Quotulatiousness

January 19, 2024

Canada “as a white supremacist genocidal settler state” also somehow has an immigration problem

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In The Line, Jen Gerson documents what she characterizes as a collapse of the pro-immigration consensus that has been a major part of Canadian political affairs for generations:

A billboard in Toronto in 2019, showing Maxime Bernier and an official-looking PPC message.
Photo from The Province.

Canada created a durable and lasting consensus on immigration by leaning on a shared national mythology: that from a colonial past, we forged a principled multicultural nation in which people from around the world are able to honour their heritage and traditions while building a prosperous and successful life for themselves and their descendants. This narrative requires that all of us — regardless of our divergent ideologies or religious views — cohere around a shared set of post-enlightenment principles: the equality of man, the rule of law, tolerance, and the rest. We take this highly abstract concept of nationhood so for granted that we’ve forgotten how historically rare it is.

This is not to say Canada ever imagined itself to have an unblemished history, but rather that this is a nation that saw itself as a fundamentally good and noble project, and therefore some place worth immigrating to, and a culture worth integrating with.

The last nine years of Liberal government have undermined that vision. Under the Trudeau Liberals, instead what we have been regularly subjected to Canada as a white supremacist genocidal settler state. And, hey, to what extent that historical reckoning is good or necessary is not for me to say: but if “Canada is bad, actually” is the starting position, by what delusion do any of us presume to perpetuate it?

A post-modern nation state that has no sense of itself, and no belief in its own inherent value, is not an experiment worth continuing, now is it? How do we expect to welcome and integrate 500,000 new Canadians annually into a corrupt national project? If “Canadian” isn’t something worth being, why should anyone sublimate their ethnic or religious grievances into this vicious national identity?

I think this is the tension that lies at the heart of this growing unease around immigration, and it’s going to be the most difficult one for the Conservatives to navigate. There will be those within the party that follow this thread directly into white grievance and conspiracies like great replacement theory, the xenophobic fear that “elites” are trying to demographically and culturally replace white people through mass migration.

I think that theory is insane, to be clear, but I’m also noticing it wend its way into politics in weird and destructive ways.

A small example: before the holidays, certain conservative social media circles were put into a state of high uproar over the construction of a 55-foot statue of the Hindu deity Hanuman on a private temple complex in Brampton.

Initially, I was baffled and confused and even a bit amused by the upset. After all, this wasn’t a publicly funded monument. It was on private property, and isn’t respect for private property a sacrosanct value for conservatives? This wasn’t rational.

The controversy was only explicable when we examine the emotional subtext of the complaints: that there was something deeply menacing about Hanuman to these people. They saw him overlooking the suburbs of Brampton with a colonial intent. (Irony abounds!) One of the most telling tweets came from one angry individual who said something to the effect: “They tore down our John A. Macdonald statues, but, sure, Hanuman is great.”

To this gentleman: the fine devout Hindus of Brampton did not tear down your John A. Macdonald statues — and I highly doubt they would any pick bones with historic or civic monuments.

We, Canadians, tore down our own statues (or allowed them to be torn down) as part of an internal process of historical reckoning. Again, immigrants are not doing anything to Canada. They are Canada, and as such, they share in this country’s problems, which are largely self created.

February 27, 2021

Q&A: Shooting the $ɦ!☦ with InRangeTV

Filed under: Food, History, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Atun-Shei Films
Published 26 Feb 2021

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August 14, 2020

From protests to riots to …

Filed under: History, Media, Politics, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the Claremount Review of Books, Angelo M. Codevilla looks at historical patterns that may prefigure what is going on in major urban areas today:

Hagia Sophia in the Faith district of Istanbul, 18 November 2004.
Photo by Robert Raderschatt via Wikimedia Commons.

The Americans who confess other people’s racism absolve themselves inexpensively by a moral mechanism common to humanity: the more I profess to hate evil, the more I showcase my own goodness. Such confessions, however, have a particular history of tragedy in Christian civilization. Again and again over the centuries, persons who have imagined themselves cleansed by ritual confessions have believed themselves elevated above the rest of humanity and, hence, entitled to oppress or even annihilate those around them. Today’s self-purifiers, arms outstretched in supine submission, who then countenance violence against persons, property, and cultural symbols, are mostly unwitting protagonists in yet another chapter of a hoary history.

Although Judeo-Christianity teaches that perfection is not of this world, nevertheless the Old Testament (see the Book of Daniel) and the New (Revelation, chapter 20) refer tangentially to a final state in human affairs in which all evil will have been defeated and the virtuous will have triumphed over their enemies. In the Book of Revelation, this final stage is to last for a thousand years. Jesus Christ’s warnings notwithstanding, people have hearkened periodically to “false prophets” who brandish the prospect of ultimate vengeance over evil. Between the 11th and 16th centuries, any number of movements of this sort used ritual confessions to cleanse themselves, and energized the mobs that waged Europe’s bloodiest wars of that age. Thereafter, though such movements secularized their terms, they fit into the same moral and intellectual categories. Now as ever, they are about destroying civilization in the name of altering the human condition.

But whereas revolutionary movements from the Middle Ages to roughly the middle of the 20th century opposed the ruling classes wholeheartedly and found no friends among them, this generation’s movements have intense, problematic relations with those classes, about which more below.

Today we see scenes of monuments which had stood for decades, now destroyed and defaced, as well as the forceful cancellation of names from circulation. Smashing others’ idols was, and remains, a staple of tribal warfare. The Old Testament recalls the divine command to destroy idols, and the clashes between Christian and Muslim armies always aimed as much at symbols as at people. The Song of Roland contains a lyrical account of Charlemagne’s iconoclasm in his campaign against the Saracens. In the 6th century, Emperor Justinian made Constantinople’s Hagia Sophia cathedral the Christian world’s biggest and most important church. The Muslims who added that city to the Ottoman Empire in 1453 killed its priests, toppled its statues, and made it into the principal mosque of the Muslim caliphate at war with Christendom. In 1923, Kemal Atatürk, Turkey’s modernizer, turned the building into a museum in order to end that war. But in July 2020 Turkey’s Islamist president Recep Erdogan, consistent with his hostility to Judeo-Christian civilization, turned it into a mosque again and began covering up what remain of the Christian frescoes on its walls. Destroying symbols, however, has had no place within Christian civilization. As the equivalent of torturing dead men, it has always been the work of cowards likelier to run from living enemies. On the other hand, war against statues, paintings, books, biographies, etc., has been a defining feature of civilization’s revolutionary enemies, consistent with their chosen identities as alien tribes.

What follows is a glance at the bloody history of this little-known flaw. It is a tale whose cautionary moral Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn best expressed: the line between good and evil runs not between persons — never mind between parties, classes, or races — but down the middle of every human heart. That is central to our civilization.

H/T to David Warren for the link.

August 12, 2020

Defending Sir John A.

Filed under: Cancon, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In his latest post for The Dominion, Ben Woodfinden attempt to defend that horrible racist, sexist, homophobe, transphobe, non-intersectional, dead, white, cis-gendered male monster, Sir John A. Macdonald:

Statue of Sir John A. Macdonald that formerly stood in front of City Hall in Victoria, British Columbia.
Wikimedia Commons.

The way you’re supposed to begin a piece like this is with a sort of penitential act. I should begin a discussion of Sir John A. Macdonald with a confession of his various sins and crimes, before offering an apology, and a reluctant defence of our first prime minister that essentially boils down to “history matters,” without actually explaining what that history is or why it matters.

If you do this you’ve already lost the historical fight, because you’ve willingly ceded the narrative to Macdonald’s detractors, and fallen back to a defence of history in some abstract sense, instead of a defence of Macdonald himself. This kind of Girondin impulse is far too common amongst many liberals and conservatives now, especially in elites institutions and fields like journalism and academia.

[…]

No one, including me, claims that Macdonald was a saint, and Canada’s treatment of Indigenous people and migrants in the early days of Confederation was racist, and wrong. I doubt any serious person would deny this. But even on these questions, Macdonald’s record is complex. Tristin Hopper, wrote an excellent and accessible piece in the National Post simultaneously laying out both the bad things Macdonald was responsible for, and also Macdonald’s paradoxically ahead of his times views on Indigenous voting rights, and recognition of the terrible plight of Indigenous peoples.

But this is only part of the story of Macdonald, and the crucial role he played in our history. Too often this is all that gets discussed, ceding the narrative to Macdonald’s detractors and dooming him to inevitable damnatio memoriae. This is why, in the name of defending our history, we cannot simply defend capital H History, we have to defend the substance of our actual history.

Macdonald’s central role as the key architect of Confederation, and our country, is not well known because Canadian history, especially the history that led to confederation, is not well known by Canadians. It’s a national embarrassment, and in this vacuum it is easy to build incomplete and partial narratives about what Canada is and what Canada means.

Macdonald is best described as “the indispensable politician.” Confederation was not inevitable, it took adept figures like Macdonald to make it happen. Macdonald was not an ideologue, and his political career was defined by his masterful ability to forge coalitions and working compromises between seemingly intractable groups. He was an important political figure in the United Province of Canada (the union of Upper and Lower Canada), and proved adept at balancing and forging coalitions with the warring and disparate factions from Upper and Lower Canada forced into an uncomfortable union. He resisted, but worked and ultimately partnered with uncompromising reformers in the province like George Brown, while ultimately laying the groundworks for constitutional reform that Brown, though principled, could almost certainly never have achieved.

July 9, 2020

Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie died in 1974, but was toppled in 2020

Filed under: Africa, Britain, History, Italy, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Critic, James Jeffrey explains the late emperor and how he fell off his plinth in June of this year:

The Ethiopian emperor has fallen in leafy Wimbledon, but there’s more to his demise than meets the eye

In 1936, Emperor Haile Selassie gave a rousing speech to the League of Nations reminding it of its moral duty to defend Ethiopia which was being invaded and ransacked by Italy.

Despite the League entirely ignoring him — thereby dooming its proclaimed doctrine of collective security, which in turn hastened World War II — Selassie’s impressive performance recounting “the tortures inflicted upon the Ethiopian people,” while imploring the League to save Ethiopia from the “bonds of vassalship,” cemented his iconic international reputation. Time magazine named him “Man of the Year.”

All the while, and for the span of his reign from 1930 to 1974, the vast majority of Ethiopians lived in feudal conditions, knowing only vassalship. An authoritarian ruler, Selassie’s full title was “By the Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Elect of God.”

Among his retinue of lackies there was a man whose sole job was to wipe away the urine of the imperial dog Lulu after it relieved itself on the shoes of visiting dignitaries, according to Ryszard Kapuscinski’s The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat (a hotly contested point and accused of being invented by Kapuscinski; it sounds entirely plausible to me having seen how much Ethiopians, especially those with wealth and power, go in for being kowtowed to and waited on).

Civil rights and political rights were little known during Selassie’s reign — cementing an oppressive trend that continues to this day in Ethiopia — while he failed to adequately respond to famines in 1958 and 1973, dooming tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of Ethiopians to their deaths.

Yet for all his faults — based on what I know and saw in Ethiopia, and on my gut instinct, I’ve never been a fan — Selassie opened up Ethiopia to the world and pushed to develop it. He introduced the country’s first written constitution in 1931, which while heavily in favour of the nobility, envisaged a transition to democracy. In Ethiopia today, he remains an inspiring figure for many, his image appearing all over the place. Among the Rastafari movement, Selassie is revered by many as the returned messiah and God incarnate.

Last week a group of Ethiopian diaspora in London got to give their judgement on the so-called Negusa Nagast, King of Kings, whose dynastic lineage reportedly stretched back to Emperor Menelik I, the offspring of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. In a Wimbledon park on June 30, a bust of Selassie was destroyed by a group of around 100 people, leaving a shattered plinth surrounded by rubble.

July 3, 2020

Back to the Future Middle Ages

Filed under: Britain, Europe, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At Spiked, Dominic Frisby takes us back to a time when today’s progressive temper tantrums would fit in perfectly with accepted behaviours of the age … the Middle Ages:

A social media heretic faces trial

How much of what went on in the Middle Ages and early-modern periods do we look back on with abhorrence and a certain amount of perplexity? Burning witches at the stake, lynch mobs, self-flagellation – what possessed people to do such things, we wonder.

But take a step back, look about and you see many of these practices are still flourishing today, though they go by different names.

Here are just some of them.

Let’s start with excommunication. Excommunication meant so much more than being banned from taking communion. It involved you being shunned, shamed, spiritually condemned, even banished. Only through some kind of heavy penance – often a very public, lengthy and humiliating contrition – could you and your reputation be redeemed.

Excommunication became a powerful political weapon. It was dished out to enemies of the faith to destroy their legitimacy. Often it was used as a punishment for sins as minor as uttering the wrong opinion.

What are No Platforming and cancel culture if not a modern form of excommunication? Qualified, competent professionals are hounded out of their jobs and publicly shamed just for uttering the wrong opinion, often simply for a misjudged choice of words. Even just the wrong pronouns.

As often as not, their employer wants a quiet life, so he bows to activist pressure and sacks the target of the witch hunt. Cancel culture is excommunication.

Today’s religions, however, are not the many sects of Christianity that once perforated Europe, but climate change, education, the NHS, gay rights, trans rights, the European Union and multiculturalism. Even coronavirus and the lockdown have become sacrosanct.

Intellectuals of the right and left, from Polly Toynbee to Nigel Lawson, have described the NHS as Britain’s religion. It has replaced the Virgin Mary as the divine matriarch. Why this worship? I suggest it goes back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the state began to replace the church as the main provider of education, welfare and healthcare. After 1945, it was just a matter of time before the welfare state achieved altar status.

June 30, 2020

“It all counts for nothing, because the Conservatives themselves are useless”

Filed under: Britain, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Most Canadians, reading that headline, will assume that Sean Gabb is talking about the Conservative Party of Canada (and he’d be 100% correct in that case), but he’s actually talking about Britain’s equally useless equivalent under Boris Johnson:

Prime Minister Boris Johnson at his first Cabinet meeting in Downing Street, 25 July 2019.
Official photograph via Wikimedia Commons.

According to The Daily Mail, Madeline Odent is the Curator of the Royston Museum in Hertfordshire. This museum is funded by Royston Council. In the past few days, Mrs Odent has taken to Twitter, giving expert advice on how to use household chemicals to cause irreparable harm to statues she dislikes.

It is, she says, “extremely difficult” to remove the chemicals once they have been applied. She adds that “it can be done, but the chemical needed is super carcinogenic, so it rarely is.” Again, she says: “We haven’t found a way to restore artefacts that this happens to.” Her last reported tweet features a picture of Winton Churchill’s defaced statue in Parliament Square, and says: “Stay tuned for our next edition, where we’ll be talking about marble memorials of racists.”

The newspaper and various people are calling for the woman to be sacked. It is, I allow, surprising for someone to hold a job that involves conserving the past, and then to advise an insurrectionary mob on how to destroy the past. This being said, and assuming the story is substantially true, Mrs Odent is less to be blamed for giving her advice than those who employed her as an expert on conservation and its opposite.

We have had a Conservative Government since 2010. We have had a Conservative Government with a working majority since 2015. For the past six months, we have had a Conservative Government with a crushing majority. It all counts for nothing, because the Conservatives themselves are useless.

Political power is not purely, nor mainly, a matter of being able to make laws. It is far more a matter of choosing reliable servants. Before 1997, we could suppose, within reason, that these servants were politically neutral. They often had their own agenda. They could use their status as experts to influence, and sometimes to frustrate, laws and policies with which they disagreed. But there were not self-consciously an order of people devoted to a transformative revolution. The Blair Government broke with convention by stuffing the public sector with its own creatures, loyal only to itself. This is to be deplored. On the other hand, the Blair Government did have a mandate for sweeping change, and it is reasonable that it should have given preference to employing those who could be trusted to further both the letter and spirit of this mandate. The Conservatives have had enough time to make the public sector into at least an obedient servant of those the people keep electing. Instead of this, they have spent this time employing and promoting people whom Tony Blair would have sacked on the spot as malicious lunatics.

June 27, 2020

Andrew Sullivan on revolution in the current year

Filed under: History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The people involved in the protests — some of them would-be revolutionaries — may not know about prior revolutionary movements, and if they succeed then they’ll ensure that nobody will be able to remember what life was like before their longed-for Year Zero moment:

A building burning in Minneapolis following the death of George Floyd.
Photo by Hungryogrephotos via Wikipedia.

Revolutions also encourage individuals to take matters in their own hands. The distinguished liberal philosopher Michael Walzer recently noted how mutual social policing has a long and not-so-lovely history — particularly in post–Reformation Europe, in what he has called “the revolution of the saints.” “The ‘saints’ were very strong on the work of neighborhood committees. In Calvin’s Geneva, law and order were maintained through ‘mutual surveillance.’ Church members (ideally all Genevans were church members) ‘watched, investigated, and chastised’ each other.” Imagine what these Puritans could have done with cell phones and Twitter histories.

Revolutionaries also create new forms of language to dismantle the existing order. Under Mao, “linguistic engineering” was integral to identifying counterrevolutionaries, and so it is today. The use of the term “white supremacy” to mean not the KKK or the antebellum South but American society as a whole in the 21st century has become routine on the left, as if it were now beyond dispute. The word “women,” J.K. Rowling had the temerity to point out, is now being replaced by “people who menstruate.” The word “oppression” now includes not only being herded into Uighur reeducation camps but also feeling awkward as a sophomore in an Ivy League school. The word “racist,” which was widely understood quite recently to be prejudicial treatment of an individual based on the color of their skin, now requires no intent to be racist in the former sense, just acquiescence in something called “structural racism,” which can mean any difference in outcomes among racial groupings. Being color-blind is therefore now being racist.

And there is no escaping this. The woke shift their language all the time, so that words that were one day fine are now utterly reprehensible. You can’t keep up — which is the point. (A good resource for understanding this new constantly changing language of ideology is Translations From the Wokish.) The result is an exercise of cultural power through linguistic distortion.

So, yes, this is an Orwellian moment. It’s not a moment of reform but of a revolutionary break, sustained in part by much of the liberal Establishment. Even good and important causes, like exposing and stopping police brutality, can morph very easily from an exercise in overdue reform into a revolutionary spasm. There has been much good done by the demonstrations forcing us all to understand better how our fellow citizens are mistreated by the agents of the state or worn down by the residue of past and present inequality. But the zeal and certainty of its more revolutionary features threaten to undo a great deal of that goodwill.

The movement’s destruction of even abolitionist statues, its vandalism of monuments to even George Washington, its crude demonization of figures like Jefferson, its coerced public confessions, its pitiless wreckage of people’s lives and livelihoods, its crude ideological Manichaeanism, its struggle sessions and mandated anti-racism courses, its purging of cultural institutions of dissidents, its abandonment of objective tests in higher education (replacing them with quotas and a commitment to ideology), and its desire to upend a country’s sustained meaning and practices are deeply reminiscent of some very ugly predecessors.

But the erasure of the past means a tyranny of the present. In the words of Orwell, a truly successful ideological revolution means that “every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” We are not there yet. But unless we recognize the illiberal malignancy of some of what we face, and stand up to it with courage and candor, we soon will be.

June 25, 2020

What is the purpose of public art?

Filed under: History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In his latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes engages with a topic that is in the headlines today as we find ourselves in the midst of an unexpected outbreak of iconoclasm:

The John Cassidy (1860-1939) statue of Edward Colston, which stood in Bristol from 1895-2020 before being taken down and thrown into Bristol harbour during the protests after the death of George Floyd.
Photo by William Avery via Wikimedia Commons.

… public art in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries used to be about inculcating virtue, which is something we seem to have forgotten. Public art was explicitly moralising, and not in the subversive way so often seen today, which leads us to question ourselves but rarely gives us answers. Back then, public art was instead meant to inspire. In painting, for example, the most prestigious and public-facing genre was history painting. History painting showed allegorical, mythological, and religious scenes, as well as those from actual history, in order to illustrate the exploits of the great and good, setting an example to us of integrity and public-spiritedness.

Importantly, the subjects of history paintings were taken from classical Greek or Roman history, or from mythology or religion, because such figures were generally uncontroversial — they could be upheld as paragons of virtue in a way that more recent and local historical figures could not. And the same went for statues, which became the main mediums of public art because the spaces available for history paintings were lacking. (The great room of the Society of Arts, by the way, has some of the few major history paintings in the country, all executed by the troubled self-proclaimed genius James Barry — the fastest riser in the Royal Academy’s history, and also, as far as I know, the only person to ever be expelled from it)

So, if some public statues have become controversial, that’s a clear sign of their failure. To the Victorians who put up the statue of slave trader Edward Colston in 1895, he must have seemed a distant and uncontroversial paragon of philanthropy. But today, he is mostly remembered for his murderous avarice. As such, he doesn’t deserve space on our streets or squares, for much the same reason that people in the eighteenth century avoided putting up statues of Oliver Cromwell — depending on your politics, he was either an ambitious and fanatical tyrant, or a selfless promoter of parliamentary liberties. Either way, it was the controversy itself that made him unsuitable: controversy got in the way of moral education. (Funnily enough, Cromwell seems to have got his public statues in the 1890s, too, just like Colston — maybe it was a low-point for the quality of history-teaching?)

I’m worried, however, that we’ve lost the self-confidence to replace them with statues that uncontroversially inculcate virtue (and in more than just a subversive or critical way). I suspect it take the delusions of grandeur of a James Barry to pull it off — someone who thought the history painter akin to a poet, like Shakespeare. But, as Tim Almond pointed out to me on twitter, perhaps we already do have such forms of virtue-promoting public art, and that all that has changed is the medium. Thus, rather than gazing upon statues or history paintings, we instead watch blockbuster superhero movies.

June 17, 2020

Alcibiades, the first recorded iconoclast, but far from the last

Filed under: Britain, China, Germany, History, Middle East, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

James Heartfield on the modern day resurgence of iconoclasm:

“Drunken Alcibiades interrupting the Symposium”, an engraving from 1648 by Pietro Testa (1611-1650)
Via Wikimedia Commons.

… far more often, the attacks on public symbols are indicative of a breakdown in social solidarity — often with alarming consequences. For activists seeking to win popular support, knocking down statues is a high-risk strategy that can provoke the opposite sentiments to those hoped for. The futurist Marinetti’s proposal to fill in the canals of Venice with concrete to make modern roads is a witty way to make a point, but not a sound policy.

Alcibiades was perhaps the first recorded statue vandal. One night in 415 BC he knocked all the stone cocks off the statues of Hermes in Athens. In 1497, the friar Girolamo Savonarola launched a Bonfire of the Vanities in which artworks, books and statues were destroyed out of a fear they would tempt people away from God. As any lover of old English churches knows, the furies of the Puritan revolution led to the destruction and defacing of Catholic saints’ statues and paintings.

In the modern era, the temptation to destroy monuments has been strong. In the First World War, Britain’s local authorities changed German-sounding names of streets like Bismarck Road — now Waterlow Road — while bully boys attacked German-owned shops. In 1933, Nazi students in Germany organised bonfires of subversive books, while the Reich organised an exhibition of “degenerate” modernist art. The burning of books only served as a trial run for the extermination of people, as the symbolic slaughter failed to yield the results of a “cleansed” Germany.

People often make the point that there are no statues of Hitler in Germany — though those were not taken down by Germans, but by the Allied occupiers. You can still see Albert Speer’s Zeppelinfeld and grandstand in Nuremberg, where many of Hitler’s rallies took place, though not much else of his Nazi architecture survives. Mussolini’s architects, Giuseppe Terragni and Marcello Piacentini, did better — much of their absurdly grandiose work survives. The model of an Allied-led “denazification” was in the minds of the US-led forces that overthrew Saddam Hussein in 2003. The destruction of his statue in Baghdad was largely staged by the allies.

Under the Maoist regimes in China and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, some of the worst atrocities after the Nazis were carried out. Mao’s “Cultural Revolution” against the “four olds” led to the destruction of books and artworks. Later, there were showtrials and the politically incorrect were battered by the mob. In the wreckage of Cambodia, Pol Pot led a terrifying war on alleged capitalist-roaders and even intellectuals — who could be handily identified by the fact they wore glasses — that led to millions being killed. Pol Pot declared a “year zero” — that all civilisation before the Khmer Rouge took power would be cancelled. Tragically, the wholesale wiping out of Cambodian culture was only a prelude to the extermination of much of its population. The sentiment of wiping out the wrong history was repeated in the war that al-Qaeda-inspired regimes in Afghanistan and Mali conducted against books and statues that did not match their own Islamist views.

In Soviet Russia, when the communist-allied artists of the Proletkult organisation argued that all Tsarist culture should be expunged, the Bolshevik leader Lenin took them to task for “rejecting the most valuable achievements of the bourgeois epoch”. Instead, he said, they should assimilate and re-work “everything of value in the more than 2,000 years of the development of human thought and culture”. Sadly, Lenin’s wise advice was lost on the Stalinist regimes that followed, during which the policy oscillated between futurist iconoclasm and maudlin Russian sentimentality. History got its revenge in eastern Europe when most of the ubiquitous Lenin and Marx statues came down in the 1990s.

June 11, 2020

Current year Iconoclasm

Filed under: History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In an Areo article from last year, Alexander Adams discusses the phenomenon of iconoclasm:

The 1931 demolition of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow.
Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons.

Behind any campaign is the campaigner: the activist convinced of his own righteousness.

The political activist reserves to himself the right to retrospectively edit our history for his satisfaction by removing monuments, those fixtures of civic life, embedded in the memories of generations. The activist often knows almost nothing about the object of his hatred — merely a garbled caricature of a person caught up in the conditions of her age — but the activist acts as if he were not also caught up in the conditions of his own age.

Iconoclasm is an expression of domination and a demonstration of willingness to act — illegally and unethically — to impose the will of one group over an entire population. It asserts control over all aspects of society. It sets a challenge that will elicit a strong reaction. Iconoclasm is a warning that the protection of law and social conventions no longer applies and that the cause will be promoted through physical force if necessary.

The campaigner argues that public art, accumulated piecemeal over 1,000 years of history, must reflect our society and values today — even if that means altering or erasing stories of the values our past society expressed via its monuments, or suppressing evidence of how we arrived at our current situation. The left-wing activist wants to celebrate current-day multiculturalism, but mostly he wants to erase evidence of the historic monoculturalism that preceded it.

Our willingness to live with historical relics we feel ambivalence towards is a demonstration of our toleration of dissent. Likewise, an openness to imagining ourselves in past times — constrained by the conventions and laws of a different era — forces us to question common assumptions about the completeness of our knowledge and our moral certainty. If we can make this leap of empathy, we can free ourselves of ideological possession. We have the ability to empathize with both slave and slave owner. Empathy makes it harder to justify destruction of the cultural relics of an older age or silence the voices of individuals, who might share insights into life.

The toleration we extend towards symbols of former regimes and proponents of ideas with which we disagree shows our willingness to be honest about our nations’ pasts. To accept our flaws as a necessary part of our development is to display the maturity, restraint and empathy that define the confident yet self-critical nation. For if we cannot stand the sight of a dead political opponent carved in stone, how can we restrain ourselves in the face of a living political opponent who speaks against us?

August 12, 2018

Public statuary … can we just get rid of the politicians?

Filed under: Cancon, History, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the wake of Victoria’s city council deciding to remove a statue of Sir John A. Macdonald, Colby Cosh suggests that we apply a broader brush to what is acceptable for public display and get rid of the rest of the politicians, too:

The mayor of Victoria, Lisa Helps, emphasized that the removal of the statue is “temporary,” promising to “find a way to recontextualize Macdonald in an appropriate way.” This suggests that the statue will find a home somewhere, perhaps even in its accustomed place, but will have to be accompanied by a sanitizing “This was a bad, racist guy despite having led the creation of our federation” text inscribed nearby.

All of this gives me a chance to rehearse my inconveniently unclassifiable views on the subject of revisionist iconoclasm in public settings. Part of me is sympathetic to the anti-revisionist case. Even if Victoria took a year with this decision, a year is not a long time to reconsider an act of commemoration that was intended to be permanent in the first place. Any one generation, let alone a small group within it, ought to be hesitant in removing public statuary — doubly so, perhaps, if you are doing it “temporarily” but without a deadline for its return. Putting objects of built heritage in storage is the easiest way for a government to demolish them, through neglect, on the sly.

With that said, I could be convinced to pick up a hammer if there is to be a general smashing of statues of politicians. No city or country really has a shortage of people to honour whose contribution to humanity is unambiguously and uncontentiously positive. Those who exercise political power, even in a democracy, rarely fall into this category. If we were building a country from scratch, I would suggest we start building statues to those who excel in the realm of pure thought — physics, math, music, scholarship — and work “down” through artisans, philanthropists, innovators and entrepreneurs.

Once we’re past the tradesmen who did good work and mentored the young, and we have made modest busts or reliefs of everyone who just worked to make a neighbourhood nicer or cleaner or safer, and we have put a few people on postage stamps just for contributing their own earnings or effort to any of the Corporal Works of Mercy, we can start with politicians of an especially noble and humane character who executed great necessary enterprises by means of law.

Politicians get big-ass statues because it is politicians who build statues: that’s all. The problem is that this encourages the dangerous habit of reverence for politicians, who, despite endless complaining about the thanklessness of their vocation, hardly go without social privileges or deference or celebration within their own lifetimes. In the case of statues or images of Sir John A. Macdonald, the veneration is all but explicit. The Old Chieftain represents the juvenile desire to have a George Washington-like national paterfamilias, to have a single founder to serve as the incarnation of our glorious state.

I am not a politician and I endorse this message. I’d be even more on board if we also chiselled off the names of politicians from schools, community centres, streets, and any other edifice built with taxpayer money.

January 14, 2018

QotD: The Cultural Revolution of 1966

Filed under: China, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was proclaimed by Chairman Mao Tse-tung (as he was then spelt) on the 16th of May, 1966. […] It continued ten years, until its author’s death. It was one of the greatest continuing massacres of history — a work of incredible destruction through which most of the surviving cultural monuments from China’s civilized past were also wiped out. The Chinese Communist Party, which still rules this immense nation or empire, no longer wishes to talk about it. The anniversary has been suppressed, and even in Hong Kong, where media retain some fraction of the freedom they enjoyed under British colonial rule, Internet links to the anniversary have been frozen.

Led by young, psychopathic Red Guards, it was an unrestrained obliteration of what Mao called “The Four Olds” — old habits, old customs, old ideas, old culture. His satanic dream was of a “perpetual revolution.” His principles were ultimately those of the French Revolution — “improved” by the models of Leninism and Stalinism, the Hsin-hai Revolution of 1911 (in which the Chinese emperor was deposed), and the imagination of a petty bourgeois from a rural backwater in the province of Hunan (Mao himself). At this day, nothing like an adequate historical accounting can yet be attempted of the Cultural Revolution; nor of Mao’s previous iconoclastic essays; nor of the ways in which subsequent economic accomplishments have depended on them. Crucial sources for such a history remain under the control of the Politburo; and travel within their empire is still regulated by their “guides.”

The personality cult Mao launched, for the worship of himself as living god, exceeded that of Hitler or of Stalin. (At one point nothing was allowed in print that was not either by or about him.) I note that his image yet adorns Chinese banknotes.

[…] I had skirted China by then in my own travels, and read other newsy-historical works, and chatted with more than one acknowledged “China expert” in my quasi-vocation as a hack journalist; and thereby been fed almost entirely with lies. I knew that Maoism was evil, but could not begin to compass how radically evil. A growing appreciation of the grandeur of the ancient Chinese civilization accentuated this. For what was destroyed, in addition to the bodies corresponding to tens of millions of human souls, was of tremendous value, not only to China but to the legacy of the planet.

To my mind looking back, the Cultural Revolution may be the most sustained and thorough exercise in the cause of “progress” that men have yet performed.

David Warren, “Creative Destruction”, Essays in Idleness, 2016-05-16.

March 21, 2017

QotD: Society’s unspoken rules and modern iconoclasts

Filed under: Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Unfortunately for us, starting with Rousseau, someone mistook those rules for “arbitrary and unnecessary.” Now, a lot of them were, of course. Human societies acquire unspoken rules, a lot of them dross, like a dog acquires fleas. And yep, if you follow all the unspoken rules, you’ll reinforce the power of the elites because that’s what the rules are designed to do. […]

But the Rousseau attempt to change those rules started from the idea that all unspoken societal rules were wrong. ALL of them. And that absent them, humans would live in a sort of paradise. I wish he’d been acquainted with some savages, not the least because then he probably wouldn’t have lived to pen his awfully misguided ideas. His ideas have been bouncing around society for a while, aided by Marxism (Marx MUST have been Asperger’s. No, I mean that. He looked at society and had no clue why things functioned, and couldn’t see people as people but as widgets belonging to particular groups which MUST of course be opposed to other groups they interacted with) in its feminist and racialist versions, cut the threads of things that were actually important, functional, and so early-set-in that they were never spoken of.

So women didn’t see the two sides of the bargain and just saw the way their side of it “oppressed” them, which led them to lose the power they did have in society, and now they want it back – see the way they’re racing back to the fainting couch where men can’t touch them or look at them – but since they don’t understand its origins, they’re trying to get it back in all the wrong ways. It’s all “check your privilege” but without ever checking their own privilege, even as it causes white knights to run to their defense. I don’t know how long a society or a culture can last like this. Every time I know of in history, it ended in tears or guillotines.

Sarah Hoyt, “Noblesse Oblige and Mare’s Nests”, According to Hoyt, 2015-05-05.

February 14, 2017

An Islamic Reformation? No, that’s not quite the way to go…

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Colby Cosh points out that the historical Christian equivalents to modern day ISIS fanatics are not the Puritans, but the so-weird-it-must-be-fiction Anabaptist Kingdom of Münster in 1534-5:

One thing about this sculpture group [the International Monument to the Reformation] is: the foursome is terrifying. The depiction would not be so accurate and meaningful if it weren’t. Knox, in particular, has the face of a killer. The four men wear clerical robes and have long beards. They wield holy books as if they were weapons, which, in their hands, they were. The Reformed Protestant faith is a faith of the book; it sought to displace traditions, hierarchies, customs, culture, and authorities, and to replace them with the Word of God.

In its extreme manifestations, the Protestant Reformation was an annihilating tidal force of literal iconoclasm—the destruction of religious images and relics. There is still a visible scar across the face of northern Europe resulting from the preaching of Calvin, Zwingli, and Knox: in a belt from Scotland to Switzerland, you can find damaged antiquities, desecrated church reliefs, physically insulted Madonnas.

The attacks on religious art are easy to date: they spread outward from Zurich in much the same manner as the epidemic European political revolutions of 1848. Holland is where the iconoclastic rioting was most intense, and it arguably still influences the Dutch aesthetic character. They have a taste for minimalism and abstraction you can detect in Mondrian or M.C. Escher or the mathematician-artist Piet Hein. (Kenneth Clark made this connection in passing in his television series Civilisation, linking Mondrian to Pieter Saenredam’s 17th-century paintings of spare, whitewashed Calvinist church interiors.)

The Protestant Reformation had many personalities. One of them, ejected from the mainstream of European history in Darwinian fashion, was “crazy as all hell.” (Read about the Kingdom of Münster and tell me that, even correcting the record implicitly for propaganda and prejudice, this wasn’t just 16th-century ISIL.) When commentators talk of an “Islamic Reformation” they are looking back at reformers of tolerant, generous spirit, scholars like Erasmus and Melanchthon who infused the word “humanist” with the positive connotations it still has.

The Kingdom of Münster was founded by fanatic Anabaptists after throwing out the existing Lutheran local council and driving away the Bishop and his troops in 1534:

So in 1534, with most non-Anabaptist men leaving and large number of Anabaptists immigrating into the city to be part of the upcoming “big show”, the city council (to this point solidly Lutheran) was taken over legally by the Anabaptists, and the ruling Bishop of the city was driven out of the town. But the Bishop and his soldiers (they had such things then) did not go far. Unhappy with the treatment they received, they laid siege to the city and blocked any supplies from entering and leaving the city.

With everything falling into place, the people of the city began to refer to themselves as “Israelites” and the city as “New Jerusalem”. Jan Matthys now introduced the idea of a community of goods and all property of all citizens who left (sorry ladies, there’s a new sheriff in town) was confiscated and all food was made public. People could keep what they had, but they were required to leave their houses unlocked at all times. The use of money was eliminated, and all resourced were now pooled for the common good. No longer was there any idea of private property, everything was owned by the public.

One day, convinced and prophesying that God would protect him, Matthys rode out to meet some of the Bishops troops who were laying siege to the city. Charging right into a group of opposing soldiers, Jan Matthys proved a poor prophet and was made quick work of by the soldiers. The soldiers placed his head on a pole for the entire town to see, and did other really, really bad things to his body.

And the story may have ended there (sound familiar), but on of the people Matthys had baptized earlier was a charismatic young man named Jan van Leyden. The story goes that after Matthys’ death, van Leyden is said to have run through the streets naked, foaming at the mouth, and speaking incoherently before collapsing and remaining unresponsive for 3 days. Van Leyden claimed that God revealed many things to him during these three days, and things in Strasberg were going to change. Oh were they ever.

After a few victories over the bishop’s armies, van Leyden had himself anointed “King of Righteousness” and the “King of Zion” – the absolute prophet and ruler of the city whose word was equivalent to God’s. Any resistance to his rule was ruthlessly suppressed.

Van Leyden then instituted polygamy in the city. He used the Old Testament to justify it (like all great nut jobs), but it was well known that van Leyden had a desire for Matthys’ young widow. But aside from lust (van Leyden had 16 wives!!!), polygamy did serve a practical purpose in the city. It helped deal with a ratio of women to men in the city being about 3 to 1, and also was seen as a way to increase the population of the city to 144,000 (required for the beginning of the end).

At this point, a few people became a little unhappy with the “direction” the city is moving. Van Leyden, a master of persuasion, had all resisters are executed (men) or imprisoned (women). One of these “unhappy” people was one of van Leyden’s 16 wives. In a “women belong it the kitchen” moment, van Leyden publicly beheaded her himself and trampled on her body.

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