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Two cultures clash as a wave of anti-immigrant rhetoric spreads over a country in Teboho Edkins profound documentary Days of Cannibalism, which focalizes the China-Africa relationship in rural Lesotho, an enclaved country surrounded by South Africa. Utilizing an observational vrit approach, Days might be light on context, but even within these self-imposed limitations, the film reveals both the universality of cultural conflict and the highly specific economy of the Basotho people.

Framed around the changing socio-economics of the region, Edkins film moves from subject to subject as the increase in the Chinese immigrant workforce has threatened to recontextualize the traditionally trade-based economy. The system is moving from bartering to monetary exchange as a direct result of a Chinese influx. In changing this system, the Basotho have launched a socio-political protest in an attempt to denigrate the Chinese.

At the height of this conflict is the ideological differences between uses of livestock, specifically cows. Treated as a type of currency within Basotho culture, cows are viewed as a symbol of community wealth with religious significance. The Basotho can freely buy cows outside of their ethnic group, but they cannot sell them within. As such, cows became a method of storing or accumulating wealth as the community takes care of these animals and are free to use them for their labor. Individualistic ideologies of wealth and capital, associated with free-market capitalism, are the new beliefs that the Chinese are bringing into Lesotho.

This highly specific hybrid of economy and religion is pitted against Chinese notions of exchange, treating cows and livestock as goods to be bought and sold. That these two opposing ideologies are rife with conflict is, perhaps, unsurprising, but manifests itself in interesting ways. In one of the longer scenes within this relatively short documentary, two Basotho farmers are put on trial for stealing and selling cows to Chinese businessmen. The Chinese have killed the cows, violating the religious and legal precedents in Basotho culture. These two farmers were desperate for money, but have still broken the cultural laws of their group, and despite their pleas for mercy are sentenced to a staggering 10 years.

Edkins film is neutral within this conflict, showing both sides as they struggle to bridge their cultural divide, creating ethnic pockets of communities within the larger country. These smaller communities are created along racial and religious dividing lines, as the Chinese are just looking for work but are constantly rebuffed and disparaged by the Basotho. A throughline tracks a Basotho radio DJ as he spins Americanized records and comments on the Chinese workforce with increasing hostility.

Culminating in a robbery of a local Chinese-owned store, in which Edkins becomes the subject of his own documentary, Days of Cannibalism is content to observe the ethnic fracturing and increasing global influence that descends on a small country, never spending too long on a single subject and refusing to take sides in the culture wars that are seemingly on the verge of erupting in Lesotho.

In avoiding a worldview-like ideology, and refusing to recontextualize these socio-economic clashes to fit a westernized approach (though the parallels may be obvious), Days of Cannibalism may be too highly specific to reach a general audience, but the film nonetheless is a harrowing look into a seemingly forgotten corner of the world; one that, despite their long history, is still susceptible to increased fracturing that accompanies globalization.

Days of Cannibalism premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival.

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Berlin Review: Days of Cannibalism is a Harrowing, Profound Look at the Culture Wars in Lesotho - The Film Stage

The debate on abortion continues to divide us here in Utah and across the country, exactly as intended.

After the 1973 landmark 7-2 Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade, which said unduly restrictive state regulation of abortion is unconstitutional, there was relatively little political debate on womens reproductive rights, let alone a movement.

Today, of course, there is a decades-long campaign to end abortion, but it takes place in a historic vacuum, ignoring the long struggle for the most basic elements of family planning.

Times have changed. In 1969, President Richard Nixon told Congress, No American woman should be denied access to family planning assistance because of her economic condition. The following year, he signed into law Title X the Family Planning Program.

But in 1979, Republican operatives and strategists huddled to conceive wedge issues that would favor the GOP and splinter the Democratic Party.

Richard Viguerie and Paul Weyrich recruited televangelist Jerry Falwell into a coalition designed to bring together economic and social conservatives around a pro-family agenda, according to historian Jill Lapore.

It would target abortion, gay rights, the E.R.A. and sex education, sowing the seeds of mass agitation and the Culture Wars.

On the abortion front, it led to picketing with protestors decrying baby killers at clinics and even the homes of providers. It also resulted in hundreds of burglaries at clinics and more than a dozen murders of clinicians and their clients.

But in the halls of Congress or the sidewalks of Salt Lake City, discussions, debates and sermons lack historical perspective on contraception, infant mortality, maternal child-bearing deaths and 100 years of developments that eventually led to reproductive freedom for women.

In 1915, maternal mortality in the United States was 607.9 deaths per 100,000 live births. By 2007, it had declined to 12.7. It climbed to 17.4 by 2018.

It wasnt until 1916 that Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic for poor women, contending that women have a right to have sex without fear of death in childbirth. She was arrested and jailed for three months.

On appeal, the court ruled that it could be permissible for a doctor to talk to a patient about contraception. But until 1936, it was illegal to disseminate information on birth control. All the while, women were getting pregnant every year and dying from back-alley abortions.

Sangers clinics eventually became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. In 2019, the non-profit health centers served 2.5 million people, but only 3 percent pursued abortions, according to the organization. Most clients sought birth control or STD tests.

In their zeal to stop abortion, conservative activists are waging war against Planned Parenthood. Since 2011, some 300 state laws have been passed to restrict access to abortions. One result is the closing of Planned Parenthood clinics: 32 in 2017; 40 in 2018; and 36 in 2019. Some 400 Planned Parenthood clinics remain open nationwide.

Not coincidentally, STDs are on the rise.

Last week, Republican lawmakers in Utah moved to ban most abortions on the condition that Roe v. Wade were to be set aside. The proposal would make performing an abortion a felony punishable by up to 15 years in prison.

When vocal proponents of banning abortion, such as Utah state Sen. Dan McCay and his wife, Riverton Councilwoman Tawnee McCay, publicly cry out to stop killing babies, they ignore women, present and past, who were denied reproductive health care and died as a result.

Even Catholic-dominated Ireland has legalized abortion.

Beyond that, pro-lifers seem unaware of their role in the systematic agitation that brought the GOP to power in order to achieve another agenda, which has led to income inequality next only to the 1890s.

These folks believe life begins at conception and in a free society that ought not be a problem. But whats troubling is that those people, who are oblivious to the long struggle for womens reproductive rights, would force their beliefs on all women, denying them agency over their own bodies.

Christopher Smart is a freelance journalist who lives in Salt Lake City.

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Christopher Smart: The intended outcome of the abortion fight - Salt Lake Tribune

Aristotle, Niccol Machiavelli, Alexis de Tocqueville, Adam Smith and Karl Marx grounded their philosophies in the understanding that there is a natural antagonism between the rich and the rest of us. The interests of the rich are not our interests. The truths of the rich are not our truths. The lives of the rich are not our lives. Great wealth not only breeds contempt for those who do not have it but it empowers oligarchs to pay armies of lawyers, publicists, politicians, judges, academics and journalists to censure and control public debate and stifle dissent. Neoliberalism, deindustrialization, the destruction of labor unions, slashing and even eliminating the taxes of the rich and corporations, free trade, globalization, the surveillance state, endless war and austerity the ideologies or tools used by the oligarchs to further their own interests are presented to the public as natural law, the mechanisms for social and economic progress, even as the oligarchs dynamite the foundations of a liberal democracy and exacerbate a climate crisis that threatens to extinguish human life.

The oligarchs are happy to talk about race. They are happy to talk about sexual identity and gender. They are happy to talk about patriotism. They are happy to talk about religion. They are happy to talk about immigration. They are happy to talk about abortion. They are happy to talk about gun control. They are happy to talk about cultural degeneracy or cultural freedom. They are not happy to talk about class. Race, gender, religion, abortion, immigration, gun control, culture and patriotism are issues used to divide the public, to turn neighbor against neighbor, to fuel virulent hatreds and antagonisms. The culture wars give the oligarchs, both Democrats and Republicans, the cover to continue the pillage. There are few substantial differences between the two ruling political parties in the United States. This is why oligarchs like Donald Trump and Michael Bloomberg can switch effortlessly from one party to the other. Once oligarchs seize power, Aristotle wrote, a society must either accept tyranny or choose revolution.

The United States stood on the cusp of revolution a fact President Franklin Roosevelt acknowledged in his private correspondence amid the breakdown of capitalism in the 1930s. Roosevelt responded by aggressively curbing the power of the oligarchs. The federal government dealt with massive unemployment by creating 12 million jobs through the Works Progress Administration (WPA), making the government the largest employer in the country. It legalized unions, many of which had been outlawed, and through the National Labor Relations Act empowered organizing. It approved banking regulations, including the Emergency Banking Act, the Banking Act and the Securities Act, all in 1933, to prevent another stock market crash. The Federal Emergency Relief Administration provided the equivalent in todays money of $9.88 billion for relief operations in cities and states. The Democratic president heavily taxed the rich and corporations. (The Republican administration of Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s was still taxing the highest earners at 91%.) Roosevelts administration instituted programs such as Social Security and a public pension program. It provided financial assistance to tenant farmers and migrant workers. It funded arts and culture. It created the United States Housing Authority and instituted the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which established the minimum wage and set a limit on mandatory work hours. This heavy government intervention lifted the country out of the Great Depression. It also made Roosevelt, who was elected to an unprecedented fourth term, and the Democratic Party wildly popular among working and middle-class families. The Democratic Party, should it resurrect such policies, would win every election in a landslide.

But the New Deal was the bte noire of the oligarchs. They began to undo Roosevelts New Deal even before World War II broke out at the end of 1941. They gradually dismantled the regulations and programs that had not only saved capitalism but arguably democracy itself. We now live in an oligarchic state. The oligarchs control politics, the economy, culture, education and the press. Donald Trump may be a narcissist and a con artist, but he savages the oligarchic elite in his long-winded speeches to the delight of his crowds. He, like Bernie Sanders, speaks about the forbidden topic class. But Trump, though an embarrassment to the oligarchs, does not, like Sanders, pose a genuine threat to them. Trump will, like all demagogues, incite violence against the vulnerable, widen the cultural and social divides and consolidate tyranny, but he will leave the rich alone. It is Sanders whom the oligarchs fear and hate.

The Democratic Party elites will use any mechanism, no matter how nefarious and undemocratic, to prevent Sanders from obtaining the nomination. The New York Times interviewed 93 of the more than 700 superdelegates, appointed by the party and permitted to vote in the second round if no candidate receives the required 1,991 delegates to win in the first round. Most of those interviewed said they would seek to prevent Sanders from being the nominee if he did not have a majority of delegates in the first count, even if it required drafting someone who did not run in the primaries Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio was mentioned and even if it led to Sanders supporters abandoning the party in disgust. If Sanders fails to obtain 1,991 delegates before the convention, which appears likely, it seems nearly certain he will be blocked by the party from becoming the Democratic candidate. The damage done to the Democratic Party, if this happens, will be catastrophic. It will also all but ensure that Trump wins a second term.

As I wrote in my Feb. 17 column, The New Rules of the Games, Sanders democratic socialism is essentially that of a New Deal Democrat. His political views would be part of the mainstream in France or Germany, where democratic socialism is an accepted part of the political landscape and is routinely challenged as too accommodationist by communists and radical socialists. Sanders calls for an end to our foreign wars, a reduction of the military budget, for Medicare for All, abolishing the death penalty, eliminating mandatory minimum sentences and private prisons, a return of Glass-Steagall, raising taxes on the wealthy, increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour, canceling student debt, eliminating the Electoral College, banning fracking and breaking up agribusinesses. This does not qualify as a revolutionary agenda.

Sanders, unlike many more radical socialists, does not propose nationalizing the banks and the fossil fuel and arms industries, I continued. He does not call for the criminal prosecution of the financial elites who trashed the global economy or the politicians and generals who lied to launch preemptive wars, defined under international law as criminal wars of aggression, which have devastated much of the Middle East, resulted in hundreds of thousands of dead and millions of refugees and displaced people, and cost the nation between $5 trillion and $7 trillion. He does not call for worker ownership of factories and businesses. He does not promise to halt the governments wholesale surveillance of the public. He does not intend to punish corporations that have moved manufacturing overseas. Most importantly, he believes, as I do not, that the political system, including the Democratic Party, can be reformed from within. He does not support sustained mass civil disobedience to bring the system down, the only hope we have of halting the climate emergency that threatens to doom the human race. On the political spectrum, he is, at best, an enlightened moderate.

The Democratic Party leaders are acutely aware that in a functioning democracy, one where the rich do not buy elections and send lobbyists to Washington and state capitals to write laws and legislation, one where the danger of oligarchic rule is understood and part of the national debate, they would be out of a job.

The Democrats, like the Republicans, serve the interests of the pharmaceutical and insurance industries. The Democrats, like the Republicans, serve the interests of the defense contractors. The Democrats, like the Republicans, serve the interests of the fossil fuel industry. The Democrats, along with the Republicans, authorized $738 billion for our bloated military in fiscal 2020. The Democrats, like the Republicans, do not oppose the endless wars in the Middle East. The Democrats, like the Republicans, took from us our civil liberties, including the right to privacy, freedom from wholesale government surveillance, and due process. The Democrats, like the Republicans, legalized unlimited funding from the rich and corporations to transform our electoral process into a system of legalized bribery. The Democrats, like the Republicans, militarized our police and built a system of mass incarceration that has 25% of the worlds prisoners, although the United States has only 5% of the worlds population. The Democrats, like the Republicans, are the political face of the oligarchy.

The leaders of the Democratic Party the Clintons, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Tom Perez would rather implode the party and the democratic state than surrender their positions of privilege. The Democratic Party is not a bulwark against despotism. It is the guarantor of despotism. It is a full partner in the class project. Its lies, deceit, betrayal of working men and women and empowering of corporate pillage made a demagogue like Trump possible. Any threat to the class project, even the tepid one that would be offered by Sanders as the partys nominee, will see the Democratic elites unite with the Republicans to keep Trump in power.

What will we do if the oligarchs in the Democratic Party once again steal the nomination from Sanders? Will we finally abandon a system that has always been gamed against us? Will we turn on the oligarchic state to build parallel, popular institutions to protect ourselves and to pit power against power? Will we organize unions, third parties and militant movements that speak in the language of class warfare? Will we form community development organizations that provide local currencies, public banks and food cooperatives? Will we carry out strikes and sustained civil disobedience to wrest power back from the oligarchs to save ourselves and our planet?

In 2016 I did not believe that the Democratic elites would permit Sanders to be the nominee and feared, correctly, they would use him after the convention to herd his followers into the voting booths for Hillary Clinton. I do not believe this animus against Sanders has changed in 2020. The theft this time may be more naked, and for this reason more revealing of the forces involved. If all this plays out as I expect and if those on the left continue to put their faith and energy into the Democratic Party, they are not simply willfully naive but complicit in their own enslavement. No successful political movement will be built within the embrace of the Democratic Party, nor will such a movement be built in one election cycle. The struggle to end oligarchic rule will be hard and bitter. It will take time. It will require self-sacrifice, including sustained protest and going to jail. It will be rooted in class warfare. The oligarchs will stop at nothing to crush it. Open, nonviolent revolt against the oligarchic state is our only hope. Oligarchic rule must be destroyed. If we fail, our democracy, and finally our species, will become extinct.

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Class: The Little Word the Elites Want You to Forget - Truthdig

Were Melanie Phillips and Douglas Murray to hold the same kinds of views about Jews as they do about Muslims and transpeole, they would not have shared a stage at Jewish Book Week (JBW).

Had Phillips said it was the Jewish world that is given a free pass, had Murray called the whole antisemitism issue a delusion, the pair would be public enemy numbers one and two among British Jews.

As it was, our most prestigious cultural event welcomed them with open arms. Perhaps the same logic that distinguishes brown migrants from white expatriates turns those with unsavoury views into provocateurs.

Sharing the full story, not just the headlines

Welcoming the JBW audience on Tuesday night, Phillips acknowledged her and Murrays reputation as enfants terribles: The fact that both of us are on this platform, she told the packed-out auditorium, should warrant a trigger alert.

Phillips had been invited to interview Murray about his latest contribution to the culture wars, The Madness of Crowds. Yet when she opened with the most basic of questions why Murray had written the book there was little clarity. Speaking with all the fluency of a chocolate fountain recycling brown liquid, Murray suggested that certain subjects had become unsayable. What those subjects were, he was unable to say.

Murray was practising a skill that both he and Phillips have honed over the course of their careers: the ability to talk in a way that makes crystal clear what you think, without having to come out and say it. Murray would never openly state that he disdains trans people; instead he says that trans people too often top the news agenda and asserts that the notion that the basic facts of trans identity are complicated.

We are Jewish Solidarity Action (JSA), came a cry from the gallery. Solidarity with trans women! As the protesters were escorted from the auditorium, I thought perhaps ideas like Murray and Phillipss shouldnt be quietly listened to, but loudly protested. Perhaps the events quasi-intellectual framing was inviting us to seriously consider viewpoints that in my view should not be even momentarily entertained.

I stayed, but decided to confront the speakers after the event. Yet my impassioned spiel went out the window when I found myself drawn into a lively tete-a-tete with Phillips. I suppose well just have to agree to disagree! I chirruped. Here we were, at another stall in the marketplace of ideas, and here I was, buying Phillipss wares.

Sadly, the organisers response to the protest was to double down. Jewish Book Week has always been a platform for a diversity of voices, they tweeted last night, in response to JSAs action. We take pride in providing our audiences with the opportunity to hear and question different perspectives - including those they may not themselves share - on the topics that matter.

Yet Phillips and Murray are not simply right-wing thinkers with whom we might disagree. They are the polite faces of a dangerousideology.

Parleying in their plush armchairs, contemplating whether trans women are women and whether racism exists, the wolfishness of these sheep was entirely apparent to me. Yet to many in my community, it is not.

Part of the reason for this, I believe, is that both Murray and Phillips's thinking makes an exception for Jews Phillips for obvious reasons, Murray for less obvious ones (though Phillips joked that she suspected him a secret Jew).

Murray a man seemingly unbothered by some forms of prejudice has called antisemitism the vilest and most deadly prejudice of all. Why Murray is so appalled by antisemitism but not by Phillipss alleged Islamophobia is hard to say.

Phillips, meanwhile, complained at the event that identity politics produced a binary view of power: either one is a victim or a victimiser, but never both. I put to Phillips that this sounded a hell of a lot like a certain Jewish state. In an apparent volte-face, she asserted that this was a binary conflict, with Israel the victim, Palestinians the victimisers. For her own people, Phillips seemed willing to undermine her own argument.

This selective prejudice brings to mind a certain Boris Johnson, doling out bagels to Jews and insults to Muslims. Too many Jewish people have become happy to humour those who oppress others, so long as they dont doesnt oppress us.

This kind of political nimbyism is not just morally abhorrent it is dangerous short-sighted. A politics that targets one minority targets us all.

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The Jewish community should see Melanie Phillips and Douglas Murray for what they are wolves in sheep's clothing - The Independent

Several years back, the estimable Father Paul Scalia observed, of some cultural idiocy or other, Who knew the end of civilization would be so amusing?

I detected a subtle theological point within that mordant comment: a point worth reflecting upon during Lent. Christians are the people who know how history is going to turn outGod is, finally, going to get what God intended from the beginning, which is the Wedding Feast of the Lamb in the New Jerusalem. (The trailer, so to speak, is in Revelation 21.) So Christians can afford to relax a bit about the vicissitudes and traumas of history. To be sure, faith that Gods purposes in creation and redemption will ultimately be vindicated ought not lead to insouciance about here-and-now; we have responsibilities within history and we should take them seriously. But faith in the triumph of the Kingdom for which we pray daily should invite us to chill (as the kids used to say).

Thats what I did during a recent skirmish in the American culture wars, which erupted a few weeks back over a leaked memo suggesting that President Trump would issue an Executive Order creating a preference that federal courthouses and other federal buildings be designed in a classical style. There isnt much to laugh at along the Potomac these days. But the freak-out from the high priests and priestesses of the concrete-and-glass boxthe modernist architectural establishment and its acolytes in the mainstream mediawas (as I think the kids still say, at least in text messages) LOL.

The ever-more-ludicrous New York Times, in high editorial dudgeon, asked why the republic should be festooned with more fake Roman templesas if the Capitol, the Lincoln Memorial, the Jefferson Memorial, the West Building of the National Gallery of Art, and similar architectural masterpieces were a blight on the national aesthetic. Does the high priesthood of architectural modernism really want to defend such grotesqueries as the Robert H. Weaver Federal Building (headquarters of the Department of Housing and Urban Development), aptly described by a government worker as ten floors of basement? Or the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building, another concrete-and-glass eyesore that (as my friend Andrew Ferguson wrote) is even more obnoxious than its namesake? Or the Hirshhorn Museum, a concrete Bundt cake squatting on the National Mall?

Alas, these horrors are precisely what the modernist architectural establishment wants to defend, and continues to defend with some success: most recently, in ramming through the Frank Gehry design of the Eisenhower Memorial in the nations capital, a gargantuan nonsense better suited to the Berlin imagined by Albert Speer after the triumph of the Third Reich.

The idea of Donald Trump as a promoter of architectural classicism is not without its ironies, of course, given the designs of his own buildings. But as the good folks south of the Mason-Dixon Line have been known to observe, Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn every now and then. And in the current madhouse of American national politics, one takes with gratitude any signs of sanity one can get.

Modernist architectural fanaticism is not about aesthetics only. As critics like Tom Wolfe (From Bauhaus to Our House) and John Silber (Architecture of the Absurd) have demonstrated, the International Style, Brutalism, and the rest of the modernist canon embody a worldview and an anthropologyan idea of the human person. The worldview is resolutely secular and lacks any sense of transcendence. The anthropology is similar: Human beings are cogs in various machines, economic or political, and cogs need neither beauty nor uplift nor charm, only surroundings defined by the ultimate value of efficiency. (That a lot of modernist buildings dont work, rapidly decay, and require enormous sums to maintain compounds the problem even while underscoring the point: Dumbing down the human has its costs, including its financial costs.)

The modernist curse afflicted Catholic church architecture in the U.S. for a while, but that unhappy period is now passing. Marcel Breuers Brutalist-inspired abbey church at St. Johns in Minnesota was often considered the most important U.S. Catholic building of the mid-20th century. Compare it to Duncan Stroiks chapel at Thomas Aquinas College in California, which Id suggest is the most important U.S. Catholic building yet erected in the 21st century. Stroik, not Breuer, is the future, because the TAC chapels classicism and decorative beauty call us out of ourselves and into the Kingdom; the Breuer church depresses the spirit.

Back to the future, then, in both civic and ecclesiastical architecture.

George Weigelis Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington, D.C.s Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.

Photo by Ted Eytan via CreativeCommons. Image cropped.

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The Clerisy of the Concrete-and-Glass Box Freaks Out | George Weigel - First Things