (often referred to as a pull and relax rhythm), and windlass shanties, which synchronized footsteps. I find them incredibly infectious, which is probably intentional because they’re meant to kinda keep spirits up as well as set a pace for work, but I’ll try and sell ya more on that when the time comes. In the meantime you can content yourself with singing drunken sailor to yourself, probably one of the most well known shanties.

French Canadian music also has some very fun additions to it that come from the body itself, like ur own dang body. The first one is a singing technique but also song style. It’s technically a form of non-lexical vocable which is a fancy way of saying “sounds that comes from ur mouth in music that aren’t necessarily words.” In fact sometimes it’s also just referred to as French Canadian mouth music. This specific one I’m talking about kinda, lord how do you describe this, it’s like a scatting but much slower, less bombastic, and more rhythmic. I’m gonna fuck up the pronunciation because, again, even though I have a French Canadian background and had to take it from grade 4 to grade 9 in school I remember it about as well as one might remember an event they’ve never been to, that is to say not at all. The form is called a turlutte (ter-lute) which uses a lot of D, T, and M sounds to kinda fit the sound that ur looking for in a song. It sounds something like this!

French Canadian music also has the real fun addition of podorythmie or foot rhythms which are complex rhythms that people keep with their feet. For those who don’t know what a rhythm is, it is defined as a strong, regular, repeated pattern sound so lets say that you start clapping, and each clap is spaced exactly by one second, now on the first and third claps you clap a little harder, that would be a rhythm. Rhythms can be incredibly simple like that one or they can be really complex and the ones that you will hear in French Canadian music are of the more complex variety. Usually if the person performing them is also playing an instrument they’ll often sit in a chair with a little wood box or hard surface underneath which they will use to tap their feet on. Sometimes they will wear special hard bottomed shoes made with leather or wood to do this in order to accentuate the sound. Less commonly people can also stand while performing a podorythmie turning it into a kind of dance. Here’s my favorite example of what that sounds like.

Some of this style was eventually transported to Louisianna when the Acadians were eventually pushed out of Canada by the English in 1755, many of them ended up actually settling in Louisiana forming the ethnically Cajun population, Cajun deriving from the word Acadian. Not to say that life wasn’t hard for damn near everybody who wasn’t nobility in the 1700s, but the dramatic shift for Acadians made it particularly hard for a long time. People had trouble adjusting to their new way of life at first, coming from a mostly trading based economy to agrarian based was hard on the population, not to mention the massive change in climate that came with moving all the way from what would now be modern nova scotia all the way down to Louisiana. To give a real succinct idea of where exactly they were moving imma quote Loyola university in New Orleans that have done a really good succinct history on the Cajuns of Louisianna ”Few Acadians stayed in the port of arrival, New Orleans. Some settled in the regions south and northwest of New Orleans and along the Teche, Lafourche and Vermilion Bayous. Far more went further west to the marshes and prairies of south central Louisiana. They became hunters and trappers and farmers. It is a popular misconception that most Cajuns live on the bayous and in the marshes, poling their pirogues and hunting alligators. Far more became farmers in the grand triangular prairie that stretches from Lafayette north to Ville Platte and west to Lake Charles.” Like shit man, my giant canadian ass if forced to live in Louisiana would probably catch fire as soon as I got there let alone back then with no air conditioning and what have you. Their music also then changed to reflect their new way of life, not that the music was about catching fire in a corn field (although that would fucking slap), music was written and sung about hard times and hard livin’.

From the same Loyola University document: The music these people brought was simple. It was made by singing, humming, and rhythmic clapping and stamping. Instruments were brought to the colony, with a violinist's death recorded in 1782. Early instrumental music was played primarily on violins, singularily or in pairs. One violin played lead and the second a backing rhythm. A simple rhythm instrument was created out of bent metal bars from hay or rice rakes: the triangle or 'tit fer, meaning little iron. Musicians wrote original songs telling of their life in the new world. The song J'ai passe devant ta porte tells of the suddenness of death from accident and disease. The singer tells of passing by his beloved's door and hearing no answer to his call. Going inside he sees the candles burning around his love's corpse.

In the south they would have been influenced by other settlers in the area, more scotts and irish of course but also eventually African descended peoples. Some were brought as slaves during the French and Spanish colonial period or brought in by settlers after the Louisiana Purchase. Under Spanish rule, slaves were allowed to buy their freedom (which I cannot emphasize entirely how fucking difficult that would have been), leading to an early population of free Blacks in southern Louisiana. People of African descent also came from the Caribbean, including the colonized French-speaking islands. During the revolution in Haiti between 1789 and 1791, French-speaking Haitians who fled the violence often chose the Louisiana coast as a destination due to having a familiar linguistic population and ease of access. These populations would become to be known as creole. The term Creole comes originally from the Spanish criollo, for a child born of Spanish parents in the New World. The French borrowed it as Creole. Creole could refer to anyone of European parentage born in Louisiana. Over two centuries it began to be used to mean a person of mixed foreign and local parentage. One use today is to refer to someone entirely or partly of African descent.

Now, it’s incredibly important that we don’t discount the influence of slaves and former slaves in the creation and dissemination of creole musics because they are absolutely integral to the process. Creole songs originated in the French and Spanish slave plantations in Louisianna and thus contain tonnes of African musical elements from the instruments they used to the syncopated rhythms. For example, original instruments you would have heard could have been percussion instruments made out of gourds, known as shak-shak which would be shaken to create a rhythm, the mouth harp, a type of metal instrument that one holds in place in the mouth and plucks with their finger opening and closing their mouth hole to create different pitches and textures of sound, the bamboula, tambou, or tombou lay lay which are types of drums; and as I mentioned before, a type of banjo known as a banza might have been played if someone could fashion one. Because that in essence is what we’re talking about, when we talk about Creole music we’re talking about music slaves could make with the limited resources that were available to them, in order to make the music they wanted to hear. This is why overtime we also see the addition of the washboard as an instrument because it was something that would have been available to them. A washboard for those who don’t know is most literally a board, usually made out of ridged wood or metal that one would put into a source of water, either a basin or a river, and methodically rub the dirt and stains out of your dirty clothes as well as you could with soap if you could access it, believe me it’s about as fun as it sounds.

So what was this music they were playing? What did it sounds like? Well as I already mentioned there was a lot of African influence to the music. One of the most prominent features of this influence is the syncopated rhythm. A syncopated rhythm is a rhythm that is built so that the strong beats eventually become the weak beats. So if we continue our example from before, where we clap harder on the first beat and third beat, a syncopated rhythm would move to become the opposite of it on the 2nd and 4th beats or the off beats, like this. Don’t be worried if that’s something you can’t do yourself, I still find it hard to switch between.

As no type of culture exists independently of time or location though, the type of music they played was also influenced by the culture of their oppressors. While there was music that existed independently that slaves brought from their Native African groups such as the Bamboula, Calinda, Congo, Carabine and Juba, over time, a lot of their music also began to incorporate French and Spanish influence. A type of French dance called a quadrille for example was worked into the repertoire, a Spanish dance called the contradanza or the habanera actually became some of the first written music to incorporate the aforementioned African rhythms. Even the language used in these musics grew and changed. For the slaves, and even free black folk coming from the Caribbean, they would bring with them what is now known as patois, a language that is a combination of English, French, Spanish, and African languages. So when we think of what creole music is, it really then is a patchwork of different cultures mainly driven and compounded by the efforts of African slaves.

Now I will say before I play this example here that it is difficult when looking for early musics belonging to oppressed peoples because 1. It wasn’t written down for the most part, at least not in the way it would have been originally performed, 2. Pieces that were written down, recorded, or coopted were often done by white people looking to profit off of African music (which we’ll see way too fucking much of as we continue our north American music excursion), which seems like a rather disingenuous way to present it to you, and 3. Because music recording as far as actually recording audio didn’t exist until 1860. So if we’re looking for songs from the periods that they were written or invented we still have to find people who are alive that remember them. Even as I was researching this I was trying to look for recordings that would make it easier to hear the differences between the dance genres I mentioned earlier. Unfortunately there isn’t much in the way of albums or popular bands dedicated to these types of genres, so instead I’m going to play a clip of a bamboula rhythm being played by some students at the Asheh Cultural Arts Center's Kuumba Institute in New Orleans, and then a clip of another group performing a Calinda.

From where we’re currently standing in the year 2020 there is still Creole and Cajun distinct musics but they also created a fusion genre which has become it’s own thing, this genre is called Zydeco. Zydeco developed out of both the Cajun and Creole though (hard core purists will insist that it is a mostly creole development) which then further changed when German Immigrants started moving into the area. The accordion, which was invented in Vienna about 1828, was brought to Louisiana by the German immigrants many of whom lived adjacent to or among the Cajuns. Though it arrived in Louisiana as early as 1884, it was not immediately incorporated into Cajun music. This is because where fiddles were tuned differently than the accordions coming into the country. What I mean by that is that some instruments have pitches they’re better at playing naturally. So for example, you’re standard run of the mill trumpet, like if u look up a trumpet on google, well they’re most suited to play in the key of B flat because the sound that you get when you blow into one without putting any of your fingers on the buttons is B flat. For the accordions that were coming with the Germans, they were tuned to the keys of A and F, so it wasn’t till much later in 1925 that accordions tuned to C and D started appearing and thus started to be better incorporated into the music around it. The guitar was also added pretty late coming in in around 1920ish. The word Zydeco itself is actually derived from the title of a French song Les haricots sont pas sale or The snap beans are not salty! You can hear in the French if you put a little punchiness into it, the transition between the les and haricot sounds like a Z (yes I’m a Canadian that says Zee, I blame it on my American mother, plus it just sounds better, zed sounds like a bee flew into a hard surface). So because of the Z sound it became abbreviated to zarico and through time morphed into Zydeco! We got BEAN music.

And how does this bean music sound, well I personally think it sounds pretty fucking rad, kinda like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kPztofSd5Y

fun fact about that one, I’ve known this song for roughly 5 years I knew it I definitely just thought these dudes were scattin, like WHOA BA BA WHOA BA BA WHA BA PA BYE BYE DOO DOO, I did not realize until roughly 2 years until after I heard it that it had lyrics…

Now you may have noticed I haven’t touched on Appalachian folk music yet and I’ve done it very strategically for 2 reasons. One is just simply because if I had put it any earlier yall would have been like HUEHUEHUE I HAVE HEARD ALL I NEED and then absconded into the night like a raccoon after finding half a cheeseburger in the trash. The second was because Appalachian folk music and next week’s episode are gonna be pretty instrumental in the episode after that, so to keep it popping freesh in ur brain bits I figured I’d stick it at the end of the episode.

So appalaichan music turns out is actually a really tricky genre of music, if we wanna go by the United States Library of Congress introduction to Appalaichan music: The term "Appalachian music" is in truth an artificial category, created and defined by a small group of scholars in the early twentieth century, but bearing only a limited relationship to the actual musical activity of people living in the Appalachian mountains. Since the region is not only geographically, but also ethnically and musically diverse (and has been since the early days of European settlement there), music of the Appalachian mountains is as difficult to define as is American music in general. I should also probably say before we get too far that like the Appalachian mountains (which first of all that I pronounce incorrectly because it’s pronounces with a CHian not Shan) but the appalachian mountains are the mountain range that run through a lot of the eastern United States, so like Appalachian Mountains extend 1,500 miles (or 2414 km for everyone else) from Maine to Georgia. They pass through 18 states and encompass the Green Mountains of New Hampshire and Vermont, the Berkshires of Connecticut, New York's Catskills, the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, and the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. The region known as the Southern Highlands, or Upland South, covers most of West Virginia and parts of Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Maryland, the Carolinas, and Virginia. In colonial times, this area was known as the "Back Country."

It was in these areas that Cherokee and Algonquin people already existed but then colonists would come from England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales and eventually from other parts of Europe came the Germans, French Huguenots, Polish, and Czechians. So we’ve already looked at the influence from the British Isles before (the jigs and reels and English folk music) but these would evolve into Square dances with a little help from French influences as well. A square dance for those who don’t know is a dance usually with 8 sets of partners who perform steps that are either established and vary based on song or thencaller which then the dancers perform. But just as we saw with instruments and musics being carried by free or escaped slaves to different parts of the southern united states and being integrated into the musical cannon of the area, the same thing happened in this area by the other people settling here as well. For example, the hammered dulcimer I told y’all about earlier (which if you haven’t seen one I would recommend lookin one up they can come in really fun shapes, ) but yeah those same hammered dulcimers were not an invention of the British isles carried over by those settlers but it is almost a direct descendant of a German instrument (the Germans btw came in a couple different waves the first big one being in 1670) so this instrument they brought was called the Scheitholt. Even African American instruments entered the scene in around the 1840s just in time for minstrel shows to start travelling around the country which I will be doing an episode on by the way because you can’t talk about American music without talking about the fucking disaster that is minstrel shows. It was these same free black peoples that also really popularized the call and response type of vocals which is pretty much just what it sounds like. The main singer will call out a line of lyrics sometimes as a holler, sometimes more musically, and other singers will answer it by doing it right back at them. This can be found in all sorts of music but just for the kicks of it here’s an example of it in gospel music.

But we’re gonna back track a little bit back to the Germans because we really haven’t talked about them enough and have left out one of their biggest influences on developing Appalachian folk music which is yodelling. If you’re from the states you’ll probably know yodelling from that kid that got famous a couple years ago and was in a Walmart commercial or something but for those of you who don’t know or people who do know that kid and are just curious about the mechanics of yodelling: The main components of a human singing voice are the head voice and the chest voice which I CAN and will demonstrate but to explain first, the head voice and chest voice are the two registers humans typically have. There’s also falsetto which is slightly different as it is kinda a pushing of the voice to a place it isn’t really supposed to be but I digress. So the head voice is where we get all our higher notes where the chest voice is where we get all out low notes. This is mainly due to the resonators we are using in creating these sounds as well as how tense or thick or thin and how long or short your vocal chords are. Resonators are simply just the air passages and open spaces in your body that sound resonates through. So for head voice you’re pushing the sound up and into the head using like ur nasal passages and all ur skull space for the sound to vibrate through which are all really small so you get a higher often sharper sound and chest voice mainly resonates in the chest (or ur LUNGS) which is a lot more space and so more low and rumbly. You can tell the difference between the two by putting a hand on ur chest while you’re singing, start with your lowest note you can comfortably reach and just start ascending, eventually you will feel your chest vibrate less and less and should be able to feel the switch into head voice. I’ll just give you a quick demonstration as to how different they are. Please bear in mind I am a natural soprano so my low range isn’t incredibly low but here it goes so the head voice “as I don’t do remembering, can’t give this song a ghost of past, I wander, I ponder, why there is weight in time” and again the same line but in chest voice “as I don’t do remembering, can’t give this song a ghost of past, I wander, I ponder, why there is weight in time.”

So if you tried it yourself you’ll notice that there’s a little, what vocalists call, break between where ur chest register is and where ur head voice is, it happens for everyone don’t worry. What yodelling does then is fluctuates between the head and the chest voice really fast and most importantly smoothly like this:

ahh shit man, the sounds of my ancestors, you can almost smell the leiderhosen, taste the octoberfest, YOU CAN ALMOST SEE THE SCHUPLATTING. But yes so Germans brought this with them from their homelands along with their accordions and it established itself the Appalachian folk tradition. Now it’ll probably interest you to know that yodelling isn’t a genre without purpose, as I’d like to do a whole episode on it though at some point I don’t wanna spoil too much but it is good for communicating across mountain ranges because of how it echoes and the types of inflection you can put into it. This makes it easier to understand why it survived the shift from the mountains in Germany all the way to the mountains of America. The Germans also brought something else with them, but it wasn’t just Germans, the Polish, and Czechian influences also brought it with them too! And what is it that they brought? The waltz of course! The waltz is a type of dance that focusses on a ¾ time signature, and has one heavy beat on the front and two lighter beats after. For any of you who’ve ever seen the musical Oliver, this is precisely the type of song Oom Pah Pah is.

So these collections of music and the things they developed into can be called Appalachian folk musics. It’s hard to pin down precisely what Appalachian music then sounds like at times because of all the different influences depending on place that you were living in, if you had to pick out a few things though you would head that firstly you get a lot of stringed instruments like guitars, fiddles and banjos. Secondly the themes were often similar and reflected day to day life living in the region such as mining or logging, there’s the fun little genre of murder ballads which I wanna do a whole episode on some day, and after the civil war we also get the addition of a lot of war songs. Thirdly this music would vary depending on purpose but would definitely include dances, campfire songs. So Imma play you a few samples then, first we just have a good old mountain song

if these sound familiar to other genres of music like bluegrass and country that’s because Appalachian folk music was the predecessor for both genres but those I’m gonna save for their own episode sometime in the future. It might be a part of the north American genre business it might be just another nebulous episode I do in the future at some point. But for now at least you know the history of some of the biggest Genres of American folk music. BUT WHAT ABOUT FOLK MUSIC TODAY, LAURA, WHAT ABOUT MUMFORD AND SONS, HOZIER, FUIMADANE, AND KORPIKLAAN? And I know, they’re ALL fantastic acts and I’ll get to people like them eventually, but for now at least you know where it all started.

So with that, hat’s all for just a music podcast this week, I hope you’ve heard something new, and I hope you’ve heard something that you like. If you haven’t there’s always next week where we’ll be getting heavy with slave and gospel music. In the meantime, though if one of y’all would like to suggest a topic I would love nothing more than to answer your musical question or talk about topics that interest you guys in music. Feel free to drop me a line at [email protected]

Bye!

1. Over the Hills and Far Away - 17th Century English Traditional - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MR7VihPm2E

2. Woodsong Wanderlust Solo Hammered Dulcimer by Joshua Messick https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayAvzVdOJJY&list=RDfD0rNyjDAa0&index=13

3. Out on the Ocean https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynKDggMtMww

4. Rakish Paddy & Braes of Busby (Reels) Uilleann pipes Chris McMullan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0umOtiKyUc

5. A Quick Lesson on Southern Linguistics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNqY6ftqGq0

6. Huron Carol https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgPeEvUl06Y

7. La Bolduc - Reel Turluté https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASW3Cejl5oc

8. Le Lys Vert https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASW3Cejl5oc

9. J'ai passe devant ta porte https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtchvhughFw

10.New Orleans Kuumba camp https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItRuHjjGMhg

11. Calinda (Stickfight) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaM0PI3T1s8

12. Bye, Bye Boozoo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kPztofSd5Y

13. Call and Response in Gospel Music https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMgNTwZW5gY

14. Underthing Solstice https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anMKMu9Tpoc

15. Yodelling Franzl Lang https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQhqikWnQCU

16. Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles – Ost – Maggie is Everything https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Fn1Pw-LxU8&

17. Ola Belle Reed High on the Mountain https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsRRY5k5Psg

18. Traditional Tennessee Square Dance Caller Gerald Young of Pulaski https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7-DWvegcL8

#podcast #just a music podcast #music #music history #comedy #comedy podcast #learn urself a thing #folk #folk music #american folk music #canadian folk music

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excelsi-or · 5 years ago

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Asians, speak out #blacklivesmatter

Hello~ All I’ve been doing the last week between writing and art is learning about Black Lives Matter. We’ve all seen the videos. We’ve watched the news. We’ve heard the stories. Stories that are played out over and over and over again.

I’m Asian, Filipino to be exact, and Canadian born. While still a minority, I sit on my own pedestal of privilege. And while the conversation surrounding George Floyd and the BLM movement feels like a black-white conversation, we Asians can’t just sit around and watch this happen. We are still minorities, we just got the luck of the draw that our skin colour doesn't get us killed.

At the beginning of this, I wondered where I sat in this conversation. Yes, we’re all trying and learning to be anti-racist, but when all the stuff is being targeted at white people and white privilege, it feels like this isn’t our conversation. But it is. I’m linking Hasan Minhaj’s most recent video on YouTube on the Patriot Act channel. It calls out Asian people hard and truthfully. There was an Asian cop that stood there and watched George Floyd die that day. The store across the street who called on Floyd was an Arab store, an Asian store. We are too used to sitting on the sidelines, thinking this isn’t about us so don't get involved. But we need to stop being complacent.

Hasan makes it very clear: “The only reason so many of us are here (America) is because of the Immigration Act of ‘65. That law rode the wave of the Civil Rights Act of ‘64.”

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It all feels very American based, but that doesn’t mean this racial bias against black folx isn’t happening world wide. In Canada, this is happening too. We’re just masking it over by our “multiculturalism” and “diversity”.

Naomi Pabst wrote in an essay called “Mama, I’m Walking to Canada:” Black Geopolitics and Invisible Empires, “Among Canadians... Canada’s much publicized and much celebrated history of offering asylum to escaped slaves lends itself to widespread Canadian self-perceptions as anti-racist.” It’s not as bad as the U.S., but that should never be enough.

“Not as bad as” is not good enough.

I’m done being scared of doing the wrong thing or saying the wrong thing. I’m angry and frustrated. But this is not about my voice. This is about amplifying black voices, to get them the equality that they’ve been fighting centuries to have. That they thought they got when MLK led the way to the Civil Rights Act. This is about everyone else learning and understanding what is going on in black communities around the world. And Black folx shouldn’t be doing it for you.

If you’re scared to protest, donate.

If you don’t have the means to donate, educate.

No more sitting on the sidelines.

To start learning about Black issues in Canada:

“Mama, I’m Walking to Canada”: Black Geopolitics and Invisible Empires - Naomi Pabst - a 21-page essay on Black Canadian identity and how it’s a little bit different from American’s.

Black in Canada - an interview-style article done by BBC

Janaya Khan’s website - they’re the co-founder of BLM - Canada and they link a bunch of articles about Black lives in Toronto

Follow blackvancouver on IG (they have a website too)

Follow Black Lives Matter - Toronto on Twitter

To start learning about Black lives in general:

Listen to podcasts like The Nod & The Secret Life of Black Women

To listen to Black opinions and prospectives:

The podcast Code Switch (specifically episodes: “A Decade of Watching Black People Die” from May 31, 2020; “Can We Talk About Whiteness?” from May 30, 2016; “We’re Going To Start A Dialogue... Again” from February 6, 2019)

This video from YouTuber, Jada Jones. She’s 18 years old with a lot to say and strong opinions. It’s 43 minutes long, but I gained new perspectives.

This video from YouTuber, Vee Katihvu

For a general explanation of why the police system isn’t working:

Hasan Minhaj did an episode all about on Patriot Act

#black lives matter #blacklivesmatter

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artsyeti · 6 years ago

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Hi, I hope you don't mind me asking this, but I'm curious. I'm an australian studying a course on race and ethnicity for my assignment i was considering doing multiculturalism in aus. I feel that for most of my life people have DRILLED into me that Aus is a successful multicultural nation with everyone mingling together in harmony etc etc. However, some people i talk to including think this is not the case at all - that we're actually a little racist. Im really interested to know ur thoughts?

FUCK OKAY SORRY I TRIED SO HARD TO EDIT THIS LIKE 9 TIMES BUT IT’S JUST A BUNCH OF WORDY VOMIT SORRY !!

I don’t mind at all, I’m honored you’d even be bothered to hear my dumb opinions !

Personally I feel like Australia is FAR ahead of other countries when it comes to the legal aspects of racism within the country, and similarily progressive when it comes to educating primary and highschool students on other cultures. but socially we have a LITTLE bit more to go, and i think we’ll get there in about 20 years when the older generation…. dies off lol… If you take a little look into our laws, you’ll find a LOT of things to protect minority (and specifically Indigenous rights), one of the most controversial being section 18c of the Racial Discrimination Act which essentially condemns hate speech to a HELLA strong degree (like…. a little too strong if you ask me, like it literally says it’s illegal to say things that could ‘offend’ but moVING ON).We have a lot of publicised fear of ‘boat people’ but I genuinely do not believe that this countries fear of immigrants is intrinsically tied to a fear of POC like it *appears* to be in other countries. (Obviously, I am an Australian citizen and don’t know the inner-workings of anywhere but Australia - if that - those countries could be racism free.) A lot of the language politicians and news outlets use to describe immigrants are NOT race specific or racially coded, I’ve found. We have a bit of a fear of muslims, but I think this is more central to the religion (and ofc, brought on by a fear of terrorists) than is tied to the race, so I wouldn’t exactly put it as racist? more… prejudice? I’m arabic, not muslim, and people usually find out these facts together so aside from my friends purposefully racist jokes I don’t hear much about islam from people.(Also yeah, maybe thats worth mentioning, AUSSIES HAVE A REALLY DARK SENSE OF HUMOUR and if you’re a minority coming from other western countries, you might think the jokes are racist but they never intend to be. And when youre raised here, you don’t take it that way, you usually make the jokes more than your friends. One of my mates is just a whole mix of different darker skinned races??? literally i don’t even know what exactly, but every time he see’s a POC on tv he goes ‘thaTS ME’ for some fucking reason, its so dumb but it makes us laugh.)

I’m not sure about you, but I know in my childhood I was taught that the colonisation of Australia was a violent and kind of disgusting event in our history. To me, this seems like a given, but from what I’ve read not every country condemns colonisation like that, and I think and important part of ensuring children don’t develop racist tendencies from their parents is teaching them history from a critical standpoint (this way we don’t get any of that ‘Make Australia Great Again’ garbage). From a VERY young age I was well educated on the culture and history of Indigenous Australians (I can literally still quote to you the Mabo Case) and it was treated with the same amount of respect that, say, Catholic studies were. This might vary across state lines though. I spent my primary school years in FAR North Queensland (Townsville and above) where there is a much larger % of Indigenous students than say Ipswich. Something about focusing on ensuring there is no racial tension between white and indigenous students, kind of limited all kinds of racial tension. I’m half afro-arab, half white, and I never felt subjected to racism or bullying from the other kids at all. The most annoying thing I had to deal with is people fucking touching my hair and telling me to ‘brush it’… but that’s not really a racism thing because the filo kids did it just as much as everyone else ksjsks. When I got into highschool I moved to a rural school (it was like 85% white which was SOOOOO weird, and i think contributed to me experiencing the racism i did). Racism in students was rare, and the racists were bullied for their beliefs, ostrazised even. Instead of the other way around. The biggest issue in children, I think is when poorer kids see the sheer amount of benefits AUS provides to indigenous students. The biggest issues in adults is when they see Australia letting overseas chinese billionaires buying up land to rent out here. Either way, I think ‘racists’ blame the government, not the people more than anything.

Now, I’m in university (Studing law and psychology which btw both have EXTENSIVE units on race and racial discrimination, literally everything here does). I live in Brisbane, I walk past signs in chinese, arabic and korean every day. Some specific areas don’t even have english-speaking shop workers and no one bats an eye. The university lecturer’s read of a spiel about honoring the traditional owners of the land (they did that in my senior year of highschool too btw) BASICALLY, yeah in Brisbane it’s incredibly multi-cultural, and the government doesn’t really care if you like that or not. And i think that’s the best way to sum up australia’s multi-culturalism. It’s forced upon the older generation, but embraced by the younger. The most ‘racist’ of the new generation see themselves as victims and are usually poor or homeschooled or something, but they’re honestly REALLY rare, in my experience.

ALSO lol in this whole spiel I kept refering to australia’s history as ‘my history’ in my head. But lmao,,, i’m first generation Australian, the white half of me is Irish for gods sakes BUT I have never doubted my identity as an Australian first and foremost before anything else and neither has anyone else. A huge difference between AUS and like the US is that. American people tend to hyphenate, yknow? african-american. asian-american. that doesn’t happen in australia, were just AUSSIE, and to me that means we’re doing something right in terms of multi-culturalism.

WOW WOW THIS WAS SO LONG SORRY I DIDN’T MEAN TO WRITE THAT MUCH I’M SO PATRIOTIC SORRY

#australia #racism #multi culturalism #anon #Anonymous #fuck im so #patriotic #woops #iM SORRY #I TRIED TO BE UNBIASED #I LOVE MY COUNTRY #we're a little racist #we are #but NOT FOR LONG AYE

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nothingman · 7 years ago

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The alt-right may depart from mainstream conservatism in a number of ways, but one trait they both have in common is an obsession with something known as “Western Civilization.” The term gets waved around a lot by people all across the political right. The near-genocidal Traditionalist Worker Party founder Matthew Heimbach once headed a chapter of the “Youth for Western Civilization,” Stanford pop historian and Kissinger hagiographer Niall Ferguson makes a hierarchical distinction between “the West and the rest,” while noted social-scientific blowhard Jordan Peterson has repeatedly declared that “The West is right.” But what is this mysterious entity called “the West” anyway? Or, to break the question down a bit more, what do they think they mean by “the West,” what are they actually signaling by talking about “the West,” and why should anyone care about “the West” at all (since, spoiler alert, it’s largely a fabrication)?

When people on the right talk about “the West,” they almost always do so in glowing terms. It’s the “birthplace of democracy” or the “mother of reason” or the “nursemaid of science” or any number of other natal clichés. The achievement of the West, in their minds, is a kind of origination or invention of various significant cultural institutions that, for better or worse, now shape the experiences of billions of people around the world. (Ferguson nauseatingly calls these great Western institutions “killer apps.”) Setting aside for a moment the fact that modern democracy looks absolutely nothing like the Athenian system, or that Indian scholars began developing multiple systems of formal logic several hundred years before Aristotle was born, this affection is understandable: democracy and reason and science are generally considered good things, and it’s good to want to know how they came about.

But is that really all that’s going on? Some other facets of this fixation suggest not. If one browses the corners of the internet frequented by the far right (and I do not advise doing so without something pleasant at hand to drink, like overproof whisky or a warm mug of cyanide), one finds a pretty high concentration of jokes and memes centered on the Crusades, which are implied to be a great moment in the clash of civilizations. Current Affairs readers, who are noted for their depth of learning and historical savvy, might find this somewhat confusing. After all, the Crusades are famous mostly for their large death toll, their ultimate ineffectiveness, and their having inadvertently caused one of the longest and bitterest religious schisms in history between the Eastern and Western Christian churches. Not exactly a proud civilizational high point. Those same readers might conclude that a West-loving person celebrating the Crusades must have some other facet of them in mind. That facet, to no one’s surprise, turns out to be anti-Arab racism, and the numerous downsides to the Crusades are overlooked in favor of their having been occasions for a bunch of Europeans to kill a lot of Arabs.

I don’t pretend to have uncovered some great secret about the far right. Talking to these people mirrors the experience of talking to someone who’s just a bit too interested in German artillery from the First and Second World Wars, though the alt-right’s attempts at dog-whistle Nazi fandom are less like a soft whistle than a fifty-piece military band. The more mainstream right, however, despite its frequent disavowal of racism, upholds these very same visions of European superiority and colonial conquest, and, moreover, does so in terms that an attentive reader cannot help but gloss as racial. Its representatives will say otherwise: their devotion is to the “culture” of the West, or to history, or to “Judeo-Christian values.” But the way in which this culture and these values are represented must occasion serious reflection on what the “values” in question actually are.

The preferred aesthetic modes of this kind of “Western culture” conservatism are classicism and neoclassicism, and this should give us immediate pause. I don’t mean to deride classical and neoclassical art. Classical sculpture and architecture are genuinely beautiful, and while some neoclassical architecture is bland and derivative, it has also given us beautiful public buildings and spaces that are pleasant to look at and move through. But it’s hard to think of monumental edifices of white marble and not suspect that the “white” might bear a heavier load than the marble. Sarah Bond, a historian and archaeologist at the University of Iowa, reminded us of this last year when she published an essay bringing to popular attention what scholars have known for a while now: the plain white marble commonly associated with Greek and Roman antiquity was in fact painted and brightly colored, and that the “idealized” proportions of classical sculpture have a long history of deployment in explicitly racist scientific literature, like medical textbooks describing phrenology. Bond’s argument is that we need to be conscious of the ways in which a classicizing aesthetic of white marble forms and European facial features can unintentionally uphold notions of white racial superiority. After making this eminently sensible point, Bond was subjected to coordinated online harassment and death threats from the far right, while mainstream right-wing publications like the National Review scoffed at her radical suggestion that we ought to discuss ancient statues as they actually were.

Classicist Donna Zuckerberg has also written against alt-right appropriation of antiquity and has faced similar death threats from the far right and scorn or indifference from the mainstream right. In the desire of these supposed custodians of history to maintain their already-existing conceptions of antiquity even at the price of ignoring what these statues were actually like, we see history actively giving way to other concerns. When a supposedly mainstream conservative publication dismisses expert scholarly opinion and wonders why we can’t just keep the statues white, it doesn’t take a trained philologist to draw out what’s really going on.

Since, however, I actually am a trained philologist, I’d like to draw this out a bit further. The notion of a “cultural inheritance” common to “Western” people—a category that is both strikingly modern and shockingly difficult to define—purports to stand for a cohesive “European” achievement. (It also attempts to escape any possible charge of racism, by insisting that race has no bearing on culture, i.e. the problem with Muslims is their faith rather than their ethnicity. This is completely untrue, of course. White supremacy is omnipresent in American and European cultures, and people who are not white consequently experience those cultures very differently from both white people and from one another, depending on where they are and how their race is perceived.) We can see this rhetoric in detail in the Paris Statement, a recent product of the “cultural right” put out by a small but representative group of European conservatives and endorsed by “respectable” conservative journals like the National Review. The statement is careful to disavow racism from the very beginning but then posits a crucial dichotomy between a “true Europe” that is vital and productive and strong (but also somehow under threat), and a “false Europe” that is hollow and weak (but also somehow threatens to overwhelm the true Europe). Umberto Eco once identified a particular rhetorical register of fascism in which “by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.” The constant vacillation between the vitality/vulnerability of “true Europe” and the unreality/unstoppability of “false Europe” fits Eco’s criterion exactly. The “true Europe” is also identified repeatedly with particular people as their patrimony or inheritance, which certainly implies ancestry and “roots.”

Indeed, the notion of European culture as a kind of patrimony can be traced back to the 19th-century search for the “original” Indo-Europeans, the people who spoke the language from which the Germanic, Celtic, Romance, Slavic, Iranian, and Indic languages, along with many others, all descend. It was by asserting Germans’ direct descent from this group that the Nazis asserted a hereditary German right to rule over Europe. Using the same conceptual apparatus smuggles in questions of race, as it were, through the back door.

The Paris Statement also suggests that the primary threat to Europe is too much “openness,” particularly to the cultures of Muslim immigrants. These cultures are, apparently, incompatible with Europe and cannot exist within its borders. This particular strain of argument is drawn straight from Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” thesis, which posits a unified “West” identified primarily with Protestant and Catholic Christianity and predicts that the next great conflict will be between “Western” and “Islamic” civilizations. This connection illustrates the strong cross-pollination between European nativism and American neoconservatism, and the ease with which each substitutes “Europe” and “the West” for one another when translating their ideas back and forth.

Illustration by C.M. Duffy

What exactly, then, is this “Western culture” that so fascinates and concerns them? What is the common inheritance that modernity has supposedly abandoned? This proves a far more difficult question to answer because the idea of “the West” turns out to be a surprisingly modern way of looking at Europe and the countries formed by European settlement and colonization (principally the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand). Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, from 1918, occupies an important place in this. Not only is it one of the favorite texts of the modern alt-right, but it was the text through which a great many Anglophone intellectuals took up the notion of a unified “West” that could be talked about across historical periods. Spengler wasn’t the first prominent scholar to speak of it, but he was the most publicized, and his framework was particularly influential on the European political right. Though Spengler did not espouse the same sort of vicious anti-Semitism that would later result in the Holocaust, he did help to cement the notion that the world was divided into distinct “civilizations” along ethno-religious lines, writing in his introduction that “it is self-evident that for the Cultures of the West the existence of Athens, Florence, or Paris is more important than that of Lo-Yang or Paliputra.” Lest we mistake his meaning, he writes only a few pages earlier that “We men of Western culture are, with our historical sense, an exception and not a rule. World-history is our world picture and not all mankind’s.” This is not overt eugenicist superiority, but it clearly searches for the exceptionalism of an internally coherent “West,” which lays the intellectual groundwork for the systemic exclusion of Jews, Romani, and others who can be labeled foreign.

Shortly after Spengler published the first volume of Decline, American education began a series of reforms that would shape the way that we perceive “the West.” Throughout most of the 19th century, the elite universities in the United States stuck to a curriculum centered on the Greek and Latin classics. Toward the century’s end, some of those universities, most famously Harvard, began switching to an elective system in which students had far greater choice in what they would study. In partial reaction to this, as well as to the horrors of World War I and the failures of European nationalisms, professors at Columbia and the University of Chicago formed their own curricula grounded in what they considered “great books” of human civilization, the designated classic texts that supposedly comprised the core of worthy human insight.

These courses didn’t begin as exclusively “Western,” but they quickly became so. The designers aimed to strengthen American democracy and our relationships with European countries by promoting an understanding of American “roots” as well as the common heritage of “Western” countries generally. Historian-turned-biologist Dylan Morris sums up this transition in his Master’s dissertation on the subject:

“Since American freedom was founded upon Western roots, [educators] argued, American citizenship required a grounding in the Western tradition. In the context of conflicts with Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, the great books educators argued that opposition to totalitarianism required the sense of universal values their education could provide… Moreover, associating the great books with the West also allowed the great books educators to avoid explicitly making the claim that the books were greater than any modern thought or than the works of the emerging ‘East,’ claims that increasingly risked being seen as ‘new medievalism’ and ‘ethnocentric,’ respectively.”

Morris notes that these educators at once attempted to disavow any claims of “Western” supremacy, but also claimed that this education would impart “universal values,” claiming the “universal” perspective for the West in the same way that Spengler claimed for “world history.”

Of course, capitalism will find a way to monetize anything that comes near it, and “great books” are no exception. The moment of truly explosive popularity for “great books” came in 1952 when Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins, who had been responsible for the curriculum at Chicago, released a set of “Great Books of the Western World” published by Encyclopedia Britannica. It sold very well and found its way into middle-class homes across the country. This, far more than the curricula at a couple of elite universities, shaped popular American perceptions of “Western Civ” and its importance to national identity. But it’s instructive to compare Adler and Hutchins’s set with another famous “Great Books” collection, the Harvard Classics, put out in the late 19th century by Charles Eliot, the Harvard president responsible for instituting the university’s elective system. Both sets of books market themselves as a kind of self-education. By reading and reflecting on these books, privately and in their own home, a person will become better equipped for citizenship in a democratic society. But the earlier Harvard set, even with its sparse selection of Buddhist texts, Indian epic, and excerpts from the Qur’an, is far more inclusive of non-“Western” perspectives than the later Chicago set. In the Chicago set, we can also see the barest gesture toward including Russian literature under the canon of “the West,” with a single novel each from Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. As Morris observes, Adler’s equation of “Western” with “universal,” begun in his curriculum and in the Britannica series’s pompously-titled Syntopicon, reached its apex with the 2000 publication of his final book, How to Think About the Great Ideas, in which he identifies exactly 103 “Great Ideas” that, he claims, sum up all of human thought: “All the Great Ideas are recognizably the same as they were in the ancient world. None of them is a ‘modern discovery.’ The ancient Greeks had a name for all 103 of them.” Leaving aside my severe professional skepticism that the concept of an “Angel” is a universal idea or that fifth-century Athenians had any notion of such a thing, this assertion is remarkable for the bald transparency of both its intellectual parochialism and its sheer snake-oil hucksterism. Here, for the low price of $34.95, is every idea worth considering, all explored in a list of books you already know and respect.

The notion that “Western thought” contained every major human intellectual contribution was not inevitable, and in fact would have been unthinkable a century beforehand. What makes this collapse of perspective noteworthy and alarming is the wildly different attitude that 19th-century European intellectuals held toward “the East,” by which they meant chiefly Middle Eastern, Chinese, and Indian cultures. Indeed, much of the intellectual life of the later 1800’s was marked by a pervasive enthusiasm for the literatures and religions of these regions. Between 1879 and 1910, Oxford University Press put out a fifty-volume series of the Sacred Books of the East, overseen by Max Müller, one of the leading Indologists of the era. That a press could undertake such a mammoth series with the expectation that it would sell speaks to the ready appetite of both scholars and the literate public for “Eastern” material. The late 19th century also saw a minor literary mania for Edward Fitzgerald’s famous English translation of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, which kindled enthusiasm for Persian and Arabic literature among readers of all ages.

We know, of course, that this enthusiasm was also suffused with an Orientalism that effaced the great cultural diversity of Asia and the Middle East, turning them into a unified blob of Eastern exoticism while exploiting the people and resources of those regions. But at the same time, it did get something right: other people in other places had produced art and thought that was different from our own, but no less worthy. That this zeal to learn from other cultures would give way, in the 20th century United States, to Adler’s bargain-bin parochialism seems to me one of the great tragedies of American intellectual life.

The 20th century shift in the focus of educational curricula and book series shows that popular notions of “great” literary and cultural achievement, though overwhelmingly focused on Euro-American works, once did attempt to embrace important works outside that sphere. Only later did it become entangled with delimiting “the West” and limiting its selections to that area. But perhaps more importantly, it also demonstrates just how unstable the idea of “the West” was and remains to this day. Nowadays it’s hard to find a “Great Books of the West” list that doesn’t include major Russian authors, and even many of the self-avowedly “Western” curricula like those at Columbia and UChicago have incorporated readings from the Qur’an and from Islamic thinkers like Ibn Rushd, Al-Ghazali and Ibn Sina. The idea of the “West” as a distinct and self-contained set of cultures and works is a deeply modern idea, and the gaps between contemporary articulations of “the West” and those from even the middle of the 20th century show how closely that idea reflects the twists and turns of modernity rather than any kind of unchanging body of historical tradition.

But I don’t just mean to jab a finger at the right and lecture them on their ignorance, abundant though it may be. What I mean to expose here is that there is no stable “Western” tradition at all. There were other concepts that encompassed Europe, like the medieval and early modern idea of “Christendom,” but Christendom was badly damaged by the Wars of Religion and was thoroughly dead after the French Revolution, and in any case, “Christendom” is a very different thing from “the West.” The latter is a modern invention, taken up by some elite college professors and then sold door to door for a tidy profit. The right, particularly the “respectable” right, is very keen to claim that it remains faithful to some cultural inheritance that the left has abandoned in favor of contemporary fashionable orthodoxies, but they play the same game that we do—they’re just better at selling it. In fact, the most prominent tradition of left-wing scholarship, Marxism, is markedly older than the idea of “the West,” since the first volume of Capital was published in 1867.

The harm in buying into the right’s framing of a venerable and antiquated “Western tradition” goes somewhat beyond being mocked by classicists in academic footnotes. Accepting their terms means accepting, implicitly, that there is a tradition of thought with enough internal coherence that one can decide what falls within it and what doesn’t. This is the premise of those conservatives like former education secretary William Bennett, whose report on higher education declares that “our society is the product and we the inheritors of Western civilization,” and immediately goes on to identify “Western civilization” with “masterworks of English, American, and European literature.” This is a transposition of the Paris Statement into a more intellectual and less geopolitical register, but it sounds all the same notes: a patrimony that belongs to “us” by inheritance; the necessity of maintaining its integrity; the danger that opening it too widely will destroy it; the implicit threat from influences inside it but somehow also foreign. (It’s curious that the right, which so loathes “identity politics,” embraces the most extreme and dangerous forms of identity politics: the civilizational and the national.)

Framing matters around an “us” and a “them” invites an audience to imagine what these degrading influences are. Some blame leftist Jewish academics like the expatriate Frankfurt School, others blame feminism and suggest that things were better when nobody had to care what women thought. Charles Murray has written that “Europe dominate[s] the narrative of human accomplishment,” and that “so does the minority that has become known in recent years as dead white males,” implying that any attempt to uncover the histories of women’s accomplishment must be distorting fact in the service of politics. (Incidentally, this is demonstrably false. Philosopher Christia Mercer has recently made a very persuasive case that much of René Descartes’s most famous philosophical argument was drawn from the writings of the Christian mystic Teresa of Avila.) When the left cedes this ground and allows the right to frame discussion in terms of a very white and male “West,” we allow the right to construct a Euro-American past that does not involve Jews or women or people of color, which sets the stage for excluding the ideas of Jews and women and people of color from present consideration.

We also concede the notion that this continuous and identifiable “West” developed primarily through its own powers, with only marginal influence from the “non-Western” peoples. This myth of self-generated vitality is an old one, traceable back to the Athenian myth of the first Athenians springing from the soil of Attica, and finding new and horrifying life in the Third Reich’s foundational myth of Germanic aboriginality. But it is well known that European civilization has always engaged in trade and exchange with non-European peoples, and that those peoples have sometimes exercised profound influence on large segments of culture. This is not even something that takes careful exegesis to discover. Throughout medieval scholastic philosophy, for example, the commentaries on Aristotle by the Andalusian Muslim polymath Ibn-Rushd are explicitly quoted either to confirm a point or as as an authority sufficiently eminent to demand specific refutation. The whole shape of this most stereotypically European period of thought depends on that influx of Arabic philosophy. Even the very Christianity held so dear by so many avowedly secular right-wing intellectuals is the product of contact between a heretical Jewish sect and the Hellenistic culture that pervaded the Mediterranean in that era. There simply isn’t any way to imagine modern Europe without the foundational influence of these and many other distinctly non-European voices.

Of course, acknowledging Euro-American cultural and intellectual debts is not sufficient. A focus on the cultural integrity of “the West” also elides the ways in which so many European countries built their wealth and cultural production through colonial exploitation and enslavement of non-European people. This cannot be pushed to the periphery. It was foundational to Euro-American modernity as we know it, and any serious attempt to understand European and American societies must confront it. In a very real sense, focusing on an integrated “West” minimizes and obscures that historical atrocity. It says that the development of European and North American nations came about through the actions and ideas of people unequivocally on the cultural “inside,” and relegates the ideas and actions of exploited and enslaved peoples to a footnote. This is the very same “history as therapy” of which the right so often accuses fields like Afro-American Studies and Gender Studies. It tells its intended audience that only the actions of people like them really matter, and that any historical crimes weren’t really so bad as to affect the foundations of their culture.

As it happens, I am not at all an opponent of “history as therapy.” Quite the contrary, I think that finding our individual and collective selves through the study of history is one of the most rewarding uses of leisure, and that everyone should have the time and resources to do so. But good therapy requires honesty, as any qualified therapist will tell you. Far from being a process of constant affirmation, an effective course of therapy often forces us to confront the parts of ourselves we least want to acknowledge, and to abandon the comfortable illusions that allow us to ignore the harm we do to others and to ourselves. This therapeutic end is precisely what requires us to abandon the notion of an integrated and continuous “West” in our studies of history and culture. By continuing to speak in those terms, we allow our discussion to be shaped by an illusion that obscures millennia of ongoing contact between European nations or settlements and non-European peoples, as well as the many evils perpetrated against those peoples. We allow ourselves to say that only “our” people’s deeds and experiences matter, and that other people’s deeds and experiences are not really important enough to affect who “we” are.

So where does this leave our view of literature or history or other forms of culture? How are we to structure our conversation and study of these things without a term like “the West” to draw them together? This is a less difficult proposition than it might appear, since these subjects were studied before the invention of “the West” and will continue to be studied in other ways. There are plenty of ways to frame questions of literary and cultural history that don’t lie about which people matter, and we certainly shouldn’t abandon studying the histories and cultures of Europe and North America. These regions and cultures exercise enormous influence around the world, and understanding them is a worthwhile project. But we have an obligation to do so responsibly, in a way that is faithful both to the material and to our fellow human beings. Virtually no one involved in the culture wars over “Western Civ” in the 90’s ever said that the study of Plato or Cervantes or the Thirty Years’ War was worthless. They just aren’t the only things that matter, and we should delight that there is so much more for us to know that does matter and that can instruct and delight us. The poet and classical scholar A. E. Housman put it best:

“Other desires become the occasion of pain through dearth of the material to gratify them, but not the desire of knowledge: the sum of things to be known is inexhaustible, and however long we read we shall never come to the end of our story-book. So long as the mind of man is what it is, it will continue to exult in advancing on the unknown throughout the infinite field of the universe; and the tree of knowledge will remain for ever, as it was in the beginning, a tree to be desired to make one wise.”

The realization that “the West” has not exhausted all worthwhile human endeavor should fill us with wonder at the scope of human possibility. There will always be more to know, more places to see, more people to meet. For those of us on the left who claim to love humanity, I can think of few more powerful visions of our future.

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mithliya · 3 years ago

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wasn’t this after u agreed with an anon that me being from bahrain but learning german so i can study in germany means im somehow biased? and u replying by saying “if germany is so racist why does she want to go there”? and after u put a bunch of words in my mouth? so not for ur stance on immigration at all like u claim? 🤗

and yes u are on a list of racists and u continuously reaffirm my belief that u are racist w the shit u say. many others agree with me bc u haven’t even tried to seem like someone who actually listens to woc about our realities or experiences. even after multiple Dutch woc questioned u on ur statements on zwarte piet, after multiple women from the Middle East questioned ur insistence that Armenians are Arab, and many other incidents of u showing this exact behaviour.. u either backtrack or double down, u never admit u were ever in the wrong. so again… ur stances on immigration had nothing to do with it. and u had quite literally nothing to do w this convo, u came in and made it about something it never was about, and then started posting racist anons u got in agreement with those anons… and then i got an influx of racist anons too. then u act like it’s insane anyone would think ur racist. i hardly ever interact with ur posts and simply have warned ppl and directed them to evidence showing what you have said for a reason. bc ive tried talking to u and giving u the benefit of the doubt for a very long time before giving up any hope that u aren’t racist (or at least that u try not to be).

another reason why a bunch of westerners moaning about the threat of refugees is bizarre is …. it’s actually the eastern world taking in most refugees. u guys act like europe is being overthrown by adult male refugees when only 1 european country has taken in 1 million refugees, and half of refugees around the world are literally children

#it’s telling u changed ‘list of racists’ to ‘list of Bad People’ tho

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christianworldf · 5 years ago

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New Post has been published on Nehemiah Reset

New Post has been published on https://nehemiahreset.org/news/minnesota-news/government-news-mn/trump-calls-on-minority-congresswomen-to-apologize-after-he-said-they-should-go-back-to-their-countries/

Trump calls on minority congresswomen to apologize after he said they should ‘go back’ to their countries

John Wagner

National reporter leading The Post’s breaking political news team

July 15 at 12:08 PM

President Trump on Monday called on a group of minority, liberal congresswomen to “apologize” to the United States, Israel and him and accused them of “racist hatred” a day after he said in inflammatory tweets that they should “go back” to their countries.

“When will the Radical Left Congresswomen apologize to our Country, the people of Israel and even to the Office of the President, for the foul language they have used, and the terrible things they have said,” Trump said in new tweets Monday. “So many people are angry at them & their horrible & disgusting actions!”

He later criticized Democrats for coming to the defense of the congresswomen, who he claimed had shown “racist hatred” in their speech and are “very unpopular & unrepresentative.”

With his latest tweets, Trump dug in further on a line of attack that was widely condemned by Democrats as racist and employed a tactic he has used before: accusing his opponents of the same transgressions for which they have criticized him.

Trump’s tweets appeared to target four outspoken freshmen lawmakers who have been feuding with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.): Democratic Reps. Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), Rashida Tlaib (Mich.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) and Ilhan Omar (Minn.).

Only one of them — Omar — was born outside the United States.

[Trump tells four liberal congresswomen to ‘go back’ to their countries, prompting Pelosi to defend them]

All four have called for Trump’s impeachment — Tlaib has done so using profane language — and have been highly critical of his administration, notably denouncing conditions at federal detention facilities near the U.S.-Mexico border.

Trump’s comments regarding Israel appeared to target Omar and Tlaib.

Earlier this year, Omar apologized after she was widely accused of anti-Semitic speech for suggesting that supporters of Israel’s government have an “allegiance to a foreign country.”

Tlaib, the daughter of Palestinian immigrants, has advocated what has been dubbed a “one-state solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Arguing that the Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu effectively opposes a two-state solution of neighboring Israeli and Palestinian states, she has supported the transformation of Israel into a single, jointly governed Arab-Jewish nation. But the idea has little support among either Israelis or Palestinians.

When will the Radical Left Congresswomen apologize to our Country, the people of Israel and even to the Office of the President, for the foul language they have used, and the terrible things they have said. So many people are angry at them & their horrible & disgusting actions!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 15, 2019

If Democrats want to unite around the foul language & racist hatred spewed from the mouths and actions of these very unpopular & unrepresentative Congresswomen, it will be interesting to see how it plays out. I can tell you that they have made Israel feel abandoned by the U.S.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 15, 2019

Republicans remained largely silent Monday morning about Trump’s tweets targeting the minority lawmakers.

Ocasio-Cortez went on Twitter to denounce Trump shortly after his latest posts.

“It’s important to note that the President’s words yday, telling four American Congresswomen of color ‘go back to your own country,’ is hallmark language of white supremacists,” she wrote. “Trump feels comfortable leading the GOP into outright racism, and that should concern all Americans.”

Trump’s tweets on Sunday morning were sent before he headed to his golf club in Sterling, Va.

“So interesting to see ‘Progressive’ Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run,” Trump tweeted.

“Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” Trump added. “Then come back and show us how it is done.”

[Republicans are quiet as Trump urges minority congresswomen to leave the country]

Pressley was born in Cincinnati, Tlaib was born in Detroit, and Ocasio-Cortez was born in New York. Omar was born in Mogadishu, Somalia; her family fled the country amid civil war when she was a child, and she became a U.S. citizen as a teenager.

Pelosi subsequently described Trump’s tweets as racist and divisive.

“When @realDonaldTrump tells four American Congresswomen to go back to their countries, he reaffirms his plan to ‘Make America Great Again’ has always been about making America white again,” she said in a tweet. “Our diversity is our strength and our unity is our power.”

By Sunday evening, at least 90 House Democrats, plus Rep. Justin Amash (I-Mich.), had denounced Trump’s remarks, with more than half of them using the words “racist” or “racism” to describe his tweets.

The only Republican member of Congress to speak out against Trump on Sunday was Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.), who wrote on Twitter that “POTUS was wrong to say any American citizen, whether in Congress or not, has any ‘home’ besides the U.S.”

“But I just as strongly believe noncitizens who abuse our immigration laws should be sent home immediately, & Reps who refuse to defend America should be sent home” in the next election, he added.

A few other Republicans were critical of Trump’s tweets when asked about them on Monday.

Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), speaking on the syndicated radio program “Michigan’s Big Show,” called Trump’s tweets “really uncalled for” and “very disappointing.”

“We don’t respond to everything that’s out there,” he said when asked about the relative silence from GOP lawmakers. “But I would imagine, I would know, that a good number of my Republican colleagues don’t appreciate the comments as well. And actually if you look at the facts . . . three of the four were born in this country, so it makes no sense.”

During a television appearance Monday morning, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) counseled Trump to focus on policy differences with the congresswomen rather than on them personally.

“Aim higher. They are American citizens. They won an election. Take on their policies,” Graham said on Fox News’s “Fox & Friends.”

During the interview, Graham called the congresswomen’s ideas “anti-Semitic” and “socialist” and said their agenda is “disgusting.”

“We all know that AOC and this crowd are a bunch of communists,” Graham said, referring to Ocasio-Cortez. “They hate Israel. They hate our own country.”

Trump later tweeted selective quotes from Graham’s interview that did not include his advice to “aim higher.”

[‘1950s racism straight from the White House’: Trump’s tweets revolt politicians around the world]

Trump also faced some criticism from Republicans beyond Capitol Hill.

In a statement, former Ohio governor John Kasich, a frequent Trump critic, called the president’s comments “deplorable and beneath the dignity of the office.”

“We all, including Republicans, need to speak out against these kinds of comments that do nothing more than divide us and create deep animosity — maybe even hatred,” he said.

Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) sought to highlight the silence of most Republicans on Capitol Hill.

“Is the Republican silence over President @realDonaldTrump’s racism agreement or embarrassment?” he said in a tweet late Monday morning.

On Sunday night, Trump tweeted that it was “sad” to see Democrats “sticking up for people who speak so badly of our Country and who, in addition, hate Israel with a true and unbridled passion.”

He returned to that argument Monday morning.

“If Democrats want to unite around the foul language & racist hatred spewed from the mouths and actions of these very unpopular & unrepresentative Congresswomen, it will be interesting to see how it plays out,” Trump wrote. “I can tell you that they have made Israel feel abandoned by the U.S.”

Speaking to reporters at the White House on Monday morning, Marc Short, chief of staff to Vice President Pence, said: “I don’t think the president’s intent in any way is racist. . . . This is not a universal statement that he is making.”

Asked about the controversy during an earlier appearance on the Fox Business Channel, Short mentioned a recent naturalization ceremony at which Pence presided and that was attended by Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, who is Asian American.

“So when people write the president has racist motives here, look at the reality of who is actually serving in Donald Trump’s Cabinet,” Short said. “He is making a point about a great frustration a lot of people feel that, I think it’s hard to find anything Ilhan Omar has actually said since elected to Congress that has been positive about the United States of America.”

Felicia Sonmez, Mike DeBonis and Ashley Parker contributed to this report.

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