tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8746692.post8728972547624440200..comments2024-03-29T02:03:49.151-04:00Comments on History Unfolding: The new ideologyDavid Kaiserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05020082243968071584noreply@blogger.comBlogger12125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8746692.post-54572185019062046482021-03-28T14:27:36.747-04:002021-03-28T14:27:36.747-04:00Professor
"Now I believe that slavery was th...Professor<br /><br />"Now I believe that slavery was the original sin of the American colonies and the young American Republic, and that its impact persists in many ways to this day..." DK <br /><br />For those white Westerners who say they are guilty of original sin against all negroes, then there are about 2 billion Africans and Western Hemisphere mulattoes combined who now believe, after The 1619 Project, and the globalization of BLM, that they gotcha.<br /><br />They are right.<br /><br />All the best,<br /><br />Bozonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18078858723231122013noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8746692.post-70940533548507150772021-03-02T19:27:44.013-05:002021-03-02T19:27:44.013-05:00Professor
Cannot resist firing another round.
Dy...Professor<br /><br />Cannot resist firing another round.<br /><br />Dylan Matthews, at VOX, whose article you also had quite properly pilloried, had claimed that we should never have broken away from Britain in the first place, for all Dylan Matthews' own BLM reasons.<br /><br />It seems to me that Glaucon X and Dylan Matthews might make common cause together.<br />My reference to Jefferson must strike a resonant chord with them both!<br /><br />All the bestBozonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18078858723231122013noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8746692.post-65926770448551339052021-02-07T12:23:11.284-05:002021-02-07T12:23:11.284-05:00Professor
Great stuff.
I am trying to stay out of ...Professor<br />Great stuff.<br />I am trying to stay out of the line of fire, but still snipe.<br /><br />Regarding the whole American Enterprise, re which monumens:<br /><br />Re Jefferson's commercial interests, in particular, not that they were especially exceptional, I would refer readers to a nice, short, article in Smithsonian Magazine, Henry Wiencek, "Unmasking Thomas Jefferson", October 2012, p. 40.<br /><br />All the best.Bozonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18078858723231122013noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8746692.post-2793161250234521342021-02-07T09:41:34.600-05:002021-02-07T09:41:34.600-05:00Gloucon X, neither I nor most of the historians I ...Gloucon X, neither I nor most of the historians I know have ever tried or wanted to exclude people who fought against slavery, segregation or imperialism--or Indians trying to defend themselves--from American history. As for Confderate monuments, I too believe they should be taken down--the Confederates, like the San Francisco activists, rejected the whole American enterprise as reflected in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Meanwhile, thanks for providing an excellent example of the kind of thinking I was talking about.David Kaiserhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05020082243968071584noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8746692.post-32402319731538434032021-02-03T17:23:53.756-05:002021-02-03T17:23:53.756-05:00Unfortunately, your reaction to these events exude...Unfortunately, your reaction to these events exudes an attitude that American history is white male territory, with other views regarded as acts of trespass. The SF school district is 87% non-white. Is it a crisis that a handful of school districts with similar demographics out of more than 13,000 decide to rename their buildings to honor people who didn’t have anything to do with slavery, segregation, imperialism, or the slaughter of Native Americans?<br /> <br />As a historian, shouldn’t you welcome a broadening of historical knowledge that includes Americans who fought against those evils? Most white people hardly know that such people existed. They existed, so let’s name some buildings after them. I say too bad if it shocks the feelings of Fox News bigots who want to keep their own tribal monuments to murderous white supremacist Confederate traitors. There are still more than 600 such monuments in the US, with many maintained using taxpayer funding.<br /> <br />We should have empathy for descendants of their victims who are rightly appalled at being forced to pay taxes honoring people who hated, murdered, or enslaved them. It will build feelings of common humanity among us, which you rightly say we need. Germany doesn’t allow monuments to Nazis. How would you feel if they had 600 such monuments maintained by German taxpayers?Gloucon Xhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05218027862578514587noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8746692.post-57773458022447712222021-02-02T16:57:54.567-05:002021-02-02T16:57:54.567-05:00Professor
To paraphrase Kennan, the Old European ...Professor<br /><br />To paraphrase Kennan, the Old European Order was better than anything that replaced it.<br /><br />All the bestBozonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18078858723231122013noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8746692.post-17563163806629469642021-02-01T11:15:19.146-05:002021-02-01T11:15:19.146-05:00Professor:
"...Most importantly, those princ...Professor:<br /><br />"...Most importantly, those principles of equality, equal rights, and majority rule, remain the only possible basis for the survival and prosperity of our nation. Tribalism will only breed more tribalism If this post leads anyone to think a little harder about where we are and where we are going, it will have been worthwhile..." DK<br /><br />Taking your last paragraph seriously, I suggest reading Intellectuals and Race. <br /><br />The first two chapters, "Questions About Race", and "Disparities and Their Causes" deal with racism and disparities in wider perspectives.<br /><br />All the bestBozonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18078858723231122013noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8746692.post-54215432543314831772021-01-31T17:00:05.345-05:002021-01-31T17:00:05.345-05:00I was thinking about how New World culture has suc...I was thinking about how New World culture has such difficulty with centrifugal forces tearing it apart. As long as people have a common denominator in culture so they can agree to ignore their differences civilly then life continues normally. It seems this tacit agreement has broken down. Integration of immigrants, minorities into a majoritarian society was normed. This worked for Irish, Italians, Jewish immigrants. Perhaps as latinos have a large home base just over the border and can maintain their language indefinitely in some areas and perhaps reoccupy areas of southwest that integration concept might change. And if the whites become a minority in some or many large states then the competing minorities can agree on only one matter, the enemy is the whites. This brings to mind the idea of where the concept of whiteness comes from. A white identity would not exist without the black slaves and their descendants, ghettoized. Integration of Irish, Italians, Jews, Poles, latinos, Asians into polite white society is helped along by having an outcast class in ghettoes, a bad other. Jewish ghettoes existed existed for hundreds of years in Europe. If there were sufficient numbers of oppressed blacks to play the role of societal outcasts comparatively then jewish integration would have moved along much more quickly, as the lesser evil. In comparison, to make this point clear. Hollywood movies use alien invasions to unite humanity. Black Africans have 6 times the genetic diversity of the rest of humanity combined. All of the Asians and Europeans are relatively similar genetically. Our brains might agree as you said but our gut instincts might move differently. The greater the cultural and genetic diversity in the general population the more difficult it will be to agree on matters in society. When the immigrants were just northern Europeans then a common history, linguistic structure, even religion could be presumed, a substrata to build upon. The 60s opened up immigration to non Europeans, thereby risking that basic tenet. The centrifugal powers increase manifold under such pressures without a severe external threat like aliens. So we see constant harping about evil islam, then Russia, lately China and finally the ' White menace' . The new majority is made of ethnic, sexual minorities and progressive whites who see multiculturalism, blank page at birth so to speak as the path forward. Meanwhile elsewhere on Earth historical, cultural, genetic or better said, ancestral roots of large majority populations are core to maintaining peace in countries. Some ex colonies suffer under poorly drawn borders designed to weaken them by Britain, etc. Over time natural borders could return after conflicts. In countries that experiment with a fundamental discarding of such tribalism entirely, like the USA, it is to be feared that civil war could occur or as has long been the case, patriotism is stoked by the govt against a faux enemy to help unite an unnaturally disparate populace.Energyflowhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14476915209268786507noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8746692.post-67208348060213147622021-01-31T11:56:56.789-05:002021-01-31T11:56:56.789-05:00Thank you, David, for your courage in stepping up ...Thank you, David, for your courage in stepping up to talk sense about all this. It stuns me to realize that this movement was already afoot 45 years ago when I was first attacked for my whiteness at an all-faculty, all-administration meeting at my inner-city public college. It was explained to me by the hired race consultant that I taught "White Studies"--not "English" (as my field was once, without apology, called). erik f storliehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10674430310730993153noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8746692.post-15318622651285185412021-01-31T11:38:47.078-05:002021-01-31T11:38:47.078-05:00Professor
Very interesting post, and comments.
The...Professor<br />Very interesting post, and comments.<br />These are some notes on slavery and sinners, thrown together from prior posts I have done.<br /><br />More negro slaves were always kept as slaves by "sinner" Africans in Africa than were ever exported by the Muslim "sinner" middlemen who ran and controlled the whole out of Africa trade, either to the New World, or to the Middle East. Sowell, Conquests and Culture, p. 111. See also: Empires of the Atlantic World<br /><br />The origins of the American colonial rebellion had nothing to do with original sin for importing negroes. The 1619 Project's and Eric Foner's are Whig interpretations, including white colonial original sin.<br /><br />Colonial America "displayed the problems of England, Scotland, and Ireland in a more acute form." Clark, Ch 3 sec III. <br /><br />The unrest, disorder, and fragmentation did not improve with time and every increasing immigration of impoverished heterodox populations.<br /><br />People think that "sinner" colonists were long united against Britain prior to 1776. They were not.<br /><br />They think that winning the American colonial Civil War resulted in an end to all manner of violent and wide ranging religious social and economic unrest. It did not. <br />See, for example, T P Slaughter, The Whiskey Rebellion; Independence: The Tangled Roots of the American Revolution; J C D Clark, The Language of Liberty, Ch 3, Secs III, V especially.See Clark, Our Shadowed Present, Ch 6, p. 214.<br /><br />All the best<br /><br />Bozonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18078858723231122013noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8746692.post-80119495407101931752021-01-30T16:25:56.542-05:002021-01-30T16:25:56.542-05:00"Representation matters" is a mantra of ..."Representation matters" is a mantra of these politics. But what's really meant is "representation creates reality"--the opposite of "representation follows reality".<br /><br />I want to point out that this is very similar to Trumpism. <br /><br />Identity politics wants to change hard reality by changing soft reality. And so does Trump. Trump has never lied in his whole life. That’s because when he speaks he never describes reality--he creates reality. When he says an election is "stolen", then some people start looking at it differently. They will find something to work with. The tiniest bit of "evidence" is good enough. Soon there will be more people who believe him and so Trump creates a reality in which his lies aren’t lies anymore, but "well judged guesses". This has worked for him his whole life. Of course he can’t accept that an election (= representation) just follows reality. That’s something for people who don’t create.<br /><br />And in Identity poltics it’s almost the same. It’s not about finding the truth, like, was Lincoln a good man or not? It’s not about different <i>opinions</i> about what is reality, like in science and journalism. Representation matters because representation <i>creates</i> reality, that’s their point. So you have to change representation first. Reality will follow. Change language, change culture, change history the way you want. This is not 'magic thinking', as is always said about Trump. 'Magic thinking' does’t work, but this <i>can</i> work. Earlier generations may have called it 'White Lies', but that is obviously not opportune. Identity politics <i>could</i> work and create a society in which minorities are not treated as minorities, but this society is unfortunately the same society in which a trained professional has not more to say than a wacky conspiracy follower (who must must then be called "supporter of a minority opinion").noriborihttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11746086704148831224noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8746692.post-25453941446262855512021-01-30T12:05:24.386-05:002021-01-30T12:05:24.386-05:00Your best piece ever, David. I note in passing som...Your best piece ever, David. I note in passing some overlap between "woke folk" today and American Puritans.Among the later, those who considered themselves elect also believed they had a right and duty to force others to conform, which sparked dissent, with dissenters then choosing to impose conformity on others, a recurring cycle in U.S. history. "Wokeness" may just be a secularized version of American Puritanism. It may have helped Trump come to power by sparking dissent against it. And of course if all identity is tribal and unmoored in objective reality, then none is superior to any other. You might as well side with your tribe against all others, thus making white identity politics just as logical as all others. So tribal identity politics on the left would seem partly responsible for tribal identity politics on the right. Not clear how we get out of this sewer.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16508765453639655912noreply@blogger.com