(12-09-2016, 06:46 AM)beneficii Wrote: I'm not sure I entirely buy into this 4T stuff, but as I understand the point of a 4T (Crisis) is that the situation is extremely fluid. It is a time of change, and movements that could not have succeeded in the past can now put things into motion for themselves. The best thing to do in such a situation is to try to accomplish something you find worthwhile and on which you think you can do some good, especially if you are young. That is why our generation is labelled a "Hero" generation, after all.
It is fluid, but not uniformly fluid. For good reason, President Obama has been called "No Drama Obama"; the most destructive tendencies in the 4T evolved slowly. But they eventually did move, and things got volatile and explosive on one day -- the cursed November 8, 2016 on which Donald Trump was elected president and the Republican Party sealed political dominance so long as the current political alignments exist.
American political life has become more dangerous than at any time since the Civil War (all in all, American political life was very placid during the Great Depression and Second World War. We face an authoritarian, exploitative, repressive, and perhaps brutal new order in which only 2% of the people really matter in political life and the rest are obliged to endure poverty and exhaustion in full compliance with an oligarchy devoid of any moral virtues. When people say that fascism is nigh and start panicking about the loss of all civil liberties and the establishment of a harsh dictatorship even if such are practically without precedent in America (OK -- Ku Kluxism in the Jim Crow South) by people who recently pooh-poohed conspiracy theories... just see how differently I thought of the prospects of American life early last month and in the middle.
"We have nothing to fear... but Fear Itself", said Franklin Roosevelt when the distress was entirely economic. I can see Americans taking up sides, and major powers choosing sides in America based on what they want to see prevail here. I can also imagine concentration camps and torture chambers... and people 'disappearing' as they did in the Dirty Wars of southern South America in the 1970s and 1980s.
Quote:As for me, one of my biggest projects is to attack the intellectual basis of white supremacy, one of the major planks of which I take to be the following narrative:
Starting with Ancient Greece, Europe developed by itself without interference or input by people of color. Europeans by themselves became increasingly enlightened, with Providence largely keeping threats at bay, and in 1492 when Columbus discovered America, Europeans set forth to bring enlightenment to the benighted peoples of the world.
The implication of this narrative, of course, is that any prominence of people of color could only ruin this "great project" of white people.
I can imagine history going very differently, in which case any white arrogance would be preposterous. In one alternative-history scenario, imagine the very tolerant Vikings establishing a successful colony in the New World and doing what the Vikings did after they found nothing to loot: they started trading. If there was no sophisticated people to deal with, they established primitive industries for generating wealth to then be traded. I can imagine them establishing a natioin of mixed Norse-First Peoples origin in eastern North America much as the related Rus (land of the Rus -- and "Rus" is originally a Scandinavian word for 'oar man") did in Russia by using the rivers for access. . I figure that they would be analogous to the French traders in beaver pelts which would soon practically flood Europe. Around the same time, the Chinese would start exploring the northern Pacific shorelines and be about to give up as they got to about the sites of Vancouver and Seattle... after which things would get very promising. Instead of having a Chinatown, the site of San Francisco is a Chinese town... and the Vikings and Chinese eventually meet somewhere around the site of... Banff National Park?
Quote:However, I am becoming aware of evidence that this narrative is BS. One piece of evidence is the very well-researched book The Huns, Rome, and the Birth of Europe by Hyun Jin Kim, an Oxford-trained Classicist with an interest in Inner Asia. In it, he argues that the Huns, a large multiethnic group originating from Inner Asia and likely linked to the Xiongnu who were often at war with the Han Dynasty, had a profound impact on the development of what we today consider to be "Europe" and shaped Medieval culture. He questions the whole idea of there being separate European and Asian continents.
"Hun" has of course become a by-word for destructiveness, with Attila recognized as one of the most evil persons to have ever lived. But put some of the fault on the rottenness of the Roman Empire which could no longer well defend itself. The distinction between Europe and Asia dates from ancient Greek times, when "Asia" meant practically anything to the east of the Aegean Sea and "Europe" anything to the west of the Aegean Sea. Eventually the Greeks started finding that there was much more to "Asia" than Persia, Syria, Iraq, Palestine, and Arabia -- and that "Europe" extended only as far as what is now Portugal.
It was really the Arabs who brought civilization back to southern and western Europe.
Quote:Next, I found this admittedly speculative piece by an Anglo-Saxon scholar, Caitlin Green, who explores the idea that there were Huns in Anglo-Saxon England and that the Anglo-Saxons were even partly descended from them:
http://www.caitlingreen.org/2015/07/were...gland.html
She examines writings from Bede, an English monk and important source of early Anglo-Saxon history, and Priscus, an Eastern Roman ambassador to Attila's court in 447/8, as well as archaeological and other historical evidence. In a recent email conversation with both her and Kim, we discovered that the likely structure of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of Kent in its early years, as described by Barbara Yorke, was similar to that practiced by the Huns and other Inner Asian groups, with the realm divided into east and west and the king of the east having precedence over the king of the west. Essex may have had a similar structure.
Similarities between the ancient Anglo-Saxons and the Huns (the Huns never got to Britain!) are either coincidence due to a similar level of development or Hun influence upon Germanic tribes closest to the Huns and to the Angles and Saxons by diffusion. Something that works diffuses.
Quote:Other informative sources include the article "Hawks, Horses, and Huns" by John Niles, which looks at the large impact of the Huns on Germanic cultural practices, those of the Anglo-Saxons in particular:
https://www.academia.edu/26820839/_Hawks...016_133-64
And of course, as always, a Tumblr blog that chronicles Medieval PoC:
http://medievalpoc.tumblr.com/
Maybe.
Quote:Of course, attacking the intellectual foundation of white supremacy won't do anything immediately, but if 4T is right and we have maybe 10 years left of the Crisis, it can help shape the attitudes toward race in the post-Crisis period.
Most of us thought that white supremacy was discredited for all time. White kids adopting the pop culture of blacks as theirs and dating across racial lines, a large and successful black middle class, and a successful President with a black father.... whoops! People with nothing more to be proud of than pale skin started to get scared.
White bigots might not be so troubled by persons of Asian origin with nearly-white skin or Hispanics who look a little off white because of some First Peoples ancestry but who aren't particularly exotic. White bigots may fear 'black crime' as an immediate danger.... but it is the black middle class that is more likely to seduce some white person's offspring and absorb that offspring's white genes into the black gene pool. Few people dare express that fear aloud, but they may feel it strongly.
Donald Trump ripped the scab off the wound of American life... and brought forth some of the most primitive thoughts in the American psyche. He found visceral fears to exploit in white workers and made sure that people with those fears did not think. The expert infamously expresses this fact:
Quote:...(P)ropaganda does not lie in the scientific training of the individual, but in calling the masses' attention to certain facts, processes, necessities, etc., whose significance is thus for the first time placed within their field of vision.
The whole art consists in doing this so skillfully that everyone will be convinced that the fact is real, the process necessary, the necessity correct, etc. But since propaganda is not and cannot be the necessity in itself, since its function, like the poster, consists in attracting the attention of the crowd, and not in educating those who are already educated or who are striving after education and knowledge, its effect for the most part must be aimed at the emotions and only to a very limited degree at the so-called intellect.
OK, give credit where it is due, even if I can't overstate my contempt for the evil man who wrote this.
Quote:Another project is Calexit which could end up functioning as a trap for the Fascists. As CalExit is explicitly a non-violent movement that hopes to make California independent through cooperation and legal procedures, if violent force is used to crush it, then it could backfire for the Fascists.
So things like these are what I hope to have an impact on, and work toward.
Fascists invariably treat any expression of dissent as a monstrous crime deserving of the severest punishment possible. A hint: Slobodan Milosevic did not have nuclear weapons at his disposal. If you don't think that a fascist tyrant wouldn't incinerate 20 million Californians to make a point about dissent against a political order that demands that 95% of the people suffer for the elite 2%... all that would stop him is the inability to redevelop several sites that resemble Hiroshima and Nagasaki for resettlement of his most loyal supporters in a climatic paradise, then you underestimate the potential for evil.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.