Category Archives: Political Correctness

The following is an excerpt from the authors new book, The Weaponization of Loneliness: How Tyrants Stoke Our Terror of Isolation to Silence, Divide, and Conquer. (Bombardier Books, Post Hill Press.)

Feminists have long urged women to promote the politically correct viewpoint that they are oppressed victims. Champions of second-wave feminism such as Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem emphasized valid grievances of women, such as feeling like a sex object or being passed over for career advancement. However, the media-tech complex has gone well beyond promoting any constructive awareness of these concerns. Instead, it cultivates the resentments such women have felt for past humiliations.

Two cases in point are the confirmation hearings of Justice Clarence Thomas in 1991 and Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2018. In both, the Democrats playbook to derail the confirmation process was exactly the same. At the eleventh hour, a woman appears with stories of sexual harassment from decades past. There is virtually no corroboration.

Kavanaugh was a teenager when his accuser Christine Blasey Ford said he tried to take her clothes off at a party, though none present at said party could corroborate anything. Anita Hill accused Thomas of making some off-color comments while she worked in his office. Again, uncorroborated.

But Democrats trying to disrupt the confirmations were not concerned about the flimsiness of the charges. The stories hyped big in the media served a far greater purpose. The unspoken goal was to emotionally manipulate American women who may have been humiliated in the past. They stirred up old resentments and traumas and then projected responsibility for those traumas onto the nominees. And it worked. It dredged up old memories of mistreatment among many women across America. They then became emotionally certain that the nominees were guilty.

Hence, the nominees could be framed in the public eye as Me Too perps, members of Wifebeaters Inc., and so on. The Senate Judiciary Committee and halls of Congress during the Kavanaugh hearings became a circus of angst-filled women, just as planned. They screamed in the hearing room. They screamed at swing-vote senators in hallways and elevators. On Capitol Hill, there were parades of women posing in handmaid costumes. The slogan of the day was Believe all women! no matter who they are or what they say about you.

Which leads to another question: What is a woman anyway? When Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson was asked to define the word woman, she refused to do so and even added: Im not a biologist. Given the propaganda of gender ideology which seems to deny that males and females exist in biology or reality why did its recent propaganda continue to speak out of both sides of the mouth as though two sexes really do exist? More specifically, why do traditional feminists like Steinem and company accept that narrative while deploring their erstwhile sisters known as radical feminists who object to it?

And since any man can claim to be a woman simply by saying so, we end up having to ask the central question posed by British novelist Dorothy Sayers in her 1938 lecture: Are Women Human? It is the spark of individuality, along with the biological reality of humanity as a dimorphic species, that makes us human. And were losing both in the morass of identity politics enforced by political correctness.

This review of women in the clutches of identity politics seems to point to two broad outcomes. First, social pressures from all corners schools, media, popular culture appear to be taking their toll on young women in particular. Hence, trying to navigate political correctness has been so exhausting that it added to the mental health crisis of women, especially during the Covid-19 era.

This should come as no surprise assuming they have internalized the guilt foisted on them for racism, for poverty, for environmental disaster, to properly mask up, and more. An Evie Magazine article noted that progressivism is an ideology that keeps score to an exhausting degree. [I]ts understandable that anxiety and depression thrive in these kinds of environments.

Second, all this slicing and dicing leads to an isolation and exhaustion that probably causes many struggling women to hope just to be taken care of. With so many relationships broken and real conversations off-limits, what is left but the new patriarchy, the Daddy State?

In 2012, the reelection campaign of President Obama hoped to lure young women voters with just that message by presenting an infographic called The Life of Julia. It offered up a utopian story about an atomized woman and showed how the government would take care of her and her child from the cradle to the grave. In 2021, the Biden administration released a similar infographic called The Life of Linda, another isolated Stepford wife to the state.

Both infographics provide a perfect illustration of sociologist Robert Nisbets point that the State grows on what it gives to the individual as it does on what it takes from competing social relationships. The governments showcasing of Julia and Linda represent the push for a new social order that replaces our intimate relationships with a mass relationship with the state. The biggest losers of all are children and their childhoods. But the propaganda is meant also to destroy motherhood, fatherhood, and the whole family.

That leads us to wonder about the role of men in all this. I would say it all depends on the strength of women to reject the dystopia being foisted on us by a totalitarian force. We should reject the narrative that men are the bad guys and women are always the victims. In general, men take a lot of their cues from women. I would guess that elitist men take their cues from men who are higher in the pecking order.

But the de-masculinization of men and the bullying of women and girls by men who inject themselves into female sports by claiming a female identity are of a piece. Obedience to political correctness out of fear of being socially rejected drives much of it.

This psychological chaos is brought on by utopian power elites of both sexes. Divisiveness between the sexes is key to family and relationship breakdown across society. That division proved critical to the breakdown of the black family in America and, increasingly, to the American family across the board.

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Why Women Are So Susceptible To Political Correctness

The Cancel Culture Mob knows few limitations. While social media has empowered people to speak their minds, it has also empowered the masses to attempt to cancel those who express controversial opinions. Victims of cancel culture often end up jobless, friendless, and helpless.

Those engaging in canceling people, however, gain nothing but empty satisfaction. In a Cancel Culture, everyone loses the ability to understand differing perspectives, making echo chambers and their disastrous consequences inevitable.

What is Cancel Culture

Cancel Culture has been described as accountability by its proponents, but that is not a fair assessment of this phenomenon. If Cancel Culture implied accountability, then there would be an avenue for redemption. When the mob controls justice, there is no means by which you can regain their respect.

In the research paper, Does Apologizing Work? An Empirical Test of the Conventional Wisdom, Richard Hanania of Columbia University shows that public apologies typically have no effect or make the mob want the offender to be punished even more. In other words, Cancel Culture is not about Accountability.

Jeff Deist, president of the Mises Institute, provides a great definition: Cancel culture means shutting people out of jobs, opportunities, platforms, & social settings- attempting to impoverish people, financially and otherwise. The point of Cancel Culture rests in the name eliminating thought criminals from polite society. If the mob cannot control what you say, they will attempt to control your ability to function in society. To put it another way, Cancel Culture is the necessary tactic the mob adopts when the conventional tactics of Political Correctness fails.

Weaponized Political Correctness

Jeff Deist defines Political Correctness as the conscious, designed manipulation of language intended to change the way people speak, write, think, feel, and act, in furtherance of an agenda. The goal of PC is to shape modern humanity into something that goes against our very nature. It destroys individualism and distinct communities and replaces our nature with mob-imposed values. It is not about good manners; it is about control.

But what happens when people refuse to be controlled? What happens when the programming fails? When people push back against PC, the mob must resort to more drastic measures. In the same way fascism emerged as a socialists last resort to impose their unnatural worldview, Cancel Culture emerged as a means to achieve a politically correct society. If you do not bend your knee to the mob, then the mob will unperson you.

This works remarkably well against ordinary people. But with someone like Michael Bloomberg, a billionaire who imposed racist Stop-and-Frisk upon millions of people, there is no way to cancel him. Bloombergs money and financial connections shield him from being canceled. Those engaged in Cancel Culture do not fight for justice. Rather, they target vulnerable individuals and preclude them from ever redeeming themselves (assuming what they said was actually wrong). Rather than have a conversation with people who hold different opinions, the Cancel Culture mob would prefer to dehumanize their adversaries.

The Consequences

Cancel Culture not only harms individuals who fall in the mobs crosshairs, it harms all of society. When you hold a view that the PC Mob may disagree with, the Herd Psychology of the canceler imposes fear upon your psyche. Because of this fear, you either dont express your opinion or you only express your opinion around people you know to agree with you. In other words, Cancel Culture curbs public discourse and creates echo chambers. A 1996 MIT study prophetically predicted that the internet would lead to more echo chambers, areas of conversation in which no differing views are expressed.

This study indicated that echo chambers lead to increased radicalization and decreased understanding of the other side. In a study on links between echo chambers, radicalism, and violence, Nature Research indicates that such an atmosphere is a breeding ground for violence. People internalize their beliefs. Rather than you believing in your politics, you become your politics. If someone disagrees with your perspective, they do so with ill will according to PC culture. Society confirms this grim prediction as people become more hostile about their politics. Radical organizations like Antifa and other groups engage in violence against their political opponents. To lay it bare, politics drops its pretenses and exposes itself as the violent struggle it truly is.

Cancel Culture benefits no one. Rather, it gives a false sense of dispute resolution and gives the canceler a false sense of improved social status while isolating people from civil society. The time to fight back is now. First, refuse to cancel anyone. Dont engage in the mobs tactics. Talk with people with whom you disagree. Second, engage in alternative media. The State Linguistic Complex has its filthy fingers in all mainstream media. Provide your own counter-narrative. Tell the Truth. Unless we fight back against Political Correctness and Cancel Culture, discourse will die.

Originally posted here:

Cancel Culture: Its Causes and Its Consequences

A story of rampant child abuseignored and abetted by the policeis emerging out of the British town of Rotherham. Until now, its scale and scope would have been inconceivable in a civilized country.

Imagine the following case. A fourteen-year old girl is taken into care by the social services unit of the town where she lives, because her parents are drug-addicted, and she has been neglected and is not turning up in school. She is one of many, for that is the way in Britain today. And local government entitiesCouncilscan be ordered by the courts to stand in for parents of neglected children. The Council places the girl in a home, where she is kept with others under supervision from the social services department. The home is regularly visited by young men who try to entice the girls into their cars, so as to give them drugs and alcohol, and then coerce them into sex.

The girl, who is lonely and uncared for, meets a man outside the home, who promises a trip to the cinema and a party with children of her age. She falls into the trap. After she has been raped by a group of five men she is told that, if she says a word to anyone, she will be taken from the home and beaten. When, after the episode is repeated, she threatens to go to the police, she is taken into the countryside, doused in petrol, and told that she is going to be set alight, unless she promises to tell no one of the ordeal.

Social workers tell girls they cannot help them

Meanwhile she must accept weekly abuse, in return for drugs and alcohol. Soon she finds herself being taken to other towns in the area, and hired out for sexual purposes to other men. She is distraught and depressed, and at the point when she can stand it no longer, she goes to the police. She can only stutter a few words, and cannot bring herself to accuse anyone in particular. Her complaint is dismissed on the grounds that any sex involved must have been consensual. The social worker in charge of her case listens to her complaint, but tells her that she cannot act unless the girl identifies her abusers. But when the girl describes them the social worker switches off with a shrug and says that she can do nothing. Her father, his drug habit notwithstanding, has tried to keep contact with his daughter and suspects what is happening. But when he goes to the police, he is arrested for obstruction and charged with wasting police time.

Over the two years of her ordeal the girl makes several attempts on her own life, and eventually ends up abandoned and homeless, without an education and with no prospect of a normal life.

Impossible, you will say, that such a thing could happen in Britain. In fact it is only one of over 1,400 cases, all arising during the course of the last fifteen years in the South Yorkshire town of Rotherham, all involving vulnerable girls either in Council care or inadequately protected by their families from gangs of sexual predators. Almost no arrests have been made, no social workers or police officers have been reprimanded, and until recently the matter was dismissed by all those responsible as a matter of no real significance. Increasing public awareness of the problem, however, led to complaints, triggering a series of official reports. The latest report, from Professor Alexis Jay, former chief inspector of social work in Scotland, gives the truth for the first time, in 153 disturbing pages. One fact stands out above all the horrors detailed in the document, which is that the girl victims were white, and their abusers Pakistani.

Sociologists convinced government that the police are racist

Fifteen years ago, when these crimes were just beginning, the Stephen Lawrence Inquiryinto the conduct of the British police was made by Sir William Macphersona High Court judge. The immediate occasion had been a murder in which the victim was black, the perpetrators white, and the behaviour of the investigating police lax and possibly prejudiced. The report accused the police not just those involved in the case, but the entire police force of the country of institutionalised racism. This piece of sociological newspeak was, at the time, very popular with leftist sociologists. For it made an accusation which could not be refuted by anyone who had the misfortune to be accused of it.

However well you behaved, however scrupulously you treated people of different races and without regard to their ethnic identity or the colour of their skin, you would be guilty of institutionalised racism, simply on account of the institution to which you belonged and on behalf of which you were acting. Not surprisingly, sociologists and social workers, the vast majority of whom are professionally disposed to believe that middle class society is incurably racist, latched on to the expression. MacPherson too climbed onto the bandwagon since, at the time, it was the easiest and safest way to wash your hands in public, to say that I, at least, am not guilty of the only crime that is universally recognised and everywhere in evidence.

Police more concerned with political correctness than crime

The result of this has been that police forces lean over backwards to avoid the accusation of racism, while social workers will hesitate to intervene in any case in which they could be accused of discriminating against ethnic minorities. Matters are made worse by the rise of militant Islam, which has added to the old crime of racism the new crime of Islamophobia. No social worker today will risk being accused of this crime. In Rotherham a social worker would be mad, and a police officer barely less so, to set out to investigate cases of suspected sexual abuse, when the perpetrators are Asian Muslims and the victims ethnically English. Best to sweep it under the carpet, find ways of accusing the victims or their parents or the surrounding culture of institutionalised racism, and attending to more urgent matters such as the housing needs of recent immigrants, or the traffic offences committed by those racist middle classes.

Americans too are familiar with this syndrome. Political correctness among sociologists comes from socialist convictions and the tired old theories that produce them. But among ordinary people it comes from fear. The people of Rotherham know that it is unsafe for a girl to take a taxi-ride from someone with Asian features; they know that Pakistani Muslims often do not treat white girls with the respect that they treat girls from their own community. They know, and have known over fifteen years, that there are gangs of predators on the look-out for vulnerable girls, and that the gangs are for the most part Asian young men who see English society not as the community to which they belong, but as a sexual hunting ground. But they dare not express this knowledge, in either words or deed. Still less do they dare to do so if their job is that of social worker or police officer. Let slip the mere hint that Pakistani Muslims are more likely than indigenous Englishmen to commit sexual crimes and you will be branded as a racist and an Islamophobe, to be ostracised in the workplace and put henceforth under observation.

Rotherham Town Hall. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

No one will be fired

This would matter less if fear had no consequences. Unfortunately political correctness causes people not merely to disguise their beliefs but to refuse to act on them, to accuse others who confess to them, and in general to go along with policies that have been forced on the British people by minority groups of activists. The intention of the activists is to disrupt and dismantle the old forms of social order. They believe that our society is not just racist, but far too comfortable, far too unequal, far too bound up with fuddy-duddy old ways that are experienced by people at the bottom of society the working classes, the immigrants, the homeless, the illegals as oppressive and demeaning. They enthusiastically propagate the doctrines of political correctness as a way of taking revenge on a social order from which they feel alienated.

Ordinary people are so intimidated by this that they repeat the doctrines, like religious mantras which they hope will keep them safe in hostile territory. Hence people in Britain have accepted without resistance the huge transformations that have been inflicted on them over the last thirty years, largely by activists working through the Labour Party. They have accepted immigration policies that have filled our cities with disaffected Muslims, many of whom have now gone to fight against us in Syria and Iraq. They have accepted the growth of Islamic schools in which children are taught to prepare themselves for jihad against the surrounding social order. They have accepted the constant denigration of their country, its institutions and its inherited religion, for the simple reason that these things are theirs and therefore tainted with forbidden loyalties.

And when the truth is expressed at last, nobody is fired, no arrests are made, and the elected Police and Communities Commissioner for Rotherham, although forced to resign from the Labour Party, refuses to resignfrom his job. After a few weeks all will have been swept under the carpet, and the work of destruction can resume.

Link:

Why Did British Police Ignore Pakistani Gangs Abusing 1,400 ... - Forbes

Where are the defenders of Kanye Wests right to speak out on television and on social media? The newest censors in our land are the moguls who own the newspapers and TV stations and social networks like Twitter and Meta; they proudly de-platform the rants of the Kanye Wests.

I was among the lucky who got to hear West, the Black dissident, on Tucker Carlsons Fox News Channel show when West mocked those who criticized his having worn a White Lives Matter t-shirt. I heard his contentious viewpoints about Jews, some of whom think they have a right to dictate the terms and prohibitions of our discourse about vexing social justice issues if and when an advocate utters the J-word. I disagreed with most of what West had to say, but Im glad I got to hear it from the horses mouth.

Who do these modern-day censors think themselves to be, and why do they think that the readers of tweets and watchers of the Idiot Box need their protection from the rants of the weirdest and wildest provocateurs of our times?

The modern-day censors think that banning the wild West from our TV screens and his angry voice from our social media outlets is the civically responsible solution. Why not deplatform hate speech? Because their rules are arbitrary, and their goalposts, ever-moving. Today theyre banning Kanye; yesterday they banned speakers on our college campuses who spoke up for Palestinian rights, or on behalf of Zionism, and the defenders of Anita Bryant, the fierce opponent of gay rights.

It was on the college campus where literal barricades were erected against hearing the speeches of renegade lecturers who decried censorship of any kind, where the advocates of political correctness were welcomed and the purveyors of anti-racism were cheered; they condemned the works of authors like Mark Twain whose Huckleberry Finn cleverly and prodigiously used the N-word.

Kanye West attends the "The Greatest Lie Ever Sold" Premiere Screening on Oct. 12, 2022 in Nashville, Tennessee. (Jason Davis/Getty Images for DailyWire+)

That Mark Twains books and the author himself was anti-racist did not much matter to the zealots who think the best thing about freedom and speech is purging controversial ideas and bad words from our conversations. Gone and just about forgotten are the great defenders of free speech stalwarts like Nat Hentoff, the now-deceased author whose columns and books argued that odious ideas and so-called hate speech not only deserved to be heard and read, but should never be banned outright in our literature or public arenas. Rather, they should be answered.

Hentoff was one who favored bringing onerous, offensive ideas into the open where they could be confronted instead of hidden or squelched as bad ideas. In a democracy, practiced in a truly open discussion, the instinct to bury our viewpoint differences is the equivalent of errant nonsense.

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But not even the American Civil Liberties Union took Hentoffs side when he excoriated its leaders for passing rules that would have prohibited its dissident board members from expressing to the public their opposition to pompous, errant positions.

Even then, Hentoff and his free speech colleagues were a dwindling legion, especially on the college campus and on television. I remember a time when Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan were invited onto television talk shows to pronounce their ideology and to protest Black incursions on everything sacred and white. Occasionally, a Black nationalist would be invited onto TV and to the campuses to complain about whites studied silence about supposed Jewish foes of Black power and intact Black communities.

Not every day did we see the likes of Louis Farrakhan or Black anti-Semites on our TV screens or in major media but occasionally, they got heard and seen, and their books and venomous preachments read and debated. Airing such putrid sentiment and contested opinions used to be the fashion of the colleges and social media.

Yes, I understand the legal argument that Twitter and Facebook, as private companies, have a right to craft and enforce so-called community standards and ban people who turn their platforms into uncivil environments. I am speaking to the wider wisdom of such an approach, not to its legality. The First Amendment surely does not require owners of our media to let in trouble-making speakers. (West may try to avoid the problem by buying Parler, another social media platform; well see if he can build that into a true free-for-all.)

But where are the owners of mass media who used to welcome fierce and contentious disagreements about social events and civic matters? Are there none (other than Elon Musk) who want to hear what others think and say who disagree with them and the body politic?

Stifling free expression in any widely available forum is un-American. Not every social media platform, newspaper or TV station will choose a free forum for programming choices, but some, at least one, should be a purveyor of free, unfettered speech (with warnings to their audience, if they want). If racists or anti-Semites make it on the platform, so what? Neither Jewish nor Blacks blood is so thin we cant stomach hearing what our foes think of us and themselves by way of fake superiority.

Meyers is president of the New York Civil Rights Coalition.

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Where are the liberal defenders of Kanye West's freedom to speak? - New York Daily News

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It has been announced that legendary Hollywood star Anna May Wong will become the first Asian American to appear on US currency.

According to CNN, the design is the fifth to emerge from the American Women Quarters Program, which highlights pioneering women in their respective fields. The other four quarters, all put into production this year, feature poet and activist Maya Angelou; the first American woman in space, Sally Ride; Cherokee Nation leader Wilma Mankiller; and suffragist Nina Otero-Warren. The latter two were, along with Wong, selected with input from the public.

According to The Guardian, starting Monday, Wongs image will be imprinted on quarters across the country. Recognized as Hollywoods first Asian American movie star, she acted in over 60 films across a decades-long career.

Wong called for greater representation of Asian people in Hollywood and challenged stereotypical depictions at a time when yellowface was normalized and the Chinese Exclusion Act was still law.

Why is it that the screen Chinese is nearly always the villain of the piece, and so cruel a villain murderous, treacherous, a snake in the grass, Wong stated in a 1933 interview with the Los Angeles Times. We are not like that.

In 1960, Wong was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. She died the next year. When actor Lucy Liu became the second Asian American woman to earn a Hollywood star, in 2019, she lauded Wong as a pioneer while enduring racism, marginalization, and exclusion.

Between March 2020 and March 2022, more than 11,400 hate incidents against Asian Americans have been reported across the United States, according to a report by Stop AAPI Hate, a national coalition that tracks such incidents and advocates for combatting hate crimes against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.

The findings signaled a persistent rise in harassment, verbal abuse and hate speech that have plagued Asian communities since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. In 2021, the group identified more than 9,000 hate incidents in the pandemics first year. A separate study by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism found that hate crimes against Asian Americans rose 339% nationally between 2020 and 2021.

A tireless advocate for her people, the US Mint writesof Wong, She is remembered as an international film star, fashion icon, television trailblazer, and a champion for greater representation of Asian Americans in film.

The family of Tubman had been looking forward to 2020, when Tubmans likeness was set to adorn the bill but the Trump administration halted the Obama administrations efforts to do so. Former President Donald Trump opposed the move, calling it pure political correctness during an interview on the campaign trail in April 2016.

In January 2021, the Biden Administration said it would look into ways to accelerate the effort.The Treasury Department is taking steps to resume efforts to put Harriet Tubman on the front of the new $20 notes, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said at a press briefing on Jan. 25, 2021. Its important that our money reflect the history and diversity of our country.

But nearly two years later, its unclear where those efforts stand.

According to Insider, redesigning cash is far different than minting coins, andit will most likely be 2030 before a Tubman bill enters circulation.

Why the delay? It turns out, it can take decades for the United States to redesign a single currency note. The $20 bill redesign has been planned since 2013 years before the Obama administration even selected Tubman to grace the front.

The $10 bill is set to be redesigned in 2026, the $50 in 2028, the $20 in 2030, the $5 in 2032 to 2035, and the $100 in 2034 to 2038.

The founder of Women on 20s, the group responsible forpetitioning Tubman on the $20 bill, told Insider she was hopeful the Biden administration could find a way to put the redesigned bills in circulation by the end of 2024.

More here:

Anna May Wong is now the first Asian American on US currency - The Black Wall Street Times

When looking back through history to figure out how we ended up in this hellscape that will inevitably be known as the "Trump era," pundits often look to predecessors like Barry Goldwater in the 1960s, Richard Nixon in the '70s or even Ronald Reagan in the '80s. The 1990s, however, are often overlooked, even though that's when Donald Trump's notoriety as a tabloid fixture really came into focus. That decade is often remembered fondly these days, as a time of relative innocence, a country preoccupied with how to figure out email and what to do about a president getting a blow job in the Oval Office.

In her new book "Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s," historian Nicole Hemmer wants us to take another look at the '90s. It was, she writes, "actually an era of right wing radicalization." And not just on the fringes, as with Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. Led by figures like House Majority Leader Newt Gingrich and race-baiting gadfly Pat Buchanan, it was a time when the GOP stopped being merely a conservative party and forged its new path a competitive race to the bottom in which the trophy goes to the most repulsive political troll. (Right now, it's Trump, but there are contenders, including Florida's Gov. Ron DeSantis.) That was when the idea of winning elections in order to govern wound down for Republicans and was replaced with scorched-earth politics, in which destroying the opposition is all that matters.

Hemmer spoke about her book and the dark side of the '90s with Salon. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The '90s: We like to remember it as a time of peace and prosperity. However, as you argue in this book, for the right, it wasn't just an era of increased polarization, but was "actually an era of right-wing radicalization." What do you mean by that?

In the 1990s, polarization wasn't a particularly good way of describing what was happening with the two major parties. Yes, the Republican Party was moving to the right, but the Democratic Party was moving to the right as well. So the parties weren't running away from one another in the way that we think of when we think of polarization. Instead, polarization was a tactic that was being used by Republicans to try to heighten the differences between the Republican and Democratic Party.

And because the Democratic Party was moving to the right, that meant that the Republican Party had to move even further to the right. A combination of right-wing politicians, politicians interested in polarization like Newt Gingrich, and a new media ecosystem helped to create a Republican Party that was much more radical, much closer to the far right and to violent extremism than it had been in previous eras. It was caught in a cycle that it would repeat in the decades that followed of constantly being pulled to the right by the most activist parts of the party.

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I feel like we're in at least the third cycle of that, with the Tea Party being an example.

They had pushed for impeachment well before Newt Gingrich felt comfortable with it.

People are familiar with the ways that, for instance, [former House Majority Speaker] John Boehner was constantly being challenged by the Tea Party contingent of his party, who were threatening his leadership and acting as an obstacle for any type of legislating that he was hoping to do. But that was the same cycle that you actually see with Newt Gingrich.

We think, correctly, of Newt Gingrich as a radical figure, as a revolutionary figure in some ways. But he was constantly being challenged by a part of his party, a part of his House caucus that called themselves the True Believers. People like Helen Chenoweth. Lindsey Graham was part of this. They saw Newt Gingrich as too much of a swish. They constantly were threatening his leadership. They were trying to extend the government shutdowns even further. They had pushed for impeachment well before Newt Gingrich felt comfortable with it, and ultimately challenged his leadership and were not sad to see him step down after the 1998 midterms.

Why the '90s? Right-wing radicals have been chewing on the Republican Party at least since the 1950s. What was it about the '90s that they started to get the upper hand?

"Suddenly you have people like Pat Buchanan, who are arguing that maybe democracy isn't the best form of government."

This is a great question. So yes, there has been a strain of radicalism that has been absolutely foundational for conservatism in the United States. I don't want to undersell that. But there were some things that happened in the '90s that allowed them to become ascendant. One of them was the end of the Cold War. The Cold War provided both this kind of logic and this constraint on all of U.S. politics over the course of the 1940s to the 1980s. And it both opened up a space for this intense anti-communism and the Cold War conservatism that we're also familiar with.

But it also required people involved in politics to speak in the language of democracy and freedom and to, over time, capitulate to the idea that we should widen the electorate and make sure that people across the United States have the right to vote. When the Cold War ends, that logic goes away. Suddenly you have people like Pat Buchanan, who are arguing that maybe democracy isn't the best form of government, maybe those old constraints that had governed American politics for so long, maybe those weren't actually the proper boundaries for U.S. politics.

Even somebody like Ronald Reagan was a big supporter of open immigration to the United States. But you see a rise of nativism in the 1990s that was no longer constrained by this need to project a welcoming image to the world. But I also think that a couple of other things matter as well.

First, again, that new media environment. You had talk radio with Rush Limbaugh. You had the rise of cable news. You also had the experience of the Reagan presidency, which for some conservatives was really disappointing. It forced them to pay more attention to things like congressional elections, because they weren't sure that a conservative presidency was enough to enact the changes that they wanted.

You focus a lot on a lot of different interesting political figures in the '90s. But the three that really jumped out at me were Newt Gingrich, Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot. What about these three men were so important? How did they really define this changing GOP in the 1990s?

Newt Gingrich "was somebody who understood the importance of polarizing the electorate."

Each of them plays a different role. Pat Buchanan really was the person who had sussed out that there was an opening in U.S. politics, as he put it, to the right of Ronald Reagan. That by moving to the right you could activate a base of white voters to get engaged in politics and to join the Republican Party and the conservative movement in a way they hadn't before. He tapped into this kind of exclusionary racist white populism and helped to bring it into the Republican Party.

Ross Perot, on the other hand, is a very mediagenic person. He's an independent candidate. He's heterodox in his politics. He's opposed to the North American Free Trade Agreement, but he's in support of abortion. He's in support of gun regulation. He wants balanced budgets. He doesn't fit neatly in the two-party system. But as an independent, he attracts so many voters from across the political spectrum and really helps us to see how unsettled American politics were in the early 1990s.

Newt Gingrich was somebody who was, honestly, one of the savviest political operators in U.S. politics in the 20th century. He was somebody who understood new media. He was somebody who understood the importance of polarizing the electorate. That was his big complaint about Reagan that Reagan had spent too much time governing and not enough time polarizing the electorate. He understood new media like cable. He was a big advocate of C-SPAN because it allowed him to get his message out over cable television.

He tried to attract the Perot voter through this kind of neutral, pragmatic language of reform. But he was constantly weaponizing it. He was somebody who understood the appeal of ethics reform and bipartisanship, and all these different things. But anytime he would touch those popular things in American political life, he instantly sought ways to use them as a weapon against Democrats. So he was somebody who understood the art of polarization in a way that I think did fundamentally transform U.S. politics going forward.

When I think of figures who kind of were central to the Republicans functionally losing their minds in the 1990s, I actually think a lot about Bill Clinton. Republicans just had an unhealthy fixation on him. There were these conspiracy theories that he and Hillary were murderers. In the book, you draw a clear line from the conspiracy theories to what eventually happened with the impeachment. Why Bill Clinton? What was it about him that made them lose their minds?

It's such a great question because you look back at Bill Clinton now, and he seems like kind of an anodyne figure, especially because he is a fairly conservative Democrat and somebody whose entre into politics, particularly national politics, was about pulling the Democratic Party to the center. So you would imagine him in an alternate timeline as being somebody who worked very closely with Republicans and was able to foster a kind of bipartisan comity. That's not what happened.

In part, he was seen as a real threat. He was somebody who could tap into that populist anti-establishment fervor because he was this Southern Democrat. He was somebody who was a creature of Little Rock and not Washington, D.C. Yet at the same time there were these pictures of him and Hillary Clinton floating around in the 1960s and '70s, and so in a way he also epitomized all of the social and political changes of the 1960s. Hillary Clinton in particular. This idea that she might be a co-president, that she was a feminist, that she was somebody who used her birth last name, her family name, as her middle name. There were just so many things about her that said "feminist" in this way that the right really recoiled against. They saw a real opening to attack the Clintons as the avatars of the 1960s and 1970s.

"Even Bob Dole running in 1996 talked about the 'supposed' suicide of Vince Foster."

But of course, as you mentioned, they go well beyond that. That opposition, that threat of the Clintons, hits this new media environment of conservative talk radio, this extremely well-funded investigatory network that was devoted to creating conspiracy theories around the Clintons and to de-legitimizing Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton.The combination of those things creates this fervor and almost this competition to see who can outdo the last person on the biggest scandal. You have people like David Brock writing for The American Spectator about Bill Clinton in Arkansas. But then you have the conspiracy theories.

The one that really takes off and sets the tone is when a close friend of the Clintons and a member of the White House team, Vince Foster, dies by suicide. That is immediately turned into a conspiracy theory of a cover-up [alleging] the Clintons murdered Foster in order to keep him quiet, and that takes off. You have members of Congress who are reenacting his suicide in order to try to prove that it's a murder. Even Bob Dole running in 1996 talked about the "supposed" suicide of Vince Foster. Very quickly, it gets into this feverish space and explodes in very well-funded conspiracy media. And you're right, it's not separate from the politics of the era. It's not even necessarily something triggered by Bill Clinton's radical politics, because his politics aren't that radical. But it feels very familiar for people who are experiencing politics in the U.S. today.

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Speaking of the new media environment, it's hard to overstate how central Rush Limbaugh was in forming the conservative identity as we know it. In the book, you say people think a lot about Fox News, but in the '90s it was really Rush Limbaugh more than anything. What was it about him that made him so important? He remade the GOP in his image.

He absolutely did, and part of it is timing, and part of it is talent. He becomes a national host in 1988, not out of politics but out of radio shock jock entertainment. He was somebody who, unlike conservative media figures of a previous era, really knew how to entertain. He knew how to use airtime. He knew how to use the microphone. He knew how to use parody songs and little comedic bits mixed in with the politics of his show nobody had seen anything like it before. For the right, that mix of comedy and entertainment and politics was instantaneously addictive.

Rush Limbaugh "was somebody who, unlike conservative media figures of a previous era, really knew how to entertain."

Within just a few years of his launch, he was on hundreds of stations, he was making tens of millions of dollars, but he was also a cross-platform hit. In the early 1990s, he has two bestselling books. He has a television show that Roger Ailes produces that launches in 1992 and runs for four years. He's also somebody who was willing to challenge the Republican establishment. He challenges George H.W. Bush.

So Bush invites him to stay overnight at the White House. He really works hard to get Limbaugh to say positive things about him, and Limbaugh ultimately does. He backs Bush in 1992. Bush loses, but people still thought of Limbaugh not just as an entertainer, but as somebody who was reshaping U.S. politics and really held power within the Republican Party. He becomes someone to whom the Republican Party not only feels it owes fealty but to whom it feels it owes deference. That gives Limbaugh first the appearance of power, and then actual power because Republicans refuse to cross him. There just hadn't been a media figure like that in U.S. politics before, and that's why he loomed so large over the 1990s.

One of the more interesting observations you make about Limbaugh, that I think a lot of people don't understand at this distance, is that he was able to walk an interesting tightrope. He was a shock jock who says the unsayable things, and yet somehow manages to always skirt away from the responsibility for racism, or misogyny, or anything like that. How did he manage to play that game so well for so long?

It's so fascinating, because you go back and you listen to him and you're like, "Oh. This is really racist, and misogynistic, and homophobic, and all of these things." But in part it was that combination of politics and entertainment and comedy. Whenever he crept a little too close to the line, to the extent that the line ever existed, he would say that he was just kidding. He would back away from it. There were bits that he did, especially in his early days, that he did drop. He had done these things called "caller abortions," which people felt crossed the line. So he stopped doing them. He apologized for this thing that he did called "The AIDS Update," which was not just homophobic, but especially cruel to people living through the AIDS epidemic.

He was also careful to package the more racist bits of his show as comedy routines. He had this parody song that he played in the late 2000s called "Barack the Magic Negro." This was a wildly racist parody song. But he would say it was parody. He would also point to a Los Angeles Times piece that had that as its headline. And even though obviously the Los Angeles Times piece had much more going on in it, Limbaugh used it to claim h was parroting and skewering the left.

Nowadays, we're enduring a moral panic over "cancel culture" and "wokeness." In the 1990s, the same thing was going on, but it was deemd to be a response to "political correctness." When you actually dig into the stories, it's either exaggerated or it's outright fake. These supposed excesses of the left are often not real, once you peel back the panicked overreaction. Yet it still manages to capture mainstream media attention. Why does this shtick keep working over and over again?

It really was a ripe environment for this lavish interest in political incorrectness.

If you spend any time looking at the "political correctness" language of the early 1990s, it feels so familiar and it feels so repetitive in many ways to what we're experiencing now. Part of it was that mainstream media outlets were hungry for this content. It was controversial. It was very easy to present a story that was full of these over-the-top examples that the conservatives often trotted out. And you wouldn't necessarily have to investigate them if you were a mainstream reporter. You could just report on what conservatives were saying about these various controversies, and that was enough for a story. It was a story that instantaneously had a sense of balance to it. You were showing that you weren't anti-conservative because you were giving airtime and credence to these conservative concerns in the 1990s.

And I think even among mainstream reporters, who were still largely a white male profession, there were shared anxieties and shared beliefs that there was an excess in a culture that had suddenly discovered sexual harassment, a culture that had begun to make space for women in the workplace, and for non-white people in the workplace, and in politics. It really was a ripe environment for this lavish interest in political incorrectness.

I think it's a lot of what we see today around the same cancel culture panic. There are plenty of people who are not at conservative outlets, who are in mainstream outlets, who share this belief that cancel culture has gone too far, share this idea that there is something suspect about the politics of the left, the politics of equity, the politics of equality, and the rise of women and people of color in the workplace. So we're seeing a lot of the same dynamics play out now.

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about the impact of '90s politics

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Perfecting the "art of polarization": How these '90s conservatives created today's radicalized right - Salon

I almost never sign group letters or put my name to group efforts aimed at correcting some governmental or administrative or judicial or university decision. First off, I tend not to agree with the sort of people who initiate these things. Secondly, it pretty easily descends into virtue-signalling look at me; Im a good person; Ive signed this letter. And thirdly, even amongst those who are inclined to sign there is enough disagreement to make signing up something of a hostage to fortune.

Thats my basic rule. But there have been two exceptions. The first was the Great Barrington Declaration co-authored by three of the worlds most eminent epidemiologists. I was an early signee. They looked at a century of data, not modelling that even at the time looked dodgy and now can be seen to have been wrong on every axis and often by orders of magnitude. And they argued for what was the orthodox approach (focus on protection, dont lock down, trust citizens, etc) up until the end of 2019 when based on China welding people into their homes the public health clerisy, the political class and virtually all journalists (yes, even on Sky News) went crazy and joined Despots, Inc.

The other time takes us across the Tasman Sea to New Zealand as well as back in time all the way to 1993. I had just arrived in that country with my wife from four wonderful, Somerset Maughamesque years in pre-handover Hong Kong. That year a gay childcare worker Peter Ellis was convicted of sexual offences at the childcare centre where he worked in Christchurch. I will sum things up for Australians by saying that the case against Ellis was so weak it made the ridiculous charges against Cardinal Pell look somewhat plausible. The police did everything wrong in how they interviewed the kids, whose stories changed with each interview, with the jury seeing the finished product. The underlying claim of how and when Ellis could have done what he was alleged to have done (in the childcare facility with others about) stretched credibility far more than the latest Dan Andrews reflection on the state of play of the Science. I was then part of the NZ Skeptics and we threw ourselves into helping Elliss supporters. Leading academic critics of recovered memory syndrome the underlying notion that helped convict Ellis came on board. One told me the police case was worse than useless. It was an incredibly broad coalition of people from authors to academics to other childcare workers who worked hard to show Ellis had been wrongfully convicted.

To no avail. The Court of Appeal over there upheld his sentence and thirteen of the sixteen convictions. Magazines took up the Ellis case. He appealed again in 1999. The court palmed this one off to a royal commission. In 2000 Ellis was released from prison, a tainted man and supposed sex-offender. Make that paedophile. He would have been released much earlier but Ellis refused to attend parole hearings, because to do so you have to admit your guilt. (Peter Ellis maintained his innocence right through to his death in 2019.) A ministerial inquiry in 2001 concluded there was no miscarriage of justice. While I couldnt possibly comment, many Kiwis felt that this was just backside covering by a lawyerly and judicial caste that did not want to admit its own errors and role in putting an innocent man in jail for seven or so years. Team Ellis never really gave up. There were petitions to the NZ parliament in 2003, 2008 and 2014. All were unsuccessful.

And then in 2019, basically twenty years after Peter Ellis left prison, the New Zealand Supreme Court finally agreed to take another look at Elliss conviction. By then Ellis had terminal cancer. He died before his appeal could be heard. Ill come back to why in a moment, but the judges allowed his appeal to proceed and last week he was retrospectively cleared. All charges against him were overturned. In a War and Peace-length judgment the NZ Supreme Court unanimously quashed all of the charges because much of the evidence put before the original jury had been contaminated, misleading and incorrect. This had been a significant miscarriage of justice.

Better late than never, I suppose, though this is cold comfort to Peter Ellis who died a guilty man. Maybe he has close family still alive for whom this provides some measure of comfort. Thats the best we can hope for. My view back then was the same as it was with the Cardinal Pell case. It is not just that the Crowns evidence fell short of overcoming the reasonable doubt burden of proof. No, the evidence made it plain that the person charged was patently innocent. Thats what I thought with Pell. Thats what I thought many years ago with Ellis.

Thats the good news. And in a sense we take our wins any way they come. But speaking for myself, I strongly dislike the way the New Zealand court last week went about clearing the name of the late Peter Ellis. You see when Ellis died the court had plenty of room to continue hearing the case under the courts current rules. Instead, the top Kiwi judges called in aid some traditional Maori notion known as tikanga. In fact, the judges during argument suggested Elliss lawyers argue for the continuance on this basis of tikanga which, I think, is a traditional Maori notion that your mana or reputation lives after you. And they have used this Ellis case to inject this Maori notion into the law, to make a big change to the common law. And they did it by usurping the role of democratic politics (since the government had been looking into making this change itself). This is stunning judicial activism. Where are the constraints on them?

Put more bluntly, New Zealand has already travelled far down the path of woke political correctness and race-based politics. I was recently over there and most signs are now in Maori first. The worlds first language of English is subordinated to one spoken by a miniscule number of speakers. Schools are putting Maori foundation myths on the same plane as science. For some time now weve known that judges are some of the biggest agents of this change. This case makes that point on steroids. Consider this: Already NZ race-based activists are saying the top court in Ellis has recognised tikanga (and no, dont ask me for a definition) as being the first law of Aotearoa. Thats what virtually all of the wokesters over there now call New Zealand, if youre interested. And if youre looking for some of the most virtue-signalling wokesters on earth, look no further than the lawyerly caste from which todays judges are chosen. If you doubt me wander into one of the big downtown Sydney law firms, chosen pronouns prominently displayed somewhere.

So the Ellis case was the best of times. And the worst of times. The epoch of belief. And of incredulity. The season of light. And of darkness. That Dickens fellow sure had a way with words.

Here is the original post:

Best of times, worst of times - The Spectator Australia

Actor Rekha is no stranger to body-shaming, after being judged for her looks when she was starting out in the industry as a child star. And perhaps that is why she suggested that young female actors should work extra hard on looking beautiful. In a 1985 interview with Simi Garewal, Rekha said that beauty is both internal and external, but in the same breath said that being fat is ugly.

A snippet of the interview found its way on Reddit, where it fuelled a debate among viewers. Some of them argued that the comment was made when people werent concerned about political correctness, and others seemed to disagree with what Rekha had said. Many also pointed out that she herself had experienced such judgement, and shouldve been more careful about her words.

Simi Garewal asked her about her metamorphosis into a new, sleek, confident Rekha, and how she had accomplished this transformation in her appearance, and if it is possible for other women to do so as well. Rekha said, Appearance? Why only appearance? They can achieve just about anything they want. I think it should be both ways inside and outside.

Asked if she had any advice for young women who might look up to her, Rekha said, To be beautiful. To be a complete beautiful woman, you have to be physically fit. If you can manage to be slim, fine. Definitely not fat. Fat is ugly.

People in the comments section weighed in on the matter. This was during a different time. People werent politically correct nor did they care about it. Most people still have the same mindset even now, they just dont say these things openly, one person wrote. Rekha herself was fatshamed and called fst dark and ugly initially, another person commented. A third person wrote, Its the standard she was held to, so thats how her mindset was. It might not be right, but its difficult to expect healthy opinions about body image from celebrities since they usually struggle with it themselves due to extreme scrutiny of their bodies. But it would be shocking to hear a celebrity say that now, since they have to be more socially aware for their own brand and reputation. No doubt a lot of people still feel this way today though.

Regarded as one of her generations most graceful stars, and someone who is still admired for their looks today, Rekha last appeared in a starring role in 2014s Super Nani.

See the article here:

When Rekha's beauty advice for young women was to be 'physically fit and definitely not fat': 'Fat is ugly' - The Indian Express

The DoctorDuke of Yorks Theatre, London, until December 11

Juliet Stevenson had to wait all of two and a half years to see The Doctor a play that the great actress clearly believes in passionately make its West End transfer from the Almeida Theatre in north London. Such is the backlog in theatreland that the pandemic has created, but it was worth the wait.

This is a clever, knowing play by Robert Icke very freely adapted from Arthur Schnitzlers Professor Bernhardi that touches on medical and religious ethics, the horror of social media and the media in general, political correctness and how very easy it is these days for even the most reasonable of individuals to find themselves becoming overnight enemies of the people.

Stevenson is on spellbinding form in the title role as a stressed-out medic who turns away a Catholic priest who asks to see a dying girl, and has to spend the rest of her life accounting for that single decision.

Its interesting how at the Almeida everyone got Ickes little joke about black people playing white people, white people playing black people and men playing women, but to the Americans next to me it was perplexing.

My only real gripes are the musical accompaniment which, after a while,sounds very much like a smoke alarm in the background.

I am just not sure, too, if any play should run for almost three hours. That was just about bearable when it had its first run in the much more comfortable Almeida, but in the cramped old Duke of Yorks the final 45 minutes were something of an endurance test.

Read more:

Theatre Review: You should see The Doctor now - The New European

IN JUNE, Lund Humphries published Andreas Huyssens Memory Art in the Contemporary World: Confronting Violence in the Global South as part of their New Directions in Contemporary Art series. Building on two decades of work related to the oeuvres of artists such as Doris Salcedo, Guillermo Kuitca, William Kentridge, Nalini Malani, and Vivan Sundaram, Memory Art in the Contemporary World is also, in part, a summa of Huyssens career-spanning engagement with the way the processes of historical consciousness and globalization impact one another. As one of the founding editors ofNew German Critique and emeritus professor and founding director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University, Huyssen has kept his research rooted in the question of how critical theory can help us understand current cultural and political phenomena.

In this conversation, we discuss the contribution contemporary art criticism can make to antiauthoritarian discourses, and the way it illuminates transnational solidarities in the face of state atrocities and accelerating neofascisms.

ANDREAS HUYSSEN: Having been born in 1942, I was a member of the first postWorld War II generation in Germany, and memory and forgetting have been central to my published work since the 1970s. The rise of memory studies since the 1980s led me to observe and write about traveling Holocaust tropes and trauma narratives in Latin America after the end of the dictatorships in Argentina and Chile, in postapartheid South Africa, and in contemporary India. Doris Salcedo read some of my work on Holocaust memory and sought me out. So did Nalini Malani and Vivan Sundaram, both of whom I first met at a conference in Mumbai in the late 1990s. Guillermo Kuitca and I met in Argentina during those same years. I was deeply touched by William Kentridges film Felix in Exile when I viewed it at documenta X in Kassel in 1997 and then met him in Johannesburg during the second Joburg Biennale later that year. Slowly, my interest in the role of Holocaust memory in other traumatic histories gave way to the issue of transnational comparison across the Global South as I became aware of the growing networks of truth and reconciliation commissions, memory museums, and commemorative projects around the world and what Michael Rothberg later called multidirectional memory.

Considering current controversies in Germany regarding the comparability of the Holocaust with colonialism, did you face any methodological or ideological challenges in contextualizing the Holocaust in relation to disparate international events?

Asking questions about the comparability of the Holocaust with other historical traumas was never an issue for me. The historical specificity of the Holocaust is not inevitably diminished, as some would claim, by comparison, nor by the use of Holocaust images, tropes, and narrative elements in other cases of state violence, terror, and genocide. On the contrary, I see a clear benefit in the ways that atrocities in the Global South can be made to resonate nationally and internationally by comparison with Nazi racial genocide. Comparison, after all, includes both similarities and differences. Thus, for instance, the Argentine military dictatorship [197683] was deeply influenced by Nazi thought and language, but the target of its terror was the political left rather than a racial or ethnic minority. And yet, the title of the official report on the Argentine state terror was Nunca Ms Never Again, a Holocaust trope if there ever was one. It is equation that should be taboo, not comparison.

You articulate the way in which state violence in the Global South has often been enabled by Western support of autocratic regimes and their embrace of neoliberalism. As you remind us, the designation Global South is not meant in the strict geographic sense. It rather refers to a history and a condition of entanglement with the North under the rubric of globalization. How does this history and condition of entanglement also implicate the positioning of these works in the global art market and Western centers of capital?

Of course, the work of these artists has become quite successful and influential over time. They were barely known internationally in the 1990s when I first encountered their work and began to write about it. Clearly, their work challenged me to think beyond German history, especially in their frequent use of Holocaust tropes and images. Their international stature today benefits from transnational memory debates and the privileging of remembrance, rights, and social justice in the culture at large. It has thus gained in market value, but it is definitely not market-driven.

Much could be said about the ways these memory artists critically negotiate commodification and the bank-asset value of art. Many of their works refuse the individual collector or make the work of the curator exceedingly difficult, not only in the limited temporality of some of the installations. At the same time, the works do not transcend the ties to the market, to galleries, museums, and cultural institutions. This is a small price to pay as their success garners remembrance and nurtures public mourning at a time when memory revisionists everywhere are abusing memorialization for openly nationalist and racist purposes.

Andreas Huyssen.

Your point about the current proliferation of neofascist and racist memory revisionists is key for me. I was struck by a passage in your book in which you describe the fraught context of national and transnational struggles for human rights in the face of a rising tide of 21st-century fascisms facilitated by finance capitalisms neo-liberal policies of dispossession and its ruinous effects on social cohesion. How do these examples of contemporary art from the Global South differ or diverge from authoritarian memory revision on the level of strategy, form, or tactic (since obviously the content and aim of memory art and reactionary memory revision are opposed)?

Reactionary memory revisionists across the world create nostalgic phantasms of nationalist pasts that deny historical realities of conflictual relations of class, race, ethnicity, religion, and gender. A falsely harmonized (often white-supremacist) past confronts a decadent and corrupt present that deserves to be destroyed: for example, MAGA and drain the swamp. This strategy pursues a neofascist power politics. Memory cultures focus on victims of past injustice, racial violence, and trauma is adopted by the rights claim of being itself victimized by the left, by political correctness, wokeness, and the oppression of free speech. It is a kind of reverse victimization that works by a tactic of mirroring and projection.

It seems clear that the recent rise of memory revisionism is a reaction formation to the strengths of progressive memory discourse. National memory battles have become ever more ferocious, not just in the United States, where the 1619 Project or the battle over preserving or dismantling Confederate monuments challenges the underlying self-understanding of US democracy and its history. Make no mistake whats at stake is not the past but the future.

Is there a concrete way in which memory art can resist or counter reactionary memory revision?

The memory art I discuss in my book never posits some unitary notion of national memory as a safe place to return to or to draw inspiration from. Neither does it believe in the cult of the infallible witness. It avoids the direct message of political art devoted to a specific cause. Its politics is found in the ways the forms and media of art acknowledge and actually reproduce the structural vicissitudes of all memory: its ellipses, its inevitable erasures and gaps, its sudden eruptions and traumatic repetitions. While always tied to national histories of violence, it operates in a transnational sense of cultural and political solidarity that has emerged in the context of the tenuous international human rights movement of recent decades. This art translates the difficulties of grasping a haunting past without voyeurism, victimology, or facile compassion; it acknowledges the embattled structure of social memory in its very forms while leaving no doubt about who bears responsibility for past and present violence. It advocates affective response and political accountability for historical trajectories gone wrong.

Even while you emphasize the interconnectivity and interdependence of national contexts and cultural phenomena, you also discuss the importance of aesthetic autonomy. Writers such as Andr Breton formerly debated the possibility of politicized art retaining its independence from the utilitarianism of propaganda (in the 1930s, for instance). Why is this issue relevant today?

The idea of aesthetic autonomy is indeed central to my approach. It is simply meant to reassert the affective and cognitive power of artworks at a time when relational aesthetics have abandoned any idea of autonomy in favor of a celebration of the viewers participation or immersion. Autonomy is no longer the kind of ideologized autonomy of art as a complete separation of the realm of art from social and political reality that notion of autonomy Walter Benjamin had dismantled so efficiently in his essay on the mechanical reproducibility of art. It is rather an aesthetic autonomy localized in the active and activating relationship between the sensuous organization of the work and its viewers always historically mediated aesthetic experience.

Without adopting Adornos notion of the autonomous work as closed monad, I reread his statement that the work is both autonomous and social fact as articulating the dialectic of the works form and the historically located aesthetic experience of the recipient. Such a rereading clearly departs from Adornos view that social fact only refers to the genealogy of the work itself, its location in a historical trajectory of artistic forms and genres. For me, the notion of social fact includes the additional dimension of an always historically specific reception. Production of the work and its aesthetic experience must be thought together.

Of course, talk about arts autonomy is still taboo for many. I do think, however, that the radical postmodern attacks on notions of aesthetic autonomy as purely ideological no longer serve a political or even cognitive purpose at a time when the politics of art is on everybodys mind. In this situation, it is important, I think, to insist again on arts formal autonomy against an understanding of the political in art as simply a reflection of the artists identity or the causes they espouse. More importantly, it allows us to distinguish between works of formal complexity requiring affective contemplation and message-oriented agitprop art, which aims at direct action and intervention. In the field of memory art, both are valid, yet different, acts of memory.

In terms of rejecting the notion of the work of art as a reflection of the artists identity, you refuse a monographic approach the paradigm so favored by academic art historians. A comparative schema allows you to avoid the monumentalization of any one artists biography or legacy, which in itself suggests a critical orientation toward the tendencies of the art market.

As you know, I am not an art historian. I take comparison as investigative strategy from my primary field of comparative literature comparison, that is, not as establishing hierarchies of value and power relations, but rather as close reading of aesthetic and material practices embedded in a larger history, which is always more than simply context. We act in history and history acts upon us. This dialectic energizes my approach.

For instance, differing cognitive and affective uses of minimalist sculpture emerge in the comparison between Salcedo and Sundaram. The very comparability of their works, however, is grounded not just in their transformative postcolonial appropriation of Western minimalism but also in their political urge and commitment to work through their respective national histories of violence the ongoing Colombian civil war and the ethnic-religious violence of the Indian partition and its aftereffects today. What emerges is not some global memory art, but highly differentiated aesthetic and political practices that speak to each other across national and geographic boundaries.

Andreas Huyssen with Doris Salcedo in October 2017.

I have no illusions about these works impact on specific human rights struggles and political culture at large in their countries, whether India or Colombia, Argentina or South Africa. I simply want to assert the affective and cognitive power of memory art to create a semblance of human solidarity between cultures that remain largely distant to each other, to open up horizons of human history and commonality that befit our living together on this planet: comparison as a challenge to the imagination, nurturing transnational connectivities and learning about each other.

How does this question of aesthetic autonomy within the realm of politically activating art affect your focus on the medium of installation?

Installations expand on traditional forms like sculpture, painting, or drawing, incorporating them into a larger whole using technical support systems like film, video, slide projection, animation, and assembly of objects. Installation as medium and form goes back to the legacies of modernism and the historical avant-garde, but only in recent decades did it become the polyphonic mode of art production that it is today. As open form, the installation represents the latest stage of what Adorno first described in the late 1960s as the fraying of the arts. It radicalizes boundary crossings not just between aesthetic media but between national traditions, in such a way that spaces for new encounters and experiences are opened up across the world.

The memory art that has emerged in such installations in the Global South is not captured by the notion of hybridity or of being in-between cultures, nor does it represent some global flow. Instead, it creates palimpsests articulating entanglements, translations, and appropriations from Western and non-Western image and text traditions alike. Installation sets viewers in motion as active participants, challenging the ways they look at things. Grounded in a specific place and time, installation projects a potential transnational solidarity through the power of its aesthetic strategies. Such creative translations confront heterogeneous audiences with the limits of their understanding and challenge us to rethink and reimagine our place in the larger world.

Imaginative boundary-crossing remains vital in a world in which national borders and separating walls have reemerged with a vengeance in the struggle against the false promises of globalization. It is through this art that national memories can be remade and repositioned, beyond the respective national case; viewers are captivated and introduced to other frames of memory, to other histories, other lives. Whether powerful agent in the world or merely message in a bottle, this kind of memory art keeps open a horizon that one could call utopian.

See more here:

The Utopian Horizon of Memory Art: A Conversation with Andreas Huyssen - lareviewofbooks