Decolonizing

 I have been thinking of colonization for quite some time. It could run back to the early Eighties when I looked at the effects of General Motors on Anderson, Indiana. My hometown was a colony of GM, its fate depended on what happened in GM's boardrooms. If I can ever get done with "Chasing Ashes", colonization will be one of its themes. 

With my interest in colonization, decolonization has attracted my attention. Reading John Aziz's The Infinite Reopening of History  (Quillette) gives me much to think about. My judgment is that neo-decolonialism is both impossible and immoral. 

It’s important to make a clear distinction between actual decolonisation and what I am calling neo-decolonialism. Real decolonisation was a concrete, historically specific process in which empires withdrew from territories they had been administering, as exemplified by the end of the Raj. These withdrawals changed legal and political realities on the ground: e.g. British colonial governance in India ended, and two new sovereign states, India and Pakistan, emerged.

This is not to say that the end of empire erased the effects of colonialism. Political borders, legal systems, and economic structures often outlived the formal withdrawal, and many societies still live with deep, measurable legacies of colonialism. It is one thing to argue for civil rights, equal representation, or institutional reform within an existing civic order.

But neo-decolonialism is not about dismantling real empires—even though some empires still exist today, such as the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China. Instead, it retroactively reclassifies political arrangements as “colonial” based on contemporary group dynamics, racial or ethnic categories (e.g. “whiteness”), and the question of which side has the most power.

In the neo-decolonial model, you don’t need an actual empire. Some vestigial remnants of a historical empire will do—hence you can take issue with the European colonisation of the Americas, or even the waves of continental migration to the British isles, or Scottish migration to the island of Ireland. Then you draw lines: one side is framed as indigenous; the other becomes “settler-colonial.”

Yep, no way that we cannot call America a settler-colonial state. 

In most of the rest of the world, too, history is messy. There are migrations, conquests, intermarriages, conversions, displacements, and returns. Empires rise and fall; borders are drawn and redrawn; peoples are renamed, identities are invented and reinvented.

Of course, we don’t live in a perfectly equal world and some groups of people have legitimate grievances. Some historical injustices have long knock-on effects. Examples include the ongoing legacy of Jim Crow in the United States, the structural problems created by caste in India, and the fact that many postcolonial states inherited borders and institutions that were never designed for stable self-government.

But there’s a difference between acknowledging and addressing real injustices in a legal and democratic way—for example in the framework based on equality and dignity established by Dr Martin Luther King Jr— and adopting an ideology that seeks to deconstruct whole societies—or even the entire world—in the name of decoloniality through “resistance,” which in this context is a euphemism for violence.

And unless you are a full-blown MAGA idiot, you recognize not just the injustices mentioned above but also others. If not, go read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Read the Korematsu case. 

Where there are injustices, the question has to be how to provide justice? Here, I find the answer decolonization provides (as put forth in the essay) is wrong:

In a neo-decolonial framework, the questions become: who is authentic, who is indigenous, who is tainted, who is settler-colonial? Once you take that approach, rights and democracy become secondary. Because the real issue becomes the question of who has the right to exist in a place at all. This, ultimately, is the logic of 7 October and the logic of Frantz Fanon. Once civilians can be reclassified as “settlers,” atrocities can be narrated as “decolonisation.” In the worldview inspired by Fanon, violence is cleansing and regenerative. It “restores” the colonised subject. It can remake a people, rebuild a nation. It is supposed to turn humiliation into dignity through acts of terror. In such a vision, violence against innocents is both permitted and sanctified.

Denying history is the route taken by cowards and others possessing bad consciences. 

We need to recognize the injustices of our history. Then we need to ask if we have remedied those injustices. If we have not, then we must decide how we will remedy the wrongs done by our past. 

Performing the same acts of injustice done by those who were unjust is nothing more than another form of injustice - hate breeding hate does not provide life, only more death.

sch 12/21 

 

 

 

 

Being Busy

 I started drafting this post 4 days ago.

In that time, I have added to "One Dead Blonde" and compiled the "Chasing Ashes"  scraps into a sample.

I finished my research project yesterday.

There was church on Sunday; the grocery last night and the convenience store on Saturday. No other traveling; today I have not even left the apartment.

Getting ready for a medical procedure tomorrow has left me tired, and I have been spending too much time today sleeping. 

I spent time on Tubi, but I cannot rightly think of what all I saw except American Gods. 

I will leave you with the scraps of the past few days.  

Despite his knack for slick pop, the principled and passionate Chris Rea never took the easy road (The Guardian) - as much s I liked Chris Rea, found him surprising, I never followed him, and found the reaction to his death surprising. 

Eventually, a life-threatening illness led him to completely reassess his career and pursue his real musical passion, the blues: he claimed that during his recuperation from the operation that saved his life but left him without a pancreas and in permanently poor health, he’d had an epiphany after finding an old Sister Rosetta Tharpe album in a drawer, bursting into tears at the sight of it. When his label rejected his 2002 album Dancing Down the Stony Road (“because it hadn’t been compromised in any way”), and suggested he make a big-name-packed duets album instead, he walked away from his deal, set up his own record company and happily saw out the rest of his career making and self-releasing the music he wanted to.

He should have gotten more recognition.

 

Movies I want to see - reviews from RogerEbert.com

No Other Choice 

This feels like it should apply here, too.

The Testament of Ann Lee - if we're needing the weird to overturn our stagnation, then his sounds like a good start, and yet:

And this remembrance is both in the intention and the failures of “The Testament of Ann Lee.” Fastvold’s film feels like a tribute, an act of instilling memory. And yet, I’d be dishonest to say that the film, on the whole, was very memorable. It is most certainly an expert display of craft: the script is generally nimble, the visuals are stunning, and the choreography is moving. But it is bloated in history and starving for persona. Ann Lee was pious and dedicated, but in this film’s depiction, not much else. Therefore, the extended chapters of the film’s framework become repetitive, as do its themes. There isn’t a single performance in the bunch that can touch Seyfried’s, leaving the film aching for chemistry.

The Choral because I saw a preview and I agree with this:

We need the gift of new narratives to help us imagine beyond present circumstances. While “The Choral” may be riddled with a few too many false notes for comfort, the purity of its song and message make it a hard tune to disregard.  

 A name to conjure another day and age, even if I barely knew or remember the person to which it is attached: Twiggy.

‘One agency called me Thunder Thighs’: Twiggy and Sadie Frost on sexism, self-esteem and the swinging 60s (The Guardian) - the past is never as neat and tidy as we like to make out.

 I forgot this rejection from 12/23:

Dear Samuel,
Thank you for submitting your short story “Going for the Kid” to Gemini Magazine. It was definitely action packed and fast paced. Unfortunately it is not quite right for us at this time but we appreciate the opportunity to evaluate your work.
Please consider us for new work in the future.
Thank you again.
Frances Wiedenhoeft, Reader 
Gemini Magazine 

How Christmas Murder Mysteries Became a U.K. Holiday Tradition (Atlas Obscura)

Like Professor Lee, Khan finds that the best Christmas murder mysteries offer a challenge and are thought-provoking. But they’re also based on the reality of family holidays. “You’ve got these seething things going on under the surface,” he says. “Crime fiction takes that one step further: You bump someone off. Normally, we’ll just have a fight at Christmas, a sulk, and not speak to each other for a year.”

At their heart, Christmas murder mysteries are morality tales, he says. Using the holidays and an endearing detective to highlight the good and bad in human nature as we head toward a new year.

Australia’s Selective Blindness The refusal to discuss Islamic antisemitism in Australia endangers Jews and threatens social cohesion.  (Quillette)

The terrorist attack at Bondi Beach on 14 December has prompted the shock and grief any society would expect, but I fear that the accompanying public conversation will follow an unproductive and yet familiar pattern. The focus will rapidly shift away from questions of ideology or communal attitudes and toward explanations that require little cultural introspection, such as the existence of “blind hatred” and “ignorance.” Commentators will no doubt emphasise the supposedly individual pathology of the perpetrators and urge restraint, while politicians will warn against division, call for unity, and double down on “anti-racism” programmes.

This is fundamentally misguided. If we hope to prevent further violence, we must trace the roots of the Bondi attack with clarity, since any solution divorced from those roots is destined to fail. Over the past several years, there have been many signs that antisemitism in Australia is becoming more visible and, in some places, clearly linked to ideological and theological beliefs. Much of this has appeared within pockets of the Muslim community committed to a strident interpretation of Islam. 

 

***

In his well-known critique of American multiculturalism, The Disuniting of America, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. notes that a system that encourages the preservation of strong communal identities can also import longstanding antagonisms. These do not dissolve simply because they have been relocated. Australia’s experience over the past year suggests something similar. A commitment to inclusion has been interpreted as a requirement to avoid discussing conflicts that arise from divergent and incommensurable worldviews. The assumption is that harmony can be maintained if difficult topics are kept out of public view. This has the short-term advantage of reducing political tension, but it also creates a long-term vulnerability by encouraging collective blindness.

 More rejections came in.

From 12/28:

 Thank you for submitting your work to MudRoom for review. We are grateful for the opportunity to engage with your writing and thinking. Unfortunately, we do not have a place in our upcoming issue for "Agnes." We hope it finds a loving home.

All the best,
The Editors
MudRoom Mag

And 12/29, "Agnes" had two more rejections.

This is the only one ever to address me without my name: 

Dear Writer, 

Thank you so much for submitting your piece to The Hemlock Journal! 

We appreciate the opportunity to review your entry, but we regret to inform you that at this moment, it doesn’t align with our vision for this particular issue. 

After careful consideration, we want to acknowledge the quality of your piece, and the creativity it reflects. However, due to various factors in our selection process, it did not make it to the final round this time. Please know this was a difficult decision, as your work truly stood out.


We highly encourage you to submit this entry to other journals, where it might be a better fit. Thank you for trusting us with your craft. 

We encourage you to continue sharing your writing with us in the future, as we truly admire your talent and dedication to the craft. Thank you for trusting us with your work, and we wish you the very best in all your literary endeavors.

Keep creating!

Warm regards,

Team Hemlock

The Hemlock 

 Not that I did not expect this:

Thank you for submitting "Agnes." We regret that we are unable to publish it, but we appreciate your interest in The Paris Review.

Yours sincerely,

The Editors

http://theparisreview.org

And one more for today:

We are grateful that you trusted ANMLY with "Coming Home," however, our readers felt that this particular packet was not a good fit, and we will be unable to publish it. We wish you luck in placing this elsewhere.

Sincerely,
The Editors
http://www.anmly.org 

 There remain 76 submissions out there waiting for a future rejection.

 Done with this post. Going to watch something on Tubi and take my med for tomorrow I see the doctor. 

 Don't expect tomorrow!

sch 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Politics & History - Lessons

 Two pieces from Englesberg Ideas are being mashed together in this post. Selected subconsciously or not, bear with me.

One looks at Europe and Russia; the other only considers China. The more Trump denigrates NATO and allies, the more I keep wanting to ask this question: who won World War Two?

Not us. The United Nations led by America, Great Britain, the USSR, and China won World War II. 

The red teams mentioned in the first essay should be applied to the maritime problems outlined in the second; the allies favored in the second are needed for the problem of Russia.

NATO’s 1937 moment  

This sense of a ‘prewar era’ has only become more urgent as senior officials and officers across the Euro-Atlantic community point to the possibility of a Russian attack on NATO within the foreseeable future. Primarily, the new approach has focused on increased defence spending. Thinking about the challenge, though, tends towards updates of the past, framing the broader picture either as a ‘return to the Cold War’ or revisiting the Nazi assault on Europe of the late 1930s, and the specific one of a Russian assault on the Baltic States. Very often, however, these are echoes and versions of debates that the Euro-Atlantic community has had for the last 20 years: a new Cold War. And all too often, the discussion about the late 1930s returns to the well-worn analogies of Munich and the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.

In fact, 1937 offers another apt reference point for lessons about evolving strategic challenges and deterrence and defence: this was the year that then-Colonel Arthur Percival, a well-connected, decorated and upwardly mobile British officer, wrote an ‘appreciation’ of a potential attack on Singapore from the Japanese point of view. Following on-site inspections in Singapore and Malaya, Percival observed that such tremendous change had taken place concerning the whole problem of the defence of the naval base at Singapore that it could no longer be considered an impregnable fortress. Instead, the base would be in imminent danger if war broke out.

***

‘Our 1937 moment’ means shaping an appreciation of a potential attack on NATO from the Russian point of view and acting on it. The long-serving baseline scenario of a Russian invasion of the Baltic States appears to be the most complex and potentially costly of options open to Moscow given the terrain and NATO’s defensive preparations. So, why would it work this way, and what are Moscow’s alternatives? How do Moscow’s changing international partnerships influence this, if at all? Answers to these questions will go a long way to mitigating the perennial Euro-Atlantic sense of surprise about Moscow’s actions, and to ensuring that deterrence and defence remain not just up-to-date, but ready for the future.

(Which should also seriously under the idea of a conspiracy underlying the Pearl Harbor attack - the British military made similar mistakes regarding Japan.)

Maritime allies are America’s superpower  

Realistically, building a commercial maritime-industrial base to compete with China’s would require vast sums of money. This would not be a one-time expenditure for retooling outdated shipyards and modernising crane factories. Grants and loans to manufacturers are only part of the story. Higher wages – which ultimately would be funded by larger public subsidies for commercial vessels – would be needed to attract workers into an industry they have shunned. Selling that industry’s products would entail a readiness to provide public-sector financing to shipowners – and to accept stunning losses when difficult economic conditions cause owners to default on their mortgages and leases. International collaboration to produce ships and maritime equipment at costs even remotely comparable to China’s cannot be taken for granted: shipyards tend to be large employers, and any government that will cede the jobs of well-paid workers represented by powerful labour unions is brave indeed.

Would approaching commercial shipbuilding as a collective venture diminish America’s standing as a great power? Hardly. Shipping is a thoroughly globalised industry, and no one worries about where a vessel was built. Nor would cooperation with friends and allies on maritime matters diminish the country’s ability to project force, deter adversaries and secure sea lanes. Nationalism has not served the maritime industry well, it is not likely to succeed in sustaining a defence against China’s challenge.

 sch 12/21

Nietzsche, Orthodox Christianity, Democracy - Swimming In the Deep Water

 I got distracted the other day with a question about how Orthodox Christianity deals with Nietzsche and vice versa. YouTube gave me a better answer than what I found elsewhere. What seems to be clear is that Orthodoxy contains ideas that have not been considered by Western philosophy.

An Unbelieving Age: Nietzsche’s Challenge & the Christian Response (Terry Eagleton, Commonweal, 2014)

 In Nietzsche’s eyes, truly noble spirits refuse to be the prisoners of their own principles. Instead, they treat their own most cherished opinions with a certain cavalier detachment, adopting and discarding them at will. It is what Yeats, who like many a modernist felt the influence of Nietzsche, and for whom opinions were fit meat for bank clerks and shopkeepers, called sprezzatura. One’s beliefs are more like one’s manservants, to be hired and fired as the fancy takes you, than like one’s bodily organs. They are not to be regarded as constitutive of personal identity, but rather as costumes one can don or doff at will. For the most part, as with kilts and cravats, it is aesthetic considerations that govern the donning and doffing. The left-wing historian A. J. P. Taylor once informed an Oxford Fellowship election committee that he had extreme political views, but held them moderately. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche scorns what he calls the “longing for certainty” of science and rationalism, an itch for epistemological assurance behind which it is not hard to detect a deep-seated anxiety of spirit. In his view, the compulsion to believe is for those who are too timid to exist in the midst of ambiguities without anxiously reaching out for some copper-bottomed truth. The desire for religion is the craving for an authority whose emphatic “thou shalt” will relieve us of our moral and cognitive insecurity. The free spirit, by contrast, is one that has the courage to dispense with “every wish for certainty,” supporting itself only by “slender cords and possibilities,” yet dancing even so on the verge of the abyss.

***

If religious faith were to be released from the burden of furnishing social orders with a set of rationales for their existence, it might be free to rediscover its true purpose as a critique of all such politics. In this sense, its superfluity might prove its salvation. The New Testament has little or nothing to say of responsible citizenship. It is not a “civilized” document at all. It shows no enthusiasm for social consensus. Since it holds that such values are imminently to pass away, it is not greatly taken with standards of civic excellence or codes of good conduct. What it adds to common morality is not some supernatural support, but the grossly inconvenient news that our forms of life must undergo radical dissolution if they are to be reborn as just and compassionate communities. The sign of that dissolution is a solidarity with the poor and powerless. It is here that a new configuration of faith, culture, and politics might be born. 

I Am a Traditionalist; Therefore, I Am (Public Orthodoxy, 2019) - has less to do with Nietzsche than the misuse of tradition. 

My thesis is very simple: the use of the word “traditionalist” and its derivative forms (“Orthodox morality,” “traditional values”) is philosophically untenable, i.e., it’s wrong. Why? Because we are all traditionalists. How? Because it is impossible to exist as a human being without tradition. Put another way, traditionless existence is impossible. Put yet another way, humans exist not simply in and through, but as tradition.

If this thesis is unexpected, what may be more shocking is the fact that it’s actually been around for a long time; I’m definitely not the first to articulate it. I’m simply repeating an axiom that has gained a fairly wide philosophical consensus and was probably most famously articulated by the philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre, whose work many of the so-called traditionalists appropriate. They do so selectively, because they fail to mention that for MacIntyre, everything is tradition, even the liberalism against which the “traditionalists” self-define. The fact that liberal democracy itself is a tradition sustained by particular civic practices was definitively shown by the Princeton philosopher, Jeffrey Stout.

***

One thing is for certain: the non-religious would, at least, consider me a traditionalist; but, their use of the term is simply the flip side of the bad religious use of the term. Again, it’s not about being a traditionalist versus a non-traditionalist; it’s about identifying what kind of traditionalist we are. For the record, I am an Incarnational traditionalist. I suspect those with whom I disagree on what is discussable in the Orthodox tradition share this epistemic presupposition. Our real debate is over the acceptable amount of diversity that can exist among those who share a common dogmatic tradition.

We should, thus, recognize our common presuppositions; affirm those common presuppositions, especially the dogmas, as ground rules for debate; and we need to stop using words like “traditionalist,” “traditional values,” and “Orthodox morality,” which only obfuscate what we share in common or, at worst, become rhetorical tools for  demonization. These words are conversation stoppers, which, for anyone who knows the history of Christianity, is actually antithetical to the living Tradition.

It is the loss of this commonality that is playing out in modern American politics. 

 Father Sergius Bulgakov: Personhood, Inequality, and Economics (Public Orthodoxy, 2020) - goes towards where Orthodoxy possesses ideas not addressed in Western philosophy.

Father Bulgakov’s training as a Marxist economist eventually led him to disavow its  anti-personalism and its suppression of human freedom. He described the Marxist economic concept of history as“a funeral dirge sung for the person and personal creativity” (Karl Marx as a Religious Type, 52).While returning to the Orthodox Church and subsequent ordination to the priesthood, Bulgakov sought to articulate a philosophy and theology of economics that refuted the Marxist concept of homo economicus while placing economics within the realms of Christology, sophiology and eschatology (Philosophy of Economy, especially pages 123-156). This meant economics should not be studied either in isolation or as the basis upon which all aspects of human life depend. Rather, economics had to be placed within a theological context that eschews the extremes of hedonism and asceticism (see  “The Economic Ideal”). For Bulgakov, it is the Church that navigates between these extremes along with their derivatives – luxury and involuntary poverty – and provides the concrete grounding for how economics can be used as an agent for restoring the culture and spiritual integrity of a local community and/or a nation. 

 ***

 The “battle for the rights of the human spirit” is synonymous with the battle for human freedom. Working to articulate a via media that avoids the anti-materialism of asceticism and the hedonism of materialism, Bulgakov draws attention to the relationship that “human value and spiritual expansion” have with acquiring the necessary material demands for living that in turn allow for the development of democracy.

…the increasing sense of human value and the spiritual expansion of personality inevitably express itself in the expansion of material demand: we have a good example of this in the whole contemporary movement towards democracy. (“Economic Ideal,” 48)

The democracy Father Bulgakov prophesizes envisions an economics that does not systematize poverty but creates a culture that allows and protects the development of the person by avoiding the communitarianism of socialism and the individualism of capitalism. This is the difficult path Bulgakov sets before the Orthodox Church. This is the path that places the Church in a vulnerable position as it upholds the freedom, honor and glory of the human person.

 Which is why I remain a democrat - it values humanity.

Eastern Orthodoxy vs Nietzscheanism Debate with Uberboyo is long, comprising several interviews, but it does leave me thinking that Nietzsche would have done well to read Orthodox writers.

Nietzsche, Žižek, to Christ: A Philosophical Journey to Orthodox Christianity 

 

sch 12/21 

 

Phenomenology - Nietzsche - Heidegger: YouTubing and Beyond

 Phenomenology

Nietzsche & Psychology:

Supernatural Polemics: Reason, Wonder, and Science with Carlos Eire & Peter Harrison:

I think (pun intended) this gave me an insight into Heidegger: I am, therefore I think – how Heidegger radically reframed being.

sch 12/19 

Essaying Montaigne  (Englesberg Ideas)

And this I think gives us a new understanding of Montaigne’s title: Essays. Essays are, in Montaigne’s French, not yet ‘essays’; they are assays, trials, tests, experiments. Take away belief, whether in philosophy or religion, and what do you have left? What you have is your own enquiring mind. Montaigne is the first modern because he is the first (although there were some classical precedents) to find himself without belief, at which point man becomes the measure of all things, endlessly trying and testing but never finding an eternal foundation. Montaigne is, in Richard Rorty’s language, the first anti-foundationalist. It is precisely because he is not a believer that Montaigne is constantly in movement, always adding, revising, rewriting, unable to settle. Had Montaigne been a pious Catholic the Essays would never have been written; they are, as it were, the record of his failure to believe (except, of course, in friendship). They are also a guide for readers, readers whom Montaigne assumes will be pratiquant but not necessarily croyant. (He is impatient with those who practise Protestantism while believing in the truth of Catholicism, or vice versa; there is no similar condemnation of those who practise without having any belief.)

To chronicle himself, Montaigne, the most conservative of thinkers, invented a new literary form. Malcolm Smith writes wonderfully about him, but he thinks and writes like a Roman censor, albeit a highly civilised one; to do Montaigne justice one would have to write like Montaigne, one would have to assay the Essays. And perhaps that too, like Montaigne’s constant, quiet distinguishing between belief and practice, can only be done indirectly, as in Carlo Ginzburg’s wonderful essay ‘The Soul of Brutes’, where Montaigne’s famous line ‘When I am playing with my cat how do I know that it is not rather she who is playing with me?’ is of course present even though it is, like Montaigne’s Jewish ancestry in the Essays, never mentioned.

Rara temporum felicitate, ubi sentire quae velis, et quae sentias dicere licet. (Tacitus) ‘Happy the day when you can think what you like and say what you think.’ It’s comparatively easy to write about authors who think what they like and say what they think. The Essays presents itself as such a book; it isn’t, which is why it is difficult to write about it. In my yard the pools of water have sunk into the Suffolk sand. And yet ‘There are figures from the past that time seems to bring closer and closer to us. Montaigne is one such figure.’ (Ginzburg) Writing about Montaigne is difficult, but surely not, in these times of conflict and uncertainty, impossible.

I need to get back to reading Montaigne, just as I need to get away from this computer!

sch 12/21 

 

Chess Records, Rock and Roll From The BBC, Weird AL

 

sch 12/8

Indiana Clickbait

 Just proof I am not immune to the manipulations of the internet.

10 No-Frills Restaurants In Indiana Locals Say Have The Best Comfort Food In The State (Family Destination Guide) has the usual weight given to Indianapolis and Hamilton County. It warmed the cockles of my heart to see The Steer-In still exists (Mom took us there when we kids) and the Mayberry Cafe looks even sprucer than it did 20 years ago.

10 Indiana Buffets Locals Cant Stop Going Back To (My Family Travels) presents something interesting. Yes, there is the concentration on Indianapolis, but it presents a dichotomy that would not have existed 15 years ago: we have Amish buffets, and we have Asian buffets. Glad to see MCL, that Indiana institution, remains; although, I would call it a cafeteria. Cafeteria style eating had a long history here. But what of Wellievers?

15 Indiana Tenderloin Joints That Prove The Hoosier State Makes The Best Sandwich In America (Decor Hint) - ah, The Mug and Bun! King's Ribs! Nice to see the list gathered from outside of Indy. I am not such a good Hoosier - the breaded tenderloin is something I have avoided.

7 Most Idyllic Small Towns In Indiana (World Atlas) - yeah, but do you want to live in them?

sch