Mediaboss Marketing

Back in the 1990s, when stand-up comedy was hailed as the new rock n roll, Robert Newman and David Baddiel used to perform a sketch entitled History Today. The two comedians played elderly historians, slumped in the chairs of a dull, late-night talk show. Each time they attempted to engage in scholarly debate their discussion descended into puerile, playground insults.

It worked because Newman and Baddiel are brilliant comic performers, but also because it was then possible to portray history as the musty domain of grey-haired, grey-suited men, trapped in personal feuds and obsessed with obscure historical controversies. That history and historians could be so lampooned was, in retrospect, a luxurious state of affairs.

Two decades later historians have become unwilling conscripts in toxic culture wars, the focus of online hate and tabloid misinformation, rather than TV satire. What is, and what is not, taught in schools and universities, what appears in our childrens textbooks, how heritage organisations research and present the houses and objects under their care, have all become front-page news.

We are where we are, in large part, because historians have been doing their job. Over recent decades that has led them to turn their analytical gaze towards aspects of Britains past that had long been purposefully marginalised in particular the histories of slavery and empire. The historians now being targeted by journalists and politicians are almost exclusively engaged in those fields of study. Given that politicians, this summer, were willing to pick fights with the star players of the England football team, it is hardly surprising that historians are considered soft targets.

[See also: The England team have exposed the lie of the governments culture war]

The gradual growth in the study of slavery and colonialism, which began in the 1960s, was a small component within a far bigger revolution in the study of history. Back then a generation of historians that included EP Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Dorothy Thompson and Christopher Hill expanded the fields of social history and working class history, which they very often examined from a Marxist standpoint. Their aim was to recover the lives of the poor from what EP Thompson called the enormous condescension of posterity.

Twenty-first-century historians seeking to rescue the millions who laboured on the plantations, or who resisted British imperialrule, from similar condescension find themselves in a radically different environment. The study of those specialisms is increasingly portrayed not as an expansion of our national history but as a politicised assault upon it.

Yet rather than challenge the history of the favoured culture-war topic, the tactic is to discredit the historians themselves, the intellectual equivalent to playing the player, not the ball. As the facts of phenomena such as the transatlantic slave trade cannot be refuted, the motives of those who study them are instead called into question. While the historians of the 1960s were denounced for their Marxism, the abuse levelled at todays historians is of a different order. The aim is not to engage in historical debate but to delegitimise opponents.

Corinne Fowler, a professor at the University of Leicester, who co-edited a report on the links between National Trust properties and historical slavery and colonialism, has rightly compared these campaigns against historians to the methods used by those who work to delegitimise the scholarship of climate scientists. Another tactic is to rebrand historians as activists, and claim that their scholarly detachment has been surrendered to woke ideology. I myself have been denounced as an ideological historian despite being, in truth, a rather old-fashioned empirical historian.

[See also: The Little Britain affair is a reminder of the UKs long and toxic love affair with blacking up]

Historians who regard the study of slavery and empire as valid now face a difficult task. They must stand up for the study and the public dissemination of history as it really is messy, contradictory and often far from glorious or heroic while at the same time standing up for one another. To do this they must accept that culture wars appeal to emotion they involve calculated distortions that aim to convince people their history and thus their identity is under attack, and cannot be defeated with mere facts.

Historians can and should point out that while culture wars are toxic they are also confected. The articles attacking historians and heritage organisations are often peppered with inaccuracies. There never was, for example, a mass cancelling of memberships at the National Trust, in response to the research into links between the Trusts properties and slavery. And the project in question was not a woke reaction to Black Lives Matter but a peer-reviewed work of scholarship conceived before both the murder of George Floyd and the protests of 2020.

[See also: Africas forgotten empires]

Historians should repeatedly point out that the rewriting of history is not some act of professional misconduct but literally the job of professional historians. The phoney arguments at the heart of this phoney war have too often been allowed to define the debate. Historians, so skilled at reframing discussions and problematising debates, need to bring those skills to bear on those who would reduce public history to what Donald Trumps infamous 1776 Commission termed patriotic education something as far away from history as an academic discipline as can be imagined.

David Olusogas books include Black and British: A Forgotten History (Pan Macmillan)

Read more from the original source:
Historians have become soft targets in the culture wars. We should fight back - The New Statesman

CULTURE wars and woke attacks on Britain are a gift to our enemies, Liz Truss will declare.

Endless bickering over how bad the UK is makes us a laughing stock to adversaries and gives hostile states like China and Russia an advantage, the Foreign Secretary will add.

1

She will tell the most senior diplomats that the UK has been too naval gazing since the Berlin Wall fell and it is time to step forward, be proud of who we are and what we stand for, ready to shape the world anew.

It comes as tensions with Russia mount over Ukraine.

Ms Truss will tell the Chatham House think tank today: In recent years the free world took its eyes off the ball.

After the collapse of communism, many were convinced it was the end of history, confident that freedom and democracy would go global.

People turned inwards. Its time to wake up. The age of introspection must end now.

We need to believe in Britain and project the best of Britain to the world.

"I want us to be confident, outward-looking, patriotic and positive and to be proud of our great country.

She plans to closer partnerships with allies like Japan, Australia, Canada, Indonesia and India across trade, tech and security.

An ally said: "Liz thinks we need to spend less time quarrelling among ourselves and more on promoting freedom and winning the battle for global influence against bad guys."

See original here:
Foreign Secretary Liz Truss says culture wars and woke attacks on Britain are a gift to our enemies... - The US Sun

The journalist, author and filmmaker picks his five best books about the culture wars, which form the subject of his new eight-part series, Things FellApart, available now on BBC Sounds and Radio 4.

One of the pleasures of makingThings Fell Apartwere long walks listening out for buried treasure in audiobook memoirs. This extraordinary life story gave me episode one. A boy in an alpine evangelical commune, dreaming of making avant-garde movies, inadvertently kickstarts a campaign of murders in the 1990s.

Da Capo Press 11.95

In his exhaustive culture wars history, Hartman includes fascinating conflicts I couldnt fit in like Piss Christ, an artwork of a crucifix dipped in urine that caused wild ructions in the 1980s but is now largely forgotten, as many of the conflicts that overwhelm us today will surely soon be.

University of Chicago Press 17;The Week Bookshop 13.99

Walkers father was a Jewish lawyer; her mother was Alice Walker, author ofThe Color Purple. Her beautiful memoir tells how, after their split, her childhood was spent moving between universes that never overlap. The experience inspired her to invent a new movement third-wave feminism in the 1990s.

Out of print

Tammy Faye Bakker was an ostentatious 1980s televangelist. While undeniably fraud-adjacent her husband Jim was imprisoned for misusing viewer donations Tammy was a wonderful oasis of curiosity among her deeply homophobic peers.

Tarcher 10.99

Dick Gregory was a hugely successful comedian before he quit it all for civil rights activism in the 1960s. His memoir does not asterisk the n-word. Its spelt out. As a result, it was banned by Christian conservatives in the 1970s. And now it has been banned again this time by progressives on college campuses. Illiberalism mutates.

Plume 13.99

Read more from the original source:
Jon Ronson: my five best books about the culture wars - The Week UK

The last time I wrote for The Spectators diary slot, over the summer, theatres were tentatively beginning to turn their lights on again, following the historically long closures at the height of the pandemic. On Monday night the West End went dark once more, but thankfully only briefly. Theatres along Shaftesbury Avenue and beyond dimmed their lights at 7 p.m. to mark the legacy of Stephen Sondheim, who died last week. I came to Sondheims work quite late myself, and Im sure a new audience will be found following the affection generated at his passing. Sondheims impact is felt as much on the theatre scene here as it is in America, but he didnt write about British politics, of course or did he? This song from A Little Night Music is in reference to the theatrical tactic, deployed when a show isnt going well, of bringing on a clownish figure to offer some distracting jokes: Where are the clowns?/ Send in the clowns./ Dont bother, theyre here.

Im in the final days of rehearsals for my own new play, which opens at Londons Young Vic theatre this week. Best of Enemies covers the 1968 US television debates between the father of modern American conservatism, William F. Buckley Jr, and the liberal playwright Gore Vidal. These exchanges the first real example of the modern cultural phenomenon of pitting opposing pundits against one another to create debate only came about because ABC, the lowest-rated and poorest of the television networks, needed a cheap innovation to their coverage of the Republican and Democratic conventions that year. What occurred, by accident or design, was a ratings winner that pretty much transformed political coverage for ever.

Buckley and Vidal loathed one another and saw the others ideology as immoral and reckless. Their clash was a gladiatorial match of minds for the soul of a nation. And yet even though it could be seen as a moment when mainstream political discourse became overtly petty, personal and adversarial the origins of the culture wars being played out across our more modern media platforms today it also was the kind of serious discussion its hard to imagine existing any more: 15 minutes of uninterrupted, primetime conversation, each night, between two public intellectuals speaking in philosophical terms about the nature of society and governance, tax systems and racial divides, foreign policy and the role of the state. They spoke in poetry, but they were also precise about the problems facing the West. Buckley proclaimed that Vidals hobgoblinisation of Marxism would lead to a spiritual world of stagnation. Vidal believed that these were revolutionary times when radical changes were needed, otherwise to be perfectly bleak and to be perfectly blunt, I think were headed toward total disaster, this empire.

There was drama on BBC Radio 4 this week too, but not in its Afternoon Play spot. I, like millions of others, felt a pang of existential dread when the Today programme was taken off air for a full 30 minutes on Monday as an errant alarm caused the presenters and technicians to be evacuated. Nick Robinson and Martha Kearney tweeted photos of themselves outside in the cold to reassure listeners all was fine, but perhaps also to avoid unleashing nuclear catastrophe, as the failure to broadcast Today remains on the countrys doomsday protocols. So unconscionable is the programmes absence that its disappearance remains an official measure that Royal Navy captains use to determine if the nation has been obliterated with atomic weapons, and must therefore retaliate. Thankfully, a documentary about the history of the T-shirt was broadcast to fill the dead air until the presenters could re-enter the building.

Despite the fears I have over the pointlessness and nastiness of conversations on social media, Twitter can be a great place for a writer to discover absurd moments in history that might inspire new work. I read that Switzerland has accidentally invaded Liechtenstein on quite a few occasions in history, most recently in 2007 when the marching Swiss soldiers took a wrong turn over the border and quickly apologised. I went down an internet rabbit hole of research that dragged up the time the UK accidentally invaded Spain in 2002, when some Royal Marines misjudged a training-exercise landing meant for Gibraltar, storming a beach some yards away in neighbouring Spain instead. A Ministry of Defence spokesman at the time said: They were informed of their error by local policeman and only spent about five minutes on the beach. The Ministry reiterated that we were not trying to take Spain and have no plans to do so. Although taps nose we would say that, wouldnt we?

See more here:
The birth of the culture wars - Spectator.co.uk

Senate Republicans will not issue any sort of a platform before next years midterm elections. At a meeting of donors and lawmakers in mid-November, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said that the Republican Partys 2024 nominee would be responsible for deciding on an agenda. The Republican senators in 2022 will simply attack the Democrats.

Rather than advancing any sort of a positive program, Republican Senators will be focusing on culture wars. Those have devolved to a point that Republicans are denying the legitimacy of any Democratic victory because, by their definition, Democrats are destroying the country.

As Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) said yesterday in a video from a parked car: Joe Biden is a communist. And thats what the Democrats are theyre communists. A lot of people are swallowing down the word socialist, butthey are communists.

In fact, the Democratic Party advocates neither socialism nor communism. Socialism is a system of government in which the means of production are owned by the government and, through the government theoretically by the people. Communism is the final stage of that form of social organization. It abolishes private ownership of land, farms, and factories, giving control of all those things to the state, which, in turn, provides everyone with jobs, housing, education, and medical care.

Democrats are a far cry from calling for this system of government. What they are calling for is for us to maintain the system of government we have had in this country since 1933. In that year, under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the government began to regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, and promote infrastructure projects that were too big or unprofitable for private industry.

In the years after World War II, Republicans joined Democrats in advocating this system, which filed the sharp edges off unrestrained capitalism and stabilized the economy, preventing another Depression.

On Tuesday, Representative Tim Ryan (D-OH) called out the political reality of todays America. What youre seeing here before the United States Congress is two clear, different visions of America and where we want to go and what we want to do, he said. He insisted that a strong middle class after World War II was key to our national prosperity.

Our greatest strength has been we reinvested into the United States. We reinvested into our communities. We invested in the technologies, and we dominated the industries: steel, glass, aerospace. he said. He called out Republicans for their opposition to that reinvestment into America: And now were hearing from the other side, Shut government down, dont do anything. We dont want to be an honest broker. Tyranny? he said, What are you people talking about? Were talking about universal preschool, and they have it as a communist indoctrination of the American student. Its insane. We have to rebuild our country!

The American horror of socialism came long before Russias 1917 Bolshevik Revolution tried to put socialism into practice. Americans began to worry about socialism in 1871, the year after the federal government started to protect Black male voting with the Fifteenth Amendment.

Also in 1870, Congress had established the Department of Justice to guarantee that Black southerners could enjoy the rights former Confederates were trying to terrorize them out of. Suddenly, attacking their Black neighbors on the basis of race became unconstitutional, and the federal government began to prosecute those who did so.

In 1871, unreconstructed white southerners began to argue that they did not object to Black rights on racial groundswhich was unconstitutional but objected rather on class grounds. They did not want Black men voting, they said, because formerly enslaved people were poor and were voting for leaders who promised them things like roads and hospitals.

Those benefits could be paid for only with tax levies, and the only people in the South with property after the war were white. Thus, Black voting amounted to a redistribution of wealth from white men to Black people, who wanted something for nothing. Black voting was, one popular magazine insisted, Socialism in South Carolina.

After World War II, Americans of all parties rallied around the idea of using the government for the good of the majority. But the idea that Americans who want the government to work for the good of the community were socialists regained traction with the rise of Ronald Reagan to the presidency. Republicans under Reagan focused on slashing regulations and the social safety net.

But Americans continued to support an active government, and to keep those voters from power, Republicans in the 1990s began to insist that the only way Democrats won elections was through voter fraud. Those false allegations have metastasized until we are at a moment when Republicans refuse to believe that a majority of Americans would vote for a Democratic president.

Although Joe Biden won the 2020 election by a majority of more than 7 million votes and by a decisive margin of 306 to 232 in the Electoral College the same margin Trump had called a landslide in 2016, Republicans are doubling down on the idea that the election must have been stolen and they must declare independence from the socialist government.

And yet, as Republicans around the country insist on the Big Lie, they are running up against reality, in the form of the legal system.

See the original post here:
A Fear of Legitimacy: When the only political agenda is to deny Democracy by igniting culture wars - Milwaukee Independent