Matthias Grünewald,The Temptation of Saint Anthony, 1515
Panel from the Isenheim altarpiece: oil on wood
Musee d'Unterlinden, Colmar
I
wish and I ask that our rulers who have Jewish subjects exercise a
sharp mercy toward these wretched people
. . . They must act like
a good physician who, when gangrene has set in, proceeds without mercy
to cut, saw, and burn flesh, veins, bone, and marrow. Such a procedure
must also be followed in this instance. Burn down their synagogues,
forbid all that I enumerated earlier, force
them to work, and deal
harshly with them, as Moses did in the wilderness, slaying three
thousand lest the whole people perish. They surely do not know what
they are doing; moreover, as people possessed, they do not wish to know
it, hear it, or learn it. There it would be wrong to be merciful and
confirm them in their conduct. If this does not help we must drive them
out like mad dogs, so that we do not become partakers of their
abominable blasphemy and all their other vices and thus merit God's
wrath and be damned with them. I have done my duty. Now let everyone
see to his. I am exonerated."
Martin Luther, The Lies of
the Jews (1543)
from The First Crusade: A New History, Thomas Asbridge (Oxford, 2004)
These accusations (
) had little or no basis in
fact, but they did serve [Pope] Urban's purpose. By
expounding
upon the alleged crimes of Islam, he sought to ignite an explosiion of
vengeful passion among his Latin audience, while his attempts to
degrade
Muslims as 'sub-human' opened the floodgates of extreme, brutal
reciprocity. This, the Pope agued, was to be no shameful war
of
equals, between God's children, but a 'just' and 'holy' struggle in
which an 'alien' people could be punished without remorse and with
utter ruthhlessness. Urban was activating one of the most
potent
impulses in human society: the definition of the 'other'.
Across
countless generations of human history, tribes, nations and peoples
have
sought to delineate their own identities through comparison to their
neighbours or enemies. By conditioning Latin Europe to view
Islam as a species apart, the Pope stood to gain not only by
facilitating his proposed campaign, but also by propeling the West
toward unification.
pp. 34-5
"Two forces seem to have been at work, stimulated by the crusading message that Urban had shaped. Characterising Muslims, the expedition's projected enemies, as a sub-human species, the pope harnessed society's inclination to define itself in contrast to an alien 'other'. But tapping into this innate well-pool of discrimination and prejudice was akin to opening Pandora's Box. A potentiallly uncontrollable torrent of racial and religious intolerance was unleashed." p. 85
pp. 34-5
"Two forces seem to have been at work, stimulated by the crusading message that Urban had shaped. Characterising Muslims, the expedition's projected enemies, as a sub-human species, the pope harnessed society's inclination to define itself in contrast to an alien 'other'. But tapping into this innate well-pool of discrimination and prejudice was akin to opening Pandora's Box. A potentiallly uncontrollable torrent of racial and religious intolerance was unleashed." p. 85
from Puritanism as a Revolutionary Ideology, Michael Walzer, History and Theory, Vol. 3, No. 1 (1963), pp. 59-90
About
the Puritan saints Walzer writes of " . . . their almost Manichean
warfare against Satan and his worldly
allies, their nervous lust for systematic repression and control." p.
63
"They felt themselves to be living in an age of chaos and crime and sought to train conscience to be permanently on guard against sin. The extent to which they would have carried the moral discipline can be seen in the following list of offenses which merited excommunication in one seventeenth-century congregation:
"They felt themselves to be living in an age of chaos and crime and sought to train conscience to be permanently on guard against sin. The extent to which they would have carried the moral discipline can be seen in the following list of offenses which merited excommunication in one seventeenth-century congregation:
-for
unfathfulness in his masters service
-for admitting cardplaying in his house . . .
-for sloth in business.
-for being overtaken in beer.
-for borrowing a pillion and not returning it.
-for jumping for wagers . . .
-for dancing and other vanities.
-for admitting cardplaying in his house . . .
-for sloth in business.
-for being overtaken in beer.
-for borrowing a pillion and not returning it.
-for jumping for wagers . . .
-for dancing and other vanities.
Had
the saints been successful in establishing
their Holy
Commonwealth, the enforcement of this discipline would have consituted
the Puritan terror." p. 64
"The persecution of witches, of course, was not a vital aspect of Puritan endeavor, but the active, fearful struggle against wickedness was. And the saints imagined wickedness as a creative and omnipresent demonic force, that is, as a continual threat." p. 79
"The persecution of witches, of course, was not a vital aspect of Puritan endeavor, but the active, fearful struggle against wickedness was. And the saints imagined wickedness as a creative and omnipresent demonic force, that is, as a continual threat." p. 79
"If
the state was
one
master-noun of eighteenth-century political discourse, the
nation
was another. Indeed, as a source of inspiration, it was the
more
potent. For although the state was an ambitious, omnivorous,
hyperactive agent, the blood it sent pulsing round the body politic was
very much on the thin side. While a dedicated enlightened
absolutist such as Frederick the Great or Joseph II might wish to
dedicate his life to its service, most Eurpeans found it difficult to
work up much enthusiasm for such an abstract entity. The
nation,
on the other hand, proved to be brimful with motivating force, for it
triggered both positive and negative responses to a self-generating
dialectical progression. For every virtue a nationalist
ascribed
to his own national group, there was a corresponding vice to be
denigrated in the 'other' against which national identity was defined."
"This
kind of
mutually
supportive national prejudice was of long standing by the eighteenth
century. In the Middle Ages, satires singled out, for
example,
the envy of the Jews, the cunning of the Greeks, the arrogance of the
Romans, the avarice of the French, the bravery of the Saxons, the bad
temper of the English and the lasciviousness of the Scots. As
the
German scholar Winfried Schulze has cogently argued, the humanists of
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries advanced these simple stereotypes
much further by integrating simple prejudices in national historical
narratives, especially foundation myths, for 'just about every culture
and every religion has its own creation myth, its own equivalent of the
Book of Genesis' (Colin Renfrew)." (306)
"To detect
the continuing
ground-swell of submerged hatred of past wrongs and hopes of future
vengeance, it is the oral tradition of nationalist ballads and epics
that need to be examined, for 'if a man were permitted to make all the
ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation', as the
Scottish patriot Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun (1653? —
1716)
put it. That this is not an impossible unertaking has been
shown
by Vincent Morley, who has demonstrated just how ubiquitous and popular
ws the long historical poem variously entited 'Tuireamh na hÉireann'
('Ireland's Dirge') or 'Aiste
Sheáin Uí Chonaill'
('Seán Ó Conaill's Composition'), first composed
in Kerry
in the middle of the seventeenth century. This offered all
the
essential elements of a fully fledged nationalism: a foundation myth
(the migration of the Milesians to Ireland from Spain), a mythical hero
(Fionn mac Cumhail and his warrior band, the Fianna), special
assistance from God (the arrival of St Patrick), cultural achievement
(the monasteries), an alibi for failure in the face of foregn invasion
('the betrayer Dermod' was just the first of many),
and —
above all — a gnawing sense of grievance in the face of
foreign
oppression (Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, Cromwell, etc.)." (314)
"The targets of
the London
rioters [1733] were often national or religious minorites.
Attempts to allow the naturalization of Jews in 1751 and
again
two years later, for example, provoked waves of popular anti-Semitism.
The most estructive episode of the enire century was the
'Gordon
Riots' of 1780. directed against the Catholic Relief Act." (326)
"Unfortunately
for enlightened intellectuals, more often than not 'the people' proved
to be not just unenlightened but positively reactionary, just as likely
to riot against attempts to remove discrimnation against Jews or
Catholics as to demonstrate in favor of 'Wilkes and Liberty!'
In
the Habsburg Monarchy they were far more likely to turn out to greet
the Pope, as more than 100,000 proved in April 1782, than to welcome
the enlighened reforms Joseph II was trying to thrust down their
throats. Indeed, what prompted Joseph to put the brakes on
his
liberalization of the public sphere toward the end of his reign was the
awful realization that it was not being used to propagate
enlightenment, as he had hoped, but rather to incite conservative
resistance to his reforms. As so often before and since, it
was
the reactionaries who proved the more adept at exploiting the written
word, not least because their arguments struck a much more responsive
chord than those of their progressive opponents." (334)
from Darrin M. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightement: the French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 48-52
What
were the elements of this emergent right wing vision? The
fundamental importance of religion in maintaining political order, a
preoccupation with the perils of intellectual and social license, the
valorization of the family and history, the critique of abstract
rights, the dangers of dividing sovereignty, and the need for a
strategic
alliance between throne and altar . . . Even more fundamental
was
a Manichean readiness to divide the word in two: bewtween good and
evil,
right and wrong, Right and Left.
Yet to say that the anti-philosophe discourse fulfilled an ideological function is not to assert that it offered a fully developed political platform. Rather it provided a "symbolic template" through which to construe a perplexing and rapidly changing world, a number of "authoritative concepts" and "suasive images" by which they could be grasped.
By invoking this mythic golden past . . . anti-philosophes revealed signs of a romantic, qasi-utopian yearning for wholeness and social unity that would characterize a strain in far Right thinking for years to come.
Reactive, reductive, Manichean, this thinking is less noteworthy, perhaps, for its particulars than for its general form. It was precisely this tendency to view society as a battleground between opposing camps that stands as a hallmark of the bipolar, Right-Left model of politics so fundamental to subsequent European history. . . . Dividing the world between good and evil, between the pious and the profane, anti-philosphes saw their struggle as a cosmic war in which the winners would take all.
Yet to say that the anti-philosophe discourse fulfilled an ideological function is not to assert that it offered a fully developed political platform. Rather it provided a "symbolic template" through which to construe a perplexing and rapidly changing world, a number of "authoritative concepts" and "suasive images" by which they could be grasped.
By invoking this mythic golden past . . . anti-philosophes revealed signs of a romantic, qasi-utopian yearning for wholeness and social unity that would characterize a strain in far Right thinking for years to come.
Reactive, reductive, Manichean, this thinking is less noteworthy, perhaps, for its particulars than for its general form. It was precisely this tendency to view society as a battleground between opposing camps that stands as a hallmark of the bipolar, Right-Left model of politics so fundamental to subsequent European history. . . . Dividing the world between good and evil, between the pious and the profane, anti-philosphes saw their struggle as a cosmic war in which the winners would take all.
from Mary Vincent,
"The Spanish
Church and the Popular Front: the experience of Salamanca province," in
Martin S. Alexander and Helen Graham, eds., The French and Spanish Popular
Fronts (Cambridge University Press, 1989)
Catholic polemicists
writing
during the Civil War had no difficulty in blaming the Popular Front for
the tragic end of the Second Republic. One of the innumerable
tracts put out by Catholic apologists in support of the
generals' rising [Franco] baldly stated that the Popular Front
was
essentially evil, 'a monstrous conglomeration of anti-Catholic
political parties' whose tyranny was manifested in its persecution of
the 'sacred institutions' of the family, relgion and property.
Manipulated by international masonry, it intended to deliver
Spain to Soviet communism thus betraying both the fatherland and the
Catholic religion. (p. 79)
This appeal for united action was given greater weight by the presentation of the Popular Front as the Church's declared enemy, a nihilitic alliance of the forces of evil. The right was firm in its intentions to cauterize all 'unhealthy' elements in the Spanish state. In 1933 Gil Robles had announced the need to purge the fatherland of 'judaising freemasons'. In 1936 he broadened this considerably, saying on the eve of the elections that the party wanted primarily
The CEDA called on all its supporters to work against 'anti-Spain', 'against the revolution and its accomplices', obscure figures commonly understood to be marxists, fremasons and Jews. In similar vein, the Dominican Father Carrión published an article in his Order's journal which spoke of those three forces aligning themselves against Spain. Jewish marxists, expelled from ghettos all over the world, came to Spain where 'they settle down and sprawl about as in conquered territory'.
This appeal for united action was given greater weight by the presentation of the Popular Front as the Church's declared enemy, a nihilitic alliance of the forces of evil. The right was firm in its intentions to cauterize all 'unhealthy' elements in the Spanish state. In 1933 Gil Robles had announced the need to purge the fatherland of 'judaising freemasons'. In 1936 he broadened this considerably, saying on the eve of the elections that the party wanted primarily
to
eliminate the sowers of discord who leave the fatherland broken and
blood-stained, to eliminate in the realm of ideas that suicidal
rationalism which, killing the great universal ideas of Catholicism and
the fatherland, had broken with those supreme factors which made up the
soul of the nation.
The CEDA called on all its supporters to work against 'anti-Spain', 'against the revolution and its accomplices', obscure figures commonly understood to be marxists, fremasons and Jews. In similar vein, the Dominican Father Carrión published an article in his Order's journal which spoke of those three forces aligning themselves against Spain. Jewish marxists, expelled from ghettos all over the world, came to Spain where 'they settle down and sprawl about as in conquered territory'.
American Exeptionalism:
Wealth and Religiosity
Wealth and Religiosity
from
World
Publics Welcome Global Trade -- But Not Immigration
Pew Global Attitudes Project 10.04.07
Pew Global Attitudes Project 10.04.07
Data from the DailyKos, "Birthers are mostly Republican
and Southern," by kos, Fri Jul 31, 2009
The Research 2000 findings were pulled together from a survey of 2,400 adults.
Poll question: Do you believe that Barack Obama was born in the United States of America or not?
Choices: Yes No Not sure
No + Not Sure = variable graphed
Cash tersely assesses the psychological price paid by the southern Euro-American man of any class who defines himself as white: "a fundamental split in his psyche [resulting] from a sort of social schizophrenia." Those at the top believed they were as grand and aristocratic as the Virginians after who they modeled themselves. Backwater cotton planters thus imitated the Virginians in manner, dress, and comportment, but they could never, Cash argues, "endow their subconscious with the aristocrat’s experience, which is the aristocratic manner’s essential warrant. In their inmost being they carried nearly always, I think, an uneasy sensation of inadequacy for their role."
The common man also wrapped himself in class illusions that separated him from the actual experiences of his life. He actively embraced the idea that he was an aristocrat, identifying with the planter class through a glowing sense of participation in the common brotherhood of white men. The "ego-warming and ego-expanding distinction between the white man and the black" elevated this common white man, Cash argues, to a position comparable to that of, say, the Doric knight of ancient Sparta. Not only was he not exploited directly, he was himself made by extension a member of the dominant class – was lodged solidly on a tremendous superiority, which, however much the blacks in the "big house" might sneer at him, and however much their masters might privately agree with them, he could never publicly lose. Come what might, he would always be a white man. And before that vast and capacious distinction, all others were foreshortened, dwarfed, and all but obliterated.
The grand outcome was the almost complete disappearance of economic and social forces on the part of the masses. One simply did not have to get on in this world in order to achieve security, independence, or value in one’s estimation and in that of one’s fellows.
This delusional "vast and capacious distinction," by blinding the white poor to their own class interests, reduced the common white man’s economic worth to naught. Writes Cash, "let him be stripped of this proto-Dorian rank and he would be left naked, a man without status." In effect, the emotional security lent by the hand of a fine gentleman on the common man’s shoulder in a friendly greeting became a substitute for economic security. Having shifted focus form class issues to racial feelings, the common white man, in effect, had been robbed of almost everything by his own racial "brothers."
"I want my country back!"
("The language and symbols of an authentic American fascism . . . ")
("The language and symbols of an authentic American fascism . . . ")
Climate Change Deniers (analysis
of database* provided by http://www.desmogblog.com/)
Right-wing GOP Senator Inhof, in his attack on the UN report on global warming, cited sixty experts disproving global warming and climate change. A preliminary analysis of this dataset revealed the following: A first subgroup of the Sixty consists of people directly connected to extractive industries and their service organizations and political fronts. Almost all of the peer-reviewed articles in "the Sixty" were written by this group. A second group consists of quirky individuals with pet theories (i.e.: cosmic rays cause global warming, not greenhouse gasses). A third group consists of individuals with little or no expertise in climate change. Overall they have few peer reviewed pubs, they are very old (often retired), they are almost all Anglo Saxon in descent and attached to universities in the Anglo Saxon fringe of Canada, western and southern USA, New Zealand, Australia, and Great Britain. In addition, the three with the highest profiles (inst affil & pubs) were also connected to the tobacco industry's denial of the health hazzards of smoking.
Compare this with: the IPCC - Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Working Group I Contribution to the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis: Coordinating Lead Authors, Lead Authors and Review Editors
This list of climate change scientists is enormous. More important, when you do Google searches on each one and obtain their vitas--degrees, institutional affilation, and publications--one finds a young to middle-aged, cosmopolitan group drawn from the world's major universities, in stunning contrast to the group of sixty climate change deniers summarized above.
These are provisional categories and may be changed. The oveall picture however is clear. When we compare this matrix of right-wing scientists with two other similar groups, one involved in the Terry Schaivo battle of the experts and the other involved in the Dover school boards battle over evolution and creationism, we notice a similar pattern of fraud (Judges' comments), intellectual marginality, and a marked ethnocultural provincialism and homogeneity.
The above provisional conclusions were arrived at when desmogblog.com had a database of 60 climate change deniers. Now that number has been multiplied several times over. This would be a good student project. For purposes of such an analyis I suggest the following categories:
name/age/retired/country/institution/publications/corp.
connections/events/
Ontological,
Structural, Situational Elements of Historical Model
Ressentiment,
desire, and cognitive development are the primary ontologies
of the world (plus primate inheritance--Collective
Violence: Comparison Between Youths and Chimpanzees)
secondary ontologies would be the institutions (estates, corporations, churches) emergent out of the play of primary ontologies (Michael Mann on elites)
structural configurations (or tertiary ontologies: e.g., securities bloc, Keynesian elite)
finally situations and events
Was the Holocaust a necessary or contingent event--necessary in the sense of flowing from a deep ontology (Hitler's expression of ressentment taken as determinative: the intentionalist school); contingent in the sense of being an event shaped more by circumstances. Browning takes the latter position.
secondary ontologies would be the institutions (estates, corporations, churches) emergent out of the play of primary ontologies (Michael Mann on elites)
structural configurations (or tertiary ontologies: e.g., securities bloc, Keynesian elite)
finally situations and events
Was the Holocaust a necessary or contingent event--necessary in the sense of flowing from a deep ontology (Hitler's expression of ressentment taken as determinative: the intentionalist school); contingent in the sense of being an event shaped more by circumstances. Browning takes the latter position.
[from
wiki:
Browning is a functionalist
in the origins of the Holocaust debate, following the principles of the
"moderate functionalist" school of thought, which focuses on the
structure and institution of the Third Reich, moving the focus away
from Hitler. Functionalism sees the extermination of the Jews as the
improvisation and radicalization of a polycratic regime. Functionalists
do not vindicate Adolf Hitler yet they recognize that many other
factors were involved in the Final Solution.]
This makes the Holocaust a removable singularity: a particularly brutal (words actually fail here) but nevertheless not essential element of German fascism. The essential elements of German fascism are the same as those of contemporary American "conservatism." Had the rage against Muslims during the Ground Zero Mosque near pogrom (let us call it what it was) been operationalized and produced a large number deaths (and who knows how close we came to that), we might have gotten an event similar to German fascism's Kristallnacht.
The works listed below can be read in terms of the ontological, structural, and situational elements of such an historical model. (I will comment on them when I get a chance.)
Lionel B. Steiman, Paths to Genocide: Antisemitism in Western History (Macmillan Press, 1998)
Christopher Browning, The origins of the Final Solution : the evolution of Nazi Jewish policy, September 1939-March 1942; with contributions by Jürgen Matthäus (University of Nebraska Press, 2004)
Don E. Carleton, Red scare! Right-wing hysteria, fifties fanaticism, and their legacy in Texas (Austin, Tex. : Texas Monthly Press, 1985)
Thomas B. Edsall, Building Red America: the New Conservative Coalition and the Drive for Permanent Power (Basic Books, 2006)
Michael W. Miles, The Odyssey of the American Right (Oxford University Press, 1980)
Richard M. Freeland, The Truman Doctrine and the origins of McCarthyism: foreign policy, domestic politics, and internal security, 1946-1948 (New York University Press, 1985)
from Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph N. Cappella, Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment (Oxford Univeristy Press, 2008), p.p. 188-89. (Emphasis added.) See Carter, p. 78 n. 37
Limbaugh's attempts
at gender-based "humor" are of the locker room variety. As
the
California gubernatorial recall was heating up, Limbaugh informed his
followers that Leutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante--"whose name loosely
translates into Spanish for 'large breasts'--leads the Terminator by a
few points" (August 18, 2003). A photomontage on the Limbaugh
website shows a photograph of Schwartzenegger's head and shoulders from
his Pumping Iron days as a body builder. A naked woman has
been
transposed onto his shoulders. Over her breasts is a sign
reading
BUSTAMONTE. When Madonna endorsed General Wesley Clark,
Limbaugh
reported that she had "opened herself" to him. Why the
vulgarity
in this message does not alienate the churchgoing conservatives in his
audience is a question for which we have no ready answer.
from Puritanism as a Revolutionary Ideology, Michael Walzer, History and Theory, Vol. 3, No. 1 (1963), pp. 59-90
About
the Puritan saints Walzer writes of " . . . their almost Manichean
warfare against Satan and his worldly
allies, their nervous lust for systematic repression and control." p.
63
"They felt themselves to be living in an age of chaos and crime and sought to train conscience to be permanently on guard against sin. The extent to which they would have carried the moral discipline can be seen in the following list of offenses which merited excommunication in one seventeenth-century congregation:
"They felt themselves to be living in an age of chaos and crime and sought to train conscience to be permanently on guard against sin. The extent to which they would have carried the moral discipline can be seen in the following list of offenses which merited excommunication in one seventeenth-century congregation:
-for
unfathfulness in his masters service
-for admitting cardplaying in his house . . .
-for sloth in business.
-for being overtaken in beer.
-for borrowing a pillion and not returning it.
-for jumping for wagers . . .
-for dancing and other vanities.
-for admitting cardplaying in his house . . .
-for sloth in business.
-for being overtaken in beer.
-for borrowing a pillion and not returning it.
-for jumping for wagers . . .
-for dancing and other vanities.
Had
the saints been successful in establishing
their Holy
Commonwealth, the enforcement of this discipline would have consituted
the Puritan terror." p. 64
"The persecution of witches, of course, was not a vital aspect of Puritan endeavor, but the active, fearful struggle against wickedness was. And the saints imagined wickedness as a creative and omnipresent demonic force, that is, as a continual threat." p. 79
"The persecution of witches, of course, was not a vital aspect of Puritan endeavor, but the active, fearful struggle against wickedness was. And the saints imagined wickedness as a creative and omnipresent demonic force, that is, as a continual threat." p. 79
Theoretically, it
might be possible to separate race from the social
issues. Theoretically. In reality, fears of
blackness and
fears of disorder were the warp and woof of the new social agenda,
bound together by the subcounscious connection many white Amerians made
betweeen blackness and criminality, blackness and poverty, blackness
and cultural degradation. 42
from Lisa McGirr, Piety
and
Property. . . in the wake of Goldwater’s defeat Reagan and other conservatives had refashioned their discourse, moving away from tirades on socialism and communism and toward attacks on liberal “permisiveness,” “welfare chiselers,” and “runaway spending.” 365-6
National political contenders like Nixon and Wallace picked up on the discourse of “morality,” “law and order,” “welfare chiselers,” and “liberal permissiveness,” and rode a tide of popular middle- and lower-middle-class resentment toward the social changes of the decade. 366
Free marketeers, the senior partners in the conservative coalition, have been at the cutting edge of recent historial change. Religious conservatives, while obtaining new access to the corridors of power, are still waiting to see their concerns over abortion, homsexuality, and obcenity reflected in pubic policy.” 370
Reagan proved
himself to be very much a man of the Old Right . .
. Although Reagan could speak as movingly about traditional
values as he spoke about everything else, his priorities were
elsewhere: in cuts to domestic programs, in reductions in marginal tax
rates, and in large increases in military spending . . . In
the
meantime, abortions continued, women kept flooding the
workplace—and not a word of prayer was recited in the schools
to
petition the Almighty to turn these trends around.”
from Thomas Frank, What's the Matter with Kansas: the Plen-T-Plaint
"As
culture war, backlash was born to lose. Its goal is not to
win cultural battles but to take offense, conspicuously, vocally, even
flamboyantly. Indignation is the great aesthetic principle of
backlash culture; voicing the fury of the imposed-upon is to the
backlash what the guitar solo is to heavy metal. Indignation
is
the privilege emotion, the magic moment that brings a consciuosness of
rightness and a determination to persist. . . . Everything
seems
to piss conservatives off, and they react by documenting and
cataloguing their disgust. The result is what we call the
plen-T-plaint, a curious amassing of petty, unrelated beefs with the
world. Its purpose is not really to evaluate the hated
liberal
culture that surrounds us; the plen-T-plaint is a horizontal rather
than vertical mode of criticism, aiming instead to infuriate us with
dozens, hundreds, thousands of stories of the many tiny ways the world
around us assaults family values, uses obscenities, disrespects
parents, foments revolution, and so on." 121-3
theater
of ressentiment (I'm not sure how to integrate this into my work, but I
am sure what Rozik has to say should be taken into account, and is of
great importance)
Eli Rozik, The roots of theatre: rethinking ritual and other theories of origin (University of Iowa Press, 2002)
"As
thought,
mythos never appears on its own but is always coupled with a logos--a
thematic contextualization--which enables its assimilation into the
system of values and beliefs of the society within which it is
articulated." 312
"The basic relationship between the audience and the fictional world thus ceases to be, as commonly conceived, one of watching a world of others with whom the spectator can identify or not and becomes instead a confrontation with the spectator's own inner being, including conscious and/or unconscious layers, in the shape of a (usually metaphorical) mytho-logical description. Such a relationship cannot be understood in terms of identification, since it is the spectator on two different levels: being and self-description.
"The combination of mythos and logos indicates that the ultimate aim of drama based on myth is to provide an opportunity for a culturally controlled encounter between the spectator and the deeper layers of the psyche and to integrate disturbing unconscious contents into conscious discourse. When integrated into a drama, it becomes a complex object of experience that enables the spectator to confront the unconscious self with the shield of culture and even to make such a confrontation enjoyable.
"A dramatic fictional world based on a myth may, therefore, be an opportunity not only to confront suppressed contents of the psyche but also to indulge in a suppressed method of representation. Theatre may provide an opportunity to experience both within the context of a cultural permit. Mythos, logos, and theatrical iconicity thus create a legitimate collective way of facing the unconscious: this is the arena where culture meets and subdues nature." pp. 312-3
"The basic relationship between the audience and the fictional world thus ceases to be, as commonly conceived, one of watching a world of others with whom the spectator can identify or not and becomes instead a confrontation with the spectator's own inner being, including conscious and/or unconscious layers, in the shape of a (usually metaphorical) mytho-logical description. Such a relationship cannot be understood in terms of identification, since it is the spectator on two different levels: being and self-description.
"The combination of mythos and logos indicates that the ultimate aim of drama based on myth is to provide an opportunity for a culturally controlled encounter between the spectator and the deeper layers of the psyche and to integrate disturbing unconscious contents into conscious discourse. When integrated into a drama, it becomes a complex object of experience that enables the spectator to confront the unconscious self with the shield of culture and even to make such a confrontation enjoyable.
"A dramatic fictional world based on a myth may, therefore, be an opportunity not only to confront suppressed contents of the psyche but also to indulge in a suppressed method of representation. Theatre may provide an opportunity to experience both within the context of a cultural permit. Mythos, logos, and theatrical iconicity thus create a legitimate collective way of facing the unconscious: this is the arena where culture meets and subdues nature." pp. 312-3
on the origins of the Iraq war
Wars "whose mainsprings are essentially political and internal fail to acquire a well-defined project." p. 138
"As for wars of primarily partisan and internal dynamic . . . . at the outset even the minimal external objectives of wars that are sparked internally have a tendency to be singularly ill-defined."
Sound familiar? Why can't we ever get a straight answer about our purpose in Afghanistan?
Rationale for the Iraq War
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Throughout
late 2001, 2002, and early 2003, the Bush Administration worked to
build a case for invading Iraq, culminating in then Secretary of State
Colin Powell's February 2003 address to the Security Council.[5]
Shortly after the invasion, the Central Intelligence Agency, Defense
Intelligence Agency, and other intelligence agencies largely
discredited evidence related to Iraqi weapons and, as well as links to
Al Qaeda, and at this point the Bush and Blair Administrations began to
shift to secondary rationales for the war, such as the Hussein
government's human rights record and promoting democracy in Iraq.[6][7]
Opinion polls showed that the population of nearly all countries
opposed a war without UN mandate, and that the view of the United
States as a danger to world peace had significantly
increased.[8][9][10] UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan described the war
as illegal, saying in a September 2004 interview that it was "not in
conformity with the Security Council."[11]
Accusations of faulty evidence and alleged shifting rationales became the focal point for critics of the war, who charge that the Bush Administration purposely fabricated evidence to justify an invasion it long planned to launch.[12]
Accusations of faulty evidence and alleged shifting rationales became the focal point for critics of the war, who charge that the Bush Administration purposely fabricated evidence to justify an invasion it long planned to launch.[12]
Foreign
policy in this case is
a function of internal domestic political considerations, not the
rational calculations that would flow from "diplomatic and external"
considerations. War in this case is a tool used by
conservative elites
in the mass mobilization of the forces of ressentiment, and whose
purpose is above all political theater. (And consider, in
this
regard, Wilbur Cash's concept of the proto-Dorian convention.
Given the primitive
processes of identification with the chief*, one can see
why a
black man becoming President is a profound psychic shock to
the ressentiment
demographic subset.)
*Wrangham and Wilson, "Collective Violence: Comparison Between Youths and Chimpanzees"
*Wrangham and Wilson, "Collective Violence: Comparison Between Youths and Chimpanzees"
"Historians
frequently treat the conservative
movement in the United States as a populist cultural conflicts
over the civil rights, feminist, and gay rights movements in the 1960s
and 1970s. During the postwar period, business and labor
are thought to have been unified on basic political and economic
questions, the common cause of the Cold War overriding conflicts in an
era of economic expansion. My dissertation suggests that this unity has
been overestimated by historians and that in fact many businessmen
remained sharply critical of the political
economy inaugurated
by the New Deal. Instead of looking at conservatism primarily
as a
populist revolt driven by the cultural conflicts of the
1970s, or as a social movement, historians need to be aware of the
elite components to organizing against liberalism."
movement
in its origins, which grew primarily in response to from Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: the Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (W. W. Norton, 2009), pp. 142-3
Failing
to
get support from businessmen in the months leading up to the [1964
Presidential] election, the Goldwater campaign decided to try a new
tactic: finding ways to translate the conservative message into
rhetoric that could mobilize working class voters. Even
though
Goldwater's low-tax, non-union vision for economic growth won the
support of some union members in Arizona, Cliff
White
[who conceived and masterminded the conservative dominance of the 1964
Republican National Convention and its nomination of Barry Goldwater
for President] thought that his surveys about reactions to the civil
rights movement indicated the potental for success with a different
strategy--one that focused on fearrs of racial integration and on a
broad call for morality in politics.
As the election approached, the New York offices of Citizens for Goldwater-Miller . . . saved a survey of forty white ethnic voters in Queens--mostly first- and second-generation Americans, some recent immigrants, mostly lower middle class--that a supporter sent into the office. About half were for Goldwter and half either for Johnson or still undecided. The issues the Goldwater supporters felt most strongly about were "rising crime" and "fear of integration"; even Johnson supporters were agitated about these problems. Nearly everyone opposed busing children from one neighborhood to another to integrate the public schools. "Most of those voting for Johnson thought Goldwater was right with respect to the 'racial issue,' but thought he was anti-union or would weaken social security," according to the survey. The most striking aspect of the poll was the finding that the economic elements of the conservative program--"'right-to-work' and voluntary social security"--made an "almost universal negative impression" on the Queens voters. But these cold be trumpoed if the Republicans changed their platform to capitalize on racial fears. And that's eactly what the Goldwater supporte suggested. "Signs should not simply read 'Vote Goldter' but rather 'Make our meighborhood safe again. Vote Goldwater.' Or 'Streets must be made safe again. Vote Goldwater' or 'Don't experient with our children. Keep neighborhood schools. Vote Goldwater' or 'Our children want education--not transportation. Vote Goldwater.'"
The letters coming into the Goldwater campaign offices from political allies and supporters made similar suggestions. In September one political consultant wrote that on Long Island the busing program was known as the LBJ program, for "Let's Bus Juveniles," and suggested that "race riots" might sway New York City voters. Another Goldwater supporter, a Wall Streeter who wrote to the campaign while on a business flight, argued that "much more must be done to exploit the white backlash," saying that whites feared that "Negroes will move into their neighborhoods." The white backlash, he declared, "was the biggest single reservoir of votes that Goldwater can tap into but you will have to get more to the point, if you are going to get these votes."
As the election approached, the New York offices of Citizens for Goldwater-Miller . . . saved a survey of forty white ethnic voters in Queens--mostly first- and second-generation Americans, some recent immigrants, mostly lower middle class--that a supporter sent into the office. About half were for Goldwter and half either for Johnson or still undecided. The issues the Goldwater supporters felt most strongly about were "rising crime" and "fear of integration"; even Johnson supporters were agitated about these problems. Nearly everyone opposed busing children from one neighborhood to another to integrate the public schools. "Most of those voting for Johnson thought Goldwater was right with respect to the 'racial issue,' but thought he was anti-union or would weaken social security," according to the survey. The most striking aspect of the poll was the finding that the economic elements of the conservative program--"'right-to-work' and voluntary social security"--made an "almost universal negative impression" on the Queens voters. But these cold be trumpoed if the Republicans changed their platform to capitalize on racial fears. And that's eactly what the Goldwater supporte suggested. "Signs should not simply read 'Vote Goldter' but rather 'Make our meighborhood safe again. Vote Goldwater.' Or 'Streets must be made safe again. Vote Goldwater' or 'Don't experient with our children. Keep neighborhood schools. Vote Goldwater' or 'Our children want education--not transportation. Vote Goldwater.'"
The letters coming into the Goldwater campaign offices from political allies and supporters made similar suggestions. In September one political consultant wrote that on Long Island the busing program was known as the LBJ program, for "Let's Bus Juveniles," and suggested that "race riots" might sway New York City voters. Another Goldwater supporter, a Wall Streeter who wrote to the campaign while on a business flight, argued that "much more must be done to exploit the white backlash," saying that whites feared that "Negroes will move into their neighborhoods." The white backlash, he declared, "was the biggest single reservoir of votes that Goldwater can tap into but you will have to get more to the point, if you are going to get these votes."
"in fact many businessmen remained sharply critical of the political economy inaugurated by the New Deal. Instead of looking at conservatism primarily as a populist revolt driven by the cultural conflicts of the 1970s, or as a social movement, historians need to be aware of the elite components to organizing against liberalism."
A problem with
liberalism is
that it allows the right to set the parameters of its thought.
We
really don't need proof of the obvious: that elites of various sorts
throughout history have played the dominant role in politics.
We
need analysis of the various kinds of elites and the way they have
deployed their power as an historical force.
(Just as we don't need proof that racism exists. What we need is analysis of the various forms, and the deep roots, of ressentiment as an historical force.)
(Just as we don't need proof that racism exists. What we need is analysis of the various forms, and the deep roots, of ressentiment as an historical force.)
A. Elites in the
Political Economy: research projects
1. Strategic-hegemonic elites (KE, Sec Bloc, Commodities in Int'l Trade)
2. Provincial & regional elites (E.g., Mellon and Coors; see Ungar, Miles and
Carleton)
3. local elites (Miles and Carleton)
Water buffaloes wallowing in pond
Credit: BJORN SVENSSON/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
Above videos demonstrate why Collective Violence: Comparison Between Youths and Chimpanzees is indespensible.
Redneck lady disses Obama Sept 30
Campaign 2008: McCain-Palin
Rallies: videos
Racist McCain Supporters in Pottsville, Pennsylvania
The Sidewalk to Nowhere, McCain Supporters in Bethlehem, PA,
Sarah Palin Rally Causes Confrontation with Obama Supporters Sarah Palin Supporters confront Obama Supporters after a Palin rally on October 21st, 2008. One supporter of Palin suggests that Obama could be the antichrist. Then some guy picks up horse feces, calls it Obama, and throws it at Barrett.
Hatred, Ignorance and Racism on Display Outside a Palin Rally in Ohio Oct. 19, 2008 (read article as well)
Campaign 2008: McCain-Palin
Rallies: news accounts
Accusations Fly Between Parties Over Threats and Vandalism
By MICHAEL COOPER
Published: March 25, 2010 NYT
Racist Incidents Give Some Obama Campaigners Pause, By Kevin Merida
Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, May 13, 2008
In Ex-Steel City, Voters Deny Race Plays a Role By Paul Vitellon
New York Times, April 4, 2008 (The rhetorical maneuvers of Pa. blue
collar whites)
Keep
Your Goddamn Government Hands Off My Medicare! Huffington Post,
June 27, 2010
Anti-Obama Billboard: President? or Jihad?
November 23, 2009 MSNBC The ED Show (Video and transcript)
Anti-Obama Billboard: President? or Jihad?
November 23, 2009 MSNBC The ED Show (Video and transcript)
SCHULTZ:
.
. . what does jihad mean to you, Mr. Wolf?
WOLF: I think to me it means it's an extreme element of a struggle to overcome somebody. It can be interpreted probably some different ways. but to me it's-it's certainly not one of us. It's something other than what an American is, that I've been taught.
SCHULTZ: Jihad is religious war, is it not? The definition is religious war. You must have put that word up there for something. Do you think Barack Obama wants a religious war?
WOLF: I think it's definitely anti-Christian. Yes, I do.
WOLF: I think to me it means it's an extreme element of a struggle to overcome somebody. It can be interpreted probably some different ways. but to me it's-it's certainly not one of us. It's something other than what an American is, that I've been taught.
SCHULTZ: Jihad is religious war, is it not? The definition is religious war. You must have put that word up there for something. Do you think Barack Obama wants a religious war?
WOLF: I think it's definitely anti-Christian. Yes, I do.
L.
We believe in the same document. You just said you
believe in the Constitution.
R. I do believe in the Constitution
L. But you just said you don't.
R. I do believe in the Constitution
L. But you just said you don't.
<this is where the
psychic rupture>
R.
People were jumping out of the buildings; people were
disintegrating, all over the city
L. By terrorists. you can't blame Muslims for the work of the terrorists.
R. I'm not blaming Muslims. But if they had the respect that they claim they have . . .
L. Why should they have to appologize for the actions of radicals?
R. I would rather see no church than a mosque right where people are going to to . . .
L. By terrorists. you can't blame Muslims for the work of the terrorists.
R. I'm not blaming Muslims. But if they had the respect that they claim they have . . .
L. Why should they have to appologize for the actions of radicals?
R. I would rather see no church than a mosque right where people are going to to . . .
Demonization
Run Amuck
core rhetorical maneuver revealed
the anatomy of the smear
Radio Host Kevin James Walks into a Smackdown
core rhetorical maneuver revealed
the anatomy of the smear
Radio Host Kevin James Walks into a Smackdown
Rep. Graves (R-MO) Attacks Opponent's "San Francisco Values" in New TV Ad
The historical,
sociological,
and cultural differences between the campaigns of Obama and Clinton are
fundamental.
The Obama campaign's center of gravity is in the milieux of insurgent secular and mainstream Protestant cosmopolitans: the sociotechnical formation that is the essense of advanced capitalism as a society. That these people are better educated and more highly paid that the Clinton milieux attached to the old agrarian and industrial sectors is only a by-product of their essential location and role in the making of an advanced capitalist society. (Snide comments about latte- and wine-drinking elites miss the point entirely.)
The Clinton campaign's center of gravity is in the two oldest and most provincial segments of the Democratic party: the white fundamentalists rural south, and the catholic working class, centered in the northeast. (MAPS)
The Clinton campaign turned to the same culture of ressentiment that is the GOP's staple resource in its attack on the progressive insurgency represented by Barack Obama, while the Obama campaign was characteristically progressive in its rhetorical maneuvers, emphasizing reason and fact, on the one hand, and a common identity that transcended race, gender, and class, on the other, avoiding the kind of identity rhetoric that is the essense of Clinton's (and the GOP's) appeal.
The Clinton campaign is based on the two major declining sectors of north america: rural whites and blue collar catholics; the Obama campaign, on the rsing sector of a modern knowledge-based society. This is the dynamic, long-term aspect of this campaign that is completely missed by talk of who has more votes, or who is more electable.
The Obama campaign's center of gravity is in the milieux of insurgent secular and mainstream Protestant cosmopolitans: the sociotechnical formation that is the essense of advanced capitalism as a society. That these people are better educated and more highly paid that the Clinton milieux attached to the old agrarian and industrial sectors is only a by-product of their essential location and role in the making of an advanced capitalist society. (Snide comments about latte- and wine-drinking elites miss the point entirely.)
The Clinton campaign's center of gravity is in the two oldest and most provincial segments of the Democratic party: the white fundamentalists rural south, and the catholic working class, centered in the northeast. (MAPS)
The Clinton campaign turned to the same culture of ressentiment that is the GOP's staple resource in its attack on the progressive insurgency represented by Barack Obama, while the Obama campaign was characteristically progressive in its rhetorical maneuvers, emphasizing reason and fact, on the one hand, and a common identity that transcended race, gender, and class, on the other, avoiding the kind of identity rhetoric that is the essense of Clinton's (and the GOP's) appeal.
The Clinton campaign is based on the two major declining sectors of north america: rural whites and blue collar catholics; the Obama campaign, on the rsing sector of a modern knowledge-based society. This is the dynamic, long-term aspect of this campaign that is completely missed by talk of who has more votes, or who is more electable.
May 7 to 11
on connecting with the (white) working class:
Talking heads
discuss success of candidates in connecting--ie,
stroking egos, appealing to deeply-held prejudices, shmoozing
around in bars and bowling alleys. The language
implies the
patron-client, lord-peasant relationship. The successful
candidate, inplicitly, is the one who best manipulates the materials of
everyday ressentiments and petty concerns. It is not that you
have
to show that you are one of the people. On the contrary, the
very
status of the patron/lord is crucial to the effectiveness of the good
ole boy maneuver. Beneath today's populist rhetoric is a
politics
of psychological dependency. Ironically, Obama's
"aloofness" is in part a consequence of the Progressive appeal to
reason. We expect our politicians to shmooze and to stroke;
we
resent attempts at complex rationality, prefering instead simplistic
appeals (the gas tax holiday). Thinking, in this context, is
anathema.
Hecklers Taunt 200 in a March Against Racism
By MARK A. UHLIG, New York Times, September 21, 1987
Racism Comes Home: The Howard Beach Case (Queens Tribune, [re Dec. 20, 1986 ]
Right Wingers Wreak Havoc on Philadelphia Town Meeting, by Denise Dennis, Posted: August 3, 2009 10:09 AM Huffington Post, specific moments-events embedded in interviews
It
was a matter of calling the theme of the subject into question once
again, that great, fundamental postulate which French
philosophy, from
Descartes until our own time, had never abandoned. Setting
out with
psychoanalysis, Lacan discovered, or brought out into the open, the
fact that the theory of the unconscious is incompatible with a theory
of the subject (in the Cartesian sense of the term as well as the
phenomenological one). . . Indeed, Lacan concluded that is
was
precisely the philosophy of the subject which had to be abandoned on
account of this incompatibiity, and that the point of departure should
be an analysis of the mechanisms of the unconscious. p. 56-7
from Friederich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (Penguin, 1968)
"Moral judgments are therefore never to be taken literally: so understood, they are always merely absurd. Semiotically, however, they remain invaluable: they reveal, at least for those who can interpret them, the most valuable realities of cultures and psychologies that did not know how to "understand" themselves. Morality is only a language of signs, a group of symptoms: one must know how to interpret them correctly to be able to profit from them." p. 55
"The so-called 'motive': another error. Merely a surface phenomenon of consciousness, an accompaniment to an act, which conceals rather than exposes the antecedentia of the act." {re Imus and that which is called racism} p. 49
TO CONTINUE: AE4--DECODING THE SEMIOSPHERE: SEMIOTIC REGIMES (THE TWO PARTY SYSTEM AS ORGANIZED DISCOURSE)
“Hegel
remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages
appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as
tragedy, the second time as farce.” [Marx, 18th Brumaire of Louis
Bonapatre, Chapter 1.]
or
Hitler
: Trump = Tragedy : Farce