Category Archives: Nihilism

The anti-reforms protest by farmers of Punjab, Haryana and some parts of western Uttar Pradesh, targeting the three laws enacted by Parliament to make agriculture more market-friendly and offer more remunerative choices to cultivators, has transmogrified into a #hashtag campaign on social media. This completes the by-now-familiar cycle of disruptive and insurrectionary dissent in the times we live in. There is nothing either amusing or asinine about this #hashtag campaign, especially after the violence on Republic Day when protesters ran riot at Red Fort.

In keeping with global trends, the #hashtag campaign is vicious and inflammatory. A hateful #hashtag, containing the word genocide, that was promoted and trended on social media platforms, bears out this point. With prominent foreign political and social media personalities, who are not known to have demonstrated any interest in or knowledge of Indian affairs in the past, wading in to bump up their numbers and grab eyeballs, the edge of the campaign has got sharper and more malicious, prompting a formal response from the Government of India.

In many ways, the evident disruptive anarchy in the guise of democratic dissent, which is not unique to India as recent events in the US and other countries would bear out, is reminiscent of the original Naxalite Movement and its subsequent avatars in various forms, spanning multiple shades of ideology and political impulses. The common thread binding them together has been the defiance of the Indian state and rejection of its constitutionally-mandated institutions.

Like the 2020s, the 1960s too were a decade of global turmoil. India was not untouched by the ferment. In 1967, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), born of a split in the Communist Party of India three years earlier, splintered with the Marxist-Leninist faction led by Charu Majumdar calling for an armed democratic revolutiona violent insurrection that would come to be known as the Naxalite Movement, named after remote Naxalbari in rural West Bengal, a place of which nobody had heard till then.

Majumdars aim was to ignite a prairie fire, fuelled by the Historic Eight Documents, encapsulating his Far Left extremist agenda of supplanting the Indian Republic with a revolutionary state. He was confident that the fire lit by him would sweep through Indias many villages and finally engulf the countrys too few towns and cities, and Robespierrean mimic men and women would seize power not through ballots but bullets.

The Peoples Daily, propaganda organ of the Communist Party of China, ran a lengthy editorial on July 5, 1967, extolling the virtues of the Naxalite Movement and exaggerating its power to bring down the Indian state. A peal of spring thunder has crashed over the land of India, it wrote, Our great leader, Chairman Mao, teaches us: The seizure of power by armed force, the settlement of the issue by war, is the central task and the highest form of revolution.

The China-inspired Naxalite revolution failed, and miserably so, as did its latter day Maoist reincarnation some three decades later. The road to world revolution, Lenin is believed to have said, lies through Peking, Shanghai and Calcutta. Much to the disappointment of the ultra-Left, the PLA (Peoples Liberation Army) did not come marching in and the road to revolution stopped at Shanghai.

ALSO READ| Provocative Remarks on Farm Laws Are Part of A Larger Disinformation Campaign Against PM Modi Govt

But even in its failure the Naxalite Movement extracted a terrible price and left behind a dark legacy of anarchic extremism. Like an obstinately mutating virus, this extremism is persistent and its disruptive tactics continue to be invoked again and again, even as yesterdays revolutionary pamphlets have morphed into social media hashtags. Anarchy now rides along with dissent and protest. B.R. Ambedkar had warned the nascent Republic of India of the grammar of anarchy. That warning is coming true with disruptive regularity.

The Hashtag Naxal (#Naxal) is not necessarily a dyed-in-the-wool revolutionary motivated by Mao and the Marxist-Leninist ideology he espoused. But, like the pamphleteering Naxals of the 1960s, todays #Naxal is both a disruptor and an instigator of violence in varying forms, deftly exploiting the faultlines of democracy and of an incredibly diverse populace. The nihilism lives on like a stubborn cancer, seemingly incurable and un-excisable.

For Naxals of the age of ferment the state was the enemy and its organsthe Executive, the Legislature and the Judiciarywere to be mocked and ridiculed, the elected were to be replaced by the proletariat, and the comprador bourgeoisie were to be put against the wall. The #Naxal of the social media era remarkably thinks similarly and rejects the constitutional mandate to Government, Parliament and Judiciary, even as it seeks the privilege of constitutional rights. If in the times of Maos Little Red Book power flew from the barrel of a gun, it now flows from tweets with hashtags.

Yesterdays comprador bourgeoisie is todays corporate sector, to be reviled and despised by the #Naxal who may have nothing to show by way of any alternative offering that may have worked in a pluralistic society. In the 1960s, India was on the verge of being defeated by poverty, hunger and disease, desperately struggling to stay afloat. In 2021, its an entirely different India. It could be argued that the faultlines of democracy remain and divisions in society are real, but that would be true for all democracies. Yet they become the reason for debunking Parliament and diminishing Judiciary, as has been attempted, for instance, by successive agitations of recent years.

The disruptive anarchy we are witnessing stands in sharp contrast to the realities of India today where the Government with no external support has rolled out the worlds largest Covid-19 vaccination programme with a Made in India vaccine produced by an Indian enterprise and businesses. In the early-1970s, during another pandemic, it was abjectly dependent on the WHO for smallpox vaccine. Indian technology now sustains space science and indigenous drones. Indian fighter planes are set to add heft to Indias defence capabilities. India produces and procures more food than the country can consume. Indias growing entrepreneurial class creates millions of jobs and generates wealth for the humblest of homes.

The list is long, the comparisons well-known. That said, it is nobodys case that things must not be better, and that missteps and failings are not part of the national story. It is also no ones case that governance deficits are not aplenty. The answer, however, does not lie in weaponising either mass mobilisation in the streets or #hashtag mobilisations on social media platforms. Disinformation, irrespective of which corner it emerges from, is truly a curse in our otherwise exciting times.

The #Naxal is both unmindful of these realities and, as some would argue, willing to play the game of those who would want to see India halted in its tracks, weighed down by losses inflicted by anarchy that uses the Constitution as its shield. Make no mistake, this anarchy comes with a steep priceto be paid, ultimately, by the people. In the last three months the damage to strategic infrastructure has been incalculable, the losses of a single large Walmart store are reported to have crossed $8 million, and it will take months to calculate the losses on account of disruption of highway traffic.

ALSO READ| As PM Modi Unleashes Wave of Reforms, He is Going to Face Even More Resistance

Constitutional rights are now interpreted as a belligerent privilege to pollute the air the masses breatheor, rather choke onand the right to prevent the installation of smart electricity meters so as not to be deprived of the licence to consume power without paying for it. The entitlement stretches to disrupting Republic Day celebrationssomething never done beforeand bunkering down regardless of the consequent misery inflicted on millions of people. It was mind-numbing to see tweets by political actors urging their digital comrades to destroy economic infrastructure. It was frightening to note that there was complicity in most quarters in the acceptance of such #Naxal behaviour.

The 1960s Peoples Daily is todays Global Times which gleefully eggs on the #Naxal anarchy: Failing to tame the pandemic and maintain economic growth, the Modi Government is cornered now. Domestic dissatisfaction is surging. Its reported that thousands of farmers from several Indian states have been camping on the outskirts of New Delhi for weeks, rattling the administration China senses another Spring Thunder moment.

It is silly to recall, as is the flavour of this silly season, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhis satyagraha and compare the insurrections of our times with the Mahatmas protests, thus seeking to legitimise anarchy. Gandhi used Truth as a weapon in his many protests to bring down a colonial, unelected, unrepresentative Government whose sovereign head was the British Crown. What we are witnessing now is an insidious attempt to change the outcome produced through ballots by unleashing unrest on the streets through tweets that trend #hashtags.

Nihilism still rules. But ballots must prevail.

Disclaimer:Kanchan Gupta is a senior journalist and political analyst. Views are personal.

Here is the original post:

Farmers Protest and #Hashtag Anarchy as Dissent in the Age of Social Media - News18

Until a half century ago or so, there was a moral consensus, however fraying, that informed and shaped the exercise of freedom in the Western world. The self-determination of human beings, of citizens in self-governing political orders, presupposed a civilized inheritance that allowed free men and women to distinguish, without angst or arduous effort, between liberty and license, good and evil, honorable lives and dissolute and disgraceful ones. Few would have suggested that liberty and human dignity could long flourish without a sense of moral obligation and civic spirit on the part of proud, rights-bearing individuals.

Since this moral consensus could be readily presupposed, Americans (and other free peoples) could and did abridge the language of politics to give priority to rights over duties, choice over the content of what was chosen, and the pursuit of happiness over the pursuit of truth and virtue. But this was precisely an abridgement because the other half of the equation was always more or less presupposed. The American Founders, for example, were in no way moral relativists, let alone moral nihilists. Rejecting religious sectarianism and the forceable political imposition of religious truth, they nonetheless appealed to honor, civic virtue, and the honorable determination of a free people to govern themselves. Facile relativism or easygoing nihilism, where all values are created equal, would have appalled them. The idea that moral judgments are utterly arbitrary, that distinctions between right and wrong, and better and worse ways of life, are wholly subjective, was completely alien to them. Almost all of them spoke of a human moral sense without which freedom degenerates into moral anarchy and despotic self-assertion.

Unlike the French Revolutionaries, they did not repudiate Christianity or begin the world anew with some ideological Year Zero (neither 1776 nor 1787 became the first year in some new revolutionary calendar). The vast majority of the Founding generation remained religious believers and combined a belief in natural rights with deference to the natural moral law. For them, rights without duties were unthinkable, freedom without self-limitation unlivable. Such was the American consensus.

All the prominent Founders were fundamentally anti-utopian (even Tom Paine), and had, as Reinhold Niebuhr pointed out, an acute sense of human sinfulness and imperfection. They were not the Puritans or Calvinists of old, but neither did they endorse the materialism and reductionism of the radical Enlightenment or its misplaced belief in an ideology of Progress. They still believed that human beings had souls and were much more than matter in motion. They had no trouble rejecting both the theocratic temptation in politics and a relativism that severed the essential connections between truth and liberty, freedom and the pursuit of the good life. Moral subjectivism (Whos to say what is right and wrong?) was wholly alien to their hearts and minds, precisely because they were civilized men and women.

We now live in a different moral universe, and by no means a better one. Of course, inspired by Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and the early civil rights movement, we have made considerable progress in overcoming racial injustice, and the legacy of the great injustice that was chattel slavery. That is all to the good. But an emphasis on inclusiveness, however necessary and legitimate, does not define or exhaust the moral foundations of democracy. Today, even religious believers habitually speak of morality in terms of values, a term derived from economics which suggests that something is good because we value or choose it (its modern use was made famous by Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Weber). Whether people who use that language know that they have succumbed to what C.S. Lewis derided as the poison of subjectivism is largely beside the point. As Allan Bloom argued in The Closing of the American Mind over 30 years ago, the language of values, and the language of right and wrong, are by no means the same thing; they ultimately point in different directions. The latter partakes of confidence in the reality of moral facts, the former of thoroughgoing relativism and subjectivism. Language matters, and the language of values is, whether we like it or not, the language of moral relativism, even moral subversion. Of course, some thinkers of note use the language of values and disvalues while dissociating those terms from a framework of moral relativism. But there is peril in that path.

It is not just a question of nomenclature. There is a deep ambiguity inherent in the modern categories of self-determination and popular sovereignty themselves. I dont believe that the architects of our political order believed in human self-sovereignty in the strict sense. They did not endorse the truly radical and subversive idea that human beings should repudiate a Higher Power, a superintending principle of Justice or Goodness as Hamilton called it, above themselves. They were not political atheists and did not believe that men should aspire to be gods. This is the great divide that separates the Founders as prudent revolutionaries, in Ralph Lerners phrase, from the proto-totalitarianism already apparent in the Jacobin phase of the French Revolution (1792-1794). The Declaration of Independence invokes not only Natures God but also God as Creator, Providence, and Supreme Judge. It thus readily accommodates, and draws together, deists, theists, and believers in the biblical God, while fully tolerating skepticism or atheism as a private belief. The new order of the ages that our currency appeals to took for granted civilizational and moral continuity. Americas prudent revolutionaries were in that important sense conservative revolutionaries, too.

Let us return to the ambiguity to which I referred. Political emancipation, even the self-determination of a free people, quite logically gives rise to more radical claims about human beings governing themselves without any natural, metaphysical, or moral restraints getting in their way. Today, many people thinkers, theorists, and ordinary citizens alike speak breathlessly about human autonomy or even self-ownership of rights without duties, of freedom without any deference to the moral law or a natural order of things. Of course, Tocqueville already noted at the beginning of the second volume of Democracy in America that democratic men and women readily succumb to inertia, to vertigo or moral panic, when they are obliged to choose but have no star and compass to guide them but the imperative of choice itself. The result is either a debilitating passivity or a creeping conformity where distraught men and women take their bearings from the predictable uniformity of the crowd. Promethean declarations of independence, of radical self-sufficiency, give way to immersion in petty and paltry pleasures and a small-minded democratic conformity. But as the bitter experience of the twentieth century suggests, autonomy understood as the rejection of Nature and Natures God can also give rise to an inhuman totalitarianism, where political atheism wars with the natural order of things. That is the path of tyranny and terror.

There is, of course, a more noble and constrained view of autonomy and self-determination. Kant, the great moral philosopher of modernity, heralded obedience to the moral law, to the categorical imperative to treat every human being as an end, not as a means to our own purposes, as a defining trait of the morally serious person who governs himself. And if one reads his Metaphysics of Morals (1797), it is apparent from page one that Kant adhered to a demanding morality that required a good deal of self-command. But Kant, for all his philosophical profundity, fatally separated morality from any ground in nature. And so latter-day Kantians, academic philosophers and law professors, think respect for the dignity of human beings requires that we not only tolerate but esteem every life-style choice no matter how base, self-absorbed, self-destructive, vulgar, or ignoble. Autonomy has been divorced from self-command and self-respect. The new moral dispensation refuses to tolerate only those who still live up to the humanizing and civilizing requirements of the moral law. This convoluted use and abuse of autonomy is a powerful impetus behind political correctness and the soft totalitarianism that inspires the cancel culture. We are now authorized to cancel those who still believe in God and the moral law, who still believe in moral self-command. The old restraints, the old absolutes, are now seen as the enemy of human freedom.

Today, we still appeal to human rights, ever more expansive, ever more indiscriminate, ever more bereft of prudence while the old idiom of natural rights, which largely presupposed natural law or the natural moral sense, can barely be heard. How else could we arrive at the conclusion that biological nature can be dismissed at will and that human beings inhabit 73, or is it 153, different genders? This is the reductio ad absurdum, the farcical concluding stage, of the view that human beings create themselves and are beholden to no standards above, or outside, the human will. This is a recipe, as we see all around us, for both moral anarchy and political self-enslavement.

Self-government and autonomy, so understood, will remain forever incompatible. But there is a complication that we defenders of the American Founding are obliged to acknowledge. The ambiguity of which I have spoken has been retrospectively read back into the Founding documents themselves. The Founders were torn between the idiom of the state of nature, bequeathed by political philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, and their own richer subordination to superintending principles of Goodness and Justice that transcend the will of men, or the founding of civil society. We all agree today that no man should be governed without his consent. But as Orestes Brownson had already pointed out in The American Republic, published in 1865, some locate this prohibition against despotic rule in the absolute autonomy of the individual, rather than in light of a more traditional understanding of what Tocqueville eloquently called liberty under God and the law. This is the ultimate root of the culture wars: whether liberty demands permissive egalitarianism, a life without law, or whether self-government is inseparable from rationally ascertainable moral and civic virtues. That is the great divide within the heart of liberalism, and liberal democracy more broadly.

We need to make explicit a moral-political-philosophical premise presupposed but not emphasized by our great forebears: Man is not God, independent, self-existing, and self-sufficing, as Brownson strikingly put it. In an age where toxic relativism and toxic moralism coexist and merge, we need to theorize, to emphasize, to stress, what our forebears could still largely take for granted. In contrast to their situation, the moral capital of Western civilization can no longer be taken for granted since it is depleting by the hour. Against the poison of subjectivism and its ugly twin, unthinking moralistic and egalitarian rage we must renew the Great Tradition with its reasonable confidence in self-rule and self-command. Our civic and civilizational renewal must be informed by moral facts and truths inherent in our nature and ultimately bequeathed to us by the divine source of our rights and obligations. Such is the great unspoken presupposition that gives life to the American civic tradition.

Excerpt from:

Op-Ed: Civic virtues as moral facts recovering the other half of our founding - The Center Square

Welcome to Horrorscope, a monthly column keeping horror nerds and initiates up to date on all the genre content coming to and leaving from your favorite streaming services. Heres a guide to all the essential horror streaming in February 2021.

Smell that? Love is in the air. A loveof horror, that is!

Valentines Day may fall in February, but dont let the cheap chocolates and the gradually increasing daylight fool you: this months as spooky as the rest of em! After all, what could be more romantic than pledging your undying love for horror films? Passive entertainment remains a challenge as the world continues to burn (thanks, ongoing global pandemic!). So, if you can, give yourself and the genre a little love this month.

Speaking of which: February comes bearing blood-soaked gifts, from hotly anticipated new releases to old bangers waiting to be re-discovered. Weve got a body-swapping sophomore flick from Brandon Cronenberg, a nihilistic family haunting, an underrated British counterculture gem, and the best Dracula dance film ever made.

Be sure to peruse the complete list below, calendar in hand, for a full picture of what horror flicks are coming and going from your favorite streaming services this February.

Synopsis: Theres losing yourself in your work, and then theres this. Tasya Vos is an elite assassin; a corporate mercenary who commandeers the minds and bodies of unsuspecting victims to fulfill her deadly contracts. But when her latest assignment gets the better of her, Vos finds herself trapped in the mind of a hostile target that would see her destroyed.

Possessor makes good on the often unfulfilled promise of its peers. For a change, the gore actually lives up to the hype! The films two nightmares are devilishly compatible: an intrusive sense of dissociation coupled with a corpulent knockdown of chipped teeth and mangled flesh. While ultimately Possessor amounts to more of a concept than a narrative, its visceral gait is more than enough to get under your skin. The loss of bodily autonomy, a simultaneous crunch of bone and self, is more compelling than half of the lesser fare in Possessors elevated weight class.

Brandon Cronenbergs second film deftly quells any residual handwaving leftover from his wanting debut. There can be no doubt: he is a tremendous talent well worth watching. As Vos, Andrea Riseborough is as fantastic as weve come to expect; a cool killer who finds herself in the throes of an identity crisis at work and at home. Christopher Abbott has been fantastic for a long time (especially in 2018s Piercing), and I hope more directors follow Cronenbergs lead and give the man more starring roles. All told: Possessor is not above being genuinely queasy and disgusting. And I respect that.

Arrives on Hulu on February 1st.

Synopsis: In an otherwise peaceful English village, spoiled brat Tom Latham chooses to raise hell with his occult motorcycle gang. Sure enough, the goth apple doesnt fall far from the tree. Toms black-magic dabbling mother just so happens to know the secret to immortality. So, how do you cheat death? Frog magic and just plain deciding not to die, of course! Thrilled at the prospect of being an eternal public nuisance, Tom giddily sails off a bridge, only to burst out of his grave with a vengeance. Soon enough the gangs name, The Living Dead, takes on a more literal meaning.

Released as The Death Wheelers in the US, the 1973 film Psychomania is a bonkers example of a larger aesthetic shift in early 1970s British horror from the gothic chills to modern thrills. Of the bunch, Psychomania is perhaps the weirdest example of an attempt to cash in on the youth market. The kids love nothing more than pagan frog cults, zombies, and motorcycle culture. Right?

Psychomania was directed by Australian-born Hammer Films veteran Don Sharp (The Kiss of the Vampire), and he brings much of the black humor and efficient pacing that defined his marvelous work throughout the 1960s. Ted Moore, who shot seven of the James Bond films, contributes his professional touch. And the legendary John Camerons pre-synth score is as haunting as it is underrated.

Beryl Reid (Dr. Phibes Rises Again) and George Sanders (Village of the Damned) co-star as Toms Satan-worshiping mother and her spooky butler, respectively. All this amounts to a wonderfully offbeat gem with eccentricities to spare. There is no better film about a frog-worshiping, motorcycle death cult.

Arrives on Shudder on February 22nd.

Synopsis: In the late 19th century, a mysterious foreigner, Count Dracula, arrives in London. The unsuspecting socialite Lucy invites the stranger into her home. Her mistake proves fatal, and Dracula bites Lucy, who succumbs to the Counts curse. Her fianc entrusts her care to Dr. Van Helsing, who confidently diagnoses the vampiric source of her affliction. When Lucy dies under mysterious circumstances, Van Helsing and literatures preeminent himbo, Jonathon Harker, are on the case!

Look, Im Canadian. And there is nothing more Canadian than the government producing a silent-era-styled performance of the Royal Winnipeg Ballets adaption of Bram Stokers Dracula directed by our nations greatest weirdo, Guy Maddin. If this isnt already a Heritage Minute, it should be.

Dracula: Pages From a Virgins Diary is, as The New York Times astutely remarks, simultaneously beautiful and goofy. A fine line to walk, no doubt, but one which Maddin frequently, and graciously, skips across with ease. Here, Maddins reputation for stylish anachronism is on full display, with Dracula mimicking many of the aesthetic traditions and special visual effects of the era.

Amidst its delirious stylish flares, the film is impressively loyal to Stokers text, making it one of Maddins most accessible films. And yet, Maddins pointedly postmodern touch is undeniable. Notably, in casting Chinese-Canadian Zhang Wei-Qiang as the titular Count, Maddins Dracula underlines the xenophobic themes of Stokers text in ways past and future films have yet to match.

Think youre well-versed with the Dracula corpus? I implore you: this wildly sexy Canadian silent-era pastiche dance film is the Dracula film.

Arriving on The Criterion Channel on February 28th.

Synopsis: Drawn to their rural childhood home, a sister and brother visit their dying, bed-ridden father. Isolated on their secluded goat farm, the siblings grow increasingly paranoid and suspicious that something evil is targetting their family. After a horrific tragedy confirms their unease, the siblings are forced to confront their grief and lack of faith as the increasingly hostile presence strengthens its chokehold on their lives.

The Dark and the Wicked is a rare 2020 release in that it is a film that was released in 2020. What a concept. For a decidedly dark year, the film is, well, fittingly dark. There are enough jump scares to satisfy the contingent of genre ghouls who get off on a good jolt. But The Dark and the Wicked hits hardest when it leans into ambiguity and its admirably unrelentingly bleak atmosphere.

The film sits comfortably on the same shelf as other modern psychological family affairs like The Babadook and Mama. Though, if you take issue with the increasingly popular trauma-as-horror trend, your mileage may vary. But if youre a fan of nihilism (like our own Rob Hunter, who christened the film as one of the years best horror offerings), The Dark and the Wicked may just be worth a peek.

Arrives on Shudder on February 25th.

More here:

All the Horror You Need to Stream in February 2021 - Film School Rejects

The February 4announcement by National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan that President Biden would end U.S. support for offensive operations in Yemen was understandably met with celebration by those opposed to the war. Almost six years of the U.S.-SaudiU.A.E. war on Yemen have left the country devastated by humanitarian disaster and famine. Anti-war activists have spent these yearsfirst during the Obama-Biden administration, then the Trump-Pence administration, and now the Biden-Harris administrationagitating to end U.S. participation in the onslaught. It has been an organizing effort that often seemed like shouting into the wind, as the bombings of hospitals, factories and weddings piled up. The countless people who have been toiling in obscurity to end this war, and the people in Yemen who have joined in this effort even while surrounded by hardship and death, certainly deserve praise and gratitude for Thursdaysannouncement.

But Bidens foreign policy speech, delivered just hours after Sullivans teaser, unfortunately underscored that we must not celebrate the end of the war until we verify that it has actually, materially ended. That is because Bidens remarks leave just enough room for the president to gesture toward ending the war without actually halting all U.S. participation init.

Biden first noted that USAID will reach Yemeni civilians who have suffered unendurable devastation (the Trump administration suspended aid to much of Yemen in 2020) and declared this war has to end. He then added, We are ending all American support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen including relevant arms sales. But the president continued, At the same time, Saudi Arabia faces missile attacks and UAV strikes and other threats from Iranian supplied forces in multiple countries. We are going to continue to help Saudi Arabia defend its sovereignty and its territorial integrity and itspeople.

Unfortunately, qualifiers like offensive and relevant do not signal aclear commitment to ending all forms of support for the U.S. war in Yemen, which includes targeting assistance, weapons sales (the U.S. is the largest supplier of arms to Saudi Arabia), logistics, training, and intelligence sharing with the Saudi-led coalition. Labeling Yemens Houthis as Iranian supplied forces, and making acommitment to defending Saudi Arabias sovereignty, echoes President Obamas initial pretense for entering the war on Yemen in 2015. The White House statement that signaled Obamas illegal entry declared, In response to the deteriorating security situation, Saudi Arabia, Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) members, and others will undertake military action to defend Saudi Arabias border and to protect Yemens legitimate government. In other words, from the outset, this onslaught was framed by the U.S. asdefensive.

Importantly, Sullivan noted that ending the war in Yemen does not extend to actions against AQAP, or Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. While sanctioned by the AUMF, its important to oppose this parallel U.S.-led war in Yemen that has also led to the killing ofcivilians.

Now, more than ever, it is vital to hold afirm line about what areal end to U.S. participation in the Yemen war means: an end to all U.S. assistance, including intelligence sharing, logistical help, training, providing spare parts transfers for warplanes, bomb targeting, weapons sales and support for the naval blockade (we still dont know the full extent of U.S. support for the latter). It also requires that the United States immediately reverse the Trump administrations designation of the Houthis as aForeign Terrorist Organization (FTO), adetermination that is cutting off critical aid to northern Yemen and significantly escalating the crisis of massstarvation.

Because these things have not yet come to pass, it is critical to keep up the pressure until the war is really ended. As much as we might welcome positive messagingno doubt aresult of the pressure exerted by dogged organizerswe must not rest until we have won actual materialrelief.

This is not to sow nihilism: It is significant that President Biden, whose own Obama-Biden administration first initiated U.S. involvement in the war, feels that he has to answer to anti-war activists. Aglobal day of action to end the war on January 25 saw people mobilize from streets to online forums demanding an immediate halt to the war, reflecting the growing power of an international movement to end theonslaught.

And the Biden administration has taken some steps. In the 24hours before leaving office, Trumps final act of war on Yemeni civilians involved signing a $23 billion arms sale to the U.A.E., in addition to the designation of the Houthis as an FTO. Two days after taking office, Bidens State Department launched areview of the FTO designation, citing deep concern about the designation that was made is that at least on its surface it seems to achieve nothing particularly practical in advancing the efforts against the Houthis and to bring them back to the negotiating table, while making it even more difficult than it already is to provide humanitarian assistance to people who desperately need it. And one week after taking office, Biden temporarily froze the sale of F35s included in the Trump deal, as well as precision-guided munitions destined for SaudiArabia.

But these temporary halts and reviews have not yet had any tangible effects, as the FTO has not been reversed and arms sales to Saudi Arabia and U.A.E. have not been cancelled. Indeed, acelebrated Wall Street Journal report from January 27 about the Biden administration pausing arm sales to Saudi Arabia subtly noted in paragraph three that the pause isnt unusual for anew administration and many of the [arms] transactions are likely to ultimately go forward. Still, these steps could indicate awillingness by the Biden administration to end U.S. involvement in the war onYemen.

But rhetoric and positive signals are not enough. We need amaterial end to all U.S. assistance now, before one more Yemeni dies, and we need to verify that this assistance has ended before we declare victory. The Trump administration claimed, at various points, that it was working toward the end of the war via a political solution. Of course, the Trump administration horrifically escalated the warrhetoric to the contrary did not shield Yemenis from U.S.-manufactured bombs, or the assault on the port city ofHodeidah.

Rep. Ro Khanna (DCalif.), in his January 25 address at the World Says No to War on Yemen Global Online Rally, noted his commitment to ending the war in Yemen by re-introducing the War Powers Resolution that Trump previously vetoed. Senator Sanders and Iwill be advocating and introducing again aWar Powers Resolution to stop any logistical supportany intelligence support, any military support to the Saudis in their campaign in Yemen, he said. Passing another War Powers resolution with these provisions would provide additional and significant pressure on the Bidenadministration.

The Obama-Biden administration made numerous announcements in 2012 and 2013 that it would end the U.S. war in Afghanistan by 2014. But we saw that declarations do not, in themselves, signify that the job is done, especially ones loaded with red-flag-raising qualifiers like offensive operations and relevant weapons systems. We should know in amatter of weeks what the details of Bidens plans for Yemen are. The job in the meantime is to maintain pressure, to ensure the Biden administration brings about areal end to the war that the president helped startand says he wants to bring to aclose.

See the original post:

Biden Says He's Ending the Yemen WarBut It's Too Soon to Celebrate - In These Times

Nihilism was notably cited during U.S. Senate deliberations after rioting Trump supporters had been cleared from the Capitol.

Dont let nihilists become your drug dealers, exhorted Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse. There are some who want to burn it all down. Dont let them be your prophets.

How else to describe the incendiary rhetoric and grievances that Donald Trump has peddled since November? What else to call the denial of the electorates will and his deep disdain for American institutions and traditions?

In 2016, I wrote about how Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky had, in his work, explored what happens to society when people who rise to power lack any semblance of ideological or moral convictions and view society as bereft of meaning. I saw eerie similarities with Trumps actions and rhetoric on the campaign trail.

Fast-forward four years, and I believe the warnings of Dostoevsky particularly in his most most political novel, Demons, published in 1872 hold truer than ever.

Although set in a sleepy provincial Russian town, Demons serves as a broader allegory for how thirst for power in some people, combined with the indifference and disavowal of responsibility by others, amount to a devastating nihilism that consumes society, fostering chaos and costing lives.

Before Demons, Dostoevsky had been writing a novel about faith, The Life of a Great Sinner.

But then a disturbing public trial spurred him in a more overtly political direction. A young student had been murdered by members of a revolutionary group, The Organization of the Peoples Vengeance, at the behest of their leader, Sergei Nechaev.

Dostoevsky was appalled that politics could be dehumanizing to the point of murder. His focus turned not only to moral questions but also to political demagoguery, which, he argued, if left unchecked, could result in devastating loss of life.

The result was Demons. It featured two protagonists: Pyotr Verkhovensky, a former student with no political convictions beyond a lust for power, and Nikolai Stavrogin, a man so morally numb and emotionally detached that he is incapable of purposeful action and stands idly by as violence engulfs his society.

Through these two figures, Dostoevsky tells a broader story about the many flavors of nihilism. Pyotr infiltrates the towns local social circles, recruits a group of disciples to a revolutionary group and spins lies to band them together so they may do his bidding. Pretending to lead a broad movement of international socialism, Pyotr manipulates those around him into committing violent acts and insurrection against the local government. As a result, one woman is crushed by a mob, a mother and her baby die from chaos and neglect and a fire breaks out that kills multiple others.

Different townspeople espouse multiple and contradictory ideologies; none translates into purposeful action. Instead, they merely leave characters whiplashed and susceptible to being instrumentalized by Pyotor, the master manipulator.

But Pyotr would not prevail without the nihilism of Stavrogin, a local nobleman.

Many townspeople see him as a leader with a strong moral compass. Throughout the novel, Pyotr seeks to loop Stavrogin into his quest for power by either doing him favors that corrupt him or hinting that he will install him as dictator once he successfully carries out a revolution.

On some level, Stavrogin knows better: He should be protecting the town and its people. He ultimately fails to do so, out of sheer despondence and because of the emotional appeal of chaos and violence have for him; they seem to jolt him out of the ennui he often appears to feel.

When given the chance to restrain and turn in to the authorities the escaped convict who perpetrates most of the violence in town, Stavrogin captures him only to eventually let him go. Steal more, kill more, he says to a criminal who has already admitted to killing and stealing. Later, when the political climate gets so heated that it seems an insurrection is imminent, he flees town.

In surrendering his responsibility to serve as a moral guardian, Stavrogin becomes complicit in Pyotrs schemes. He ultimately kills himself perhaps, in part, out of guilt for his passivity and moral indifference.

Among the two men, Pyotr is the authoritarian figure. And he cleverly insists that members of the revolutionary group break the law together, cementing a loyal brotherhood of criminality.

By contrast, Stavrogin is the novels empty center, idly standing by while Pyotr incites violence.

He doesnt help Pyotr. But he doesnt stop him, either.

A range of nihilistic justifications each successively hollower than the rest seems to have shaped the violence at the U.S. Capitol.

The homegrown American insurrection lacked any sort of ideological foundation. Most ideas fueling it are negations of persons or facts. The immediate rallying cry of the insurrection was the falsehood that the election was stolen. Beyond denying the will of over 80 million people who voted for Joe Biden, this lie also qualifies not as an ideology, but as an absolute denial of truth.

Other ideas fomenting the insurrection such as America first or MAGA and even white supremacy itself are quintessentially founded on the denial of others, whether they are immigrants, foreign nationals or persons of color.

From what we have learned since, some of Trumps supporters were even imploring him to cross the Rubicon, a reference to Julius Caesars initiation of the civil war that eventually transformed Rome into a dictatorial empire, expressing a longing to smash American systems and eviscerate the republic.

The only real purpose that seems to have brought the group together was devotion to Donald Trump, who strikes me as the arch-nihilist in all this, the Pyotr Verkhovensky of this American tragedy. Then there are the other public figures who should have known better, who might have helped stop it all, but couldnt and didnt. Some, like Stavrogin, excused themselves and were silent for far too long, as the lie about the election grew bigger and bigger. And others seemed to outright encourage the lie through formalized objections in Congress last week.

Playacting at revolution at the behest of a man seeking to cling to power, the rioters ultimately only managed only to vandalize the building, though they left five people dead in their wake.

Nonetheless, to act violently on the basis of such fictions and to transgress against the humanity of others for nothing at all is perhaps the most nihilistic act of them all.

See the original post:

Dostoevsky warned of the strain of nihilism that infects Donald Trump and his movement - The Conversation US

From the very beginning, the truth has been central to Christian faith. Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life." In the one instant where Jesus engaged in a discussion with a sly political leader, Jesus said he came to testify to the truth, and Pilate rhetorically asked Jesus, "What is truth?" not actually expecting an answer. Pilate's essential nihilism has not endeared him in our religious history. He is remembered as the one under whom Christ was crucified, after all.

Lies cause harm. When such lies are perpetuated by those in power, including the president of the United States, they cause even greater harm. This week we have seen the dangerous impact of the failure of truth-telling in our nation -- a vacuous insurrection, devoid of any real purpose other than hooliganry. It's notable, is it not, that whatever the events of Jan. 6 were, they signified nothing at all, simply sheer frustration about a reality that doesn't exist. In Christian perspective, a nation has hit a low point when a senator gets a standing ovation simply for reminding his colleagues their responsibility is to tell people the truth.

People of authentic faith remember that truth resides in the space of testimony. Christians by and large are not relativists. We do not believe that all truths are relative; neither do we believe truth and lies are simply opposite sides of the same coin. Truth is truth. But in Christian perspective, truth is also not incontrovertible. It inhabits the space of discourse. We discern the truth. Returning to Jesus' statement in front of Pilate, he says he has come to "testify to the truth."

We have reliable systems for such testimony in our nation. States count votes, and governments certify them. Courts perform their role, hearing evidence when such counting and certification is contested. Then, once various forms of testimony are brought, the courts decide what is true. We discern truth in and through such processes and institutions.

This is how truth works. Truth is not an ever deferred and bald assertion by one powerful man who says, "Just wait, we're bringing more evidence. We won by a landslide." Nor is truth hidden away and sequestered by a special privileged few, insiders to the conspiracy. That's gnosticism, not Christianity, and that's simply not how truth works. Quite the opposite, that's how liars lie. They believe their subjective personal claim has greater validity than the vetted and communal process of the courts and states and nation.

A nation that offers itself, cravenly, to the lies of a demagogue is just so bound and beholden. It is no longer free. Jesus said if you know the truth, it will set you free. As a Christian pastor, I'm a little lost these days on how to share the truth with people so gullibly willing to believe race-baited lies and conspiracies, but I do know for sure that Christian faith does not travel such roads.

The Rev. Clint Schnekloth is lead pastor at Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in Fayetteville. He blogs at http://www.patheos.com/blogs/clintschnekloth or email him at perichoresis2002@mac.com.

Originally posted here:

Clint Schnekloth: The way, the truth and the life - Arkansas Online

2021 is not off to the start any of us wanted, but at least there should be a lot of great music coming this year. With that in mind, we compiled a list of 60 albums we're particularly looking forward to, and then we asked you to let us know your No. 1 most anticipated release. Across social media, you expressed your excitement for new music from a host of different bands and artists: Tomahawk, Avenged Sevenfold, Jerry Cantrell, Poppy, Deafheaven, Wolfgang Van Halen's project Mammoth WVH. And of course, many of you just want anything from Tool. Five bands rose to the fore see the top vote-getters below.

U.K. metalcore veterans Architects have been redefining the genre (and themselves) for well over a decade. Their upcoming LP, For Those That Wish To Exist, due February 26th, continues that evolution. With 15 tracks (spanning an hour) and three big-time guest vocalists (Parkway Drive's Winston McCall, Royal Blood's Mike Kerr and Biffy Clyro's Simon Neil), it goes for the jugular, both sonically and thematically: As the band recently told Revolver, the album's lyrics navigate the push-pull of hope and nihilism in a world that's falling apart.

Over the course of 2020, Evanescence spent their quarantine working on The Bitter Truth, their first album of original music in a decade. They dropped singles as they progressed "Wasted on You," "The Game Is Over," "Use My Voice" and "Yeah Right" and vocalist Amy Lee making badass guest appearances on albums by diverse acts like Body Count and Bring Me the Horizon, making eager fans only more anxious. Your long wait will be over soon. Featuring 12 tracks, The Bitter Truth is set for a March 26th release.

photograph by Mcabe Gregg

If you thought cancer would stop Dave Mustaine, think again. The thrash OG was already working on songs while in the middle of chemotherapy in late 2019. If you thought COVID would stop him, think again again. The pandemic did sideline Megadeth's mega-tour with Lamb of God, but it also allowed the band to focus on finishing up their 16th album, tentatively titled The Sick, the Dying and the Dead. Mustaine's been quoted comparing it to Rust in Peace. Of course, you're stoked.

Atlantan progressive monsters Mastodon celebrated 20 years as a band last year with the excellent rarities compilation, Medium Rarities. Stuck at home, the band used the time to work on the follow-up to 2017's momentous concept record The Emperor of Sand. In August, drummer-vocalist-songwriter Brann Dailor told Revolver they had "too much material" but that's a good problem to have. "The new stuff, to me, is all over the place," he said. "It just sounds like us. It sounds like a Mastodon record."

photograph by Jimmy Fontaine

One of 2020's few silver linings was "Another World,"the majestic standalone single from Gojira. Discussing the song, frontman Joe Duplantier quoted Ferdinand Magellan: "It is with an iron will that we'll embark on the most daring of all endeavors, to meet the shadowy future without fear and conquer the unknown." Whatever the future holds, we know 2021 will at least bring the long-awaited follow-up to 2016's sweeping Magma. It's your hands-down pick for the most anticipated album of the year.

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Fan Poll: 5 Most Anticipated Albums of 2021 | Revolver - Revolver Magazine

In The Making of The President 1968, a deeply shocked Theodore H. White describes, first, the anarchic violence of student radicals ransacking university campuses, and then the furious backlash that propelled the third-party candidacy of George Wallace, the former governor of Alabama. In stoking the alienation of the white workingmen of America, White prophetically observed: George Wallace uncovered a reality that will be of concern for years.

Half a century later, in last weeks assault on the Capitol Buildingand thus on government itselfwe have witnessed a convergence that White could scarcely have imagined between the expressive violence of the 1960s left and the hate-filled politics of the contemporary right. The imagery has been disorienting. Those of us old enough to have participated in the mass demonstrations against the Vietnam War may have watched the scenes of bearded, placard-bearing men scaling the walls of the Capitol with a weird wrench of feeling. The muscle memory said, Right on, brother!; conscious thought cried, How dare you?

Extremists on both the far-right and left have long shared an affinity with romanticized and ritualized violence. In the apocalyptic atmosphere of the Sixties, Black Panther leaders like Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton enjoyed a lurid glamor; their place has been filled in our own time by the gun-toting cowpunchers who joined Cliven Bundy and his family at their 2014 melodramatic confrontation with federal officials over access to Western grazing. Many of outgoing U.S. President Donald Trumps rallies throbbed with a mood of violence that occasionally precipitated actual attacks against protestors or journalists. But rage and paranoia on the right was sated by a simple fact: Trump won. Had he lost in 2016, we might have seen the mayhem were witnessing today.

What was postponed has now arrived. Its all too possible that last weeks riot represents not the dying spasm of a defeated remnant, but the advent of a new era of violence carried out in Trumps name and with at least implicit blessing. The more that leading GOP officials part ways with Trump, as they have in recent days, the more he will tighten his grip on the acolytes whose dreams and nightmares he orchestrates. The mob awaits directions.

[To read FPs ongoing coverage of the aftermath of the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol, clickhere.]

The Sixties did, of course, include nihilistic violence that laid waste to whole neighborhoods in Newark, Detroit, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. And even peaceful protests can provide shelter for rioters and looters, as we saw during the Black Lives Matter protests last summer. But a protest march is not a riot; it is a form of expression that typically involves a great deal of speaking and listening. What I recall from the 1969 Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam was interminable speechifying from a platform much too far away for me either to hear or see much of anything. I found my way home in a bus chartered by the furriers union.

In short, while there can be left-wing mobs and right-wing mobs, the salient difference between that moment and this one is between purposefulness and nihilism. Protests are a form of political speech that seeks, and may be addressed by, a political response. Mob violence, insofar as it has political content at all, is more like a species of blackmail that seeks to terrorize authorities into submission. That was the goal of the armed crowd that tried to compel Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer to rescind coronavirus restrictions last summernot to mention of the small group that planned to kidnap her and other Democratic leaders, like a latter-day version of the Red Brigades. Mobs like last weeks are almost too inchoate to be said to have a goal, but these Trumpistas must have imagined that they could force Congress to overturn the results of the presidential election. The fact that they failed to change the outcome may matter less than the fact that they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams in creating a spectacle.

Former President Lyndon B. Johnson could have taken the air out of the protest movement by calling a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam and forcing the Saigon government to negotiate with the North. President-elect Joe Biden wont be able to do anything to reach the kind of people who swarmed over the Capitol. Their only demand is to reverse historynot just the outcome of the election but all the forces that have diminished the status of the white American male. Bidens emollient language of bipartisanship will mean nothing to people who identify with neither party. Public officials will have no choice but to respond with force if a mob attacks the offices of a major newspaper or broadcaster, or an embassy or a foundation. That, in turn, will exacerbate the rioters mythology of exclusion and the depth of their alienation. And Trump will likely find ways to egg on hias hardhats from the club room at Mar-a-Lago. Mob violence could well prove self-perpetuating.

Trumps Svengali-like hold on one-third or so of the American people ensures that the toxins he has poured into the American system will not drain away soon. That said, the kind of violence we saw last week may repel many Americans with a residual sense of decency. In 1968, tens of millions of Americans came to conclude that the kids were right about Vietnam, even if they deplored their tactics; much the same can be said of the Black Lives Matter protests. Trump, however, will likely preside over a shrinking, if increasingly radicalized, faction.

The analogy with the 1960s, when, as White noted, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) radicalism inflated Wallaces popularity, might encourage progressives to predict a left-wing backlash to todays right-wing extremisma Reaganism of the left. But that misjudges the moment. The mob that attacked the Capitol does not stand for right-wing politics any more than their puppet master does; they are engines of destruction. Americans are not going to respond by rallying around Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. If there is a silver lining hereand how can you not hope for one?it is that Americans of all camps might respond by repudiating mob tactics, and by coming to terms with the restraints imposed by liberal democracy.

I admit, however, that I have been holding out hope for such a mass awakening for the last two or three years. I havent been proved right yet.

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The Non-Politics of Trump's Mob Violence at the Capitol - Foreign Policy

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King (January 15, 1929 April 4, 1968)

Strength to Love is a collection of sermons by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. that explains his convictions in terms of the conditions and problems of contemporary society.

One of the major contentions in this work, which was published in1963, is that God intended humans to be tough-minded but soft-hearted. By this, King meant that people should use reason and sort out truth from fiction.

Dictators have long used soft-mindedness among people to gain power, and King believed soft-mindedness is responsible for racism. King also believed people should practice love and compassion.

King saw nonviolence as the exercise of both soft-heartedness and tough-mindedness. He wrote that Jesus preached that people should forgive others, and that the church should remind people of the virtues of kindness and forgiveness.

Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.

Following are excerpts from the book:

One of the great tragedies of life is that men seldom bridge the gulf between practice and profession, between doing and saying. A persistent schizophrenia leaves so many of us tragically divided against ourselves. On the one hand, we proudly profess certain sublime and noble principles, but on the other hand, we sadly practise the very antithesis of these principles. How often are our lives characterised by a high blood pressure of creeds and an anaemia of deeds! We talk eloquently about our commitment to the principles of Christianity, and yet our lives are saturated with the practices of paganism. We proclaim our devotion to democracy, but we sadly practise the very opposite of the democratic creed. We talk passionately about peace, and at the same time we assiduously prepare for war. We make our fervent pleas for the high road of justice, and then we tread unflinchingly the low road of injustice. This strange dichotomy, this agonising gulf between the ought and the is, represents the tragic theme of man's earthly pilgrimage.

One day we will learn that the heart can never be totally right when the head is totally wrong

The hope of a secure and livable world lies with disciplined nonconformists who are dedicated to justice, peace and brotherhood.

Too unconcerned to love and too passionless to hate, too detached to be selfish and too lifeless to be unselfish, too indifferent to experience joy and too cold to express sorrow, they are neither dead nor alive; they merely exist.

Courage faces fear and thereby masters it"

Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction. So when Jesus says Love your enemies, he is setting forth a profound and ultimately inescapable admonition. Have we not come to such an impasse in the modern world that we must love our enemies or else? The chain reaction of evilhate begetting hate, wars producing warsmust be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.

This faith transforms the whirlwind of despair into a warm and reviving breeze of hope. The words of a motto which a generation ago were commonly found on the wall in the homes of devout persons need to be etched on our hearts:

Fear knocked at the door.

Faith answered.

There was no one there.

Science investigates, religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge which is power, religion gives man wisdom which is control. Science deals mainly with facts, religion deals with values. The two are not rivals. They are complementary. Science keeps religion from sinking into the valley of crippling irrationalism and paralysing obscurantism. Religion prevents science from falling into the marsh of obsolete materialism and moral nihilism.

On the parable of the Good Samaritan: "I imagine that the first question the priest and Levite asked was: 'If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?' But by the very nature of his concern, the good Samaritan reversed the question: 'If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?

What is more tragic than to see a person who has risen to the disciplined heights of tough-mindedness but has at the same time sunk to the passionless depths of hard-heartedness?

The Christians who engaged in infamous persecutions and shameful inquisitions were not evil men but misguided men. The churchmen who felt they had an edict from God to withstand the progress of science, whether in the form of a Copernican revolution or a Darwinian theory of natural selection, were not mischievous men but misinformed men.

To have serpentlike qualities devoid of dovelike qualities is to be passionless, mean, and selfish. To have dovelike without serpentlike qualities is to be sentimental, anemic, and aimless. We must combine strongly marked antitheses.

The tough mind is sharp and penetrating, breaking through the crust of legends and myths and sifting the true from the false. The tough-minded individual is astute and discerning. He has a strong austere quality that makes for firmness of purpose and solidness of commitment. Who doubts that this toughness is one of man's greatest needs? Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.

Not ordinarily do men achieve this balance of opposites. The idealists are not usually realistic, and the realists are not usually idealistic. The militants are not generally known to be passive, nor the passive to be militant. Seldom are the humble self-assertive, or the self assertive humble. ...truth is found neither in the thesis nor the antithesis, but in an emergent synthesis that reconciles the two.

The greatness of our God lies in the fact that [He] is both tough minded and tender hearted. ... [God] expresses [His] tough mindedness in [His] justice and wrath and [His] tenderheartedness in [His] love and grace. ... On the one hand, God is a God of justice who punished Israel for her wayward deeds, and on the other hand, [He] is a forgiving father whose heart was filled with unutterable joy when the prodigal son returned home.

Violence brings only temporary victories; violence, by creating more social problems than it solves, never brings permanent peace. I am convinced that if we succumb to the temptation to use violence in our struggle for freedom, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness, and our chief legacy to them will be a never-ending reign of chaos.

Only through an inner spiritual transformation do we gain the strength to fight vigorously the evils of the world in a humble and loving spirit.

Today we know with certainty that segregation is dead. The only question remaining is how costly will be the funeral.

Forgiveness is not an occasional act; it is a permanent attitude.

We cannot long survive spiritually separated in a world that is geographically together.

Man-made laws assure justice, but a higher law produces love. No code of conduct ever persuaded a father to love his children or a husband to show affection to his wife.

Slavery in America was perpetuated not merely by human badness but also by human blindness. True, the causal basis for the system of slavery must to a large extent be traced back to the economic factor. Men convinced themselves that a system which was so economically profitable must be morally justifiable. They formulated elaborate theories of racial superiority. Their rationalizations clothed obvious wrongs in the beautiful garments of righteousness. This tragic attempt to give moral sanction to an economically profitable system gave birth to the doctrine of white supremacy. Religion and the Bible were cited to crystallize the status quo.

But if we are to call ourselves Christians, we had better avoid intellectual and moral blindness. Throughout the New Testament we are reminded of the need for enlightenment. We are commanded to love God, not only with our hearts and souls, but also with our minds. When the Apostle Paul noticed the blindness of many of his opponents, he said, I bear them record that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. Over and again the Bible reminds us of the danger of zeal without knowledge and sincerity without intelligence.

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. The true neighbor will risk his position, his prestige, and even his life for the welfare of others. In dangerous valleys and hazardous pathways, he will lift some bruised and beaten brother to a higher and more noble life.

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Finding the strength as we celebrate Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King's birthday - St. Louis American

Big Oil faces that old political dilemma. You know the one. On the one hand, the industry's chosen party has its back on regulation and climate policy. On the other, the same party also tried to overturn the result of a democratic election in favor of a president who encouraged a mob to attack the Capitol, thereby endangering our whole way of life; which underpins, among many other things, the ability for any industry, oil included, to conduct business.

It's a head-scratcher, all right.

Let's just get out of the way up front that any of the 147 Congressional Republicans who voted to undo the presidential election result deserve to be defunded into political oblivion. But corporate donations aren't about doing the right thing. They're about doing the useful thing.

Hence, it isn't that surprising oil companies have been cautious in joining the growing crowd of companies announcing they will pull contributions to offending GOP House and Senate members or the party in general. Some oil majors, such as ConocoPhillips and BP Plc, have said they will suspend all contributions to both parties for several months, while ExxonMobil Corp. and Chevron Corp. will "review" their practices.

This is probably a simple cost-benefit judgment. First, no oil company will likely garner much PR benefit from moving quickly on this. Critics won't rethink their opinion of Big Oil which is centered on the issue of climate change because it leaped to democracy's defense.

Second, the downside is potentially big. The surprising Democratic victories in Georgia's runoffs, giving the party narrow control of the Senate, leave Big Oil with some delicate political math to ponder. Senate Republicans are a critical bulwark against the passage of sweeping climate legislation, especially with the legislative filibuster still intact. Red states account for the overwhelming majority of fossil-fuel production and processing in the U.S. And the decades-long transformation of energy and climate stances into tribal markers in America's culture wars binds Congressional Republicans to the industry in a way that transcends mere output. The industry's contributions to both parties haven't been even remotely close for years.

So a 50/50 Senate, in the context of an administration committed to decarbonizing the economy, doesn't leave Big Oil with much room for further Republican losses. Come 2022, 20 out of 34 Senate races will involve Republican incumbents defending their seats from Democratic candidates and, potentially, Trumpist primary challengers (with the latter's radicalism increasing the odds of a seat being lost if they become the candidate).

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Of those 20, seven are in states with at least some oil and gas extraction, including five big ones: Alaska, Louisiana, North Dakota, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania. One of those, Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., features in the roster of eight senators who voted to overturn the election result although his 21-point margin in a state that went for President Donald Trump by a similar margin likely insulates him from opprobrium. At the other end of the scale is Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Penn., who won by just 1.5 points in a swing state that went for President-elect Joe Biden, and has been forthright in calling for Trump to quit office.

There is also risk around a dozen Republican Senators defending seats in states with no appreciable oil and gas business, blunting the usual appeal to job preservation in campaigning against climate policy. Half of those are in states that don't have much coal mining either, a traditional ally in opposing climate measures. On this front, Big Oil may harbor concerns about the likes of Richard Burr in North Carolina, who won by single digits in a state that went only narrowly for Trump. Or Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who, like Toomey, won a narrow victory in a state that went for Biden and has worked harder than many to sow doubt about the election result.

The risk of helping to unseat more Republicans by withholding cash, plus the prospect of few plaudits for doing so, dictates the logic of moving incrementally or on a both-sides basis. That isn't to say it's right or without risk. As I wrote here, the ideological pact between Big Oil and Republicans has been an effective shield for decades. But as climate has elbowed its way into the American consciousness and a swath of the GOP has embraced protectionism, populism and now electoral nihilism, the shield risks becoming an anchor.

One intriguing upshot of this is that more fossil-fuel money may flow toward Democrats, specifically those at the other end of the party's spectrum from Green New Dealers. When two Democrats won Georgia's senate races, Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., was the third winner, with leverage to largely dictate the scope and pace of climate policy. In a world where overt support for the Republican Party carries a stigma, Big Oil may regard Manchin as a more acceptable face for its defensive strategy.

Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy, mining and commodities. He previously was editor of the Wall Street Journal's Heard on the Street column and wrote for the Financial Times' Lex column. He was also an investment banker.

Read more from the original source:

Why Big Oil isn't slashing its ties to Republicans yet - Newsday