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Typography is undergoing a public renaissance. Typography usually strives to be invisible, but recently its become a mark of sophistication for readers to notice it and have an opinion.

Suddenly, people outside of the design profession seem to care about its many intricacies. Usually, this awareness focuses on execution. This years Oscars put visual hierarchy on the map. XKCD readers will never miss an opportunity to point out bad keming. And anyone on the internet can tell you, Comic Sans has become a joke.

But by focusing on the smaller gaffes, were missing the big picture. Typography is much bigger than a gotcha moment for the visually challenged. Typography can silently influence: It can signify dangerous ideas, normalize dictatorships, and sever broken nations. In some cases it may be a matter of life and death. And it can do this as powerfully as the words it depicts.

Youve seen blackletter typography before. Its dense, old-fashioned, and elaborate. It almost always feels like an anachronism. It looks like this:

But usually when you see it in popular culture, it looks more like this:

Or like this:

You probably know blackletter as the script of choice for bad guys, prison tattoos, and black metal album artand you wouldnt be wrong.

Blackletter looks esoteric and illegible now, but it started off as a normal pattern that people across Europe used every day for hundreds of years. It stayed that way until pretty recently. A third of the original fonts at Monotype, the American company behind classics like Times New Roman and Gil Sans, were blackletter.

Why dont we use blackletter anymore? The answer is literally Hitler. Nazi leadership used the Fraktur, an archetypal variety of blackletter, as their official typeface. They positioned it as a symbol of German national identity and denounced papers that printed with anything else.

As you might imagine, the typeface hasnt aged well in the post-war period. In just a few years, blackletter went from ordinary to a widespread taboothe same way the name Adolf and the toothbrush mustache have been all but eradicated.

The Nazis played a part in this. In 1941, the regime re-characterized Fraktur as Judenletter, Jewish letters, and systematically banned it from use. The long history of Jewish writers and printers had tainted the letterforms themselves, they argued, and it was time for Germany to move on. Historians speculate that the reversal had more to do with the logistics of occupying countries reliant on Latin typefaces, but the result was the same. No printed matter of any kind could use Fraktur, for German audiences or abroad. Even blackletter handwriting was banned from being taught in school.

Think about that: The government of one of the worlds great powers banned a typeface. That is the power of a symbol.

We take it for granted that we can type any word with a keyboard, but really, you should check your anglophone privilege. In English, each letter stands on its own, while Arabic connects every letter in a word, allowing many letters to take on new shapes based on context. Arabic lends itself to lush and poetic calligraphy, but it doesnt square with traditional European methods for making typefaces.

Much of the Arab world fell under Western colonial rule, and print communication remained a challenge. Rather than rethinking or expanding the conventions that had been designed around the Latin alphabet, the colonial powers changed Arabic. What we see in books and newspapers to this day is a ghost of Arabic script, reworked to use discrete letters that behave on a standard printing press.

Its not surprising that colonial powers would pull their subjects closer to their center of gravity. But even today, many Arab countries struggle with that legacy. There are over 20,000 ways to format a word in English; the Arabic world only has about 100 clunky typefaces to support communication between half a billion people.

Rana Abou Rjeily, a contemporary Lebanese designer, is reclaiming Arabic typography. After studying design in the US and UK, she developed Mirsaal, an experimental typeface to bridge the gap between Arabic and Latin text.

Mirsaal looks for the right balance of western conventions to make Arabic work in a modern context. It uses simplified, distinct letterforms, but with the goal of making written Arabic more expressive and authentic.

This isnt a purely symbolic exercise. The Middle East is dealing with political instability that stems from deep cultural divisions. It is not hard to imagine how a more robust written language might play some role in making a better future.

The Balkans are synonymous with fragmentation. The region has seen generations of violence, much spurred by the ethnic tensions within. Their typography reflects these divisions. The regional languages are a hodgepodge of typographic spheres: Latin, Blackletter, Cyrillic, and Arabic. Never mind the locally designed Glagolitic scripts.

Typography took on special meaning during the Cold War, as Latin and Cyrillic alphabets came to symbolize allegiance to global powers.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, typography continues to communicate political leanings, be they nostalgia for the Soviet era or alignment with the globalized West. Using the wrong typeface could get you in a lot of trouble.

In 2013, Croatian designers Nikola Djurek and Marija Juza created the East-West hybrid Balkan Sans. Balkan Sans uses the same glyphs to represent the equivalent letters in Latin and Cyrillic alphabets. In the words of its makers, it demystifies, depoliticizes, and reconciles them for the sake of education, tolerance, and, above all, communication.

Croatian and Serbian are similar languages that could hardly look more different in their written forms. Balkan Sans makes them mutually intelligible, so that two neighbors might be able to correspond over email without thinking twice. They transformed typography from a barrier between nations into an olive branch.

The US is not so different from the rest of the world when it comes to tribalism and conflicted identity. This has crystalized in last few months, and weve seen typography play a substantial role.

Hillary Clinton ran for president with a slick logo befitting a Fortune 100 company. It had detractors, but I think well remember it fondly as a symbol of what could have beenclarity, professionalism, and restraint.

Donald Trump countered with a garish baseball cap that looked like it had been designed in a Google Doc by the man himself. This proved to be an effective way of selling Trumps unique brand.

Im not interested in whether Clinton or Trump had good logos. Im interested in the different values they reveal. Clintons typography embodies the spirit of modernism and enlightenment values. It was designed to appeal to smart, progressive people who like visual puns. They appreciate the serendipity of an arrow that completes a lettermark while also symbolizing progress. In other words, coastal elites who like design.

Trumps typography speaks with a more primal, and seemingly earnest voice. Make America Great Again symbolizes Make America Great Again. It tells everyone what team youre on, and what you believe in. Period. It speaks to a distrust of clean corporate aesthetics and snobs who think theyre better than Times New Roman on a baseball cap. Its mere existence is a political statement.

The two typographies are mutually intelligible at first glance, but a lot gets lost in translation. We live in a divided country, split on typographic lines as cleanly as the Serbs and the Croats.

The next time you go shopping, download an app or send an email, take a second to look at the typography in front of you. Dont evaluate it. Dont critique it. Just observe it. What does it say about you? What does it say about the world you live in?

The stakes are higher than you think. The next generation of fascists will not love geometric sans serifs as much as Mussolini did. They wont be threatening journalists in blackletter.

The world is changing around us. We constantly debate and analyze the conflicts between the militaries, governments and cultures that surround us. But theres a visual war thats happening right in front of our eyes, undetected. Its powerto divide us or bring us togetherhinges on our choice to pay attention.

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How Fonts Are Fueling the Culture Wars - Backchannel

A protest in support of the BDS movement. Photo: FOA / Facebook.

Many who criticize outrageous forms of behavior on college campuses, from microaggressions to safe spaces, warn (either out of fear or glee) that once students who have been sheltered from challenging ideas and conflict enter the real world, they will quickly discover what its like to encounter an obstacle without Daddy there to intervene.

While I understand where such a sentiment might come from, it fails to note that new moral cultures tend to first take hold in the world of ideas and then work their way out to other parts of society. For once new ways of thinking and acting arise and achieve success, it is only natural that other people will try to replicate behaviors they might have otherwise never considered.

The campus situation is made more complicated by the fact that the evils protesters claim to be fighting against are not imaginary. Racial bigotry and gender stereotyping continue to be prevalent in our society, even if we have placed their most obscene aspects (such as common use of the N word or blaming women for being raped) beyond the pale. Poverty endures, even if millions arent starving in the streets. In fact, who would listen to protesters for a minute if the issues being chanted about didnt resonate with targeted audiences?

May 18, 2017 3:21 pm

But here is where experience dealing with the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel provides important insight into what might be wrong with perceiving todays campus uprisings as simply misguided tactics used in support of noble causes.

Before going further, I need to invoke some philosophy by bringing up that much-maligned 19th-century thinker, Friedrich Nietzsche. Ill let you read about the famous controversies surrounding the man and his work on your own, but for now you should be thinking about what he had to say about guilt as a form of control.

According to his theories, the powerful people of the world were brought under the control of the weak once the former were convinced that use of their power (never mind misuse and abuse) was something evil, for which they should be ashamed. In fact, Nietzsche saw the entire Judeo-Christian moral code as the means whereby the meekdidinherit the earth by convincing the strong that their strength represented sin for which they needed to atone, in particular by putting it into service for those less powerful than they.

Ill get to how those ideas were put to malicious use by others shortly, but for the purposes of this discussion keep in mind that attempts to use guilt to motivate action can only work on those already sensitive to the evils being condemned. To cite an obvious example, if everyone in a society believed it virtuous to denigrate people of other races, then no one would know what youre talking about if you condemned the evils of racism.

So accusations of bigotry or indifference to the suffering of the poor can only work against those who sincerely believe that everyone is susceptible to those evils. But doesnt everybody fall into this category?

The BDS movement provides a powerful counterexample. For, as anyone who has engaged with BDS proponents has seen, the boycotters insist that they are fighting on behalf of human rights, justice, and a wide range of noble causes and beliefs. But even as they vociferously insist others subject themselves to the boycotters own moral judgment, they are equally adamant that similar moral judgment targeting them is inadmissible.

More than that, the very notion that those whom the boycotters claim to represent (and on whose behalf they fight) exemplify the very sins being protested (human rights abuses, racism, sexism, etc.) is ignored or shouted down. In other words, to invoke my previous articles here and here, with the BDS movement we have the strange hybrid of people using the Culture of Victimhood to insist that those living in a Culture of Dignity obey them while ignoring the brutality routinely practiced by a Culture of Honor those boycotters support.

If others are now reading from the BDS playbook, creating a culture of one-way moral judgment where ends justify any means, we may be looking at a contagion not likely to end well.

The best-case scenario is that the current protest culture will turn out to be another moral panic that tends to flare up in this country, but eventually blows over.

A more troubling possibility is that a Culture of Victimhood will take hold beyond the campus driven not by those seeking to fight injustice but by the ruthless (i.e. those most able to suppress their own guilt even as they demand others feel guilty enough to bow down before them).

The threat from such a scenario is two-fold. First would be the degradation of thought and virtue currently taking hold on campuses, a phenomenon those of us who deal with BDS takeovers of institutions like academic associations and mainline churches have seen for years. Even more troubling is the possibility that a backlash will take the form of a new moral culture that, like dark ideologies of the 20thcentury, try to get beyond good and evil by rejecting all moral codes that equate power with sin.

Is there an alternative?

Possibly, but thoughts on that will have to wait until next time, when this series concludes.

Part III of a series. Part I is here, and Part II is here.

Original post:
What Can BDS Teach Us About the Culture Wars? - Algemeiner

To find evidence that deep discontent is brewing in some white Afrikaans quarters in South Africa, you dont have to spend very much time online. On Facebook in particular, pages abound with comment after comment expressing a profound sense that theirs is a community under siege: the victims of a government which has deserted them, a media which doesnt hear them, and a liberal justice system consistently failing to uphold the rights of a conservative worldview.

In the perceived absence of support from any state institutions, such Afrikaners are building increasingly powerful private bodies to lobby for their interests. The most high-profile example of this in the last year was Afriforums January announcement that it had recruited state prosecutor Gerrie Nel to set up a private prosecutions unit to pursue cases that the National Prosecuting Authority declines to prosecute. That Afriforum had the financial power to headhunt a legal star like Nel says much for the commitment of its reported 190,000 private donors.

There have been persistent rumours that the ultimate aim of this unit will be to prosecute President Jacob Zuma. Directly asked whether this was the case at the Cape Town Press Club last week, Nel reportedly replied, Im avoiding [the] question, with a smile.

Finding ways to act parallel to the state to support Afrikaners seems increasingly to be the modus operandi of groups like Afriforum. It was recently reported, for instance, that Afriforum had built a community centre in Vryheid. That would normally be the role of the government but when the government doesnt care about you, you have to do it yourself. n Boer maak n plan, as the old saying goes.

Rural security is being handled along the same lines. In March, Bennie van Zyl, the general manager of the Transvaal Agricultural Union, told the Daily Maverick that when it came to preventing farm attacks, We are now doing it by ourselves.

Van Zyl continued: The closest helping hand you can get is on your own arm. We are creating farm watches, and carrying out training and reconnaissance. We are gathering intelligence by ourselves with our farmworkers. The farming population has its own plans.

That conservative white Afrikaners are able to mobilise effectively via private channels should be evident from the revelation this week that this groups boycott of the Spur restaurant chain has cost Spur millions already. It is a telling reminder: they may no longer be able to flex political muscle through formal structures, but there is still economic muscle to be flexed.

For a snapshot into the sense that this is a community which very much considers itself into siege, papers recently filed at the South Gauteng High Court are illustrative.

In the case heard by that court this week, where an organisation called the Organisasie vir Godsdienstige-Onderrig en Demokrasie (cheekily shortened to OGOD) is taking six Afrikaans government schools to court over their enforced Christian ethos, Afriforum and Solidarity have joined the case as amicus curiae.

Afriforum explains in its heads of argument that it joined the case because it represents a portion of society who is directly affected by the case. The language it uses in its arguments is highly revealing: the threat is one of alienating communities; of strip[ping] religious communities of their freedom to practise religion, not only as individuals but also as a community; of ensuring the total deprivation of [Christian] rights.

For some context, what the applicants are arguing is that schools funded with state money should not be allowed to promote one religion to the exclusion of others, and that religious observances may be held at the school but not be run by the school.

In a recent blog post, OGOD director Hans Pietersen clarified: We have asked for equitable treatment for all religions in school, and for the ending of the religious apartheid that is currently in place at these schools. We want more religions in schools. We have never sought to ban religions.

Nonetheless, Afriforums argument continues: If the state was to buy into the form of neutrality that [OGOD] proposes and elects to expel religious practises from schools, it will in effect elevate the worldview of [OGOD] above that of the respondent schools Those persons who do not conform, would effectively be ostracised from society.

It warns: If religious freedoms are completely washed out of public schools, it would lead to a withdrawal from public schools of a large portion of society who form part of religious communities The more communities withdraw and become isolated from the public sphere, the more unstable and volatile society would become. The result? A foreseeable isolationist movement amongst different religious communities will probably arise.

If that sounds to you like a bit of an over-the-top response to a proposal that state schools host prayer meetings after school rather than within school hours, youre not alone. But the point is that for groups like Afriforum, a much wider principle is at stake: the need to protect the rights and traditions of a community which feels itself ever more pushed to the margins of the state.

We feel like the whole school governance debate is one that conservative organisations keep pushing back on, SECTION27s Faranaaz Veravia told the Daily Maverick on Thursday. Theyve tried this around language, admissions, religion These are debates that have long been settled.

As long as perceived Afrikaner interests are threatened, however, and as long as there is still money to pay lawyers, you can expect the debates to be constantly revisited. Veravia sums it up: Theres a political pushback here. DM

Photo: Afrikaans students take part in a demonstration defending the use of Afrikaans as the language of choose at the University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa, 23 February 2016. EPA/KIM LUDBROOK EPA/KIM LUDBROOK EPA/KIM LUDBROOK

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Analysis: As culture wars intensify, some white Afrikaners push back - Daily Maverick

Our opera special arrives this week, riding on the coat tails of a small controversy. Exeunt, a website that specialises in experimental and long-form theatre and performing arts criticism, reviewed a production at the Royal Opera House and put a few noses out of joint. This was not because of its critique of the production, but of its audience.

The critic in question (who also writes for The Stage) took issue with her neighbour, who had remarked that in several years time he hoped to see an all-British roster of principal dancers. She described the unidentified audience member as a tweedy prick and complained it had been another night at Covent Garden in which astounding artistic achievement is clouded by an obnoxious fug of plummy pronouncements from the audience.

I dont propose to get into the rights or wrongs of the review, other than to observe that this incident strikes me as the mirror image of another we affectionately refer to in The Stage offices as McNugget-gate. Our regular columnist, producer Richard Jordan, complained of a night in a West End theatre being ruined by a nearby audience member eating Chicken McNuggets during a show. He described it as possibly the worst West End audience I have ever encountered.

These incidents are the result of clashes of expectations between different groups of audience members. In Tweed-gate, the less traditional audience member was offended by the actions of a more traditional audience member, and in McNugget-gate vice versa.

Who is right? Who has more of a right to enjoy art in the environment they desire? We live in divisive times and these divisions are being played out within our public spaces.

If this is a growing problem for theatre, it strikes me as nothing compared with the challenges that opera faces. It is striking just how many of the features in this issue touch on perceived elitism and audience expectations.

Oliver Mears refers to challenging peoples preconceptions about the art form, Michael Chance wants to be accessible to a wider demographic, James Clutton comments on Opera Holland Parks lack of dress code and Antony Feeny warns of country-house operas reputation for toffs snoozing through antiquated performances. Wasfi Kani is eager to stress: All this stuff about opera being elitist is simply tosh.

The culture wars are alive and well.

Email your views to alistair@thestage.co.uk

This articleis part of The Stage special on opera. Read more stories here

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The Editor's View: Culture wars rage on in our opera houses - The Stage

Jeff Charles

Jeff Charles is a freelance writer specializing in politics, issues of race and law enforcement.He is the founder of Artisan Owl Media.

Editors Note: This is part two of a three-part series on the Culture Wars.

Fortunately, the left is still making many of the same mistakes that cost them power. They are learning but slowly.

Leftist agitators continue to use violence to keep conservatives from expressing their points of view. Recently, they prevented conservative author Ann Coulter from speaking at UC Berkeley with threats of violence. Leftist activists shut down Milo Yiannopoulos planned speech at the same college. In New York, comedian Gavin McIness was scheduled to give a presentation at a university. Leftist protesters physically attacked McIness and his supporters. Not surprisingly, prominent liberals were silent on the issue. As long as the left embraces violence, conservatives will remain more attractive to middle-of-the-road Americans. Nobody wants to join a party that threatens to physically harm them if they dont acquiesce to their demands.

Despite the protests of well-known liberals such as Bill Maher, the left wont let go their strategy of smearing conservatives as bigots. They are still pushing the lie that their opponents are people who hate everyone except white conservative Christians. In the previous piece in this series, Liberty Nation discussed a deceptive poll by The Washington Post. This survey was designed to conclude that Trump voters are racists. However, this is not the only example of the left using bigotry-baiting as a tactic.

Social justice warriors have also used social media to perpetuate the myth that all white people are racist even the ones who agree with the leftist narrative. In March, they shared a list that gave white people ten ways to reject their privilege. The items on this list repeated many of the same tenets pervasive in the cultural left. The last point on this list is the most telling: recognize that youre still racist, no matter what. This line exposes their intent to use bigotry as a weapon to discredit anyone who disagrees with their point of view. The idea that all white people are racist no matter what they do is a notion that will keep creating more Republicans but only if we continually expose it.

Although the left is still making some of the same mistakes that caused them to lose power, we cannot ignore the fact that they are starting to use strategies that could prove effective. As a matter of fact, if conservatives want to retain their position, they should take note of these tactics and use them more efficiently.

Black Lives Matter (BLM) is a left-wing activist group now using these new strategies. In the past, the anti-police organization engaged in violent protests and riots to draw more attention to their cause. After seeing that riots and physical attacks do not work, they are now turning to local politics. This pivot is a smart move on their part. While most of us pay more attention to national elections, the mayor of our city is more likely to have an impact on our everyday lives than the president. BLM realized that if they want to enact legislation that hampers the efforts of law enforcement, they must encourage their followers to influence their city and state governments. Liberty Nation has weighed in on this issue:

This pivot could push them closer to realizing their goals. When they engaged in protests and riots, the American public saw them for what they were: a violently anti-police organization. It was this type of behavior that helped conservatives win the election. However, if they are serious about organizing locally and every indication says that they are they will be able to gain more influence.

If BLM finds any amount of success with this new approach, other leftist groups are sure to follow. Conservatives cannot afford to ignore this reality. If we are to prevent the left from regaining their hold on our society, we need to be willing to fight them at the local level.

In the previous piece in this series, I mentioned the lefts disdain for free speech. Attacks on the first amendment have been one of their greatest mistakes. However, they have not yet given up on squashing ideas contrary to their own. Instead, they are coming up with other ways to prevent conservatives from expressing their views. Rather than allowing the free flow of ideas, the left is trying to silence conservative voices wherever they can. Their attempts to keep conservatives from speaking on college campuses have largely backfired. However, there is another way they are trying to marginalize conservative viewpoints: social media.

The major social media companies including Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are owned and run by leftists. Both Facebook and Twitter have come under fire for marginalizing conservative opinions. Twitter has deactivated the accounts of users who espouse conservative points of view. Former employees of Facebook have publicly stated that the company regularly singled out conservative posts for censorship.

These companies are well within their legal rights to censor any types of content they wish; they are private corporations. However, both Twitter and Facebook have claimed that they do not discriminate between conservative and liberal posts and they are lying. In reality, both of these social media platforms make sure that liberal points of view are featured more prominently than conservative opinions. Although this approach is not right, it is both legal and efficient. Most people do not take the time to analyze social media posts; eighty percent of users do not even read past the headline.

YouTube is another company that attempts to silence conservative voices. They do so by demonetizing videos that espouse traditional values. Conservatives who use the video platform to express right-wing views are not able to earn money from the content they publish. Of course, the Google-owned company does not treat liberal users in the same fashion. The organization has a clear objective: minimize conservative content while promoting left-leaning videos. Comedian Steven Crowder and talk show host Dennis Prager have both become prominent targets of YouTubes efforts to squelch right-wing points of view. Naturally, these actions are intended to make it more difficult for conservatives to continue to produce content by making it harder for them to fund their efforts.

While the left is still making the same mistakes that led them to their current downfall, they are beginning to use tactics that could actually work. In light of this, conservatives cannot afford to let up. As the left strives to regain influence, people on the right must develop strategies that enable us to capitalize on the lefts weaknesses. If we want to seize and secure more territory in the war for our culture, we must diligently expose the many flaws of the lefts principles while effectively advancing the cause of conservatism.

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Culture Wars Part 2: How the Left is Regaining Power - Liberty Nation (registration) (blog)