Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the construction of the Ram temple in Ayodhya, 28 years after the demolition of Babri Masjid at the same spot. The wait of centuries has ended and India is creating a golden chapter in Ayodhya, he said in a speech following the ground-breaking ceremony.

Mr. Modi was accompanied by Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat, among others. The Prime Minister also unveiled a plaque and released a commemorative postal stamp to mark the occassion.

Here are the updates:

7.40 p.m. | Uttar Pradesh

Hailing Lord Ram as Imam-e-Hind (prelate of India), some Muslim devotees of Lord Ram watched the entire bhoomi pujan ceremony in Ayodhya on Wednesday live on their TV sets as they could not go there due to the coronavirus health protocols.

Underlining the countrys tradition of syncretic co-existence, they said once the coronavirus situation improves they would visit the temple site and offer their services in its construction.

It is a moment of joy for us. We are kar sevaks and consider Lord Ram as Imam-e-Hind, Raja Raees, the president of Sunni Social Forum (an organisation working for the Muslims) told PTI on Wednesday.

As Prime Minister Narendra Modi performed the bhoomi pujan at Ayodhya Ram Janambhoomi site, Mr. Raees said, "We celebrated the occasion by beating drums and playing harmonium. Shri Ram is our Paigambar. There is a feeling of happiness among the Muslims in the country. Members of our organisation watched the event live on TV.

Sunny Abbas, who lives in Lucknow, railed against those who identified the Ram temple movement as a Hindus-Muslim issue.

The bhoomi pujan is a tight slap on their faces. Most Muslims have agreed for the construction of a Ram temple respecting the sentiments of Hindus. Now the grand Ram temple will become a symbol of brotherhood, he told PTI over phone.

7.15 p.m. | Madhya Pradesh

The construction of the grand Ram temple at Ayodhya, whose bhoomi pujan was performed on Wednesday, is expected to be completed in the next three years, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) said.

VHP international president Vishnu Sadashiv Kokje said there is enthusiasm among Hindus across the world over the foundation stone laying ceremony for the Ram temple. He blamed the Congress for the delay in the temples construction.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi performed the ground-breaking ceremony in Ayodhya for the temple at the spot where many devout Hindus believe Lord Ram was born, marking the beginning of its construction.

Mr. Kokje told PTI, The smooth manner in which the work of temple construction has been going on after the formation of Sri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra by the Central government is amazing. We hope that the Ram temple in Ayodhya will be completed in three years.

6.30 p.m. | West Bengal

As Prime Minister Narendra Modi performed bhoomi pujan for the Ram temple in Ayodhya, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Wednesday called for preserving brotherhood between communities and the age-old legacy of unity in diversity.

Hindu Muslim Sikh Isai; Aapas mein hain Bhai Bhai! Mera Bharat Mahaan, Mahaan Hamara Hindustan." Our country has always upheld the age-old legacy of unity in diversity, and we must preserve this to our last breath! Ms. Banerjee tweeted.

West Bengal BJP president Dilip Ghosh, meanwhile, accused the TMC government in the State of disregarding Hindu sentiments by clamping a lockdown on a day when bhoomi pujan ceremony was being organised in Ayodhya.

Governor Jagdeep Dhankhar, who had announced that he would light earthen lamps at the Raj Bhavan on August 5 to mark the ground-breaking ceremony in Ayodhya, said the silence of the Chief Minister was due to her appeasement politics.

5.40 p.m. | Haryana

Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar on Wednesday described the laying of foundation stone of the Ram Temple in Ayodhya as a happy and historic moment for every Indian.

He also said that with the laying of the foundation stone, the dreams of crores of Lord Rams devotees have come true.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday performed the bhoomi pujan of a Supreme Court-mandated Ram temple in Ayodhya, bringing to fruition the BJPs mandir movement that defined its politics for three decades and took it to the heights of power.

In a series of tweets on the occasion, Mr. Khattar said, This happy moment is historic for every Indian.

Moments before the Prime Minister was to perform the bhoomi pujan of the Ram temple in Ayodhya, Mr. Khattar urged people to light a lamp in the courtyard of their homes and give a message of brotherhood.

5.35 p.m. | Jharkhand

Union Minister Arjun Munda and former Chief Ministers, Babulal Marandi and Raghubar Das, on Wednesday greeted people over foundation laying of Ram temple in Ayodhya by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Mr. Munda said the historic shrine in Uttar Pradesh has been a symbol of faith for Hindus worldover and starting the construction work of a grand temple by the Prime Minister has given respect to their faith.

Ram devotees have struggled for a long time for construction of Ram temple and even sacrificed their lives. This day is also to remember them, Mr. Munda, who is Union Tribal Affairs Minister, said in a statement.

Babulal Marandi said a golden and proud age began with the bhoomi pujan (ground-breaking rituals) for the Ram temple in Ayodhya.

August 5 will be scripted in the pages of history after Prime Minister Narendra Modi ji laid the foundation stone for construction of a grand Ram temple, Marandi said in a statement.

He said with this historic event, a new chapter of national unity and harmony has also begun.

5.00 pm | New Delhi

The construction of Ram temple in Ayodhya is much more than a religious affair and the structure will stand as a tribute to the best of timeless human values, Vice-President M. Venkaiah Naidu said.

He also said that Lord Rams conduct and values constitute the core of the consciousness of India, cutting across all kinds of divisions and barriers, and they are still relevant today.

In a Facebook post marking the foundation laying ceremony of Shree Ram Janmabhoomi Mandir on Wednesday, he said the construction of a temple for Lord Ram at his birthplace is more a re-coronation of the highest human values of truth, morality and ideals that the maryada purushottam epitomised during his life.

As the King of Ayodhya, he led an exemplary life, worthy of emulation by the common men and other nobles, he said.

Mr. Naidu and his wife Usha on Wednesday also recited Ramayana at the Vice-Presidents House to mark the bhoomi punjan ceremony at Ayodhya.

The family members of the Vice-President donated 5 lakh each for the fight against COVID-19 and for the construction of Ram temple, an official statement said.

In his social media post, Mr. Naidu expressed happiness at the ceremony, saying the Ram temple will continue to remind and reinforce the ethos of the motherland which is universal in application without any discrimination.

Mr. Naidu also lauded Iqbal Ansari, son of late Hashim Ansari, one of the parties to the land title dispute, for urging the people to forget the past and move on in the true spirit of India.

His words of wisdom offer useful guidance for all, he said.

The Vice-President termed this day the beginning of a new era of mutual respect for all faiths and harmonious co-existence that should spur the building of an India of the dreams of every aspiring citizen of the country. PTI

4.45 pm | Chandigarh

Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh congratulated the people of the country on the foundation laying of Ram temple in Ayodhya, saying it fulfills the long cherished desire of every Indian.

My heartiest congratulations to the people of India on the historic foundation laying of #RamMandir in #Ayodhya, which fulfills the long cherished desire of every Indian. Lord Rams universal message of Dharma remains the guiding light not just for India but for the world," the Chief Minister said in a tweet.

4.40 pm | Chennai

The Kanchi Kamakoti Peetam in neighbouring Kancheepuram has sent gold and silver coins, holy soil collected from the Kamakshi temple and the mutt, besides Vasthu (traditional Indian system of architecture) materials to be used in the bhoomi pujan for constructing the Ram temple in Ayodhya on Wednesday.

The soil specially obtained from the temples like Ekambranathar Swamy, Kamakshi and other Vishnu temples in the town have been sent by flight to Ayodhya ahead of the bhoomi pujan, said Sri Vijayendra Saraswathi Swamy, the 70th Acharya of Kanchi Kamakoti Peetam.

4.00 pm | New Delhi

Terming the foundation laying of Ram temple in Ayodhya as a historic and proud day for India, Home Minister Amit Shah on Wednesday said it heralds the beginning of a new era.

He said by starting the construction of the grand Ram temple in Ayodhya, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has written a golden chapter in the history of the great Indian civilisation, and asserted that the government remains committed to the preservation of Indian culture and its values.

Today is a historic and proud day for India. The consecration of the grand Ram temple by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at Lord Rams birthplace has written a golden chapter in the history of great Indian culture and civilisation and heralded the beginning of a new era, Mr. Shah, who is recuperating at a private hospital in Gurgaon after contracting COVID-19, said. PTI

3.30 pm | Ahmedabad

Jay Shree Ram! August 5 will be written in golden letters in the history books of 21st century. Five decades, 500 years of penance and struggle materialised today with the bhoomi pujan of Ram Lallas temple, Gujarat Chief Minister Vijay Rupani said in a video message.

The slogan - We swear by Ram that temple will surely be built there at Ayodhya - has been realised today. A Diwali like celebration has gripped the entire nation. Many Gujaratis made a contribution in the kar seva for building this temple, the BJP leader said.

He credited the two sons of Gujarats soil Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah for the harmonious atmosphere in which the bhoomi pujan was held at Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh on August 5.

We always do what we promise. This is BJPs commitment. If coronavirus was not there, todays event would have become the biggest religious congregation. I am sure the construction of Ram temple would lead to nation-building and take India ahead with pride, Mr. Rupani said. PTI

2.30 pm

Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Wednesday congratulated the entire country on the occasion of the bhoomi poojan of the Ram Temple in Ayodhya.

Congratulations to the entire country on the occasion of bhoomi poojan. May we continue to receive Lord Rams blessings. With his blessings, our country will get rid of hunger, illiteracy and poverty, and India becomes the most powerful nation in the world. May India show the path to the world in times to come. Jai Shri Ram! Jai Bajrang Bali, Mr. Kejriwal tweeted in Hindi.

2.20 pm

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi said that Lord Ram is the ultimate embodiment of supreme human values and can never appear in cruelty, hatred or injustice.

In a tweet in Hindi, the former Congress president said, Maryada Purshottam Lord Ram is the ultimate embodiment of supreme human values. He is the core of humanism embedded deep in our hearts.

Ram is love, he can never appear in hatred. Ram is compassion, he can never appear in cruelty. Ram is justice, he can never appear in injustice, he said. - PTI

2.10 pm

Ram temple will be the harbinger of a prosperous India, said PM Narendra Modi.

"Our scriptures says there has been no ruler like Lord Ram. Lord Ram's policy was that motherland is bigger than heaven. It is also Lord Ram's policy that as a nation gets powerful, it also becomes better at living peacefully. We have to ensure that fraternity and friendship cements the bricks of this temple. We have to respect the sentiments of everyone," he said, adding that the temple will continue to inspire generations to come.

PM Modi winded up his speech by talking about the importance of social distancing and using masks to control the coronavirus pandemic. - Sandeep Phukan

2 pm

Continuing his speech after the ground-breaking ceremony of the Ram temple, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that just as every section of the society, including Dalits and tribals, extended support to Gandhi ji during the freedom struggle, today every section has supported the Ram temple.

"India's faith, the collective of the people and the strength of this collective, has been a subject of research by many across the world," he said.

PM Modi speaks at the Ayodhya Ram temple ground-breaking ceremony.

"Ram is the thread of India's unity in diversity," PM Modi said, commenting on the different traditions and names of Ram and Ramayan in different languages like Tamil, Telugu, Odiya, Bengali, Kashmiri, Malayalam etc.

"Indonesia, which has the maximum Muslim population in the world, has unique Ramayan. Lord Ram is still worshipped there," he said, mentioning the different traditions of Ramayan in Cambodia, Thailand and Malaysia. He added that references to Ramayan can be found in Iran and China, and that Srilanka has it's own Ramayan while Nepal's tradition is attached to Mother Janaki.

Ram belongs to everyone and Ram is in everyone, said PM Modi. - Sandeep Phukan

1.50 pm

Just as August 15 symbolises the end of our struggle for freedom, today symbolises the culmination of the fight for a Ram Mandir for centuries, said PM Modi, continuing his speech at the ground-breaking ceremony of the Ram temple in Ayodhya.

On behalf of 130 crore people, I bow my head and pay respect to all those who were associated with the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, he said. "Whenever we have to do something, we have looked towards Ram ji. Efforts were made to destroy Lord Ram's identity, but he still reigns in our hearts," he said, adding that the temple will be a symbol of national sentiment and collective faith.

After the temple is constructed, Ayodhya will not gain importance but the entire economy will be transformed as people from all over the world will come here, said PM Modi.

"This is an opportunity to connect people with faith, connect present with the past. It is a gift to justice-loving India," he said, adding that the event has displayed the same dignity that was shown the day the Supreme Court order regarding the temple came out. - Sandeep Phukan

1.40 pm

Prime Minister Narendra Modi started his speech with a chant hailing Lord Ram and "Jai Siya Ram".

"Today this celebration and victory call is not restricted to Ayodhya but all over the world. Congratulations to Ram devotes across the world," he said.

"It is my fortune that Shri Ram janma Bhoomi Teertha Trust invited me and allowed me to part of this event. I express my heartfelt tribute," he said, adding that it was natural for him to come.

"India Today is creating a golden chapter. Today, the entire country is immersed in Ram. Today, the entire nation is emotional as the wait that went on for centuries ended. Crores of people may not believe that they are witnessing this event. For years, Ram Lalla who has been under a tent will see a grand temple," he added.

The tradition of breaking down and rising up again will end today, he said. - Sandeep Phukan

1.35 pm

Before he begins addressing those gathered, Prime Minister Narendra Modi unveiled a plaque to mark the laying of foundation stone of the Ram temple in Ayodhya.

He also released a commemorative postage stamp on the Shree Ram Janmabhoomi Mandir.

1.30 pm

The construction of the Ram temple is equivalent to the construction of India, said Mahant Nrityagopal Das, head of the Trust in charge of building the Ram temple in Ayodhya.

Mahant Nrityagopal Das, head of the Trust in charge of building the Ram temple in Ayodhya

"We request Modi ji and Yogi ji to start construction immediately to respect the sentiments of the devotees," he added. - Sandeep Phukan

1.20 pm

RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat, speaking at the ceremony, hailed the ground-breaking ceremony as the result of 20-30 years of work. "RSS, like-minded organisations worked for 20-30 years RSS, like-minded organisations worked nearly 30 years for fulfilment of temple construction resolve," he said, adding that many people have made sacrifices for this day.

See original here:

Ram temple bhoomi poojan live updates | Grand temple will be built for Ram Lalla who lived in temporary tent for years, says PM Modi - The Hindu

They all happened almost simultaneously, as if in a choreography. On February 9, 2011, a huge crowd of protesters had gathered at the Tahir Square in Cairo, Egypt. Unruly, eyes dilating like pellets of ice immersed in mug-full Campari liquor, it was obvious that this was a crowd determined to change thestatus quo.They shouted anti-government slogans, calling for an end to oppression, economic adversities and collapse of the Arabian spirit in the Arab world.

A couple of weeks before then, specifically on January 14, 2001, at the Habib Bourguiba Boulevard in Tunis, Tunisia, it was the same huge crowd, mobilized to end the decadent order. Similarly on February 3, 2011, a mammoth crowd of dissidents gathered at the Sanaa in Yemen, calling for the resignation of President Ali Abdullahi Saleh. A couple of months after, specifically on a cold morning of April 29, 2011, hundreds of thousands of people at Baniyas, Syria, gathered to upturn the ruling order.

The overall goal of the protesters was similar: Bring down oppressive regimes that manifested in low standard of living in the Arab world. Dubbed Arab Spring, an allusion to the 1848 Revolution and the Prague Spring of 1968 by Political Scientist, Marc Lynch in an article he did for the AmericanForeign Policymagazine on January 6, 2011, the upheavals were a series of anti-government protests sparked off in early 2010s in Tunisia that eventually culminated in uprisings and armed rebellion that became widespread across the Arab World.

In a twinkle of an eye, they spread to five other Arab countries, namely Libya, Egypt, Syria, Yemen and Bahrain, leading to the deposition of the second President of Tunisia, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali; Egyptian Hosni Mubarak; Muammar Gaddafi and Yemeni first President, Ali Abdullah Saleh. In places where such upturns were not achieved, major social dislocations, riots, civil wars and insurgencies followed. In all of this social violence, the demonstrators catchphrase was, translated from Arab, the people want to bring down the regime.

So, did the#RevolutionNowconveners actually want to bring down the Muhammadu Buhari government last week and if yes, were they representative of the people of Nigeria? I asked this question because, if the Arab Spring upheavals were what they sought to clone, we must place it side by side the gloat of the Buhari presidency which likened their own version to a childs tantrum and a poor imitation of the original.Femi Adesina, Buharis spokesman, articulated the Buhari governments disdain for and scant belief in the possibility of a rehash of an Arab Spring-like revolution in Nigeria. My reading of this mockery of the protests was that Buhari, like the ruling class elite now and before him, was persuaded that the internal contradictions in Nigeria can never allow for a peoples revolt against governmental oppressors.

A revolution is always a mass thing, not a sprinkle of young boys and girls you saw yesterday in different parts of the country. I think it was just a funny thing to call it a revolution protest. In a country of 200 million people and if you see a sprinkle of people saying they are doing a revolution, it was a childs play. Revolution is something that turns the normal order. What happened yesterday, would you call it a revolution? It was just an irritation, just an irritation and some people want to cause irritation in the country and what I will say is when things boil over, they boil over because you continue to heat them, the Buhari publicist said.

I am persuaded that the social condition of the 200 million people Adesina literally venerated for staying aloof to the#RevolutionNowis far worse thanthose of the Arab countries. Like them, a tiny clique too has held the jugular of power for decades, continuously riding roughshod over their suffering people and believing that a violent upturn was a mirage. This ruling elites lethargy, in Nigeria, has resulted in apathy to the worsening fates of society and breeding a teeming agonizing majority.

However, my reading of the presidencys dismissive appraisal of the#RevolutionNowprotests shows that that mockery is situated on a wonky pedestal. Buharis basis for dismissing the protest includes its scant attendance, absence of belligerence of the protesters and the fact that things have not yet boiled over. Of a truth, on the outward, Omoyele Sowores#RevolutionNow, which provoked that disdainful appraisal of the Nigerian presidency, may look too sparse to qualify for a peoples revolt. However, proclaiming it a failure may be a fatal mis-reading of the temperature of revolts.

Though Buhari must have been buoyed into lethargy by the many contradictions of the Nigerian state that might not have allowed Nigerians to troop out in their millions to convince government that Buhari is sitting on a keg of gunpowder, things are actually fast boiling over from within.It is apparent that government has failed to see the success of the protest as a symbolism for perforation of the veneer of governmental resistance. Since it could not see this implication, government then dangerously lapsed into a couple of false assumptions which show it as incapable to properly read what people dont say.

In his weeklyFacebookepistle, Adesina was further lionized to make further fatal fallacious blunders. Citing the viral call of a 4-year old boy who urged his mum to calm down, entitledWhy We Need to Calm Down, the presidents spokesman made same ruling elite mistake of equating infrastructural projects with development and imagining that the people are happy. He regaled Nigerians with construction projects which he said were unprecedented in Nigerias history. Does he know that development is mental and not merely physical structures?

While Nigeria may indeed have witnessed a flurry of Chinese loan-funded, ostensibly corruption-ridden infrastructural projects, Nigerians joy level has sunk considerably under Buhari. Development is in the peace that has eluded Nigerians in the last five years, in the widespread belief that Nigeria is rudderless under Buhari and the fear that Boko Haram, ISWAP, ISIS and bandits are presiding over the Nigerian affairs, rather than the elected political elite.

By definition, a revolution is a fundamental, sudden change in political power and political organization. It is propelled when a people revolt against an oppressive government run by generally perceived incompetent people. In human history, there have been an array of revolutions which significantly changed thestatus quo. While notable revolutions are the American Revolutionary War of 1775-1783, the French Revolution of 1789 to 1799and the Russian Revolution of 1917, Africa has had its ownexperiences, ranging from the Angolan Revolution of 1961 1974, the Egyptian Revolution of 1919 and the Zanzibar Revolution of 1964. The most recent in this league in Africa is the Arab Spring. So, what gave#RevolutionNowconveners the impression that Nigeria is ready for a revolt?

Successful revolutions have been known to succumb to some indices.James DeFronzosRevolutions and Revolutionary Movements, which can be regarded as a handbook for revolution, provided some insights. Mass frustration resulting in local uprisings, dissident elites, powerfulunifying motivations, a severe crisis paralyzing state administrative and coercive power and a permissive or tolerant world context are some of the indices DeFronzo suggested cannot but be present if a revolt against an existing order must sail through.

A critical look at the Nigerian situation reveals the following: Whereas there is mass frustration in the country, this has seldom resulted in local uprisings, except the June 12 riots. In the same vein, the Nigerian elites, being part and parcel of the maggots that lace the Nigerian decadence, are literally having a saturnalia inside the Nigerian sewage and are far from being dissident against thestatus quo. Again, whereas there are motivations for revolt in virtually all parts of Nigeria, the complexities in diversities of tribe, religion and culture have compelled divisive motivations. The Nigerian ruling elites are coercive, reckless and feckless in their rule but the contradictory indices earlier provided have restrained massive and widespread paralysis of governments. Allied to these is the fact that while there is indeed asidon lookof the international system against the slide in the affairs of Nigeria, this has lionized the ruling elite into further tightening the screw of their misrule.

Only a surface analysis would conclude that Nigeria is not ripe for a revolution. A combination of an incompetent ruling class and a gale of hopelessness is oscillating in the Nigerian sky. A conservative estimate will show that, at least 90 per cent Nigerians, from all the geopolitical zones, are miserable, hopeless and perceiving life as worthless. At every point, those purportedly elected to provide succor daily advertise confounding helplessness.

Look at the Bauchi State governor who recently appointed a Special Assistant on Unmarried Women Affairs; or the systemic chaos that is the order of the day in Nigeria. Check out the symbolism of Edo State where the unrivalled lawlessness of Adams Oshiomhole is jamming the arrogance of power of Godwin Obaseki. And of course, the massive theft of Nigerias inheritance and full-blown wretchedness of Nigerians, both of which are tribal-blind and religion-jaundiced.

What are those contradictions that made the#RevolutionNowlook like a failure and which have made Adesina and his ilk gloat at the possibility of an overturn of the system? One is the structural default that Nigeria sits upon. No successful revolt can happen, in the words of DeFronzo, without unifying motivations. Though there is mass frustration, the motivations for revolt are not unifying. This necessitated what happened recently in Katsina, Buharis home state. Tired of their massive killing by bandits with a corresponding incapability of their son, Buhari and his sidekick governor, Aminu Masari, Katsina people blocked the roads and asked for their twin resignation.

Also, persuaded that the unprecedented heists in government and Buharis cancerous cronyism are offshoots of a systemic imbalance, Southern Nigeria has consistently called for restructuring. In the ears of a feudal North used to kowtowing, however, that singsong is absolute bunkum. Again, while bandits who come from a seeming culture that justifies slaughtering have butchered more Southern Kaduna people than the number of rams they probably slaughtered in their lifetime, the rest of Nigerias consternation at this bloodletting sounds strange to the sons of perdition whose DNA is violence and bloodshed. So where can there be one voice against systemic disorder as to propel people to massively gather to upturn a decadentstatus-quolike Buharis?

The above are ills resulting from the calamitous dalliance of Flora Shaw and her British soldier liaison, Lord Lugard. Unfazed by the fact that Nigeria is not a nation but a concentration of nations, with different persuasions, worldviews, cultures, social foundations, human excitements and expectations, this duo soldered the nations into a fractious whole, with dangers for their forcefully welded existence. This resulted in last weeks sprinkle of young boys and girls,a lathe presidencys gloat, as against a mass uprising, even though the indices of revolution, the hopelessness, the frustrations, are present everywhere. The truth is, there is no difference between the widespread despondency in Katsina-Ala, the frustration in Nkalagu or the massive disdain with Nigerian ruling class in Igboho but motivations for dissent are not the same.

Femi Adesina and the ruling class as a whole may however not have too long to gloat. To gloat at the impracticability of a revolution is a fallacious appeal to authority. It can also pass as a fallacy of the straw man. This is because it is not unlikely that the Nigerian ruling class might have been holding on to weak, phony and ridiculous beliefs that have no basis in science. The collapse of current world order, especially in this world of Coronavirus, may have underscored this.

It is in the enlightened self interest of the Nigerian ruling class to flatten the curves of inequalities and gross lack and want, otherwise, its thinking that Nigerians are incapable of rising against it will collapse.

This was the thinking of the runners of George OrwellsAnimal Farm. The lyrics of OrwellianBeasts of Englandsay this much and are a pointer to the fact that, if the oppression and frustration in Nigeria continue unabated, it may be a push for a surge of the adrenaline of the Nigerian oppressed.

Orwell had enjoined the suffering oppressed, the Beasts of England, Beasts of Ireland the corollary inside the Nigerian Animal Farm cage, the, Beasts of every land and climenot to be downcast asSoon or late the day is coming,//Tyrant Man shall be oerthrown//And the fruitful fields of England//Shall be trod by beasts alone. Rejoicing in a future of conquest of the system, Orwell also enjoined that, Rings shall vanish from our noses//And the harness from our back//Bit and spur shall rust forever//Cruel whips no more shall crack.

Are the Nigerian ruling elite who believe that the decadent order would continuead infinitumlistening?

Mimiko: A withered Iroko tree

The sagging consequence and worth of the name of Olusegun Mimiko, the former governor of Ondo State, received some boost in political discourse recently. It was buoyed by the coming October governorship election of his Ondo home state. Since leaving office in 2016, Mimiko, the man who prided self as Iroko tree of Ondo politics, seemed to have been felled from reckoning and became the butt of jokes. You could summarize his tumble in a Yoruba wise-saying thatogbon a ma pa ologbon at the juncture of fate, the Smart Alec will certainly meet their waterloo.

Mimiko received the push of destiny in his political sojourn, from being a commissioner, Secretary to the State Government, Minister of the Federal Republic, to an eight-year reign as governor. His was an unexampled case of an underdog disdained by the powers-that-be who upturned power equation in Ondo State and ran for, as well as won governorship on the platform of an unknown Labour Party. Thereafter, for eight years, he built a power base that he unfortunately wove round himself as theFuhrer. A student of the power of symbolism, Mimiko appeared almost everywhere in austereadireattire, projecting the image of an ascetic who deliberately shunned wealth and the good things of life.

But that was just a faade! It covered Mimikos reification of self above every other consideration. A few months before the 2015 election, the Smart Alec jumped ship again, from the LP to the PDP. There was thus no wonder that almost immediately he left office, with no power grip, he suffered a huge casualty of erstwhile followers who made an about-turn from a Smart Alec who thought he was the only wisdom base of power. The icing on the case of his fall was when the Iroko ran for Senate and was thoroughly humiliated by a man who could not dare the majesty of his power as theFuhrer.

Thereafter, Mimiko tumbled down politically and with resounding ignominy. His major cusp of fall was his decision to trade off the candidacy of his Attorney General for almost eight years, Eyitayo Jegede. Those in the know claimed that while Mimiko stood like an Iroko behind him by the day, he traded in the Jegede merchandize at night, smiling away with the booty of the barter. When the consignment was weighed down by the shenanigan of another merchant of politics, Jimoh Ibrahim, the former governor easily meshed into the midst of those who bore the pall of that dream. He only began to harvest the seeds of political Karma, post-office. Not only did followers migrate from him, the erstwhile Iroko became the sole inhabitant of a political party whose total membership could hardly fill a tiny living room. More instructively, all his harvests of office have vapourized into the hands of a band of smarter Smart Alecs and the Iroko is now as dry as a morsel swallowed without stew.

But, not to worry, political capital and reckoning are returning to the withered Iroko tree. A fellow political inhabitant of the hovel of the oldest profession in the world, who in less than a month, had traversed two political parties and is being careered into a third by an inordinate ambition that has no place for morality, wants to share political harlotry with the once famous Iroko. He is Agboola Ajayi, Ondo deputy governor, whose vaulting ambition is pushing to be the most notorious political harlot in recent time. And Mimikos solo political hovel Zenith Labour Party (ZLP) is the shack to harbor their co-habitation. Irokos political odyssey has over the years taken him on a merry-go-round from AD to PDP, to LP, PDP and to ZLP, barring any further political peregrination. He is likened now to a huge Iroko tree shunned of its Irokoness.

The ZLP misadventure of Agboola and Mimiko would be the last total withering of the Iroko tree. By the foot of the tree would be left this epitaph: Here are the ruins of a once domineering tree, withered by a personal belief that he is smarter than all.

Olukoya and ill-logics of the Pentecostal Republic

General Overseer, Mountain of Fire and Miracles Ministries, Pastor Daniel Olukoya, polluted Nigerias religio-political waters last week. Apparently swimming in the pool of what my friend, Ebenezer Obadare, labeled Nigerias incestuous interplay of religion and politics in what he tags a Nigerian Pentecostal Republic, the pastor took liberty on the pulpit to spew illogicalities that have become the preserve of so-called men of God.

The Olukoya epistle contained so many other cants. Speaking under the immunity of this Pentecostal Republic and a narrative from the pulpit that Nigerian politicians must have operated under a demonic spell, Olukoya highlighted what made Awolowo one of the most unique minds of the last century. From his prosecution of the war with zero borrowing as Yakubu Gowons Minister of Finance, to his ascetic lifestyle and how he mesmerized the Gowon cabinet with Simple Primary Economics, Awolowo, in the words of Olukoya, was simply a genius.

And when they were going to do FESTAC 77, they asked for Awos opinion. Awo said, This Festac 77 is a show of our primitivity and that the white man will be quite happy to see us exhibit our primitivity. He said that the money that would be used for Festac 77 should be spent on technology for education, for things that will move people forward, not going back to the idols that dragged us to where we were, and the man had this uncanny attribute of being right, said Olukoya.

However, rather than those alluring superlatives being held as qualifications for eternal life, both in the hearts of the people and the Kingdom of God which admits only the purest of hearts, Olukoya punctured all those attributes he ascribed to Awolowo with what I call the irreverent logic of the pulpit. It is a logic which Pentecostal overlords have deployed to hoodwink their congregants and the public.

Olukoya then magisterially proclaimed that the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo never fulfilled his destiny because he did not give his life to Christ. Despite Awolowos greatness and exploits on the political scene, Olukoya said the sage denied Christ even against the prodding of great Apostle Joseph Ayo Babalola, who allegedly once visited his house.

Some writers have brought out the lie of that Babalola reference so it wont detain me here. It however occurred to me that Olukoya, as said earlier, must have been operating under that general and global belief of politicians being evil and their Nigerian variants, archetype of the thief on the left cross, totally submerged in evil. It was that global tar-brush that the Pentecostal overlord apparently applied on Immortal Awo. This narrative wont wash with Awolowo.

In the history of Nigerian politics, not many of the political elite approximate Christlike attributes as Awolowo did. If the refrain in Christendom is for worshippers to fervently yearn to be like Christ, in character and humility, virtually all politicians since Awolowos earthly departure, pray to be like him in forthrightness and devotion to humanity. Awolowo made life and living worthwhile for the people of Western region, through his developmental strides.

Methinks Olukoya and his Pentecostal overlords have over the years sunk into the arbitrariness zBorn Again-ism as a classification, mis-perceiving it as literal. Born Again, in my reading, isnt only, or isnt strictly, a mouth confession to be like Christ. Born Again is found in the philosophy of humanism which Awolowo epitomized. Humanism isnt all about the metaphysics of religion or the physical service to God since no one can see Him. To be born again is to put humanity first in any earthly engagement. That was Awos creed and it supersedes any metaphysics of religion or in Born Again-ism which Pentecostal pastors have deployed for ages to mesmerize their congregants, preparatory to erecting drain pipes into their hearts which then mint cash into their pockets.

It was that same literal interpretation that Christ disdained in Mathew 25: 35:For I was hungry and you gave Me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave Me something to drink, I was a stranger and you took Me in,Iwas naked and you clothed Me, I was sick and you looked after Me, I was in prison and you visited Me.When asked when they did these to him, He replied, Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of Mine, you did for Me.

Awolowo, in serving humanity, served God affectionately.

Link:

Why the colour of #RevolutionNow was not Arab Spring-red - TheCable

Will Ferrell and Rachel McAdams in Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga. Photo: Elizabeth Viggiano/Netflix

This post is updated frequently as movies leave and enter Netflix. *New additions are indicated with an asterisk.

As the world continues to fall apart, dont you just want to something to make you laugh? Netflix is becoming the countrys biggest source for a laughter after a long week at work, but it can be hard to find exactly what youre in the mood for when you log on to the service. So were here to help. (And for more public service announcements, check out our regularly updated lists of the 100 Best Movies on Netflix and the 50 Best TV Series on Netflix.)

The romantic comedy genre has been in a dire state for many years now, but Hollywood occasionally produces a clever twist on the stale formula. Take this Richard Curtis (Yesterday) movie that features Domhnall Gleeson and Rachel McAdams at their most charming. Gleeson plays a man who can travel back in time, and uses that ability to alter his romantic future, learning that its better to accept life one day at a time with all of its imperfections.

The movie that made Jim Carrey a superstar is over 25 years old already, but its stars fearless physical comedy style doesnt really age. Carrey plays the title character, who gets caught up in a case involving the kidnapping of the Miami Dolphins mascot. Its just an excuse for Carrey to act as goofy as possible. He would do anything to get a laugh.

Movies just dont get much funnier than this 1980 classic from David Zucker, Jerry Zucker, and Jim Abrahams. Robert Hays, Julie Hagerty, and Leslie Nielsen star in a parody of the disaster flicks of the 70s, but Airplane! has far transcended its roots to become one of the most quotable and beloved comedies of all time.

Believe it or not, this is the last movie to win both the Oscar for Best Actor (Jack Nicholson) and Best Actress (Helen Hunt). James L. Brooks romantic comedy is a perfect example of a movie that caught its cast at just the right moment, getting one of the last Nicholson performances that could be called charming and supporting it with great work from Hunt and Greg Kinnear. Some of it is a bit dated, but it catches just enough lightning in a bottle in terms of casting to justify another look.

Mike Myers never could have imagined that his goofy superspy parody would launch a franchise, but all three films about the inimitable Austin Powers are on Netflix, just waiting for a rainy-day marathon. The reason these movies work is Myers complete fearlessness hell do anything to make you laugh.

Another family movie! This adaptation of the famous kids book by Judi and Ron Barrett completely expands on the world of its source material to tell the story of an inventor (voiced wonderfully by Bill Hader) who unleashes a storm of food. The character design here is clever and the script is very smart, written by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who went from this to make a little flick called The LEGO Movie and produce Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. They know a thing or two about great cartoons.

Its hard to believe that its been a quarter-century since Amy Heckerlings brilliant reimagining of Jane Austens Emma hit the pop culture landscape, but its even more remarkable how well this films humor has held up. The fashion and music may be dated, but the progressive sense of humor and perfect comic timing mean it will work even for the generations born after it was released.

InThe Death of Stalin, Armando Iannuccis acid dramatization of the days in October 1953 when the Soviet Union lost its paranoid-psychotic totalitarian leader of three decades, the characters accents are Cockney, Brit-twit, and Yank no Russian is spoken while tortures and mass murders are ordered in tones of crisp English understatement. It takes some time to adjust to the mix of silly, peevish bureaucrats and the serious atrocities they inflict. But thats the beauty of the thing. Iannucci gets that grotesque horrors often emanate from egotists, clowns, and stumblebums, from small-minded people with vast and unchecked powers.

Eddie Murphy is back! Its been a long time since we saw this version of Eddie, who reminds us how funny and charismatic he can be with the right part. That part is the flashy personality that was Rudy Ray Moore, a washed-up musician who transformed himself into the character of Dolemite. Like The Disaster Artist and Ed Wood, this is an ode to DIY filmmaking with not just a great performance from Murphy, but Wesley Snipes and Keegan Michael Key too.

One of the most delightful surprises of the dumpster fire that is Summer 2020 has been Eurovision Song Contest, an unexpectedly sweet and clever flick and Will Ferrells best comedy in a decade. The Anchorman star plays half of an Icelandic duo who stumble their way through the Eurovision singing contest, but the movie really belongs to Rachel McAdams, who gives a performance that joyfully reminds everyone that she has absolutely perfect comic timing.

Greta Gerwig got a lot of deserved attention for Lady Bird but it wasnt her first semi-biographical screenplay, and maybe wasnt even her best. She co-wrote this quarter-life crisis comedy with director Noah Baumbach, in which she stars 27-year-old New Yorker Frances Halladay. Its one of those films that doesnt have much of a plot but works because of the genuine, empathetic way it approaches its leading lady, a character who feels both incredibly specific and yet universally relatable at the same time.

Remember when Russell Brand was a star? Riding the fame from his supporting role in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, he headlined this spin-off as Aldous Snow, an obnoxious rock star who takes a talent scout played by Jonah Hill along for the ride of his personal meltdown. Brand and Hill are funny, and you may have forgotten that Rose Byrne and Elisabeth Moss pop up in funny supporting roles too.

Michael Dowses 2011 hockey comedy is a great sports movie about finding your ideal role in life. It made hardly anything in theaters but found an audience at home (so much so that theyve already made an inferior sequel). Seann William Scott stars as Doug Glatt, a sweet but kinda dumb guy who becomes the tough guy on a hockey team. You know, the one who starts and finishes most of the fights. Its funny and surprisingly sweet with Scotts career-best work.

Relive one of the best comedies of all time over and over again on Netflix. Believe it or not, this 1993 Bill Murray vehicle wasnt that rapturously received critically or commercially when it came out, but its become a beloved genre classic. Murray stars as a weatherman forced to relive the same day over and over again until he gets it right. Its not just the clever premise but how much co-writer/director Harold Ramis and Murray inject humanism and truth into it. And its held up so much better than most early 90s comedies.

The Coen brothers wrote and directed this divisive 2016 comedy about the film industry in the 1950s. Forget Ryan Murphys Hollywood and stick with this razor sharp gem with a great Coen ensemble that includes Josh Brolin, George Clooney, Ralph Fiennes, Jonah Hill, and many more.

Long before Popstar and Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Andy Samberg starred in his first Lonely Island project and first major film after Saturday Night Live. Relatively ignored and critically derided at the time, Hot Rod has developed a loyal cult following over the years. Its easy to see the Lonely Island comedy voice developing in this story of a goofy stuntman trying to perform the biggest stunt of his career to save the life of his irascible father.

There are not a lot of great Netflix Original comedies (sorry, Adam Sandler fans) as the company has focused more on sci-fi and drama in its first few years of nonstop production. One of the exceptions is this Sundance hit, a great vehicle for Jessica Williams. The former Daily Show correspondent stars as the title character, someone trying to find happiness and love. Shes charming and delightful in a movie that not enough people have seen.

One of Cameron Crowes best films became something of a punchline with its heavily quoted lines (Show me the money, You had me at hello, everything that cute kid says) but its actually a wonderful romantic comedy that has held up incredibly well in the quarter-century since its release. Tom Cruise plays the title character, a sports agent who is pushed into starting his own agency while he falls in love with a single mother, played by Renee Zellweger. Its sweet, smart, and funny.

Long before he was Deadpool, Ryan Reynolds was a fat kid named Chris Brander. Ignoring the arguably offensive fat jokes, this is an underrated laugher about a guy who is stuck in the friend zone with his best friend (played by Amy Smart) but gets a chance to make his dreams come true a decade later. Its far from perfect but features very likable performances from Reynolds, Smart, and Anna Faris.

You have likely never seen a movie quite like this 2004 martial arts comedy, Stephen Chows masterpiece. Set in 1940s China, this worldwide hit features some of the best stunt work you can find on Netflix, all in service of a movie that often plays like a live-action cartoon. Its ridiculous and unforgettable.

Greta Gerwigs Oscar nominee is one of the most personal and striking coming-of-age films of the 2010s. Saoirse Ronan stars as a young Californian who longs for someplace cooler than her own hometown. Its a heartfelt and very smart film, buoyed by great performances throughout, including Ronan, Tracy Letts, Timothee Chalamet, Lucas Hedges, Beanie Feldstein, and Laurie Metcalf, who was robbed of that Oscar.

Nicole Holofcener is one of the most underappreciated writer-directors alive, even if she did just earn an Oscar nod for co-writing Can You Ever Forgive Me? You simply have to see Enough Said, Lovely and Amazing, and Please Give. Her latest stars Ben Mendelsohn as a man deep in a mid-life crisis that comes from the realization that hes not as important as he thought that he was his whole life. Its not as good as some of her best work, but minor Holofcener is still worth a look.

Theres a movie on Netflix that features Aubrey Plaza as a profanity-spewing nun and you havent watched it yet? Jeff Baenas Sundance hit also stars Alison Brie, Dave Franco, John C. Reilly, Molly Shannon, and Fred Armisen in a ridiculous, raunchy retelling of The Decameron. Its reminiscent of classic Mel Brooks in the way it skewers classical storytelling structures with modern comic sensibilities.

Comedy doesnt get much darker than this 2015 offering from the 2019 Oscar-nominated Yorgos Lanthimos. The Greek director co-wrote and directs the story of a place where single people go to hook up with others looking for love. The catch? If they dont find a partner within 45 days, they are turned into animals. As dry and deadpan as comedy gets, there are still some very funny beats in Lanthimoss exaggerated look at the folly of human connection.

Its hard to say that youll laugh out loud at this look at marital dysfunction, but Azazel Jacobs indie critical darling has enough black humor to qualify. The wonderful Tracy Letts and Debra Winger star as an estranged, middle-age couple who are both having relatively open affairs. As their lovers insist that they end the marriage, the couple is surprised to fall back in love with each other.

Tom Hanks and Shelley Long star in this 1986 hit about a couple who end up with a disastrous home and try to renovate it with hysterical results. A whole generation of 80s kids love this movie, which has a nice blend of physical comedy for the little ones and the kind of nightmarish situation to which their parents can relate.

Theres a bunch of Monty Python specials and movies on Netflix, but this remains arguably the career peak of one of the most beloved comedy troupes of all time. A parody of tales like those of the Knights of the Round Table, Holy Grail is one of the most heavily quoted movies of all time, a comedy that feels like its playing in some theater somewhere in the world, probably at midnight, every single day. Its popularity simply never recedes.

Holy Grail may be laugh-out-loud funnier, but its arguable that Life of Brian is actually smarter. Monty Pythons most controversial movie stars Graham Chapman as Brian Cohen, the neighbor of Jesus Christ. Its an incredibly smart film that caused quite an uproar when it was released due to accusations of blasphemy. Modern comedy could use a little more blasphemy every now and then.

Pair this up with Uncut Gems for a little bit of Sandler whiplash. Years before his most acclaimed role, Sandler was the biggest comedy box office star in the world, as evidenced by his remake of Frank Capras Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, the story of an average guy who becomes an unexpected billionaire. Its all an excuse for Sandlers trademark man-child humor, but its got a big heart in some of the right places and certainly outshines some of the recent Happy Madison Netflix Originals.

Not every movie on a list like this should be a smash hit, so were digging a little deeper for this South by Southwest hit starring the delightful Nol Wells of Master of None and Saturday Night Live. She also wrote and directed this story of a young lady returning to her hometown and dealing with some unresolved issues regarding her ex-boyfriend, now with a new partner. Wells is charming and funny.

Jared Hess and Jack Blacks goofy senses of humor meshed well in this 2006 comedy hit. Black plays a cook at a Oaxacan monastery who unexpectedly becomes a famous luchador, but thats just the skeleton of a plot on which to hang physical humor and silly behavior. Its the kind of comedy thats easy to put on in the background while youre doing other things. Sometimes thats all you want from Netflix.

No one ever could have guessed that the unsuccessful TV series Police Squad! would turn into the wildly successful film series The Naked Gun, which was such a hit on its 1988 release that it turned Leslie Nielsen into a massive star and produced two sequels. The first film is still a best, a gloriously ridiculous spoof of cop shows/films in which Nielsens Frank Drebin stumbles upon a plot to kill Queen Elizabeth II that involves Reggie Jackson. Its too bad they dont make movies this gloriously stupid (in a good way) as often as they did in the 80s and 90s. The second film is also on Netflix (but not the third.)

The timing may not seem right for a movie about violent cops, but Jody Hills pitch-black comedy gets at something about corrupt power and the kind of personality drawn to the force, and people seem more drawn to it than ever during Summer 2020 for that reason. Its vicious and hysterical.

Jenny Slate should be a household name. Shes always charming, has great comic timing, and seems to find new dramatic registers with each outing. This remains her best overall film and performance, the story of a stand-up comedian who has to deal with a few of lifes unexpected curveballs. Shorthanded as the abortion comedy, theres more to Obvious Child than just that brief description allows. Its smart and genuinely likable things that arent often said about what could be called a rom-com.

For some reason, the Steven Soderbergh remake of the classic heist film, Oceans Eleven, is not on Netflix, but its two very different sequels are. The meta approach of Oceans Twelve earned the film something of a loyal following on Film Twitter, whereas the looser, more mainstream final film in the trilogy was underrated then and now. Both are worth a look when you feel like hanging out with some cool, beautiful people.

Is this Will Ferrells last great comedy? Capping off a decade that included Anchorman, Old School, Step Brothers, and Talladega Nights, the SNL alum co-stars with Mark Wahlberg as two cops forced to step into the spotlight after the hysterical death of the two most popular officers on the force. Ferrell and Wahlberg are great in one of Adam McKays funnier comedies. He should reunite with his best leading man and make another one.

Stephen Chbosky adapted his own book into this tender and moving coming-of-age comedy starring Logan Lerman, Emma Watson, and Ezra Miller. Its a remarkably smart film when it comes to teen issues that are rarely reflected accurately like depression and anxiety. And Chbosky directs his ensemble to beautiful, nuanced performances.

Andrew Bujalskis Support the Girls got a lot of buzz last year, even winning some awards for its great central performance from Regina Hall. If you liked it, check out Bujalskis last film, another movie about a very unique working environment. Cobie Smulders, Guy Pearce, and Kevin Corrigan star in this quirky rom-com set in the high-pressure world of personal trainers.

Michael Cera stars in Edgar Wrights vibrant adaptation of Bryan Lee OMalleys graphic novel, a movie that feels like it could come out exactly the same way today, almost a decade after its release. Wrights style is perfect for this material, capturing the tone and structure of the source material with his razor-sharp editing and wit.

When Set It Up hit Netflix in the Summer of 2018, it felt like a splash of cold water for one reason: the rom-com is in a dire state. They barely get released in theaters at all any more, and theyre typically awful when they do. So to see an old-fashioned, charming romantic comedy felt like something new again. It also helps that Zoey Deutch and Glen Powell have future stars written all over them. Theyre charming and delightful two things we wish we could say about more rom-coms in the past decade.

If you love Russian Doll (and really who doesnt) then you should dig into the history of its creator, Leslye Headland. She wrote and directed this clever 2015 comedy starring Jason Sudeikis, Alison Brie, Adam Scott, Jason Mantzoukas, and, of course, Natasha Lyonne.

We could all use a little romance every now and then, and it doesnt get much sweeter than this 1993 blockbuster that made Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan one of the most beloved movie couples of all time. Nora Ephron directs this story of a widower who moves to Seattle and tries to raise his 8-year-old son, and the Baltimore woman who hears his tragic tale and falls in love. They dont make many films like this one anymore.

Mel Brooks last great parody is this hysterical spoof of the world of Star Wars, filtered in a comedic style that is distinctively that of one of movie historys greatest writers. Spaceballs takes most of its direct aim at the Lucas trilogy (yes, there were only three back in 1987), but Brooks tackles other sci-fi properties too, and he does it all with his wicked sense of timing and hysterical wordplay.

There are a lot of movies on Netflix. There are not a lot of movies like this Sundance hit. Just when you think youve seen it all, along comes Daniel Radcliffe as a farting corpse. The former Boy Who Lived stars with Paul Dano in a film that cant really be captured in a tiny list entry. Just watch it and report back.

It may not be accepted in 2020, but Sydney Pollacks comedy about a man who dresses as a woman to finally make it in his career was a blockbuster hit when it was released almost four decades ago. Watch it now for the incredible comic timing of Dustin Hoffman, Jessica Lange, Teri Garr, Dabney Coleman, and Bill Murray, among others. Its one of those 80s comedies that really shattered all expectations, making over $175 million (in 1982 movie) and even winning an Oscar for Lange. It was nominated for ten Academy Awards! That just doesnt happen for comedies anymore.

If a studio had released this delightful romantic dramedy in theaters, even just in major cities, people would have noticed. Its smart, funny, and contains a pair of wonderful young performances. Its the story of Danny (Callum Turner) and Ellie (Grace Van Patten), two struggling New Yorkers drawn together over a mysterious briefcase.

This horror/comedy made hardly an impact when it was released in 2010 but has become a true cult hit in the decade since on DVD and streaming services. The main reason is that Tyler Labine and Alan Tudyk have perfect comic timing as a pair of lovable hillbillies who get caught up in a crazy horror movie situation that leads to a lot of laughs and buckets of blood. Now give us a sequel!

After John C. Reillys pitch perfect spoof of the rock biopic, one would think that the tropes skewered in this laugh-out-loud comedy would go away but watching this now after the success of films like Bohemian Rhapsody makes its genius seem even sharper.

Look, another Noah Baumbach movie! When Netflix launches movies by auteurs, they often include a lot of their older films in the catalogue, and so the inclusion of The Meyerowitz Stories means a lot of old Baumbach. This 2014 comedy may not be his deepest work, but its one of his funniest, with likable, perfectly tuned performances from Ben Stiller, Naomi Watts, and Adam Driver.

Jason Reitman directs the always-great Charlize Theron in this 2011 dark comedy about a writer of young adult novels who returns to her hometown to wreak havoc. The movie is a bit inconsistent at times but Theron (and Patton Oswalt) is simply great, especially in the way she allows her character to be genuinely unlikable. Its a smart movie about someone who thinks shes superior to those around her and learns maybe shes not.

Sometimes its fun to watch what could be a mediocre movie get totally carried by the charms of its two stars. Thats the case here. Is this a great comedy? Not really, but Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks are so delightful and fun to watch that you just dont care.

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The 50 Best Comedies on Netflix Right Now - Vulture

See link below for full info and to get tickets ($10, thanks for your support of this local museum!)

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Hello, for this event we look to entertain and also support our friends over at the Museum of Interesting Things!

A virtual thing, enjoy from your sofa!

See 16mm short vintage films (futurist theme)

Special Treat: A short presentation by Francesca Ferrando on Posthumanism

Enjoy actual antiques you can handle virtually & get demonstrated!

A history storytelling event 🙂

We will bring items that you may think are today or tomorrow but actually are yesterday!

The Museum of Interesting Things takes you back to the future!!!

See the link below for full info and to get tickets ($10, thanks for your support of this local museum!)

https://bit.ly/BackToTheFuturi...

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Museum Of Interesting Things Back to the Futurist Secret Speakeas - Patch.com

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By Dr Tshepo Mvulane Moloi

As part of my pursuit and ongoing advocacy to advance the decolonialisation of education, specifically within the context of our current national locality of South Africa, I propose to share my personal trajectory in academia.

The latter is undertaken to hopefully record and reflect about the epistimicide I experienced, in my scholarly trajectory as a "black" South African.

I completed my undergraduate (2002-2005) and honours (2006) degrees, at University of Zululand (UZ), one of the "historically disadvantaged universities" with political science as a major. I, along with fellow "black" South African classmates, observed that we were hardly taught, about "black" South African political scientists.

Oddly the aforesaid status quo incredibly prevails to date, across most institutions in South Africa. Why? Well, unbeknown to our credulous budding minds back then, we overlooked that the bulk of our lecturers were also colonised graduates, hired from other South African universities.

To be specific, the two lecturers who taught me political science were, namely, alumni of the universities of Pretoria (UP) and of Durban-Westville now University of KwaZulu-Natal.

As regards racial hue, the two lecturers who taught me political science were descendants of Afrikaners and Indians respectively.

Notably, emphasis on ones "race" in South Africa arose from absurd colonial bigotry, which climaxed post-inauguration of an apartheid regime, in 1948.

These two lecturers were (albeit differently from our "black" South African graduates), also victims. Their respective flaws, however, were consistent with the historical path imposed from a common inheritance, informed by racial prejudice.I wondered how come my lecturers, when they had an opportunity to address erasure, which is equivalent to "epistemic violence", when teaching such modules, did not do so.

They opted instead to basically continue with the earlier noted problematic status quo of dogmatic discourse, which merely renewed "epistemic violence", initiated by bygone colonialists of pre-1994 democratic South Africa. In retrospect, I recall that it is such an anomaly which inspired my eventual honours project to focus on ascertaining whether "South Africa had its own foreign policy".

To my dismay, the latter capstone by and large abhorrently magnified "white" (Afrikaans and English) scholars, as the mainly solitary scholars of South Africas foreign policy. A sample of their names included Deon Geldenhuys, Peter Vale and Maxi Schoeman.

Black South Africans who were featured appeared mostly as plenipotentiaries, as civil servants in the diplomatic corps since 1994. I only learnt later about Samuel Nolutshungu, Vincent Maphai and Tandeka Nkiwane.

As one may have expected, as a postgraduate student of political science post-2006 in South Africa, the latter incongruence worried me. The disturbing results of my study, inspired by recommendations consistent with an "epistemic break" from mainstream IR, as was explored in my doctorate.

Mindful of being a "black" South African, that is how I thus subsequently selected Eskia Mphahlele and the exploration of his Afrikan Humanism, as a possible African contribution to IR.

Both of my studies are freely available online.

Dr Tshepo Mvulane Moloi is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Johannesburg Institute of Advanced Study.

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OPINION: It's disturbing that universities don't teach about black South African political scientists - Independent Online

Donald Trump doubled down on his decision to retweet a video of Houston doctor Stella Immanuel in which Ms Immanuel touts the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine in treating patients of Covid-19 and dismisses masks as unnecessary in stopping its spread.

In the past, Ms Immanuel has made several dubious medical claims, including the harmful effects of having sexual relations with demons and witches while dreaming, the alleged use of alien DNA in various medicines, and the production of a vaccine to inoculate people against being religious.

"I can tell you this: She was on air, along with many other doctors they were big fans of hydroxychloroquine, and I thought she was very impressive," Mr Trump told reporters of Ms Immanuel at a briefing on the coronavirus pandemic on Tuesday.

Sharing the full story, not just the headlines

"I don't know which country she comes from. But she said that she's had tremendous success with hundreds of different patients. And I thought her voice was an important voice. But I know nothing about her," the president said of the Houston-based doctor.

In a speech on the steps of the Supreme Court that has gone viral in conservatives circles this week racking up millions of views across several social media platforms, many of which have since sought to remove videos of it Ms Immanuel urged people not to be afraid of Covid-19, which has killed nearly 150,000 Americans in less than half a year.

Nobody needs to get sick, Ms Immanuel said at a demonstration put on by Tea Party Patriots, a conservative political advocacy group supported by wealthy Republicans.

This virus has a cure, she said.

Health experts have warned against the potentially severe side effects of taking the drug, which Mr Trump has nevertheless continued to promote to treat the novel coronavirus, claiming to have taken it himself as a precautionary step.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) revoked emergency authorisation of its use earlier this month.

In addition to her speech on hydroxychloroquine, Ms Immanuel has frequently used her platform on YouTube to spread homophobic and anti-transgender views, protesting against the legalisation of gay marriage and abortion in the US.

How long are we going to allow the enemy to take over our beloved nation. How long are we going to allow the gay agenda, secular humanism, Illuminati and the demonic New World Order to destroy our homes, families and the social fibre of America, the caption of one of her videos reads.

Mr Trump retweeted a post including the now-deleted video of Ms Immanuel's speech about Covid-19 with a caption referring to the doctor as a fearless warrior for the truth.

Twitter suspended the account of his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr, for retweeting a version of the video and saying it was a must watch.

Twitter later said it had suspended Mr Trump Jr's account because he had posted misleading and potentially harmful information about the coronavirus.

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Trump defends doctor who claimed medicine is made from alien DNA and walks out of briefing mid question - The Independent

Three Scholars Discuss Racism and Whiteness in the Built Environment | 2020-07-30 | Architectural Record This website requires certain cookies to work and uses other cookies to help you have the best experience. By visiting this website, certain cookies have already been set, which you may delete and block. By closing this message or continuing to use our site, you agree to the use of cookies. Visit our updated privacy and cookie policy to learn more. This Website Uses CookiesBy closing this message or continuing to use our site, you agree to our cookie policy. Learn MoreThis website requires certain cookies to work and uses other cookies to help you have the best experience. By visiting this website, certain cookies have already been set, which you may delete and block. By closing this message or continuing to use our site, you agree to the use of cookies. Visit our updated privacy and cookie policy to learn more.

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Three Scholars Discuss Racism and Whiteness in the Built Environment - Architectural Record

Seventy-five years ago before dawn on July 16, 1945, a cataclysmic explosion shook the New Mexico desert as scientists from the top-secret Manhattan Project tested their nightmarish creation: the first atom bomb, called the Gadget.

This birth of the Nuclear Age, was quickly followed a few weeks later, first on August 6 by the dropping of a U-235 atom bomb on Hiroshima, a non-military city of 225,000, and then, three days after that on Aug. 9, by the dropping of a somewhat more powerful Plutonium atom bomb on Nagasaki, another non-military city of 195,000. The resulting slaughter of some 200,000 mostly civilian Japanese men, women and children naturally leads to talk of the horrors of those weapons and to discussions about whether they should have been used on Japan instead of being demonstrated on an uninhabited target.

What goes unmentioned, however, as we mark each important anniversary of these horrific events the initial Trinity test in Alamogordo, the Little Boy bombing of Hiroshima and the Fat Man plutonium bombing of Nagasaki is that, incredibly, in a world where nine nations possess a total of nearly 14,000 nuclear weapons, not one has been used in war to kill human beings since the bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945.

And thats not all. Over those same 75 years, despite seven and a half decades of intense hostility and rivalry, as well as some major proxy wars, between great powers like the U.S. and USSR, and the U.S. and China, no two superpower nations have gone to war against each other.

The reason for this phenomenal and almost incomprehensible absence of catastrophic conflict of the type so common throughout human history is the same in both cases: No country dares to risk the use a nuclear weapon because of the fear it could lead other nuclear nations use theirs, and no major power dares to go to war against another major power because it is obvious that any war between two such nations would very quickly go nuclear.

Things could have gone very differently, however, with the dawn of the nuclear age.

At the end of WWII, the U.S. was the worlds unchallenged superpower. It had emerged from war with its industrial base undamaged while Europe, the Soviet Union, Japan and much of China and were all smoking ruins, their dead numbering in the tens of millions. The U.S. also had a monopoly on a new super weapon the atom bomb a weapon capable of vaporizing a city. And the this country had demonstrated that it had no moral compunction about using its terrible new weapon of mass destruction.

Some important scientists involved in the creation of the bomb urged the sharing of its construction secrets with Americas ally in the war against the Axis powers, the Soviet Union. These scientists, many of them Nobel-winning physicists, said negotiations should begin immediately at that point to eliminate nuclear weapons for all time, just as germ and chemical weapons had already been banned (successfully as the history of WWII showed).

But military and civilian leaders in Washington balked at the idea of sharing the bombs secrets. In fact, after Bohrs visit, President Roosevelt reportedly had the FBI monitor Nobelist Nils Bohr, one of the Los Alamos scientists who directly pleaded with him to bring the Russians into the bomb project, and even considered barring him from leaving the U.S. The Truman administration considered deporting Leo Szilard, and after Robert Oppenheimer proposed to Truman the sharing of the bomb with the Russians, his top-secret security clearance was revoked.

Instead of sharing the bomb with the USSR, which, remember, was Americas ally in World War II, and then working for its being banned, the U.S. began producing dozens and eventually hundreds of Nagasaki-sized atom bombs, moving quickly from hand-made devices to mass produced ones. The U.S. also quickly started pursuing the development of a vastly more powerful bomb the thermonuclear Hydrogen bomb a weapon that theoretically has no limits to how great its destructive power could be. (A one-megaton bomb typical of some of the larger warheads in the U.S. arsenal today is 30 times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Nagasaki.)

Why this obsession with creating a stockpile of atomic bombs big enough to destroy not just a country but the whole earth at such a time as the end of WWII? The war was over and American scientists and intelligence analysts were predicting that the war-ravaged Soviet Union would need years and perhaps a decade to produce its own bomb, yet the U.S. was going full tilt building an explosive arsenal that quickly dwarfed all the explosives used in the last two world wars combined.

What was the purpose of building so many bombs? One hint comes from the fact that the U.S. also, right after the war, began mass producing the B-29 Super Fortress planes like the Enola Gay that delivered the first atomic bomb to Hiroshima and de-mothballing and refurbishing hundreds that had been built and declared surplussed right at the wars end. A B-29 could only carry one plutonium or two uranium bombs for any significant distance. But the U.S. was building several thousand of them in peacetime. Why?

The answer, according to a 1987 book, To Win a Nuclear War authored by nuclear physicists Michio Kaku and Daniel Axelrod, is that the U.S. was planning to launch a devastating nuclear first strike blitz on the Soviet Union as soon as it could build and deliver the 300 nuclear bombs that Pentagon strategists believed would be needed to destroy the Soviet Union as an industrial society and its Red Army as well, eliminating any possibility of the USSR responding by sweeping over war-ravaged western Europe. And the B-29 was at the time the only plane it had which could deliver the bombs.

This genocidal nightmare envisioned by Truman and the Pentagons nuclear madmen never happened because the initial slow pace of constructing the bombs meant that the 300 weapons and the planes to deliver them would not be ready until early 1950. Meanwhile, Russias first bomb, a plutonium device that was a virtual carbon copy of the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki, was successfully exploded on August 29, 1949, in a test that caught the U.S. by complete surprise. At that point the idea of a deadly first strike was dropped (or at least deferred indefinitely) by Truman and Pentagon strategists.

A new era of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) had arrived, and according to Kaku and Axelrod, just in time.

For that bit of good fortune, I suggest, we have to thank the spies who, for whatever their individual motives, successfully obtained and delivered the secrets of the atomic bomb and its construction to the scientists in the Soviet Union who were struggling, with limited success, to quickly come up with their own atomic bomb.

To most Americans, those spies, especially the U.S. citizens among them like Julius Rosenberg and notably Ted Hall, the youngest scientist at the Manhattan Project, hired out of Harvard as a junior physics major at 18, were modern day Benedict Arnolds. The truth is quite different.

Hall, who was never caught, and who was not recruited to be a spy but volunteered plans for the plutonium bomb on his own initiative after searching for and finally locating a Soviet agent, and another spy, the young German Communist physicist, Klaus Fuchs, working independently of each other, both delivering critical plans for the U.S. plutonium bomb to Moscow, clearly prevented the U.S. from launching a nuclear holocaust.

By decisively helping the USSR develop and test its own bomb quickly by mid-1949, half a year before the U.S. could attain a stockpile of 300 bombs, they forced the U.S. to have to consider the unacceptable risk of retaliation. Had the Soviets taken longer to create their own atomic bomb, the US could have gone through with its criminal plans, which would have dwarfed Hitlers slaughter of the six million Jewish and Roma people. (Pentagon experts estimated that over 30-40 million Russians would be killed by a US nuclear blitz.)

Hall, in public statements made in the mid-1990s after de-encrypted Soviet spy codes became public and his name was identified in them, explained that he had acted to share the plans for the plutonium bomb because he felt that the U.S., coming out of WWII with a nuclear monopoly, would have been a danger to not just the Soviet Union, but to the entire world. (The Russian bomb exploded in August, 1949 was a virtual carbon copy of the Nagasaki plutonium bomb Hall had worked on in his two years at Los Alamos.)

Looking back to the US decision to use its first nuclear weapon not as a demonstration on an empty island or military base, but on two undefended civilian cities, and to catastrophic U.S. carpet bombings using non-nuclear bombs, of North Korea and later Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, its hard disagree with Halls thinking. His concern about U.S. nuclear intentions is further borne out by how close the US came to using its nuclear bombs in crisis after crisis during the late 40s and early 50s against China and North Korea during the Korean War, in support of the French expeditionary force trapped at Dien Bien Phu, by JFK in the 1961 in the Berlin crisis, in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. and later when U.S. Marines were trapped by Vietnamese troops in Khe Sanh. Each time, it was fear of the Soviets responding with their own bomb that saved the day and largely kept American bombs on the ground (actually in the Khe San case in 1968 atom bombs were actually delivered close to the Indochina front, but President Johnson called a halt to the militarys plans).

The truth is, if the Soviets had not had their own bomb during any of the above listed crises, it is hard to imagine that the U.S., with a monopoly on the bomb, would not have used it to full advantage. If were honest, The MAD reality enabled by Russias Los Alamos spies proved to be a lifesaver for tens or perhaps millions of people around the world.

Americans may (and should!) decry the hundreds of billions of dollars (trillions in todays dollars) that have been poured into a massively wasteful arms race with the Soviet Union and later Russia and China money that could have done incalculable good if spent on schools, health care, environmental issues etc. need to consider what the alternative would have been to Cold War and MAD. With MAD (and considerable good luck) we have had no world wars, and no nuclear bombs dropped on human beings. Without it, with the U.S. having a monopoly on the bomb for perhaps as long as a decade following WWII, this country would have nuked cities all over the world, almost certainly destroying the Soviet Union entirely, and the U.S. would today be known today as the ultimate genocidal monster of history, rather than having Germany left holding that eternal badge of shame.

In reconsidering the work of Soviet atomic spies, Americans also need to know the truth about the goal of the Manhattan Project. While the push to develop the bomb began with a letter from Albert Einstein to Roosevelt warning that the Germans might develop such a weapon, by the time the program got underway, it was clear that the real target was Americas Ally in the fight against the Nazis: The USSR.

Of course we must work to ban nuclear weapons and war. Such weapons are incomparably evil and if the world agrees that germ warfare and poison gas weapons should not exist, certainly nuclear weapons a million times worse should not! But we should nonetheless, as we look back at the grim 75th anniversary of those three first nuclear bombs exploded by the U.S., admit a debt of gratitude to those spies at Los Alamos who kept the U.S. from committing an atrocity that humanity would have never forgiven, and for giving us this amazing three-quarters of a century of no nuclear or world war.

FALL FUNDRAISER

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Rethinking Manhattan Project spies and the Cold War, MADand the 75 years of no nuclear warthat their efforts gifted us - NationofChange

When the rabid left lost their battle to impeach our president they went to Plan B, which is the virus attack.

Every morning I wake up to find that my family and friends are still alive. How can that be? The news that was in the paper and on TV said we were destined to die.

I love statistics. If you learn how to properly interpret them you can quickly sift out the baloney.

I wrote to this paper in in the spring and asked them to give you two questions. First, how many individuals do you personally know who have been treated for the virus and second, how many individuals do you personally know who have died from this virus? After five months, how many? Any bells going off? I dont deny the virus existence and I think it behooves us to take reasonable precautions as far as cleanliness goes.

There are those among us who want to take away our freedoms. They want to rule our lives. They almost immediately took our freedom of religion away by closing the churches. Do you really go along with this? And then they try hard to make us wear masks and adhere to social distancing everywhere. Give me a break.

How about our freedom of speech? Whats this, hate speech? It appears to me that if you dont like what I have to say you can label it as such. Once labeled that way, by you, I can never broach the subject again. Just like that.

Patriots, wake up! If you love this wonderful country, it is time to step up. I spent 30 proud years in the military. To stand in harms way was a privilege. I have been on every continent and you wont find any country that comes close to the U.S. or has our freedoms.

Ronald Crews

Rio Vista

Editors note: Solano County Public Health reports 37 deaths thus far in the county that are linked to the novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19. There were 3,611 confirmed cases countywide as of Friday afternoon, 26 of those in Rio Vista.

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Letter to the Editor: Seeing is believing when it comes to Covid-19 - Fairfield Daily Republic

Clearly, our discomfort about wearing masksin the midst ofa pandemic has deep roots.

Bad smells and bird beaks

Medical mask-wearing has a long history. In the past few months, pictures of thebeaked masks that doctors wore during the 17th-century plague epidemichave been circulating online. At the time, disease was believed to spread through miasmas bad smells that wafted through the air. The beak was stuffed with herbs, spices and dried flowers to ward off the odors believed to spread the plague.

In North America, before the 1918 influenza epidemic, surgeons wore masks, as did nurses and doctors who were treating contagious patients in a hospital setting. But during the flu epidemic, cities around the world passed mandatory masking orders. Historian Nancy Tomes argues that mask-wearing was embraced by the American public as an emblem of public spiritedness and discipline.

Canadian reluctance and Japanese willingness

The Medical Officer of Health for Edmonton reported that practically no one wore a mask thereafter, except in hospitals. In his view, the rapid spread of the disease after the mask order was put into effect made the order an object of ridicule.

In Japan, by contrast, the public embraced mask-wearing during the Spanish flu. According to sociologistMitsutoshiHorii,mask-wearing symbolized modernity.In the post-war era, Japanese people continued to wear masks to prevent the flu, only stopping in the 1970s when flu vaccines became widely available. In the 1980s and 1990s, mask-wearing increased to prevent allergies,as allergy to cedar pollen became a growing problem. In the late 1980s, the effectiveness of flu vaccinations declined and wearing a mask to avoid influenza resumed.

Mask-wearing skyrocketed in the early years of the 21st century with the outbreak of SARS and avian influenza. The Japanese government recommended that all sick people wear masks to protect others, while they suggested that healthy people could wear them as a preventative measure. Horii argues that mask-wearing was a neoliberal answer to the question of public health policy in that it encouraged people to take individual responsibility for their own health.

A century of Chinese mask-wearing

One of the first cases of COVID-19 in Canada was that of astudent at Western Universitywho had visited her parents in Wuhan over the Christmasbreak.On the flight back to Canada, she wore a mask. She self-isolated upon her arrival in Canada and when she became sick, she showed up at the hospital wearing a mask. She did not infect anyone else.

But support for mask-wearingappears to be growing. In the face of a serious health threat, Canadians are wisely following the lead of Asian countries.

Catherine Carstairs is aProfessor in the University of GuelphsDepartment of History.

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A History of Masks From the Black Plague to Coronavirus - The National Interest

A doctor who went viral in a video shared by Donald Trump in his latest attempts to promote hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for coronavirus has on more than one occasion promoted controversial medical theories and anti-LGBTQ+ attitudes.

Dr Stella Immanuel, a physician from Houston, Texas, appeared in a video on Facebook which was removed on Monday, insisting that the malaria drug is an effective treatment for the novel coronavirus, a claim that has not been proven.

Facebook is trying to remove any re-uploads of the video because it is sharing false information about cures and treatments for Covid-19, a spokesperson said. One version of the video had more than 17 million views before the platform managed to remove it.

Sharing the full story, not just the headlines

Dr Immanuel was among a number of physicians named Americas Frontline Doctors making misleading claims about the virus at a news conference Monday in Washington.

The paediatrician and religious minister has emerged as a figurehead in light of her speech at the conference, with both Mr Trump and his oldest son singing her praises on social media.

However, a report by The Daily Beast delved into more of Dr Immanuels unconventional public appearances, revealing the doctors spiritual beliefs regarding demon sex, alien DNA in medicine, conspiracy theories, and anti-LGBTQ+ views.

In one video from 2013, the doctor attributes medical conditions such as endometriosis, fibroids, and cysts to spirit husbands, demons that have sex with women while they sleep.

They are responsible for serious gynaecological problems, Dr Immanuel said. We call them all kinds of namesendometriosis, we call them molar pregnancies, we call them fibroids, we call them cysts, but most of them are evil deposits from the spirit husband.

She also offers guidance against these spirits in an article titled Deliverance from Spirit Wives and Spirit Husbands on her website, first reported by The Daily Beast.

According to the outlet, she also speaks of a conspiracy theory in which a witch attempts to use abortion, gay marriage, and childrens toys to destroy the world and claims that alien DNA is being used in medicine to treat humans.

No hype, just the advice and analysis you need

Theyre using all kinds of DNA, even alien DNA, to treat people, she reportedly says in one sermon from 2015.

Dr Immanuel has also frequently used her platform to spread homophobic and anti-transgender views, protesting against the legalisation of gay marriage and abortion on her YouTube page.

How long are we going to allow the enemy to take over our beloved nation. How long are we going to allow the gay agenda, secular humanism, Illuminati and the demonic New World Order to destroy our homes, families and the social fiber of America, the caption of one video reads.

She has also previously suggested that the government is run in part by non-human reptilians in a 2015 sermon, according to The Daily Beast.

There are people that are ruling this nation that are not even human, Dr Immanuel reportedly said in a 2015 sermon.

Dr Immanuel has not yet replied to The Independents request for comment.

The doctor has more recently been propelled to online fame for her discussions of the coronavirus, claiming to have treated 350 people and counting for the virus.

In the video footage, the doctor says that you dont need masks, there is a cure.

Experts have in fact warned against the potentially severe side effects of taking the drug, which has been continually touted by Mr Trump, to treat the novel coronavirus. The Food and Drug Administration has also recently revoked emergency authorisation of its use.

Nonetheless, Mr Trump Jr retweeted the footage of Dr Immanuel which had tens of millions of views, calling one version of the video a must watch. Twitter later suspended his account for posting misleading and potentially harmful information about coronavirus.

The president also retweeted a post including the now-deleted video with a caption referring to Dr Immanuel as a fearless warrior for the truth.

The doctor has since angled for a meeting with the president following his apparent support of her message tweeting: Mr President Im in town and available. I will love to meet with you.

Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have been removing the hydroxychloroquine video when it has been posted, in line with policies intended to stop the spread of misinformation about coronavirus.

Additional reporting by The Associated Press.

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Sex with spirits and alien DNA: The controversial views of doctor whose coronavirus theory got Trump Jr suspended from Twitter - The Independent

The Olympics, as they exist today, are but a shadow of their former glory. Though there are more activities and participants in the modern games, they do little to entice and arouse the Greek concept of glory and pride that once made them renowned throughout the ancient world. While the prizes might be considered miniscule by todays standards, the olive wreaths and crowns that were bestowed upon the victors were more valuable than the medallions used today.

Aerial drone photo of the enthralling ruins of ancient Olympia, birthplace of the Olympic Games. ( aerial-drone / Adobe Stock )

The Olympic Games of ancient Greece adhered to certain codes and regulations, just as they do today, and each challenge had to abide by certain rules. Those who were chosen to judge the events were well informed and kept up-to-date of those rules with rigorous training in anticipation of every Olympic cycle. The judges of the Olympic Games were called the Hellanodikai. Their responsibility was not merely to pick the victors of each of the games, but also to maintain the steadfast peace declared during each period. Their role was therefore both political and religious.

An artist's impression of ancient Olympia. ( Public domain )

As Elis was the region within which Olympia resided, the Eleans were responsible for choosing the judges. This prevented bias. Though the post of judge was originally hereditary, over time this changed to the choosing of judges from each of the Elean ruling families. This ensured a constant rotation of judges for each Olympic Games and helped prevent bias from repeat judges. After a case in which a judge won two events and was accused of corruption, Hellanodikai were no longer allowed to participate in the Olympic events.

Image of a Boxer from Olympia crowned with an olive wreath. The olive wreath was known as kotinos and was the official prize for victors at the Olympic Games held at Olympia. The wreaths were made from the branch of a sacred wild olive tree that grew at Olympia. ( shako / CC BY-SA 3.0 )

The games frequently took place at Olympia, in Greece, the site giving its name to the events. While there were various games throughout the ancient world, the most famous were those at Olympia, where a colossal statue of Zeus once stood. Sculpted by the master sculptor Phidias, the massive chryselephantine figure of Zeus was known as one of the Seven Wonders of the World . The subsequent games that took place at Delos and Nemea, for example, were not comparable in terms of grandeur and prestige. The Olympian games were revered for generations in odes, art, and literature.

The purported workshop of Phidias at Olympia, where the famed sculptor fashioned the chryselephantine statue of Zeus. ( Alun Salt/ CC BY SA 2.0 )

As with everything in the ancient world, legend has it that the first Olympics took place amongst the gods. There are different versions of the story, as recorded by ancient authors including Pausanias and Pindar. Writing years after the first mortal games (c. 776 BC), Pausanias, Pindar, and their successors received the stories second, third, or fourth hand, and each story was likely tainted by the values of the audiences to which they were told.

One of the origin myths features five brothers, one named Herakles, who raced to Olympia to entertain Zeus in his youth. Whoever arrived at the site first, was awarded with an olive wreath, as became tradition during the Olympic games. In Pausanias Description of Greece , the number of brothers indicates the number of years which pass between the gamesfive brothers means that the games happen every fifth year, after four years of rest. Another myth claims that Zeus son Herakles began the games for the purpose of honoring his father. While both of these stories discuss a certain Herakles, it is not the same one: the first story describes a Zeus too young to have had children.

The statue Zeus at Olympia, was created by the Greek sculptor Phidias and was 39 feet (12 m) tall. It was known as one of the Seven Wonders of the World. (barringtheaegis.blogspot.com)

The games were intimately linked with the religious values of the ancient world and associated with the sacred site of Zeus at Olympia. Ancient Greek mythology closely associated religion with life, and idealized the so-called Golden Age, where the gods walked among men. The games themselves were therefore considered to be continuation of this golden age, whereby men participated in feats of bravery, skill, strength, and finesse, just as their legendary predecessors had done before them.

As such, scholars have concluded that the games were not just sporting events, but religious rituals as well. To participate in the games meant to participate in religious practice: honoring the gods, engaging in feasting and sacrificing, and even in ceasefire between communities that were otherwise at war. The games were considered sacred territory, and thus the participants were sacred players.

Crowning of victors of the Olympic Games at Olympia. ( Public domain )

Participants in the Olympic Games were far more limited than they are today. Only free Greek males could participate in the games, meaning that no slaves or women were allowed entrance. This is likely due to the political prestige associated with victory in the games. The city-states of Greece were independent entities, who relied on one another for trade, military aid, and alliances. However, they were always in competition to be the best of the city-states in trade, military power, and wealth. The games, therefore, served as a peaceful competition in which to prove the value of one city-state over another, without (usually) any loss of life. Women and slaves were not useful for this purpose, as land-owning men were the only individuals allowed roles in the political sphere.

Interestingly, a truce was always enacted during the Olympic Games, allowing safe passage of participants to the city of Olympia, and placing any wars effectively on hold until the games were completed. Politically, this allowed males to participate in the events without forfeiting military duties, as well as enabling city-states to gain and solidify alliances during a period of forced peace and stability. This forced stalemate further demanded no armies could invade Olympia during the games, and the temporary pause on the use of the death penalty. The advocacy for peace during these times was definitive. More interestingly, this peace was almost always honored, despite instances of unease between the two strongest city-states, Athens and Sparta.

Three ancient Greek runners on a Panathenaic prize amphora at the British Museum. Olympic athletes are said to have competed in the nude as a symbol of Greekness, probably from the fifteenth Olympiad onwards. ( British Museum / CC BY 2.5 )

The types of games which were part of the Olympic Games were very different from the ones that take part today. One could argue they were simpler, however due to their simplicity it can also be said that it was far more difficult to succeed. Over the course of 500 years, there were up to 23 games played at the Olympics, which always fell within one of three categories: racing, combat, and equestrian.

The athletes chosen to participate were trained in their respective events by individuals hand-picked by the Hellanodikai. Their training was supervised and served as a trial run, allowing the judges to reject from the games anyone who wasnt up to the challenge. If the participants were able to hold their own during the training period, they were allowed to progress to compete in the games themselves.

One of the most popular sports was running. There were various types of running which took place during the games, and they developed over time. Originally, the stade was a simple sprint from one location to the next. From here the diaulos developed, wherein runners raced in lanes one way and then looped back to the start line. Added later was the long race, called the dolichos, where it is believed that runners had to lap a minimum of twenty times. In the long race, speed was still paramount but it also required good endurance on the part of the runner.

The final running test was to run in full hoplite armor, and was thus called the hoplitodromos. Runners had to wear full military gear and complete two diaulos, adding strength onto the already difficult task of speed and endurance. As one can see, running was considered a paramount aspect of the Olympic games, and is recorded as one of the most valuable tests of honor by Xenophanes, a famous philosopher from the 6 th century.

Wrestling and boxing were valued sports during the ancient Olympic games. The bronze Boxer at Rest or the Boxer of the Quirinal, is a Hellenistic Greek sculpture of a nude resting boxer excavated in Rome. ( Paolo Monti / CC BY-SA 4.0 )

Another valued theme in the Olympic games was combat, most specifically evidenced in the tournaments of wrestling and boxing. In fact, one of the most valued pieces of art which survive from the ancient Hellenistic art is the Boxer, a bronze statue of a bearded man, seated, injured from a rough run in the boxing tournament. The statue is renowned for its realistic perspective of a weary, beaten man, his face tired and torn, his hands wrapped in leather as he takes a break from the match. While the piece is renowned in Greek art for its humanism and imperfections, it is also a valuable piece to show how important combat based games were in the Olympics.

Though wrestling came first (called pale), boxing quickly became the hot game when it was introduced in 688 BC. Possibly stemming from the demi-god Theseus game of beating a seated opponent, boxings supposed inclusion in the funeral games of fallen warriors during the Golden Age (as seen in the Iliad) further enhanced its prestige among participants. Boxers were chosen by lot rather than by weight class, and the rules encouraged beating rather than holding, as the latter was considered a wrestling move. However, wrestling and boxing were allowed to cross paths in another format: the pankration.

The excitement of boxing and wrestling led to the invention of a specialized set of games called the pankration, wherein techniques from both could be utilized to determine the victor. The intention was to determine the all-powerful champion in games of strength and might. Supposedly having first been invented by the demi-gods Herakles and Theseus, the pankration is believed to have filled the desire among audience members and participants for violent sport, later revered in the Roman amphitheater arena. More intense than wrestling or boxing alone, the pankration originally had no rules before eventually banning eye gouging and biting from the game for safety reasons, though nothing else was off limits. Whoever submitted first lost, regardless of their injuries.

Only wealthy members of the Greek elite could afford to compete in ancient Greek chariot racing. ( Public domain )

Throughout the centuries, only men were allowed to participate in most of the Olympic Games. The only exception applied to the equestrian tournaments, which were also considered the most elite of the games. Only the wealthy had access to horses and riders, and only the richest could afford the chariots needed to participate in the racing games. The chariot races could be with four horses or two, and there were also games which allowed single horseback riding races without the use of chariots.

Women could participate in horse and chariot racing, in part because the rider was chosen by the elite and therefore the women were still kept at arms length from the games themselves. The difficulty of such games lay in the control and mastery of the horses, as well as in balance. Falling off the chariot led to disqualification. Saddles were not permitted, which served to make the games more difficult as riders had to be accustomed and skilled at riding bareback, holding onto the horses mane for dear life.

The chariot race was a dangerous and captivating sport. ( trolldens.blogspot)

The Olympic Games were a paramount aspect of ancient Greek life, and were even used by ancient scholars as a time-keeping device. Years were determined in relation to the Olympics, based on the four year periods which were referred to as Olympiads. Thus, not only were the games significant politically and religiously, but they also held important civil value as well. That the games continue into the present day, albeit in a different format, is evidence of their significance as champion of peace and civic ties, as they were in the ancient Greece .

Top image: Ancient Greek Olympics were a fundamental aspect of ancient Greek culture. Various types of running took place during the games, along with equestrian sports and combat sports. Source: sebos / Adobe Stock

By Riley Winters

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From Myth to Reality: Olympia and the Ancient Greek Olympics - Ancient Origins

An underlying, but often unspoken, theme in political debate is the issue of the rights and wants of the individual versus the need to have a cohesive society.

One way to think of it is as a continuum . At one end is the tyranny of the autocratic State in which individuals who seek to assert their individual rights are imprisoned, tortured or killed. At the other end are the extreme Libertarians who believe the rights of the individual are the only thing that matter and we have no responsibility to anyone else but ourselves.

There are of course other ways of thinking about the relationship between the individual and society but, however you imagine it, when we vote at election time its something we ought to consciously consider .

Do you want a WE society in which we all pay our fair share to look after one another? Or ME society in which the individual gets maximum freedom of choice and pays as little as possible to the upkeep of the State .

Cartoonists, at their best, often point up the absurdity of some of the things we believe .

TDB Recommends NewzEngine.com

Like todays one on the Libertarian belief that whatever people choose to do or whatever happens to them in life isnt any of our responsibility.

It raises, yet again, the age old questionAm I my brothers keeper?.

Ive figured out where I stand on this issue.

How about you?

Bryan Bruce is one of NZs most respected documentary makers and public intellectuals who has tirelessly exposed NZs neoliberal economic settings as the main cause for social issues.

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GUEST BLOG: Bryan Bruce The individual versus the need to have a cohesive society - thedailyblog.co.nz

Culture/Media July 26, 2020 Matthew Flisfeder

With hindsight, a few years from now, it may well appear to us that the year 2020, the beginning of the third decade of the twenty-first century, marked the dawn of a new parasitic age. We can tell this much even by looking at one of the years most popular films. Bong Joon Hos Parasite (2019) tells the story of the poor Kim family living in a basement apartment of a decrepit house (a banjiha) in a Seoul ghetto. Both parents, Ki-taek and Chung-sook, as well as their young adult children, Ki-woo and Ki-jung, are all precarious gig workers. They scramble together to make ends meet, taking on every and any odd job they can find.

The apartment sits mostly below ground, but a window pane in the kitchen breaches the surface somewhat, giving them a ground level perspective of the outside world. The space, in this way, is an apt metaphor for the subordination (sub-ordination) of the poor, festering below the surface of ordinary life.

One day, the family is visited by Ki-woos friend, Min-hyuk, a university student who is about to go abroad for a study trip. Min works as a tutor for the daughter of the wealthy Park family and he invites Ki (who also goes by the name Kevin) to take over in his absence. But in order to work as a tutor, Ki must forge documents proving his credibility. After being accepted as a legitimate tutor and gaining the trust of the Park family, Ki recommends his sister as an art therapy tutor for the young son of the Park family. Jung, however, must also hide her identity and forge her credentials. The Kims further encroach upon the Park family as the children recommend their parents (again, hiding their real identities) to work for the household to replace the current chauffer and the trusted family housekeeper, whom the children frame in order to have them fired and replaced. Far from a dubious act, their scam is seen more as a necessary strategy of subsistence for precarious workers, an effect of the entrepreneurialization of labour and new competitive struggles of workers amongst each other over scarce temporary jobs. Meanwhile, Mr. Park, the patriarch of the family, works in the field of legitimate/capitalist scamming, otherwise known as high finance. The contrast between the Kims and Parks in this way evokes the vast cleavages between the precariat class and the wealthy, in whose favour the system is undoubtedly rigged.

The film is stunning in its visual depiction of the class differences between the families, especially through the juxtaposition of the two homes, particularly the kitchen and living spaces of each. Both homes have kitchens and living areas that have a window that looks out upon the world outside. For the Kims living in the banjiha, the window only breaches slightly above ground, where they are able to see the largely grungy slums of the inner city. The family witnesses a drunken man urinating in front of their kitchen window, apparently a regular occurrence as they recount to each other. Inside, the claustrophobic space of the kitchen is grimy and confining, an apt visual portrayal of the constraints of the poor.

This contrasts well with the home of the Parks, whose kitchen and living areas are spacious and pristine, appearing in some ways quite sterile, a perception augmented by the distanced engagement between the members of the Park family, who appear largely separate from each other, the children escaping into their own separate bedrooms, with Mrs. Park spending most of her time alone, while Mr. Park is off at work, in comparison with the very close and tight-knit family relationship of the Kims, a trope not uncommon in the depiction of the individuality and independence of the wealthy. The living area in the Parks home backs onto a large window expanding the size of one wall of the entire room. Through the window, the family gazes onto the fresh green space of the backyard, a stark departure from infested streets of the inner city. The class distinction between the two families couldnt be more apparent.

One night, while the Parks are on a family camping trip, the Kims (now all employed by the Park family) decide to enjoy the luxuries of the empty house together. In the middle of their festivities, late at night, the doorbell rings. They see on the external security camera that it is the old housekeeper, Moon-gwang, waiting there in the rain. She tells them that in her haste to leave the house after being fired she forgot to take something with her. She is let into the house and quickly runs to the basement where she uncovers a secret bunker below the house. Her husband has been hiding in the bunker from loan sharks and shes come to rescue him. However, amidst the commotion, she discovers the Kims secret, that theyve fooled the Park family, and threatens to turn them in. Ultimately, the two families struggle and fight with each other over who will maintain access to and feed off of the wealthy Park family, hence the title of the film, parasite.

The title, of course, seems appropriate given that the two families struggle over who will be able to devour and thrive off of the wealthy living of the Park family. The visual metaphor of the underground bunker, and the basement apartment reflect the parasitic portrayal of the poor feeding off of the rich. But things are surely not so clear cut. While the poor families battle against each other like vermin, beneath the surface of the shiny veneer of the rich, we might do well to turn things around and to ask what in fact is the source of their poverty in the first place?

Popular opinion is sure to read the parasite from the gaze of the elite, in which case it is the poor who are parasitic upon the wealthy. This, after all, is the leading practice of perceiving the abject and the excluded. The poor are typically portrayed as scum; vultures living off of the remainders and shreds of life of the rich. But by asking about the source of the wealth of the elite we are able to understand the reverse. Doing so lets us connect the film to a great number of issues facing us today, which intersect in the capitalist system. As Marx famously put it in Capital, Volume 1, Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. From the perspective of capital, then, Marx notes, the labour-power that it has paid for is its property and it is its right to so consume it during the time in which it has paid for the labour commodity. If the worker consumes his [own] disposable time for himself, [it appears to capital that] he robs the capitalist. As in a camera obscura, Marxs words describe here the inverted form with which the capitalist parasite is commonly misperceived or kept hidden by the very form of its own crises.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, most of us have had to limit and self-regulate our everyday lives, going into lockdown and quarantine. While millions of people are laid off of work as businesses have ceased operations and are no longer making any profit, the worlds wealthiest few, including big tech giants like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk, have increased their wealth substantially. As the old socialist saying goes, during times of prosperity, profits are privatized and rise to the top, whereas during times of crisis, risk, debt, and loss are socialized, and endured by the expanding bottom. The neoliberal myth of trickle down, it would seem, is only true in the case of socializing losses. It is loss that trickles down while the parasitic capitalists appropriate the worlds wealth, especially and even during a time of great crisis for many. What we see all too often is that the capitalist system, much like a parasite, exhausts and devours global resources, leaving the majority to scramble and fight amongst ourselves for access to basic needs. In this sense, we should see the Park family, not the Kims, as the real parasites of the movie.

We should think about the coronavirus in these terms, as well. The virus, not unlike a parasite, infects and replicates, and eats away at all forms of life confronting it. The culprit of the pandemic seems to be the virus itself, this nonhuman force of nature; but what we have been seeing is that, as another popular meme has put it, the real virus is capitalism that is, the capitalist system that erects further barriers to our collective treatment of the virus. The true crisis is not simply the virus itself, but the limited capacities in the public health care system to meet the needs for treatment amongst the population. This is a system, we should add, that has become relatively starved due to decades of neoliberal austerity measures and cutbacks to social and public services, benefits, and institutions that subsidize the costs of life and living, and that provide access to needs. In this sense, capitalism is very much the real virus, indeed.

Systemic crises are all around us, and not least as we are also currently seeing with the mass Black Lives Matter protests against racism, police violence, and police murders of African Americans, like George Floyd, in the United States. The police, Donald Trump, and much of the Right Wing media all want to make the protesters look parasitic upon society. Trump has referred to the protesters as thugs, while Fox News personality, Tucker Carlson has said that debates about racism are driven by hysteria that is spreading like a disease. But we must remember that, while the corporate media creates the illusion that the people are the robber-looters of society just as it appears to the capitalist that workers use of their own disposable time robs the capitalist from consuming the labour commodity it is in fact the capitalist, neoliberal and very much white supremacist system that continues to be the true vampire-like parasite, sucking the lifeblood out of the people.

Viewed from this angle, we can see how truly topsy-turvy is the parasite metaphor when it originates in the ruling ideology that deflects attention from the parasitic system of capital and projects its own contradictions onto false enemies. This practice is even deployed in much of the critical literature on climate change and the environment. For instance, we should even be hesitant deploying concepts like the Anthropocene and subscribing the fashionable idea that there is an Anthropocentrism at the core of our environmental troubles, for this merely abstracts from the historical relations of empire, capital, and class, as Jason W. Moore describes, displacing environmental and ecological crises onto an ill-conceived notion of humanity as a collective actor, and ignoring the class disparities so well represented in films like Parasite. Also unhelpful are the Object-Oriented Ontology and New Materialist thinkers, like Timothy Morton, who are on the brink of declaring that humans are the real parasite of the Earth. As Morton himself puts it, In symbiosis, its unclear which is the top symbiont Am I simply a vehicle for the numerous bacteria that inhabit my microbiome? Or are they hosting me? Who is the host and who is the parasite?

The danger in Mortons contrasting of innocent and alive but nonhuman nature with the guilty and parasitical human species, is that it has the potential to devolve into nihilistic activism, such as death politics. For example, Patricia MacCormacks The Ahuman Manifesto advocates for the cessation of human reproduction and the death of humans with calls for an end to the human both conceptually as exceptionalized and actually as a species. The risk in seeing humans (as a whole) as the uniform culprit of the global environmental catastrophe is that it misses the systemic forest for the individual trees. While right-wing governments compel and guilt the working class back to work to revivify the coronavirus-slumping economy, and while the anti-racist protesters are labelled thugs when demonstrating against a system that degrades and even murders their comrades, the theory of the Anthropocene ends up portraying the victims of the vampiristic system as themselves virus-like and parasitic. In this way, the theory of the Anthropocene ends up supporting the ruling capitalist ideology by portraying humanity, not the capitalist system, just as so much of the historical portrayals of racialized and colonized peoples, as well as the working class, as viruses and parasites leeching off of the system.

With so much attention being paid to the problems of the Anthropocene, and less to those of the social relations of capitalism, it is no wonder that post-humanism is becoming the dominant ideology of twenty-first century capitalism. Post-humanism, that is, both as a critique of the hubris of previous historical humanisms, and as an ideology of transhumanist technological transcendence of the limitations of corporeal humanity. On both ends, the critique of humanism displaces the cause of our collective inter-species problems from the capitalist system onto humanity as such. Instead, we should focus our critical attention on the capitalist system, and demonstrate how capitalism is incompatible with all life. We need to move from the prism of the Anthropocene to that of the Capitalocene.

Capitalism, rather than the people, is the real virus, the true parasite upon our thriving in the world today. What we need to learn is, not how to be post-human, but how to build and rethink a neo-humanism, in which, as Kate Soper puts it, human beings acknowledge our collective responsibility to each other, to the planet, and to other species a humanism, that is, in which emancipation is both universal and equitably post-capitalist, and in which human agency drives action rather than the objective laws of the market. In other words, if capitalism is the parasite, then perhaps the project of Democratic Socialism, or something like it, is the cure.

Parasite concludes, first with a bloody and violent climax where Ki-taek stabs Mr. Park to death in the middle of the familys backyard party in a burst of violent outrage. Ki-taek then flees the scene and disappears from sight, confusing the police and the media about his whereabouts. Rather than read the films conclusion as an expression of the inevitable violence of the degraded and humiliated working class in the absence of a Socialist alternative, we might instead reflect upon the final moments of the film in which Ki-woo fantasizes about his fathers survival. It is unclear whether or not the final moments of the film are a fantasy scenario that he dreams up about his father. He seems to imagine that his father was able to go back into the bunker, hiding and evading the authorities after killing Mr. Park. Ki-woo imagines that one day he will be able to then earn enough money to buy the house and in that way set his father free.

For some Posthumanist thinkers, such as Donna Haraway, the problem of the Anthropocene is in perceiving a time called the future that prohibits us from being fully present. Futurisms, according to her are what inevitably lead us toward our demise in a kind of dystopian chaos. We need to, as the title of her book claims, stay with the trouble. But can we really imagine telling those suffering from the exploitative and degrading conditions of capitalism, or those suffering from the COVID-19 pandemic, or those affected by rampant racism from an integrated system of white supremacy can we really imagine saying to the abject: dont worry, just stay with the trouble? Far from offering this un-sagely advice we should instead reflect upon the strategy of the film. It is not by staying with the trouble, but by imagining emancipated futures that we will be driven to set ourselves free from the capitalist parasite.

Matthew Flisfeder is an associate professor of Rhetoric and Communications at The University of Winnipeg. He is the author of Algorithmic Desire: Toward a New Structuralist Theory of Social Media (Northwestern University Press, Forthcoming 2021), Postmodern Theory and Blade Runner (Bloomsbury, 2017), The Symbolic, The Sublime, and Slavoj ieks Theory of Film (Palgrave Macmillan 2012), and co-editor of iek and Media Studies: A Reader (2014). He is currently working on project called The Hysterical Sublime, a critical study of the aesthetics, rhetorics, and ethics of new materialist and posthumanist critical theory, funded by a SSHRC Insight Development Grant.

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Capitalism is the Parasite; Capitalism is the Virus - The Bullet - Socialist Project

Satire on Romantic Suicide (1839) by Leonardo Alenza y Nieto (18071845)

Introduction

Why do we need to talk about Romanticism? What is Romanticism? And how does it affect us in the 21st century? The fact is that we are so immersed in Romanticism now that we cannot see the proverbial wood for the haunted-looking trees. Romanticism has so saturated our culture that we need to stand back and remind ourselves what it is, and examine how it has seeped into our thinking processes to the extent that we are not even aware of its presence anymore. Or why this is a problem. The Romanticist influence of intense emotion makes up a large part of modern culture, for example, in much pop music, cinema, TV and literature; e.g., genres such as Superheroes, Fantasy, Horror, Magical realism, Saga, Westerns. I will look at the origins of Romanticism, and its negative influence on culture and politics. I will show how Enlightenment ideas originally emerged in opposition to an absolute monarchy and the fixed dogmas of the Church and led to the formation of a working class ideology and culture of resistance.

Romanticism and the modern world

The whole exuberance, anarchy and violence of modern art its unrestrained, unsparing exhibitionism, is derived from [Romanticism]. And this subjective, egocentric attitude has become so much a matter of course for us that we find it impossible to reproduce even an abstract train of thought without talking about our own feelings. Arnold Hauser, (18921978), A Social History of Art, Vol. 3, p. 166

Romanticism arose out of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century as a reaction to what was perceived as a rationalisation of life to the point of being anti-nature. The Romantics were against the Industrial Revolution, universalism and empiricism, emphasising instead heroic individualists and artists, and the individual imagination as a critical authority rather than classical ideals.

The Enlightenment itself had developed from the earlier Renaissance with a renewed interest in the classical traditions and ideals of harmony, symmetry, and order based on reason and science. On a political level the Enlightenment promoted republicanism in opposition to monarchy which ultimately led to the French revolution.

The worried conservatives of the time reacted to the ideas of the Enlightenment and reason with a philosophy which was based on religious ideas and glorified the past (especially Medieval times and the Golden Age) times when things were not so threatening to elites. This philosophy became known as Romanticism and emphasised medieval ideas and society over the new ideas of democracy, capitalism and science.

Romanticism originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century, and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate period from 1800 to 1890. It was initially marked by innovations in both content and literary style and by a preoccupation with the subconscious, the mystical, and the supernatural. This period was followed by the development of cultural nationalism and a new attention to national origins, an interest in native folklore, folk ballads and poetry, folk dance and music, and even previously ignored medieval and Renaissance works.

The Romantic movement emphasized intense emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as apprehension, horror and terror, and aweespecially that experienced in confronting the new aesthetic categories of the sublimity and beauty of nature. The importance of the medieval lay in the pre-capitalist significance of its individual crafts and tradesmen, as well as its feudal peasants and serfs.

Thus Romanticism was a reaction to the birth of the modern world: urbanisation, secularisation, industrialisation, and consumerism. Romanticism emphasised intense emotion and feelings which over the centuries came to be seen as one of its most important characteristics, in opposition to cold, unfeeling Enlightenment rationalism.

Origins of Enlightenment emotion

Whence this secret Chain between each Person and Mankind? How is my Interest connected with the most distant Parts of it? Francis Hutcheson (16941746), An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), Treatise II: An Inquiry concerning Moral Good and Evil, Sect. I.

However, this cold, unfeeling scenario is actually very far from the truth. In fact, the Enlightenment, itself, had its origins in emotion. Enlightenment philosophers of the eighteenth century tried to create a philosophy of feeling that would allow them to solve the problem of the injustice in the unfeeling world they saw all around them.

Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury (16711713) believed that all human beings had a natural affection or natural sociability which bound them together. Francis Hutcheson (16941746) wrote that All Men have the same Affections and Senses, while David Hume (17111776) believed that human beings extend their imaginative identification with the feelings of others when it is required. Similarly, Adam Smith (17231790), the writer of Wealth of Nations, believed in the power of the imagination to inform us and help us understand the suffering of others.

Portrait of Denis Diderot (1713-1784), by Louis-Michel van Loo, 1767

For the Enlightenment philosophers the relationship between feeling and reason was of absolute importance. To develop ideas that would progress society for the better, a sense of morality was essential. Denis Diderot (17131784) a prominent French philosopher of the Enlightenment in France, for example, had strong views on the importance of the passions. As Henry Martyn Lloyd writes:

Diderot did believe in the utility of reason in the pursuit of truth but he had an acute enthusiasm for the passions, particularly when it came to morality and aesthetics. With many of the key figures in the Scottish Enlightenment, such as David Hume, he believed that morality was grounded in sense-experience. Ethical judgment was closely aligned with, even indistinguishable from, aesthetic judgments, he claimed. We judge the beauty of a painting, a landscape or our lovers face just as we judge the morality of a character in a novel, a play or our own lives that is, we judge the good and the beautiful directly and without the need of reason. For Diderot, then, eliminating the passions could produce only an abomination. A person without the ability to be affected, either because of the absence of passions or the absence of senses, would be morally monstrous.

Moreover, to remove the passions from science would lead to inhuman approaches and methods that would divert and alienate science from its ultimate goal of serving humanity, as Lloyd writes:

That the Enlightenment celebrated sensibility and feeling didnt entail a rejection of science, however. Quite the opposite: the most sensitive individual the person with the greatest sensibility was considered to be the most acute observer of nature. The archetypical example here was a doctor, attuned to the bodily rhythms of patients and their particular symptoms. Instead, it was the speculative system-builder who was the enemy of scientific progress the Cartesian physician who saw the body as a mere machine, or those who learned medicine by reading Aristotle but not by observing the ill. So the philosophical suspicion of reason was not a rejection of rationality per se; it was only a rejection of reason in isolation from the senses, and alienated from the impassioned body.

Michael L. Frazer describes the importance of Enlightenment justice and sympathy in his book The Enlightenment of Sympathy. He writes:

Reflective sentimentalists recognize our commitment to justice as an outgrowth of our sympathy for others. After our sympathetic sentiments undergo reflective self-correction, the sympathy that emerges for all those who suffer injustice poses no insult to those for whom it is felt. We do not see their suffering as mere pain to be soothed away when and if we happen to share it. Instead under Humes account, we condemn injustice as a violation of rules that are vitally important to us all. And under Smiths account, we condemn the sufferings of the victims of injustice as injustice because we sympathetically share the resentment that they feel toward their oppressors, endorsing such feelings as warranted and acknowledging those who feel them deserve better treatment.

Cooper, Hume and Smith were living in times, not only devoid of empathy, but also even of basic sympathy. Robert C. Solomon writes of society then in A Passion for Justice: There have always been the very rich. And of course there have always been the very poor. But even as late as the civilized and sentimental eighteenth century, this disparity was not yet a cause for public embarrassment or a cry of injustice. [] Poverty was considered just one more act of God, impervious to any solution except mollification through individual charity and government poorhouses to keep the poor off the streets and away from crime.

Enlightenment emotion eventually gave rise to social trends that emphasised humanism and the heightened value of human life. These trends had their complement in art, creating what became known as the sentimental novel. While today sentimentalism evokes maudlin self-pity, in the eighteenth century it was revolutionary as sentimental literature

focused on weaker members of society, such as orphans and condemned criminals, and allowed readers to identify and sympathize with them. This translated to growing sentimentalism within society, and led to social movements calling for change, such as the abolition of the death penalty and of slavery. Instead of the death penalty, popular sentiment called for the rehabilitation of criminals, rather than harsh punishment. Frederick Douglass himself was inspired to stand against his own bondage and slavery in general in his famous Narrative by the speech by the sentimentalist playwright Sheridan in The Columbian Orator detailing a fictional dialogue between a master and slave.

As Solomon notes: What distinguishes us not just from animals but from machines are our passions, and foremost among them our passion for justice. Justice is, in a word, that set of passions, not mere theories, that bind us and make us part of the social world.

The Man of Feeling (Henry Mackenzie)

Writers such as the Scottish author Henry Mackenzie tried to highlight many things that he perceived were wrong during his time and showed how many of the wrongs were ultimately caused by the established pillars of society. In his book, The Man of Feeling, he has no qualms about showing how these pillars of society had, for example, abused an intelligent woman causing her to become a prostitute (p. 44/45.), destroyed a school because it blocked the landowners view (p. 72), and hired assassins to remove a man who had refused to hand over his wife (p. 91.), etc. Mackenzie shows again and again the injustices of British military and colonial policy, and who is responsible. As Marilyn Butler writes:

Henry Mackenzies The Man of Feeling (1771), is pointedly topical when it criticizes the consequences of a war policy press-ganging, conscription, the military punishment of flogging, and inadequate pensions and when, like the same authors Julia de Roubign (1777), it attacks the principle of colonialism. An interest in such causes was the logical outcome of arts frequently reiterated dedication to humanity. It was a period when the cast of villains was drawn from the proud men representing authority, downwards from the House of Lords, the bench of bishops, judges, local magistrates, attorneys, to the stern father; when readers were invited to empathize with lifes victims.

It took a long time for the ideas of sentimentalism (emotions against injustice) to filter down to the Realism (using facts to depict ordinary everyday experiences) that Dickens used in the nineteenth century to finally evoke some kind of empathy for people impoverished by society. As Solomon notes: It wasnt until the late nineteenth century that Dickens shook the conscience of his compatriots with his riveting descriptions of poverty and cruelty in contemporary London, [] that the problem of poverty and resistance to its solutions [e.g. poorhouses] has become the central question of justice.

European literary sentimentalism arose during the Enlightenment, and partly as a response to sentimentalism in philosophy. In England the period 17501798 became known as the Age of Sensibility as the sentimental novel or the novel of sensibility became popular.

Romanticist emotionalism: the opposite of Enlightenment sentimentalism

Classicism is health, romanticism is sickness. Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749-1832)

However, sensibility in an Enlightenment sense was very different from the Romanticist understanding, as Butler notes:

It is, in fact, in a key respect almost the opposite of Romanticism. Sensibility, like its near-synonym sentiment, echoes eighteenth-century philosophy and psychology in focusing upon the mental process by which impressions are received by the senses. But the sentimental writers interest in how the mind works and in how people behave is very different from the Romantic writers inwardness.

She writes that neither Neoclassical theory nor contemporary practice in various styles and genres put much emphasis on the individuality of the artist (p. 29). This is a far cry from the apolitical, inward-looking, self-centered Romantic artists who saw themselves outside of a society that they had little interest in participating in, let alone changing for the better. Butler again:

Romantic rebelliousness is more outrageous and total, the individual rejecting not just his own society but the very principle of living in society which means that the Romantic and post Romantic often dismisses political activity of any kind, as external to the self, literal and commonplace. Since it is relatively uncommon for the eighteenth-century artist to complain directly on his own behalf, he seldom achieves such emotional force as his nineteenth-century successor. He is, on the other hand, much more inclined than the Romantic to express sympathy for certain, well-defined social groups. Humanitarian feeling for the real-life underdog is a strong vein from the 1760s to the 1790s, often echoing real-life campaigns for reform.

This movement over time towards the Romanticist inward-looking conception of emotion and feelings has had knock-on negative effects on societys ability to defend itself from elite oppression (through cultural styles of self-absorption, escapism and diversion rather than exposure, criticism and resistance), and retarded arts frequently reiterated dedication to humanity. Solomon describes this process:

What has come about in the past two centuries or so is the dramatic rise of what Robert Stone has called affective individualism, this new celebration of the passions and other feelings of the autonomous individual. Yet, ironically, it is an attitude that has become even further removed from our sense of justice during that same period of time. We seem to have more inner feelings and pay more attention to them, but we seem to have fewer feelings about others and the state of the world and pay less attention to them.

Thus while Enlightenment sentimentalism depicted individuals as social beings whose sensibility was stimulated and defined by their interactions with others, the Romantic movement that followed it tended to privilege individual autonomy and subjectivity over sociability.

Romanticism as a philosophical movement of the nineteenth century had a profound influence on culture which can still be seen right up to today. Its main characteristics are the emphasis on the personal, dramatic contrasts, emotional excess, a focus on the nocturnal, the ghostly and the frightful, spontaneity, and extreme subjectivism. Romanticism in culture implies a turning inward and encourages introspection. Romantic literature put more emphasis on themes of isolation, loneliness, tragic events and the power of nature. A heroic view of history and myth became the basis of much Romantic literature.

Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, painted by Jean-Jacques-Franois Le Barbier

It was in Germany that Romanticism took shape as a political ideology. The German Romanticists felt threatened by the French Revolution and were forced to move from inward-looking ideas to formulate conservative political answers needed to oppose Enlightenment and republican ideals. According to Eugene N. Anderson:

In the succeeding years the danger became acutely political, and the German Romanticists were compelled to subordinate their preoccupation with the widening of art and the enrichment of individual experience to social and political ideas and actions, particularly as formulated in nationalism and conservatism. These three cultural ideals, Romanticism, nationalism and conservatism, shared qualities evoked by the common situation of crisis. [] The Germans had to maintain against rationalism and the French a culture which in its institutional structure was that of the ancien rgime. German Romanticism accepted it, wished to reform it somewhat, idealized it, and defended the idealization as the supreme culture of the world. This was the German counter-revolution. [] They endowed their culture with universal validity and asserted that it enjoyed the devotion of nature and God, that if it were destroyed humanity would be vitally wounded.

The reactionary nature of German Romanticism was demonstrated in its hierarchical views of society, its chauvinist nationalism, and extreme conservatism which would have serious implications for future generations of the German populace. As Anderson writes:

The low estimate of rationalism and the exaltation of custom, tradition, and feeling, the conception of society as an alliance of the generations, the belief in the abiding character of ideas as contrasted with the ephemeral nature of concepts, these and many other romantic views bolstered up the existing culture. The concern with relations led the Romanticists to praise the hierarchical order of the Stndestaat and to regard everything and every-one as an intermediary. The acceptance of the fact of inequality harmonized with that of the ideals of service, duty, faithfulness, order, sacrifice admirable traits for serf or subject or soldier.

Anderson also believes that the Romanticists remained swinging between individual freedom and initiative and group compulsion and authority and as such could not have brought in fundamental reforms, because: By reverencing tradition, they preserved the power of the backward-looking royalty and aristocracy.

Thus Romanticist self-centredness in philosophy translated into the most conservative forms for maintaining the status quo in politics. Individual freedoms were matched by authoritarianism for the masses. The individual was king all right, as long as you werent a serf or subject or soldier.

Beyond morality: Working Class perspectives on Reason and Sentiment

We have never intended to enlighten shoemakers and servantsthis is up to apostles.Voltaire (16941778)

Around the same time of the early period of Romanticism, Karl Heinrich Marx (18181883) and Friedrich Engels (18201895) were born. They grew up in a very different Germany. Capitalism had become established and was creating an even more polarised society between extremely rich and extremely poor as factory owners pushed their workers to their physical limits. On his way to work at his fathers firm in Manchester, Engels called into the offices of a paper he wrote for in Cologne and met the editor, Marx, for the first time in 1842. They formed a friendship based on shared values and beliefs regarding the working class and socialist ideas. They saw a connection between the earlier Enlightenment ideas and socialism. For example, as Engels writes in Anti-Duhring:

in its theoretical form, modern socialism originally appears ostensibly as a more logical extension of the principles laid down by the great French philosophers of the eighteenth century. Like every new theory, modern socialism had, at first, to connect itself with the intellectual stock-in-trade ready to its hand, however deeply its roots lay in economic facts.

However, once they had connected themselves to the Enlightenment they soon saw the limitations of both Enlightenment concepts of reason and sentiment. They realised that the new bourgeois rulers would be limited by their conceptions of property, justice, and equality, which basically meant they only applied universality to themselves and their own property. The new rulers were buoyed up by the victory of their ideological fight over the aristocracy but incapable of applying the same ideas to the masses who helped them to victory. Thus Marx and Engels viewed the struggle for reason as important but limited to the new ruling class world view, just like the aristocracy before them:

Every form of society and government then existing, every old traditional notion was flung into the lumber room as irrational; the world had hitherto allowed itself to be led solely by prejudices; everything in the past deserved only pity and contempt. Now, for the first time, appeared the light of day, henceforth superstition, injustice, privilege, oppression, were to be superseded by eternal truth, eternal Right, equality based on nature and the inalienable rights of man. We know today that this kingdom of reason was nothing more than the idealised kingdom of the bourgeoisie; that this eternal Right found its realisation in bourgeois justice; that this equality reduced itself to bourgeois equality before the law; that bourgeois property was proclaimed as one of the essential rights of man; and that the government of reason, the Contrat Social of Rousseau, came into being, and only could come into being, as a democratic bourgeois republic. The great thinkers of the eighteenth century could, no more than their predecessors, go beyond the limits imposed upon them by their epoch.

As for sentiment, they were well aware of the Realist critical nature of modern writers (the Realist movement rejected Romanticism) and indeed praised them (e.g. G. Sand, E. Sue, and Boz [Dickens]), but limited themselves to offering some advice. While recognising that progressive literature had a mainly middle class audience (and were happy enough with these authors just shaking the optimism of their audience), they knew that this was not by any means a socialist literature and were

I think however that the purpose must become manifest from the situation and the action themselves without being expressly pointed out and that the author does not have to serve the reader on a platter the future historical resolution of the social conflicts which he describes. To this must be added that under our conditions novels are mostly addressed to readers from bourgeois circles, i.e., circles which are not directly ours. Thus the socialist problem novel in my opinion fully carries out its mission if by a faithful portrayal of the real conditions it dispels the dominant conventional illusions concerning them, shakes the optimism of the bourgeois world, and inevitably instills doubt as to the eternal validity of that which exists, without itself offering a direct solution of the problem involved, even without at times ostensibly taking sides.

Sentimental literature focused on individual misfortune, and constant repetition of such themes certainly appeared to universalise such suffering, so that, as David Denby writes, In this weeping mother, this suffering father, we are to read also the sufferings of humanity. Thus, individualism and universalism appear to be two sides of the same coin. Sentimental literature gives the reader the spectacle of misfortune and a representation of the reaction of a sentient and sensible observer who tries to help with alms, sympathy or indeed narrative intervention. Furthermore, the literature of sentiment mirrors eighteenth-century theories of sympathy, in which a spontaneous reaction to the spectacle of suffering is gradually developed, by a process of generalisation and combination of ideas, into broader and more abstract notions of humanity, benevolence, justice.

Workers in the fuse factory, Woolwich Arsenal late 1800s

This brings us then to the problem of interpretation, as Denby suggests: should the sentimental portrayal of the poor and of action in their favour be read as an attempt to give a voice to the voiceless, to include the hitherto excluded? Or, alternatively, is the sentimentalisation of the poor to be interpreted, more cynically, as a discursive strategy through which the enlightened bourgeoisie states its commitment to values of humanity and justice, and thereby seeks to strengthen its claims to universal domination?

While such ideas of giving a voice to the voiceless was a far cry from monarchical times, and claims of commitment to humanity and justice were laudable, the concept of universality had a fundamental flaw: The universal claims of the French Revolution are opposed to a [aristocratic] society based on distinctions of birth: it is in the name of humanity that the Revolution challenges the established order. But for Sartre this does not change the fact that the universal is a myth, an ideological construct, and an obfuscation, since it articulates a notion of man which eliminates social conflict and disguises the interests of a class behind a facade of universal reference.

Striking teamsters battling police on the streets of Minneapolis, Minnesota, June 1934

Thus for Marx and Engels defining concepts such as good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice, justice and crime, that is, a universal moral theory, could not be achieved while society is divided into classes:

We maintain [] that all moral theories have been hitherto the product, in the last analysis, of the economic conditions of society obtaining at the time. And as society has hitherto moved in class antagonisms, morality has always been class morality; it has either justified the domination and the interests of the ruling class, or ever since the oppressed class became powerful enough, it has represented its indignation against this domination and the future interests of the oppressed. That in this process there has on the whole been progress in morality, as in all other branches of human knowledge, no one will doubt. But we have not yet passed beyond class morality. A really human morality which stands above class antagonisms and above any recollection of them becomes possible only at a stage of society which has not only overcome class antagonisms but has even forgotten them in practical life.

Marx and Engels worked towards that morality through their activism with working class movements and culture. Their critical writing also formed an essential part of working class ideology and culture of resistance and has remained influential in resistance movements the world over.

The culture of resistance today still uses realism, documentary, and histories of oppression to show the harsh realities of globalisation. Like during the Enlightenment, empathy for those suffering injustice forms its foundation. And unlike Romanticism, reason and science are deemed to be important tools in its struggle for social emancipation and progress.

Conclusion: Enlightenment and Romanticism today

When we are asked now: are we now living into an enlightened age? Then the answer is: No, but in an age of Enlightenment. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

There is no doubt that the influence of Romanticism has become ever stronger in twentieth and twenty-first century culture. Romanticist-influenced TV shows on Netflix are watched world wide. Love songs dominate the pop industry and superheroes are now the mainstay of cinema. Even Romanticist nationalism is making a comeback. Now and then calls for a new Enlightenment are heard, but like the original advocates of the Enlightenment, they are limited to the conservative world view of those making the call and whose view of the Enlightenment could be compared to a form of Third Way politics, that is, they avoid the issue of class conflict.

This article was posted on Friday, July 31st, 2020 at 7:27pm and is filed under Art, Enlightenment, Equal Rights, Europe, Human Rights, Literature, Philosophy, Romanticism, Society, Working Class.

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We Need to Talk about Romanticism - Dissident Voice

Why Donald Trump? Why are American evangelicals so enamored of a president who could serve as a poster boy for the seven deadly sins?

Kristen Kobes Du Mez, a history professor at Calvin College, isnt buying either of these explanations. In Jesus and John Wayne:How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, she explains why. The majority of white American evangelicals support Trump, she says, because he embodies the kind of militant masculinity they have learned to love.

Du Mezs first hint that a radical shift had taken place in the world of white American evangelicalism came when students directed her attention to John Eldredges Wild at Heart: Discovering the Secret of a Mans Soul. First published in 2001, the book sold more than 4 million copies in the United States alone. Men are brimming with testosterone, Eldredge explained, because God needs warriors. Men are dangerous, unpredictable, combative and aggressively sexual characteristics that fitted them for lives of adventure and leadership. Instead of repenting of these traits, Eldredge said, Christian men should embrace them.

In 2015, as she watched evangelicals lining up behind the strutting embodiment of the militant masculinity celebrated in Eldredges book, Du Mez decided to take a closer look.

I first became aware of Du Mezs project shortly after writing a piece for Baptist News Global in October of 2016 called Jesus and John Wayne: Must we choose? When I Googled Jesus and John Wayne, the first item up was a 1980s song by that title by the Gaither Vocal Band that portrayed American evangelicals as living in a healthy tension between the fierce masculinity of John Wayne and the radical grace of Jesus. Evangelical enthusiasm for Donald Trump, I argued, suggested that that militant masculinity of John Wayne had eclipsed the spirituality of Jesus.

Du Mez came across my article because she was thinking along similar lines. Her book includes a couple of references to my article and uses one of my best lines as a chapter title: The unspoken mantra of post-war evangelicalism was simple: Jesus can save your soul, but John Wayne will save your ass.

Since the 1960s, Du Mez notes, male blue-collar work such as construction, manufacturing and agriculture had been in decline while sectors open to educated women such as health care, retail, education, finance and food service were rapidly expanding. At the same time, American culture still associated masculinity with working-class jobs. By the 1970s, American men were in the throes of an identity crisis.

The militant masculinity described in Jesus and John Wayne is organically related to what scholars now call white Christian nationalism. Evangelicals had been on a roll in the wake of the Second World War with new churches springing up everywhere and liberals and conservative Christians agreeing that God had given America a leadership role to play in the world. America was great, it was widely believed, because America was good.

But in the 1960s, the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement and second-wave feminism shattered American confidence. If the country was as imperialist, racist and misogynistic as her critics were claiming, the goodness of America was cast in doubt.

While Protestant mainline churches wrestled with issues of race, gender and imperialism, evangelicals, with few exceptions, clung to the myth of white Christian nationalism. Because racism was a personal and spiritual failing, the solution lay with the Christian gospel, not public policy.

Americas anti-communist crusade was ordained of God and therefore noble. The quagmire of Vietnam simply indicated that Americas latest crop of young men had gone soft.

Most significant for Du Mezs thesis, evangelicals charged that the feminist call for equal rights was a tacit rejection of biblical revelation. God created men and women with complementary, but very different, emotional attributes. Men and women were different, evangelicals typically argued, because they were built for distinct vocations.

Du Mez acknowledges that a small but valiant evangelical left has been wrestling with racism, sexism and imperialism for half a century; but she regards this movement as a minority report within the larger evangelical world. The prevailing evangelical response to these challenges has been to double down on white Christian nationalism.

In 1972, Phyllis Schlafly launched her crusade against the Equal Rights Amendment by insisting that the very notion of womens oppression was ludicrous.

Meanwhile, Marabel Morgan sold 10 million copies of The Total Woman, an account of how she revived a troubled marriage by transforming herself into a submissive servant-temptress. Morgan introduced a model of masculinity in which to be a man was to have a fragile ego and a vigorous libido. Men were entitled to lead, to rule and to have their needs met all their needs, on their terms.

Next, Du Mez moves to Bill chain-of-command Gothard, a controversial figure who established the intellectual foundation on which others would build. Gothard channeled the Christian Reconstructionist thinking of Rousas John Rushdoony, a brooding, cantankerous writer who characterized the Civil War as a religious war in which the South was defending Christian civilization. Rushdoony, Du Mez later explains, took his leading ideas from Robert Lewis Dabney, the 19th century Southern Presbyterian scholar who supplied a theological justification for slavery.

The only answer to the problems facing America, in Rushdoonys view, was the imposition of Old Testament law. At the heart of this project, Du Mez argues, was the assertion of hierarchical authority.

Drawing on Rushdoony, Gothard taught that God used natural hierarchies to regulate life. Wives must submit to husbands, children must submit to their parents, and employees must submit to employers. In this way, Du Mez says, proponents of biblical law married traditional gender roles to unrestrained, free-market capitalism.

Gothards hierarchical philosophy ordered Christian marriage on a military model in which a wife owed her husband total submission, requiring approval for even the smallest household decisions.

In 1970, child psychologist James Dobson offered a more palatable patriarchal vision in his influential book, Dare to Discipline. The authoritarian contours of Dobsons philosophy would become increasingly apparent over time. The explicitly military cast of his thinking became more apparent once he moved his Focus on the Family enterprise from Pasadena, Calif., to Colorado Springs, Colo., in 1991. Like megachurch pastor Ted Haggard, Dobson exported his patriarchal theology into the American military using the Air Force Academy north of town as a Trojan horse.

What started as a backlash against hippies, antiwar protestors, civil rights activists and urban minorities, evolved into a veneration of law enforcement and the military.

Meanwhile, Du Mez asserts, military men were refashioning Christianity in their own image, and offering their own brand of militant evangelicalism for broader consumption. Soon military men like Oliver North and Jerry Boykin were emerging as Christian exemplars.

With evangelicals in the vanguard, Americans had come to see the military as a bastion of traditional values and old-fashioned virtue, Du Mez suggests. Within this genre, real-life military warriors continued to bring an aura of authenticity that mere pastors couldnt match.

And if warriors were being valorized, the traditional war is hell mantra began to fade. If the military was a source of virtue, Du Mez says, war, too, attained a moral bearing even preemptive war.

What started as a backlash against hippies, antiwar protestors, civil rights activists and urban minorities, in other words, evolved into a veneration of law enforcement and the military.

Du Mez notes that the heroes venerated by the cult of militant masculinity were much more likely to be drawn from Hollywood, pop culture and current events than from the Bible. John Wayne, Teddy Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, Oliver North, Douglas MacArthur and George Patton were frequently held up as exemplars. When Mel Gibsons Braveheart was released in 1995, William Wallace, the movies hero, was embraced as the prototypical Christian warrior.

The purity culture that took the evangelical world by storm in the 1980s and 1990s defined the role God had in mind for girls and women. Christian girls were to remain pure, saving themselves for marriage and ensuring that they did not create temptations for men. According to Eldridges Wild at Heart, a woman sinned when she tried to control her world, when she was grasping rather than vulnerable, when she sought to control her own adventure rather than share in the adventure of a man.

Men and women who kept themselves pure until marriage, the reasoning went, would be rewarded with what one writer called mind-blowing sex. Wives also could expect the protection of a godly husband.

The evangelical aversion to the LGBTQ movement flows from the same logic. Same-sex attraction isnt part of Gods plan and therefore constitutes rebellion against the revealed will of God.

Du Mez argues that over time, a common commitment to patriarchal power began to define the boundaries of the evangelical movement itself, as those who ran afoul of these orthodoxies quickly discovered. When Russell Moore announced as a never-Trumper, he was forced to embark on a post-election apology tour in order to keep his job as president of the Southern Baptists Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.

The subheading of Jesus and John Wayne suggests that the cult of militant masculinity corrupted American evangelicalism. Du Mez identifies three ways in which a renewed focus on patriarchy shifted the focus of a faith.

First, references to pop culture and American political and military history abound in the body of literature she is describing, while biblical references recede into the background.

Second, when the Bible is quoted, the erotic poetry of Song of Songs and the violent visions of Revelation receive outsized attention. Song of Songs is used to justify the frequent allusions to testosterone-driven male sexuality found in this literature. The visions of Revelation demonstrate how the suffering Messiah turned into the conquering Messiah. New Calvinist pastor Mark Driscoll captured the tenor of the movement when he argued that Jesus was a hero, not a loser, an Ultimate Fighter warrior king with a tattoo down his leg who rides into battle against Satan, sin and death on a trusty horse. Tim LaHayes wildly successful Left Behind series, Du Mez points out, ends in a violent bloodbath ushered in by Christ himself.

Third, Du Mez argues, traditional virtues such as the fruit of the spirit and the Sermon on the Mount are either overtly rejected by these authors or categorized as feminine virtues that dont apply to men.

Du Mez notes how the shifting fortunes of American politics and foreign policy influenced evangelical teaching. On the whole, she says, conservative evangelicalism flourished when the White House was in the hands of a Bill Clinton or a Barack Obama and floundered somewhat during the Reagan and two Bush administrations.

As Religious Right organizer Ralph Reed once said: Part of politics is having the right friends, but an important part of politics is having the right enemies. For decades, evangelicals had used communism as the right enemy, but with the collapse of Soviet Communism that became problematic. The Promise Keepers, a movement which Du Mez discusses at length, provided a softer version of evangelical patriarchy than Dobson and Gothard represented. Marital submission was seen as mutual and the responsibilities of Christian fatherhood, as opposed to male prerogatives, were emphasized.

The Promise Keepers even experimented cautiously with racial reconciliation, inviting Black preachers like Tony Evans and E.V. Hill to address their overwhelmingly white mass rallies. They even asked civil rights icon John Perkins to provide a critique of white evangelical racism in a widely distributed publication. But as Bill McCartney, the retired football coach who sparked the movement, has admitted, few white participants were ready to address the subject of race.

This experiment with soft patriarchy ended with 9/11. The communist boogie man was quickly replaced by the Islamist terrorism, and charlatans like Ergun and Emir Caner, Walid Shoebat, Zachariah Anani and Kamal Saleem were soon marketing themselves as Islamic terrorists redeemed by the blood of the Lamb. Long after the distortions and misrepresentations perpetrated by these imposters had been thoroughly vetted, they were still featured speakers at evangelical churches and conferences.

Were evangelicals embracing an increasingly militant faith in response to a new threat from the Islamic world? Du Mez asks. Or were they creating the perception of threat to justify their own militancy and enhance their own power? The question answers itself.

Invariably, Du Mez observes, the heroic Christian man was a white man, and not infrequently a white man who defended against the threat of nonwhite men and foreigners. Gods call to wild, militant masculinity was not extended to Black, Middle Eastern or Hispanic men. Their aggression, she writes, is seen as dangerous, a threat to the stability of home and nation.

Du Mez anticipates the obvious critique that she is mistaking a fringe element for normative evangelicalism. The brand of militant masculinity described in Jesus and John Wayne may exist in some quarters, critics will argue, but American evangelicalism is too theologically and sociologically diverse to be reduced to white Christian nationalism and militant masculinity.

Du Mez admits that men like Rushdoony and Gothard were initially viewed as fringe actors within the American evangelicalism. But evangelical opinion leaders almost never got into trouble for pushing the envelope on patriarchy. Only for those deemed too inclusive did danger lurk. As militant masculinity took hold across evangelicalism, she says, it helped bind together those on the fringes of the movement with those closer to the center, making it increasingly difficult to distinguish the margins from the mainstream.

Du Mez is fully versed in the theological complexity within the American religious community. But her purpose is to reckon with the fact that 81% of self-identifying evangelicals voted for Donald Trump. Few of these people, she points out, read theological tomes, and few are biblically literate. They take their ideological cues from Christian television, the titles prominently displayed in Christian bookstores, the lyrics of contemporary Christian music, the opinions expressed on conservative talk radio and Fox personalities like Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson. And it is this web of ideas, she argues, that defines the parameters of the possible for evangelical pastors.

Concerns over (biblical) inerrancy gave way to a newly politicized commitment to female submission and to related culture war issues.

Du Mez uses the struggle for control of the Southern Baptist Convention in the 1980s to illustrate how, for American evangelicals, social issues trump theology every time. Large numbers of Southern Baptists even denominational officials lacked any real theological prowess and were in fact functionally atheological, she suggests. Which is why, concerns over (biblical) inerrancy gave way to a newly politicized commitment to female submission and to related culture war issues.

And it was this commitment, Du Mez argues, that allowed the New Calvinists within the SBC to participate in post-denominational networks such as the Gospel Coalition. Within a generation, she says, Southern Baptists began to place their evangelical identity over their identity as Southern Baptists. Patriarchy was at the heart of this new sense of themselves.

In similar fashion, Du Mez suggests, militant masculinity allowed evangelical opinion leaders to paper over theological disagreements. Evangelical authorities were all over the board on the contested subject of eschatology, but it didnt matter. The authors chronicled in Jesus and John Wayne patched over a long-standing division within conservative Protestantism by subordinating theological clarity to a shared desire to reclaim the culture for Christ by reasserting patriarchal authority and waging battle against encroaching secular humanism, in all its guises.

The crumbling foundations of white evangelical militant masculinity were exposed to the world in the years leading up to the election of 2016. One prominent evangelical leader after another stood accused of sexual assault, gross abuse of power or covering up for their evangelical friends. Toward the end of Jesus and John Wayne, Du Mez chronicles the imploding careers of C.J. Mahaney, Mark Driscoll, Darrin Patrick, John MacArthur, James McDonald, Bill Gothard, Ted Haggard, Andy Savage, Doug Phillips, Jack Hyles, Darrell Gilyard and Paige Patterson in excruciating detail.

The rapid implosion of dozens of the men who placed militant masculinity on the evangelical map should have served as a wake-up call. Instead, evangelical icons like Al Mohler and John Piper rushed to the defense of their fallen brothers, making excuses and blaming victims.

The evangelical cult of masculinity links patriarchal power to masculine aggression and sexual desire, Du Mez explains, and men assign themselves the role of protector. But immersed in these teachings about sex and power, evangelicals are often unable or unwilling to name abuse, to believe women, to hold perpetrators accountable, and to protect and empower survivors.

In other words, President Trump is just another exemplar of militant masculinity who gets a mulligan. Trump might not have been the best Christian, Du Mez concludes, but as a Christian nationalist he could more than hold his own.

Because militant masculinity is a defining feature of white Christian nationalism, it wont be renounced anytime soon. Jesus and John Wayne isnt a book about what more authentic expressions of Christianity might look like; its a book about what American evangelicalism has become in the age of Trump and how it got that way.

But by so thoroughly exposing a faux religion rooted in power and privilege, Du Mez poses a provocative question: What would white American evangelicalism look like if we had listened to the civil rights marchers, anti-war protesters, gay rights advocates, and second-wave feminists instead of shutting them out and shutting them down?

Why dont we find out?

Original post:

Jesus and John Wayne exposes militant masculinity in the age of Trump - Baptist News Global

We all need a bit of beauty in our lives, especially now, and storied fashion houseValentinodelivered breathtaking wonder via its Fall/Winter 2021 Haute Couture show, "Of Grace and Light," which debuted on Tuesday, July 21, in Rome.

The show, which featured models floating in the air wearing 15 exaggerated, oversized silhouettes of cascading ruffles, feathers, and more, was all about the beginning of something new, a rebirth in dark times. "Across history, moments of reset, or restart, invariably put human values at the center. Humanism is the seed of rebirth,"the brand said in a statement.

The entire collection is white, a symbolic choice meant to represent the aforementioned new beginning. "White, the sum of all colors, captures the blank slate of this new beginning, the sense of infinite possibilities. White as a sheet of paper waiting for it to be filled with lines and ideas. White as the toile, a symbol of the workmanship and dedication, the first step in the construction process. Again, a possibility," shared Valentino. But as stunning as the collection is on its own, its presentation was even more breathtaking.

Valentino's creative director Pierpaolo Piccioli partnered with artist Nick Knight, who helped the legendary brand fuse the worlds of fashion and digital with a series of videos, including gorgeous flowers and warm, enveloping light projected onto each dress a stunning blend of digital transformation, the enduring power of nature, and pure human talent and imagination. The show was set tothe FKA Twigssong "Mary Magdalene," which only added to the ethereal, haunting beauty of the show.

Fashion fans were captivated by Valentino's vision and couldn't help dreaming about wearing the stunning pieces. "Valentino and Pierpaolo delivered what no other haute couturier did: made us dream. He used that atelier, made them work and took the essence of haute couture to the extreme what couture is supposed to be,"tweetedfamed fashion blogger Bryanboy. "I dont want to get married but I DO want a wedding and I want my dress to be as dramatic as Valentino Fall Haute Couture 2020,"tweeted a fan."The only thing I can think about right now is a tea party in the forest while dressing [in] Valentino Haute Couture FW20,"daydreamed another Twitter user."Oh god this Valentino Haute Couture show Im having romantic feelings to every single dress it feels like a dream,"added another. In Lizzie McGuires words, this couture show was quite literally what dreams are made of.

Need a midweek escape or a dose of wonder and enchantment? You can watch the full Haute Couture performance and check out the looks in detail below.

Courtesy of Valentino.

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Valentino's "Of Grace and Light" Couture Show Was the Perfect Mix of Physical and Digital - Teen Vogue

Shelley Walia

Professor Emeritus & fellow, English and cultural studies, Panjab university

At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice, he is the worst. Aristotle, Politics

In times of a global pandemic nightmare, it is imperative to ask in the words of the French artist Paul Gaugin, Where did we come from? What are we? Where are we going? From the time of classical humanism, has the world progressed on matters of freedom and justice, or are we stalled or even moving backward? Are we now in the stage of the post-humanovertaken by the superhuman potential of controlling human behviour as well as using innovative medical technology and bioscience to extend life beyond unimaginable limits?

This question puts the traditional boundaries between the human, the animal, and the technological, under interrogation. Civilisations over the last century have conspicuously moved away from the temper of renaissance humanism that began in the 15th century, striking a note of the inherently privileged status of the homo sapiens. Human potential became the Faustian worldview that represented the undying quest of humanity towards freedom and progress, even if it was at the cost of ecological disasters and unbridled human, animal and environmental exploitation.

However, in two ways, humanism went against the ethical interpretation of life. First, the emphasis was wholly on the human-centred or what is called the anthropocentricstatus of its cosmography, underpinned by the Eurocentric self-centred notion of its civilisational supremacy, that triggered the colonial scramble for the third world.

Secondly, technological development in the long 19th century enabled the European nations to make forays into Africa, the Americas and Asia, giving rise to the ideologically contested terrain of empire. Underneath the facade of free trade, peace and democracy, there existed a permanent state of war, manipulation and authoritarianism. Understandably, it could rightly be surmised that though there was a surfeit of academic lecturing and debate on the subject of liberalism in the centres of higher learning, the passion for overseas exploitation remained unquenchable to date, particularly in the case of a theoretical Pax Britannica followed by Pax Americana that paradoxically held out the promise of world peace through adopting the role of a global hegemon.

Humanism or the enlightenment project that steered the industrial age was destined to flounder right from the start. Obsessed as it was with the progress of the humans, the developed world callously went ahead with its violent politics aimed not only at the colonised, but nature and the animal world too. No wonder, we now have a world-wide crisis with the lethal virus emerging from the wet markets of our meat-eating humans. The question of the ethics of animal rights foregrounds not only the value of animals, but also what it is to be human. Our collaboration with violence and killing is apparent and more so is our unthinking submission to predatory market hypnosis.

During the course of a holiday in the Swiss Alps, Vaclav Havel, the former President of Czechoslovakia and an outstanding playwright, sees a lonely man on a street clutching his cell phone deceiving himself into believing that he is communicating with his dear ones. Havel asks: But does it enable people to know one another any better? Do they like each other more? I do not think so. Placing the central emphasis on the human realm, we have finally ended in becoming victims of science.

In short, humanism called for a new order that ended up in this quagmire of violence, disease and human suffering. Rational thought on free will, human motivation and individual growth propounded by humanism, culminated in the irrationality of the culture industry and the powers that control the very mind of the public. It is the post-human world of big corporations, unregulated banks and insurance companies that make key decisions not only on governing society, but also on the categories of inclusion and exclusion.

Such politics sponsors an ideology that contests any policy intended to mitigate human suffering or promote social progress. It is amazing that the unemployment of millions does not outrage the ruling elite. Operating through deceit and deception, the world of overwhelming consumerism, appeals only to common sense values with the motive of discouraging any scepticism or interrogation of the systems or the powers that be.

Moreover, the obsession with power through data has destroyed the inviolability of the individual. The modern techno-savvy age brings in its wake not just the blitz of information with no measurable increase in knowledge or wisdom but systems that aim at behaviour control threatening human nature with serious consequences.

Would we then like to create a society we actually want to live in? Are we prepared to go back to Huxleys designerbabies with varying intellectual and physical competence. As machines take over human time and consciousness, are we not leaving ourselves behind? It is clear that the free self-contained child of the Enlightenment seems all but dead. The human stands erased with its very foundations of reason and observation challenged. We become unrecognisable as humans. How then can we advance the task of renewing a common world in these dark times?

It is hoped that the humanist worldview would finally redeem the human race by holding on to its institutions of liberalism and justice. Understandably, medicine and technological engineering have made tangible advances. But it must be kept in mind that the understanding of the human progress is neither linear nor stable, it is fraught with complexity and disruption. Change is inevitable and has to be managed and channelled towards maximum benefit to humanity. The amalgamation of the human and the mechanical can be acceptable to the extent that the arrogant anti-narcissistic sentiment of triumphalism over nature and the living forms gives way to the re-evaluation of the non-human world. We are, indeed, not at the centre of the universe.

In a world where hostile sectarianism and apathy to hunger and the ecological crisis are grossly surpassed by new-fangled technological innovations, humans have to learn to accept responsibility for themselves and the world, and face the concrete and undetected threats that lie therein. The irresponsible, unrestrained course of civilisation, in which, to some extent, we all are complicit, is one of the contributory causes of the malaise of violence and oppression. Covid-19, with its contemptuous destructive supremacy might arouse humanity to a little introspection on the death of reason as well as on drawbacks and progress of science.

Originally posted here:

Civilisational crisis and post-human society - The Tribune India

SaturdayJul25,2020at12:01AM

July Fourth weekend I traveled to the Gettysburg andAntietam battlefields. In Gettysburg I was appalled at what I saw. Homeland Security had set up a command post and placed its vans close to various monuments in the battlefield, FBI vans were driving up and down the battlefield along with State Highway Patrol cars and lots of park rangers. Something was happening in Gettysburg and it was not the reenactment of the 1863 battle.

Over the last several years we have witnessed the disabling of American history and culture but to see it firsthand was shocking. I traveled to the Robert E. Lee monument and there they were: the protesters, anarchists and, of course, BLM. How America has changed since my parentsfirst took me to Gettysburg in 1963 as a young boy!

Rewriting a nation's history is frequently one of the firststrategies taken by a conquering force. Why? Because a people who do not know where they came from also do not know where they are going. While this phenomenon has occurred repeatedly throughout history, today it is happening to our beloved country. It is happening through the rewriting and/or reinterpretation of American historical records, in our national parks, monuments, memorials, landmarks, shrines and churches. In some cases changes are subtle, and in others, blatant. It's done through the removal of key historic pieces that dont support current socialist bias. It's also done through emphasis and de-emphasis of historical periods according to what fits a mode. In fact, the history of our founding period has been eroded and eliminated, almostto the point of oblivion, in our schools.

The time has arrived when we, the people, need to take control of this systematic destruction of our nation and our past. To reclaim our nation from the destructive forces of humanism, secularism and socialism we must retrieve the true history and past of our country, the good and the bad. We are at a crossroads as a nation for our very soul and each of us must determine where we stand for the future of America.

Kenneth Hammontree

Ashland

Read the rest here:

Letter to the editor: We must retrieve true history - Record-Courier

Being black is belonging to a state organized according to its ignorance of your perspective a state that does not, that cannot, know your mind. Bryan Wagner

One: Legal Abstraction; Super Capitalism and Madness.

Systems of capitalism have historically deployed a type of abstraction that leaves humanity illegible, with Black and brown bodies in particular illegible through lenses of white supremacy. The state constructed a system of illegibility that Bryan Wagner refers to as legal abstraction. Legal abstraction was concretized by falsely representing Black being through newspapers, language, laws, paintings, space, slave codes and naming. This system was made operational through weaponized policing. As a painter, conceptualizing capitalism starts by thinking through abstraction as a comprehensive condition related to industrialization, slavery, globalization, patriarchy, space, but also liberation. Racial capitalism is capitalism, and in the face of legal abstraction providing the infrastructure to capital madness, I offer more Black imagination. I offer more acts of autonomy, self-defense, poetics, activism, creativity and more abstractions from the deep Black mindful architecture of Black being.

Two: Illegal Abstraction: Methods in Liberations and Abolition

That brings me to the question: As a painter, what does it mean to produce an illegal abstraction as dissent? To recognize that the illegal measures of action in a police state are actually the actions of moral grace against super capitalism. I offer illegal abstraction as a tool for the immeasurable presence of Black perception. A language that regards our methods of liberation as unpredictable, genius, improvisational, structural, hauntological, smooth and acute. I am certain that the beauty in Black indeterminacy, from sound to science, from architecture to migration, will continue to guide us toward liberation. Im interested in forms that are deeply spatial, generous and where the spectral presence defies the narrow proposition of life and death by the hands of industrialized white supremacy. A second question for my practice: If Blackness is already an architectonic developed out of liquidity (ocean/the middle passage), how can the work embody this phenomenon and offer sensation (sensoria) at the register of liberation?

Three: I Am Painting What I Am Doing and Doing What I Am Painting.

Legal abstraction is reinforced by the domination of a police state protecting systems of super capitalism. An abstraction of dissent needs to be named and practiced as a contribution to the traditions of Black radical imagination. I argue these issues through painting because of its ability to awaken truth between the mind and the brain. Its time for a new relationship with abstraction, an illegal abstraction developed out of the condition of new world-building toward liberation and revolution. An illegal abstraction where Black perception, ideas of scale, space, and the immeasurable are embedded in art experience. Art projects that are new conceptualizations of these histories and assert these by their presence. Objects that are not autonomous or referential, but phenomenal. Id like to address abstraction comprehensively in terms that are responsive to the breath/breadth of this unmeasurable presence of Blackness. We are always.

Closing: Now

In this moment of environmental precarity we will need to be both liquid and mountains, bird and lava. And it is the density of Black grace that will always be the thing that keeps us in our own humanity. Thinking through the histories of Black liberation, these are the victories that fortify my being in the objects I make. The paintings are true because the history of Black triumph is true. These are histories of illegal abstraction.

Link:

12 Artists On: The Financial Crisis - The New York Times