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Not that many years ago, knowledgeable Argentines took a keen interest in the culture wars raging in Europe and North America, especially the ones which pitted leftists who defended the Soviet Union against those who drew attention to the criminal nature of the Communist regime. No doubt some still try to keep track of the ideological scuffles that are going on, but these days even the most fervent progressives find it hard to take seriously the issues that obsess presumably intelligent people in those parts of the world. Despite the efforts of Kirchnerites in search of a cause to import fashions that originated in the United States, the notion that replacing sexist vowels with a resolutely neutral X would help put an end to millennia of injustice has not made much headway, and Argentine sportsmen sorry, sportspeople have yet to make fighting racism by taking the knee an obligatory pre-match ritual.

This is just as well. Not only Argentines but a great many others, including Europeans and North Americans, have far more important things to worry about than pronouns (with their going where he or she used to be), or ones proper place in the hierarchy of victims of white supremacy which, according to almost everyone of note in the English-speaking world, including Joe Biden and his underlings, is behind almost everything that is bad. At a time in which entire categories of people are steadily being rendered surplus by technology-driven economic development and the gap between the well-off and the rest is getting wider, the lefts adoption of identity politics can be seen as an attempt by those at or near the top to persuade themselves and others that they owe their good fortune to their superior virtue, which is why they continually berate ordinary working-class folk for their crass refusal to see the light.

Reports from the culture-wars front certainly make strange reading. If you want to send North American or British politicians scurrying away in terror, all you have to do is aim a microphone and camera at them and ask: What is a woman? Confronted by that dreadful question in a Senate hearing before becoming a member of the US Supreme Court, Ketanji Brown Jackson spoke for many when she said there was no simple answer and, not being a biologist, she was unable to come up with a complicated one.

Like many others, the lady feared that if she provided a straightforward definition of womanhood she would be ferociously attacked by a very small but astonishingly influential minority of individuals who pretend to believe that any man can become a woman overnight if he so desires. Some crafty male sex offenders have exploited official willingness to believe such declarations in order to get sent to womens prisons where, to no great surprise, they have taken full advantage of the opportunities made available.

After failing to bring capitalism to its knees so it could be replaced by an economy micromanaged by bureaucrats, politicians and their hangers-on, opponents of the established order gave up that particular struggle to devote themselves to fighting against traditional beliefs and ways of doing things. After overrunning legal and social barriers that all but a handful of diehards agreed should be done away with, they mounted an assault on just about everything that somehow or other reminded them of a benighted past and went on to demand reparations for whatever indignities minorities of any kind had ever suffered. For a while, they carried all before them, but they are now meeting resistance from the many who accept that, imperfect though the society they live in undoubtedly is, it is still far better than almost any other, and, in any case, are sick and tired of seeing decent people lose their jobs after being accused of Orwellian wrong-think.

Among those pilloried by the neo-puritans of the relentlessly moralising woke brigade is the author of the Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling, who after making some perfectly sensible comments about the differences between men and women was bombarded with death threats and subjected to a campaign to hound her out of public life. As one of the wealthiest women on planet earth, she is able to withstand the abuse, but many other victims of cancellation culture have been less fortunate. People who decades ago wrote or said something that could, no matter how implausibly, be interpreted as sexist, anti-trans, imperialistic or racist have suddenly found themselves in the firing line. Even having a remote ancestor accused of such crimes can get you into trouble: the poet Ted Hughes was blacklisted, post-mortem, by the British Library after it was assumed that, as a relative of Nicholas Ferrar who was born in 1592, he had belonged to a family deeply involved in the slave trade. As it happened, Ferrar died childless and wrote a pamphlet attacking slavery.

This would be bad enough if it were merely part of a game of the kind undistinguished intellectuals like to play, but it is more than that. Affirmative action designed to compensate people of colour for what their forefathers endured is not only breeding resentment among whites and East Asians but is also encouraging advanced thinkers to look for a racial bias in mathematics and the hard sciences which according to them are manifestations of the European mind and therefore alien to people of a certain ethnic origins.

Similar prejudices are making themselves felt in other fields. For years, cultish enthusiasts for the idea that sex or gender is only a cultural construct so everyone is entitled to chose their own have been preying on adolescents to induce them to let themselves be pumped full of drugs and undergo reassignment surgery, often with tragic results for those who otherwise would have emerged unscathed from a bout of what specialists in what was, until quite recently, a marginal subject call gender dysphoria.

They are also raining blows on womens sports by insisting, with the support of people like Biden, that athletes who grew up as men, with all the physical advantages that gave them, but then transitioned, should be allowed to compete in them. Some who have done so have won the events they entered by quite ridiculous margins; this was to be expected as there are thousands of males who, if rebranded as females, could smash the world records set by women.

Just how all this will end is anybodys guess. Watching it with a mixture of satisfaction and concern are members of the Chinese politburo who, along with Vladimir Putin and his supporters, see it as a gratifying symptom of a Western death wish but fear that their own populations could catch the same disease. Perhaps it will prove to be just a passing phase. Unless it does, the future will be as bizarre as Aldous Huxley imagined in Brave New World and, perhaps, as oppressive as George Orwell predicted in 1984.

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Turning the world upside-down - Buenos Aires Times

On a breezy Sunday afternoon, Biola University is a postcard of serenity. A soft light filters through a small prayer chapel where a plain wooden cross stands in front. At its base someone has left a message on a scrap of paper.

For the record:

Correction: An earlier version of this story said students at Biola University sign Articles of Faith. Actually, prospective students sign a statement of faith when applying to Biola. Faculty and staff sign the universitys Articles of Faith.

Jesus, you are my guide, the joy of my heart, the author of my hope, the object of my love.

Ascetic and minimal, the room invites conversations with God. Wall niches contain similar handwritten notes.

I pray that you draw me back to you. Teach me what the weight of the cross means fully.

Biola is a private Christian university in La Mirada, whose mission is to equip its students in mind and character to impact the world for the Lord Jesus Christ. They know the work will be difficult. So much around them is thought to be sinful.

Jesus Im afraid. Your people have hurt me. My brothers and sisters in the church, betraying Black brothers & sisters with racism and hate on their lips. And Biola is no better.

Biola University in La Mirada pays tribute to its past with a trompe loeil hanging on the side of a campus parking structure that features an image of its founding institution, the Bible Institute of Los Angeles. Its Italian Renaissance high-rise featured two JESUS SAVES neon signs that were familiar landmarks in the citys skyline.

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

Biola has attempted to shelter its students and itself from the social and civil disturbances of recent years, but its efforts have been marginally successful. Like evangelical institutions across the country, the university is facing growing disillusionment among young Christians who believe their faith should be more progressive and socially minded.

They resent how politics has shadowed their relationship with God and believe that Christs lessons of humility, tolerance and love have been forgotten amid the Christian communitys embrace of the Big Lie, former President Trump and culture-war dog whistles such as LGBTQ restrictions and anti-mask and vaccination declarations.

Evangelicals are losing their young in epidemic numbers, said David Gushee, a nationally known pastor, ethicist and author of After Evangelicalism: A Path to a New Christianity. Smart, young minds rarely color within the lines, and if they cant ask questions and get decent answers, they will bail.

One of Southern Californias oldest religious colleges, Biola has seen its enrollment drop, has trimmed next years budget and is trying to stay relevant for students while not alienating faculty and alumni.

The tension, said Richard Flory, executive director of the USC Center for Religion and Civic Culture, helps us read what the future of evangelicalism in America might look like.

::

More than 100 years ago, Charles Darwin forced Christians to an uncomfortable reckoning over the Bible. Either creation took six days, God flooded the world, Jesus performed miracles and the prophecies are true, or none of that ever happened or ever will happen.

When Texas preacher Thomas Horton took the stage before 4,200 congregants in downtown Los Angeles on Easter 1915, he made clear that the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, founded seven years earlier, stood for Scripture without error or misstatement.

We believe in the old Bible and the whole Bible and have no confidence in anyone who seeks to unsettle this belief, he said.

Hortons charisma, together with the money and zeal of Lyman Stewart, co-founder of Union Oil Co., helped spread fundamentalism around the world.

Their success led to the construction of an Italian Renaissance high-rise with twin 13-story dormitories for fledging theologians. Its two rooftop, neon-red JESUS SAVES signs were landmarks in the citys skyline for decades.

But as fundamentalism spread, it was challenged. In 1925 during the Scopes monkey trial, when a Tennessee jury convicted a high school teacher of introducing evolution to his classroom, its anti-science stance was ridiculed.

Biola College, later known as Biola University, opened in 1959. The Bible Institute of Los Angeles developed the campus in La Mirada with the fundraising help of evangelist Billy Graham.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

By the 1940s, Christians began turning toward evangelicalism, a less dogmatic version of the faith, and in that spirit, the Bible Institute of Los Angeles opened Biola College (later Biola University) in 1959. Evangelist Billy Graham helped with the $3-million fundraising drive.

Today students can take classes in criminology, physics, accounting, gender studies and cinema. They sign a statement of faith during the application process, and each year faculty sign Articles of Faith pledging allegiance to the truth of Scripture as it articulates Gods vision for humanity and prescribes a course for living in this broken world.

University President Barry Corey quotes Isaiah to rebuild the ancient ruins and raise up the age-old foundations in arguing that Biola graduates are ready to make the necessary repairs.

Our students whether they are screenwriters or accountants, policy wonks or research nerds are Gospel witnesses, Corey said. We want their vocations and lives to be a reflection of their Christian faith and a longing for others to know the redeeming love of Jesus.

But some students and faculty wonder if that is enough.

::

It grieves me deeply when students dont feel like they are welcome here.

Biola University President Barry Corey

To argue that the Bible is without error means more than accepting its origin stories. It means accepting that the problems of the world derive from Adams sin and can be solved only by Christ. For some that means the Second Coming.

As dean of faculty for the theology school, Scott Rae, said last year about climate change: Our best hope for the planet is that Gods coming back to reclaim it and to set things right and to heal what had been previously broken.

Rae qualifies that statement (Im not suggesting we passively wait, he said; we have responsibility now), but the role of Christs return has divided the evangelical community especially as it wrestles over its response to oppression and injustice in American society.

For some Christians, the path ahead is simple: Pray, proselytize and prepare your hearts. For others, fixing and reforming the world cant wait.

Earlier this year, Biola University hosted its annual three-day conference focusing on the schools missionary work and designed to ignite students hearts for the glory of God. Inspirational notes were given a public forum.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Handwritten notes fill niches in the walls of a small prayer chapel on the Biola campus. The messages celebrate a love for Jesus and the word of God and express more intimate worries and concerns.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

The party line, said one Biola professor who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity out of concern of reprisal, is that Jesus died for your sins and to have a personal relationship with Jesus is to have eternal life. Anything else is a distraction. But we think the Gospel is also about bringing healing, restoration, justice and love to a broken world.

The debate has taken on red and blue hues.

In some parts of the university, there is a flowering of a more progressive, justice-oriented Christianity, said a colleague who also asked not to be identified. In other parts, there is pushback, a fear of a liberal Christianity that strays from Biolas conservative roots.

Dissent is hard to find at a university known for its culture of niceness. Yet fractures are conspicuous.

Not long after the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, the opinion editor for Biolas student-run news site called on millennials and Gen Z to help guide Christians away from their support of the Trump presidency.

That editor, Evana Upshaw, cited Scripture to argue that, just as Moses encouraged the Israelites entering the promised land not to repeat the sins of earlier generations, young Christians need to chart a new course toward hope and healing.

Our faith, now synonymous with unwavering support for Donald Trump, is causing many to question how Christians could sell out women, immigrants, Black people, Indigenous people, people of color, the LGBTQ+ community and the poor for the sake of political power, she wrote, concluding that Gen Z sees the hypocrisy of Christians today. ... Its time to pass the torch.

Reaction was quick. Readers, commenting online, branded the piece as propaganda, racist and trash, riddled with unfounded assumption and presumption.

When the faculty advisor asked Upshaw, who identifies as Black/biracial, to start publishing more conservative opinions, she felt sidelined.

I didnt want to fight it. I felt like I was the only one giving Black issues a voice, and I was exhausted, said Upshaw, who eventually transferred to another university.

Race, as much as politics, cuts through campus life at Biola. In 2020, during Black History Month, posters of African American leaders were defaced with a racial slur, and the university held a lament session for students to talk about discrimination on campus.

Corey acknowledges that polarization and the toxic nature of the culture have found their way to Biola.

It grieves me deeply when students dont feel like they are welcome here, he said. Were in the business of helping students think deeply and express themselves in a reasonable, civil and humble manner, but this is taking more work than it did 15 years ago.

With a mixed student body (43% white, 20% Latino, 15% Asian and 3% Black, with the rest identifying as other races and ethnicities), some argue that if Biola wanted to create a more inclusive culture, it would remove the 30-foot-tall Jesus mural on the side of the art building.

Completed in 1990 by L.A.-based artist Kent Twitchell, the bearded figure in a red robe overlooking the student union has long been controversial. Eyes peering skyward, he holds a leather-bound Bible.

The image is not only historically inaccurate, but it enables and reinforces dangerous racist ideas of white power, white supremacy and white saviorism, alumna Brianna Eng wrote in a letter to the university last year. Since graduating in 2018, Eng has lobbied for its removal.

Completed in 1990 by muralist Kent Twitchell, The Word is a 30-foot-tall portrait of Christ overlooking the student union. The image is controversial for students who question its historical accuracy and believe it reinforces concepts of white power and white saviorism.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Corey is accustomed to defending the mural, arguing that it is a source of important conversations on our campus about where we are and how to move forward.

But Megumi Nakazawa wishes the conversations were more robust. Nakazawa, 20, who will be a senior this fall, grew up overseas and was not prepared for the contradiction she found in American life between Christian values and their application.

She cited the shootings of Asian women by a white Christian man last year in Georgia and the difficulty some people had acknowledging race as a factor in the killings.

That was when I started to think of Christianity as causing more harm than good, she said, and the argument from the pulpit that the most Christians can do to improve the world is make sure their hearts are in the right place sounded empty.

We talk about theological principles of justice, Nakazawa said, but it is not applied to whats happening outside of campus.

::

When former Biola professor Lisa Swain considers the division on campus, she is reminded of the schism that emerged last year within the countrys largest evangelical denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention.

The debate focused in part on the question of racial diversity after Christian symbols and Scripture were appropriated by white nationalists.

It begs the question of what it means to be evangelical, Swain said, and who gets to decide.

A larger conversation, Swain said, is taking place within the Christian community over the role of authority. By claiming to know Gods intentions, institutions such as Biola signal a greater interest in protecting power rather than grace.

To relax its power, Biola would have to acknowledge different interpretations of Scripture, she said, and give students an opportunity to apply faith to their lives as they see fit.

Ethicist Gushee wonders if Biola can afford this stance. Christian universities, he said, are being watched by heavy hitters in the evangelical world who will quickly call out any institution that they believe is straying.

Straying has consequences at tuition-dependent institutions such as Biola, where undergraduate enrollment has fallen 18% from 2014 to 2021 and $5 million has been cut from next years budget. These declines are mostly related to the pandemic but give benefactors and donors additional leverage over the universitys future.

Corey, the university president, has made it clear that Biola will not veer from its original mission.

For Biola, faithfulness into our strongest years to come will be possible if, and only if, we do not forsake what our founders gave us, he wrote last September, signaling commitment to the universitys fundamentalist roots.

Some wonder if this stance might help explain the departure over the last two years of 46 faculty members, especially women and those of color.

Rae, the theology school dean, defends Coreys commitment to Biolas original mission and expresses no interest in Biola becoming the equivalent of a Cal State University school, but with a veneer of Christianity.

What we have seen, Rae said, is that schools who have doubled down on their original identity and committed to biblical faithfulness are the ones whose enrollments are actually growing.

The recent appointment of Matthew Hall as provost seems to confirm this intention.

Hall, formerly with the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, questions critical race theory, believes church is far more consequential to eternity than any earthly political development and argues that adherence to biblical truth will reward not just students and faculty but also donors.

Gushee is not surprised the university would follow this course.

Conservative Christian universities play a kind of trick here, he said. They say they are returning to their founding principles, but their responses are remarkably similar to whatever conservative Republican politics looks like at a given moment.

Right now, he added, that is culture wars-oriented, white reactionary politics, and if this reactionary politics shuts down urgent educational discussions, it is the students who lose.

::

Frustrated by Biolas doctrinal rigidity, a group of students and alumni gathers Sunday evenings off campus to listen to one another and share their doubts and concerns about Christian faith. They call themselves the St. Thomas Collective.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Frustrated by the universitys doctrinal rigidity, some current and former Biola students are having their own theological discussions. They gather two miles off campus at a United Methodist Church every other Sunday with the belief that faith is more than an either/or proposition.

They call themselves the St. Thomas Collective for the apostle who questioned the resurrection until the crucified Jesus stood before him. Christian in spirit, nondenominational in practice, they want to provide what they havent found at Biola: a nonjudgmental space for open inquiry.

The group started in 2016, initially meeting in a garage to voice their questions and doubts and wild ideas. They currently have up to 50 members at large.

This is the community that Biola should be trying to hold on to, USCs Flory said. Most young people dont care about religion, but if you have young people trying to grapple with their faith so they can make sense of it, given the world they experience you should listen to them.

On a recent Sunday, nine members sat in a semicircle in front of the altar sipping tea and munching Oreos.

A senior majoring in Christian ministries, Jaloni Wilson Ford recently attended a meeting of the St. Thomas Collective for the first time. From an early age, his path to becoming a pastor seemed clear, but he now has his doubts.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

From an early age, my family told me I was going to be a pastor, said Jaloni Wilson Ford, 22, a senior majoring in Christian ministries. All that I did was to lead me to God, but over the last five years, Ive done a 180- or at least a 90-degree turn, questioning traditional understandings of God.

Most grew up in their parents church. They said prayers before each meal, read the Bible at night and understood that they were being kept safe from the world. Now they were stepping out on their own.

When I got to Biola, I saw a lack of consistency between the biblical values of loving your neighbor and the way many students treat and talk about others on campus, said Brandon Hall, 22, a senior majoring in human biology.

They hold no ill will toward Biola and are not ready to leave the university. But Samantha Smith, who graduated in 2019 with a degree in psychology, remembers feeling alone and frustrated as a student.

Professors had their cookie-cutter answers, she said, and friends told her how wonderful God is. Everybody was on the Jesus train, where the choices were either hop on or burn.

When Sophie Byerly arrived at Biola three years ago, she wondered if she had made the right decision to attend the university. Each day felt like a test among those who could profess their faith as the most on fire for God. Her faith practice was more quiet, more questioning, which drew her to the St. Thomas Collective.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Sophie Byerly, 21, a junior majoring in music therapy, started at Biola three years ago, and each day felt like a test among those who could profess to be the most on fire for God.

Her practice was more quiet. As a teenager, she aspired to be the radically good person that Jesus wanted his disciples to be. Now she is trying to decide whether or not to believe in Christianity.

Originally posted here:
Column One: CRT, Trumpism and doubt roil Biola University. Is this the future of evangelical Christianity? - Los Angeles Times

by Allison S. Finkelstein

Womens Overseas Service League Seattle Unit members on the 50th Anniversary of Armistice, November 11, 1968. From left to right: Mrs. Edna Lord (American RedCross), Mrs. I.M. (Anna) Palmaw (Army Nurse Corps), Miss Rose Glass (YMCA), and Miss Blanche Wenner (YMCA). Womens Overseas Service League Collection, National WWI Museum and Memorial Archives, Kansas City, Missouri.

The past several years of domestic debate over the roles and meanings of memorials on the American landscape can be enriched by looking to the example of female commemorators of the past. Todays conversations tend to focus on statues and other artistic works. By learning about an overlooked cohort of American women who served in World War I, we can find inspiration for creative memorialization projects that will expand our understandings of memorials beyond physical statues and monuments.

In the decades after World War I, American women who served or sacrificed during that conflict championed memorial projects that prioritized community service over statues. Their efforts can provide a blueprint for how to change our approach to memorialization, should we care to look for it. Examining their philosophy can yield the untapped wisdom of a generation of activists, mothers, civic leaders, and unrecognized female veterans.

The women who pursued this unconventional approach to memorialization had contributed to the war effort in a variety of ways. Some had directly supported the military through service in wartime organizations, both at home and abroad. Others had suffered extreme sacrifices. In their number were Gold Star mothers and widows who lost a child or husband. The larger community of female veterans embraced these women as their own and honored them as having served the nation just as much as male veterans.

These women banded together and put service at the center of their commemorative work. They coordinated their efforts through new organizations such as the Womens Overseas Service League (WOSL), which represented the interests of the thousands of American women who served overseas during the war.[i] Instead of monuments, the WOSL concentrated their memorialization projects on aiding people impacted by the war, whether male or female. They felt obligated to help the male veterans they served during wartime, but they also supported their own community, particularly civilian women excluded from veteran status. [ii] In the absence of government support for them, the WOSL served as their advocates and benefactors.

Although these projects included no constructed components, the WOSL defined them as memorials. In 1923, WOSL President Louise Wells wrote that in her organization, there was an overwhelming sentiment to the effect that for the present at least our best memorial to the dead would be our service to the living.[iii] WOSL members repeated this mantra as they pushed for a radical reinterpretation of memorials focused on service. Instead of spending their limited resources on statues or memorial buildings, they funded what Wells had identified in 1923 as a more pressing need: projects to help disabled ex-service women.[iv] For the WOSL, these were the most important memorials they could ever create.

During World War I, gender-based restrictions on military service meant that many American women served as civilians outside of the official armed forces, even when they worked directly for the military, in uniform and under oath. As a result, the government did not consider them to be veterans. They could not receive veterans benefits such as medical care, even for illnesses and injuries that stemmed from their wartime service. The WOSL took it upon themselves to aid these women, who included the telephone operators known as the Hello Girls, the Reconstruction Aides who worked as physical and occupational therapists, and others.[v] Among numerous initiatives, the WOSL established the Fund for Disabled Overseas Women to provide financial aid to women disqualified from government veterans medical benefits.[vi]

Despite only achieving limited success during their lifetime, both in their quest for veteran status and their attempt to change commemorative practices, these womens experiences provide powerful lessons for today. Their wartime service offers examples of how women supported the armed forces even before they could fully and equally enter all branches of the military. By identifying as veterans, they compel us to question the definition of a veteran and to consider that those who serve outside of the ranks may also be veterans in their own right.

Through their memorialization projects, the unrecognized female veterans of World War I offer alternatives to traditional memorials. They pioneered a selfless form of commemoration that memorialized the past by helping those in the present. What if we also sometimes chose this method? How much time and money would we save if, instead of debating the next memorial on the national mall, we pursued a commemorative service project? How many people could we help if we directed even just a portion of funds for memorials into service projects alongside them? Recently, we have seen how problematic permanent memorials can be. Foregoing them for intangible memorials could save future generations from further culture wars. As the nation grapples with this current reckoning over memorialization, we can learn much from the American women of the World War I generation who prioritized the needs of the living over bronze and stone.

[i] Helene M. Sillia, Lest We Forget: A History of the Womens Overseas Service League (privately published, 1978), 1, 218; Allison S. Finkelstein, Forgotten Veterans, Invisible Memorials: How American Women Commemorated the Great War, 1917-1945 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2021), 70; Susan Zeiger, In Uncle Sams Service: Women Workers with the American Expeditionary Force, 19171919 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 2; Dorothy Schneider and Carl J. Schneider, Into the Breach: American Women Overseas in World War I (New York: Viking Adult, 1991), 287-289. Estimates of how many American women served overseas in WWI vary widely. Zeiger estimated there were at least sixteen thousand, while Sillia estimated about ninety thousand. Dorothy Schneider and Carl J. Schneider argued that twenty-five thousand seemed like a realistic, conservative figure.

[iii] Finkelstein, Forgotten Veterans, Invisible Memorials, 70; Louise Wells to Mabel Boardman, June 19, 1923, box 428, folder 481.73, Memorials-Inscriptions, RG 200, National Archives, College Park (NACP).

[iv] Finkelstein, Forgotten Veterans, Invisible Memorials, 70; Louise Wells to Mabel Boardman, June 19, 1923, box 428, folder 481.73, Memorials-Inscriptions, RG 200, NACP.

[v] Finkelstein, Forgotten Veterans, Invisible Memorials, 7-8, 39-40; Zeiger, In Uncle Sams Service, 170-171; Elizabeth Cobbs, The Hello Girls: Americas First Women Soldiers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 73, 78, 83, 94, 102, 104-105, 133; Lena Hitchcock, The Great Adventure, V, Box 240, The Womens Overseas Service League Records, MS 22, University of Texas at San Antonio Libraries Special Collections.

[vi] Finkelstein, Forgotten Veterans, Invisible Memorials, 34-36.

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"Our Best Memorial to the Dead Would be Our Service to the Living" - History News Network

Why do Putin and the Republican Party sound so much alike?

Simple: Their culture wars have similar agendas.

Both are trying to distract attention from the economic looting by their respective oligarchies.

Vladimir Putin has been blasting so-called cancel culture.

This was his third cancel culture rant in recent months. Its the same imaginary crisis that Trump and the GOP have been ranting about for several years.

Tucker Carlson, one of Fox Newss most infamous personalities, accuses liberals of trying to cancel all sorts of things.

Last fall, Putin argued that teaching children about different gender identities was, quote, on the verge of a crime against humanity. Putins fixation on LGBTQ people is also echoed on the American right.

Republican state legislators are attacking trans people and restricting discussion of gender and sexual orientation in schools. And in Texasstate attorney general Ken Paxton likened kids getting gender-affirming medical care to child abuse.

While Putins MO has been to fuel Russian ethnic pride and nationalism, Americas right wing has been fueling white nationalism.

To conclude from all of this that authoritarians think alike misses a deeper truth. Putin, Trump, Carlson, and Americas right wing have been promoting the same narrative for the same reason: Manufacturing fears of the other to distract from where all the wealth and power have goneall the way to the top.

Remember, Putin was put into power by a Russian oligarchy made fabulously rich by siphoning off and privatizing the wealth of the former Soviet Union.

Likewise, Trump and the radical right in America have been bankrolled by an American oligarchy Rupert Murdoch, Charles Koch, Rebekah Mercer, Peter Thiel, and other billionaires.

Sowing racism, homophobia, and transphobia creates life-or-death dangers for many people in our society. For both Putin and the American right, it serves to divert attention from the economic plunder by the ultra-rich.

They want people to fear one another rather than unite behind higher wages, better working conditions, and a fairer economy and against authoritarianism.

To fight back, we must fight widening inequality while defending marginalized communities from these demagogues attacks. The real threat is not diverse identities its corporate greed and political corruption.

We have to see the culture wars waged by Putin and Americas right for the cynical strategies they are, and build a future in which prosperity is widely shared.

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Reich: What the GOP culture war is really about - Minnesota Reformer

If dispassionate debate of ideas is the theoretical means by which policy is formed in liberal democracies, in these increasingly hostile and desperate conditions of late capitalism, culture war has become the reality. By culture war, we mean the polarisation of debate, the Othering of opponents, the use of wedge issues loaded with any number of unspoken prior assumptions to hijack debates, and the adoption of a permanent victim complex.

The latter in particular is conspicuous for its intimate ties to an associated conspiratorial mentality that sees the world in terms of us and them, and alleges our way of life to be under siege from an endless parade of what H.L Mencken once referred to as hobgoblins, most of them imaginary. The function of mostly imaginary hobgoblins, he noted, was to provide a means with which rulers might menace the populace, who, thus alarmed, would be clamorous to be led to safety.

Historian Charles Tilly describes this kind of politics as that associated with official protection rackets. In exploring the business models of empire-builders, he noted that rulers often resembled racketeers: at a price, they offered protection against evils that they themselves would otherwise inflict, or at least allow to be inflicted. The endless parade of imaginary hobgoblins was necessary to the proper functioning of the business model; as long as they could be found or invented, the panicked clamour for national security would override and neutralise dispassionate judgement.

In his comments to US psychologist Gustave Gilbert while awaiting trial at Nuremberg, Nazi second in command Hermann Gring admitted as much, in as close as any of them ever came to a mea culpa;

Naturally, the common people dont want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America nor, for that matter, in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship. [V]oice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

In reflecting on this truism of politics for the conditions of 2022, we might observe that the exact same remains true of the culture war. It certainly might be seen to be no coincidence whatsoever that his ideological progeny are its instigatorsno small irony in light of their deep investment in victimhood identity politics, and general tendency to be the root cause of social and ideological conflict by virtue of habitually conflating being criticised and being attacked.

In this instance, we are being told that civilisation is under attack from woke leftists who want to weaken toxic masculinity and the collective narcissism of elite ingroupism by allowing traditionally marginalised and oppressed groups to share in the privileges that they have always taken for granted. The old wine of xenophobia and hatred of immigrants and refugees is repackaged in new bottles of the Great Replacement Theory, as the downtrodden looking to throw the boot off their necks are said to be stealing pieces from the rights pie, or swamping the lifeboat as the world cooks (no mention of course as to why the world is cooking or who might be behind it).

Where might these culture war fairy tales be coming from? We know that Christian fundamentalist Patrick Buchanan gave a speech during the 1992 Republican National Convention on the culture war with feminists, environmentalists and various other heretics associating structures of power with the rule of evil (as per John 12:31), alleging that

There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself . . . The agenda [Bill] Clinton and [Hillary] Clinton would impose on Americaabortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat unitsthats change, all right. But it is not the kind of change America wants. It is not the kind of change America needs. And it is not the kind of change we can tolerate in a nation that we still call Gods country.

Notable in this commentary is the conflation by the Christian Taliban of America with the values of religious fundamentalists, in defiance of the doctrine of separation of powers as well as any notion that religious values might be the basis for how we as individuals choose to live our lives, and not as an excuse to police the morality of everyone else. The supreme irony of this fact is evident in the tendency of culture warriors like Pat Buchanan, and others like him, to accuse his critics of policing morality, when they make it the stated lynchpin of their entire worldview.

This, however, does not stop dark-money funded, far-right corporate think-tanks like the Heartland Institute from crowing that Americas newest religion is secular, and its zealous missionaries are focusing their efforts on the countrys youth, in articles with titles like Woke Evangelists Spread the Gospel. Psychological projection of this kind only ultimately feeds the impression that the Heartland Institute, and the neo-aristocratic class of transnational corporate oligarchs and kleptocrats they represent, only find single-minded fanaticism problematic when it doesnt operate in their favour.

In everyday usage, the Woke Conspiracy feeds the demonisation of the Left as a monolithic entity of global and totalitarian proportionsmuch like the aforesaid transnational corporate oligarchs and kleptocrats in fact. In everyday usage, it gives rise to the whinging politics of the perpetual victim, who appear not to be able to tell the difference either between being criticised and being attacked, or between opinions and facts.

Asserting the right to an opinion in defiance and militant ignorance of facts they dont like becomes the go-to tactic of choice of every authoritarian and defender of injustice in shutting down discussion of facts they dont like, and dont want to have to acknowledge. This becomes the basis for the culture war conspiracy theory surrounding Critical Race Theorythat talking about historical racism, acknowledging it exists and attempting to do something about it is divisive (in this it figures that the problematising of critical thinking should pass entirely under the radar also).

The war on historical knowledge and consciousness implicit in the conspiricism surrounding the paranoid suspiciousness and hostility towards Critical Race Theory is useful as any other facet of culture war wedge politics in shifting blame for social conflict, oppression and injustice to the victims and sweeping the divisive nature of racism as a matter of definition under the rugalong with the class hierarchies they help to uphold through age-old divide and conquer the vassals strategies of imperial overlordship.

Meanwhile the burgeoning corporate theocracy makes no effort to challenge the divisiveness of white supremacist Great Replacement conspiracism; insurgent fundamentalism and totalitarianism benefits from this kind of woke, virtue-signalling evangelism, in all its vacant, pretentious moralism and double standards. It likewise benefits from the reversal of the democratic onus on power to justify itself to the individual, which is a threat to corporate powerwhich has never had to justify its own existence democratically, and is clearly threatened by the potential of political democracy to present challenges to, and limit the haughty power of, economic autocracy.

As Noam Chomsky has noted in the past, corporations are internally totalitarian power structures that replicate the absolutist hierarchies abolished in the political sphere by democratic revolutions hundreds of years ago. As the anarcho-syndicalist Rudolf Rocker presciently observed, liberal democracy was shipwrecked on the rocks of class hierarchy; so long as one class monopolised wealth, resources and control over the means of production, democracy ended as soon as one stepped over the threshold at work.

And so it has always been; indeed, no less than the Father of the Constitution, James Madison, argued during the 1787 Constitutional Convention that the proper role of governments out to be to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. In this was borne out the truth of the graffiti of the French rebels of May 1968, to the effect that those who make half a revolution dig their own graves.

The point here was that, in not addressing underlying economic autocracy, or instituting economy democracy at the same time, the door was left open for growing economic monopoly power to consume political democracy from within. Such fears are being borne out in the emergence of culture wars as a way of shoving the kind of ideological conformity necessary to the protection of the minority of the opulent from the majority down the throats of the population in the name of preventing it; the imaginary hobgoblins aid the construction of new empires and new fascist protection rackets.

Corporate dark money-funded think tanks with millions of dollars exist to innovate on conspiracy theories necessary for explaining why transnational corporatism, the enslavement and destruction of the planet, and protecting the minority of the opulent against the majority is the fault of anyone who notices. In demonstrating the great value of conspiricism to the project of defending the minority of the opulent from the majority, we come back full circle to Menckens observations about the whole aim of practical politics being to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary, and Tillys observations about empire-builders operating on a standover racket business model.

The difference here is that the biggest ones have a coat of arms and their own marching bandand, thanks to corporate capture of governments, a trademark in being wholly owned subsidiaries of Wall St titans like Goldman Sachs and Blackrock. Under the late capitalist culture-war driven protection racket, we can enjoy Democracy and Civilisation freed from the totalitarian yoke of critical thinking, historical consciousness and political dissent. The protection of the minority of the opulent against the majority is at least completein the name of the defence of the majority from a minority, no less.

Such was a characteristic feature of the dark days of global moral panic during the so-called War on Terrorism, the dark decades of moral panic over communism during the Cold War, and the dark centuries of moral panic over Brides of Satan during the European Witch-hunts. Each of these periods of ideologically-induced hysteria was based on a conspiracy theory that fed into a standover racket business model of political and class control; each aided empire-building, the smashing of resistance, rebellion and dissent, and the protection of the minority of the opulent from the majority, as per the prescription of the author of the US Constitution.

This latest iteration of the oldest trick in the book is absolutely nothing new. While claiming to defend democracy, the totalitarian corporate insurgency habitually conflates, as we have seen, individual freedom and privilege. It reverses the democratic burden of proof, such that critics of totalitarianism from the left, in both its corporate and religiously fundamentalist forms, are made out to be attacking individual rightswhile a culture-war powered corporate and theocratic totalitarian insurgency attacks them in fact.

As the memory of any vestige of democratic culture is increasingly relegated to the Orwellian memory hole in the name of a bastardised interpretation of freedom identified with corporate totalitarianism and racial, gender and class supremacy (Libertarianism), it merits reflecting on what democracy actually means. If democracy places burden of proof in power to justify itself to the individual, this also means that our individual freedoms end where other peoples begin, and that individual freedom means doing what you want as long as you respect the equal rights of others. Defending class and social privilege on the other handprotecting the minority of the opulent from the majoritymean doing what you want irrespective of the consequences for anyone else.

In the face of these normative truisms of democracy, the project of corporate supremacism and fascist totalitarianism must habitually conflate defence of individual freedom and the project of defending the minority of the opulent from the majority, under pain of taking any responsibility for the abuses of capitalism historically, the great crimes against humanity associated with its origins in history, and the injustice and oppressiveness and class and other hierarchies. For the same reasons, it must habitually conflate being criticised and being attacked.

This accounts for why the willing executioners of the New Order of Liberty in Gods Country are as intolerant of points of view they dont like as everything they claim to oppose (but use as a pretext to justify their own cultishness, toxicity and totalitarianism). The Woke Conspiracy is not about being heard, it is about shutting down critical thinking, heterodoxy and dissent. It is about silencing history and keeping the traditionally marginalised and oppressed. It enables a tantrum, now raised to the level of ideology, that the wheels are falling off the bandwagon of capitalist individualism.

To those who have traditionally benefitted from class hierarchy and institutional structures of exploitation, oppression and extractivism, the clamour of the downtrodden for an equal share or rights must be as daunting as the innumerable signs of impending social, economic and ecological collapse. In the face of this great dilemma, the Woke Conspiracy myth provides a mechanism for ideological acting out, and for cruelty theatre supremely evident in the toxic scaremongering and hate-targeting of major news outlets like Fox News.

With demagogues like Tucker Carlson at the forefront, cruelty theatre turns sadistic victimisation of anyone in the way of the bandwagon of accumulation into righteous vengeance for defiance of the money cult and its standover racket business model of class domination and tribute-extortion. Cruelty theatre makes attacking witnesses to the criminality of the mob bosses of institutional standover rackets a righteous exercise in defence of the tribal ingroupeven if the tribe drinks from the poisoned chalice of collusion with corporate totalitarianism, the proverbial deal with the devil.

Making a deal with the devil does, however, always guarantees betrayalin this instance, not least of which being used as an enabler for the big accumulation party for the minority of the opulent while they try to make an endless-growth economy work on a finite planet. As the vanguard of the class warfare of the minority of the opulent, collectively narcissistic culture warriors neither know nor care about the consequences of their tyranny for the majority. Their whole worldview is, and always has been, devoted to naturalising slavery, while denaturalising the slaves.

As billionaire Warren Buffett quite openly admits, Theres class warfare, all right, but its my class, the rich class, thats making war, and were winning. While they perpetrate class warfare, cooking the planet in the process, the minority of the opulent making class war and winning remain very deeply invested in victimhood identityso deeply as to distinguish neither between criticism and attack, individual rights and class privilege, nor personal spirituality and ethics and the policing of morality while claiming to oppose it.

This perpetual victimhood feeds the conspiracist mentality that the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didnt exist (Charles Baudelaire). In contrast to this mentality, the demonstrable fact of culture war conspiracism, as a means for protecting the minority of the opulent from the majority is that the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he was a God, and questioning his authority was giving aid to the Devil. The Woke Conspiracy does, after all, presume to defy Gods Country.

It is almost as through the most dangerous minority looking to replace democracy with the tyranny of spongers and freeloaders looking to be kept, while they pull the will over the eyes of the populace, is the opulent. It is the minority of the opulent who have motive, means and opportunity to perpetrate class control through an ideological standover racket, parading an endless succession of hobgoblins in front of the public and make everyone clamorous to be lead to safety, trading freedom for security.

The root claim of culture war conspiracism over the Woke Left holds that all opinions are equally valid on the one hand, and that opinions and facts carry the same weight on the other. This functions ultimately to silence debate, suppress history and protect the minority of the opulent by preferencing opinions defiant of debate, history and a distinction between facts and opinions, criticism and attack, and social and class privilege and individual freedom.

Similarly, valuing individual voices means valuing ones we dont like, and having the capacity to be contradicted. Every ideology across the spectrum has the capacity to silence dissent in the name of protecting society from external threats. The logic of if you think for yourself, the communists win, works just as well as if you think for yourself, the enemies of communism win. Both logics work equally well again recast as if you think for yourself, the terrorists win, if you think for yourself, the satan-worshippers win, and if you think for yourself, the critical race theorists win.

Strong, self-contained individuals know that freedom means survival, not victimhood; that our troubles and traumas dont define who we are. Capture-bonded slaves within class structures of inherited, perpetual class privilege, on the other hand, and slaves to the property they have invested their identities in, need to define themselves by their alleged troubles and traumas in order to justify their victimisation of others. As in the case of culture warriors like Pat Buchanan accusing their critics of policing morality, when they make it the centrepiece of their entire purpose in life, the great irony of this project of perpetrating culture war in defence of the minority of the opulent from the majority is that they embody everything they claim to oppose.

Read more here:
Culture Wars Defend the Minority of the Opulent From the Majority - CounterPunch