Christian nationalism is 'a political identity more than a religious one': expert

Christian fundamentalists in 2008 (Creative Commons)
John StoehrNovember 21, 2023


There exists in this country a small community of people who grew up with religious authoritarians, but no longer lives among them. As a consequence of having grown up with them, this small community knows something that the rest of the country doesn’t know – that religious authoritarians may sound like kooks, but they’re extremely dangerous.

This small community knows the kookiness is the point. If religious authoritarians can make people, especially young people, believe anything, they can control them, not just their choices, but the way they think. If they think the choice is between individual identity and group identity, they will gladly surrender their individualidentity.



This is why the small community I’m talking about no longer lives among religious authoritarians. They can’t, not without experiencing psychic death. They understand the subtle dangers of living among people who believe that everyone in the group must think and act and speak the same way, and that a difference of opinion is betrayal.

This small community I’m talking about, because they have such intimate knowledge of religious authoritarians, knows something else that the rest of the country does not know. They know the unique horror of witnessing “normal people,” which is to say, people who did not grow up among religious authoritarians, laughing at the religious authoritarians and all the unbelievably kooky things that they say.

This unique horror is not a consequence of religious insult. The small community I’m talking about started doubting everything they were taught as children a long time ago. This unique horror is a consequence of knowing what the rest of the country doesn’t know – that the kookiness is the tool by which religious authoritarians exert control. That’s not something to laugh at, then dismiss as inconsequential.

And yet that’s what the rest of the country seems to be doing when religious authoritarians, such as Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, say things that are stupendously kooky. “Normal people,” which is to say, people who did not grow up among religious authoritarians, seem to think that Johnson and his comrades can’t possibly believe what they say, so what they say can be dismissed as partisan politics.

The question, for those of us who are part of the small community I’m talking about, isn’t about the dangers posed by religious
authoritarians. We already understand them. Rather, the question is about getting “normal people,” who can’t possibly understand the trauma of trying and failing to live among people who demand psychic death as the price of membership into the group, to understand the danger.

I posed that question to Matthew Sheffield. He seems to be a fellow member of the small community I’m talking about. He’s also an outcast of the rightwing media apparatus that labors to hide the dangers of religious authoritarianism. He’s now committed to pluralistic democracy, he said, as the founder of the Flux Media Network.

“The beliefs of Mike Johnson and his fellow extremist Christians are so idiotic that the natural reaction for many non-religious people is to point and laugh – not realizing that evil is usually also ridiculous.”

JS: You said: "Many people who are secular or non-fundamentalist theists don't pay attention to the disturbing worldview of people like new Speaker of the House Mike Johnson." Can you explain please?

MS: Christian fundamentalism has been a minority opinion in the United States since Biblical literalism became a movement in the early 20th century, inspired by the work of people like John Nelson Darby.

In the south, this theology was explicitly intertwined with the "Lost Cause" myth about the Confederacy's defeat in the Civil War into a regional form of Christian nationalism that began spreading into other regions at the expense of mainline and progressive Protestantism.

The eventual religious identity politics that emerged, Confederate Christianity, is not popular. Its doctrines are obscure and often devolve into picayune debates about Bible verses that most people don’t know.

The southern flavor of its sermonizing and its explicit anti-intellectualism make Confederate Christianity distasteful. A vast majority would rather have their teeth pulled than listen to obvious scammers like evangelical preacher Kenneth Copeland.

Despite its comparative obscurity, only 10 percent of Americans are committed Christian nationalists, because it is a political identity more than a religious one. Confederate Christianity punches far above its weight thanks to hundreds of national and regional groups who motivate fundamentalist citizens to vote.

Most journalists have only been trained to be interested in the activities of prominent elected officials, so more obscure figures like Mike Johnson have long managed to evade their scrutiny.

At the local level, far-right Christians often mask their rhetoric in secular language, so they are often able to pull off things like
taking over school boards without others noticing.

JS: It seems to me that the problem of explaining the dangers is sheer disbelief. How do communicators like you address that problem?

MS: The beliefs of Mike Johnson and his fellow extremist Christians are so idiotic that the natural reaction for many non-religious people is to point and laugh – not realizing that evil is usually also ridiculous.

For those who are Christian but not fundamentalist, a common reaction is to simply roll their eyes.

I get where they're coming from.

Johnson believes that Noah's ark was real and that humans lived with dinosaurs. These are asinine superstitions. But he also believes homosexuality is a Satan-inspired choice that should be illegal and that birth control should be criminalized. Voltaire's aphorism that believing in absurdities leads one to justify atrocities is absolutely true.

The vicious ignorance of Johnson and his fellow Confederate Christians presents a real conundrum for those of us who are committed to pluralistic democracy. People seem to have an easier time recognizing screaming dictator-wannabes like Donald Trump for what they are than they do with folksy authoritarians.

That realization is why I decided to launch a comedy news discussion podcast called "Doomscroll" with my friend Lisa Curry.

Ridiculing the stupid beliefs of the Christian right is an important thing to do because there are a lot of smart people who were born and raised as fundamentalists who innately know that the beliefs are false and contradictory. But the humorous jabs must always carry the larger truth that these ideas are not only foolish, they are dangerous.

JS: On the funding of truly liberal media, you said there's no shortage of money. It's just spent in ways different from rightwing
media.

MS: As my friend Anne Nelson has documented in her book, Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right, there is a lot of money out there for center-to-left activists and causes. Unfortunately, much of this money is not spent with an eye toward public advocacy. From the very beginning of their movement, reactionary elites realized that they were a small minority but that it didn't matter because they could use voter suppression and advocacy media to suppress their opponents' voters and whip up their own.

The other crucial advantage of funding advocacy media is that these investments are more durable and can eventually become
self-sustaining, as Fox, talk radio, and far-right podcasts have become.

There are tens of millions of people who want to hear a progressive message in the media, but Democratic donors seem to prefer wasting their money on advertising that's ineffective and short-lived.

This needs to change, especially since rightwing propaganda is beginning to fill in the gaps in local media left by the decay of
traditional media outlets. Those who control the information will control the age. People who believe in liberal values need to fund
them.

JS: You have explored "how American evangelicalism is collapsing on itself." That's a bold statement that I have to hear more about.

MS: People often perceive religion and science to be in conflict, but up until the last 100 years or so, they were the same thing. The
Bible, Quran, Vedas and other ancient scriptures were not just theological sources. They were also scientific explanations for how
things came to be and how they work. But once the disciplines of science, history and linguistics emerged, it soon became evident to educated people that these books were about as accurate as Homer's Iliad.

Unfortunately, while the academic world came to accept evolution, the pagan origins of Judaism, and a host of other discoveries, this knowledge did not filter down to religious fundamentalists. The central problem of our age is that religious fundamentalism has been utterly humiliated in the intellectual realm and that its adherents (of any faith) are only now realizing it – to their great
consternation.

JS: You said: "Hope is the belief that we're capable of something better and the determined desire to make it so." Can you go into that more?

MS: The continuously successful efforts of pro-choice advocates to protect abortion rights through ballot initiatives demonstrates that people like us are the majority, but we must use this power to usher Confederate Christianity into the dust-bin of history.

Public opinion surveys show that people born after around 1975 are dramatically less likely to believe in scriptural literalism, and that each successive generation of Americans is more supportive of racial justice, bodily autonomy and sound reasoning.

The reactionaries who took over the GOP have been aware of this. The minoritarian strategy that they were able to effect for several decades was predicated on manipulating people through religion, sexism or racism into supporting their corrupt and authoritarian candidates.

As I discussed recently on my other podcast, "So This Just Happened," the Christian right knows that its time is coming to an end.

Far-right former Senator Rick Santorum spoke for many of his compatriots this past Election Day when he lamented that it was a
"secret sauce for disaster" that young Americans are interested in supporting abortion access and decriminalization of marijuana.

It's important to celebrate victories like we experienced in 2023, but the arc of history will only bend if we make it. Demographics are not destiny. The future belongs to those who can achieve it.

Small-town America’s never-ending struggle to maintain its values hasn’t always been good for democracy

Photo by Monica Bourgeau on Unsplash

The Conversation

November 24, 2023

For better and worse, the Maury County Courthouse in Columbia, Tennessee, has come to represent the overlooked cultural divisions between urban and small-town America.

The courthouse was the site of the lynching of a Black teenager in 1927. It also served as a rallying spot for white vigilantes who assembled there during race riots in 1946.

It is now the focus of a modern-day controversy that emerged shortly after popular country singer Jason Aldean released his music video in July 2023 for his hit single “Try That in a Small Town.”

The courthouse was used as a backdrop with an American flag in that video. Though no mention of race occurs in the song, the racial overtones are there, as the lyrics boldly smack of modern-day, big-city crime against old-fashioned, small-city values:
Sucker punch somebody on a sidewalk/ Carjack an old lady at a red light/ Pull a gun on the owner of a liquor store/
Well, try that in a small town/ See how far ya make it down the road/ Around here, we take care of our own/ You cross that line, it won’t take long/ For you to find out.

Within days of its release, Country Music Television stopped airing the music video after critics argued that is was “pro-lynching” and could incite violence.

Aldean denied using coded racist language in his song or blowing any racial dog whistles – and Republican politicians were quick to defend him. For one, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders accused Democrats of being “more concerned about @Jason_Aldean’s song calling out looters and criminals than they are about stopping looters and criminals.”

But in my view as a scholar who has studied the struggles to define American identity, the controversy over hidden agendas has diverted attention from Aldean’s overt message: that cities are turning the nation into a “shit show,” as Aldean sees it, and the remedy is a revival of small-town America.


A headline in the local newspaper details the number of arrests during the Columbia race riots of 1946.
Blackpast.org


But Aldean’s effort isn’t innocent nostalgia.

It echoes a similar period in American history during the 1920s and 1930s when the grievances of small-town America had dangerous consequences for democracy.
Master-race democracy

Before the Civil War, Southern states established what historians like George M. Fredrickson called a “herrenvolk,” or master race democracy that reserved citizenship and its benefits for one racial group at the expense of all others.


But after the war, passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments extended civil and political rights to newly freed African Americans. Known as the Reconstruction amendments, the new laws were a reversal of the Southern social order and enabled Black freedmen to hold public office, while banning white officers of the old Confederacy from federal office.

The new reality sparked a resurgence of white supremacy and racial violence against Black people by Southern whites, who feared being replaced by what they considered to be an inferior race.

One of the most influential expressions of this replacement anxiety was found in the 1916 book “The Passing of the Great Race,” a pseudo-scientific work by amateur anthropologist Madison Grant warning readers that a flood of inferior races – not only from Africa and Asia, but from eastern and southern Europe – was sweeping away the Anglo-Saxon civilization.

The remedy, Grant argued, was to get rid of democracy and disempower Black people and the teeming masses of urban immigrants as well.

By the 1920s, white Southern lawmakers had fashioned a new version of master race democracy and enacted Jim Crow laws that established racial segregation across the South and disenfranchised Black voters.



A 1919 map showing the concentration of disenfranchised Black people in southern US states.
The Crisis



Vigilante violence, which surged in the 1920s, helped maintain this regime. In February 1927, Walter Lippmann, who some regard as the father of American journalism, called it “American village civilization.”

Later that year, on Nov. 13, Henry Choate, an 18-year-old Black man, was accused of assaulting Sarah Harlan, a white 16-year-old girl. Though she could not identify him, Choate was jailed, and a mob of hundreds of white people kidnapped him from his cell.

Choate was then tied to the back of a car and dragged across town, and eventually hanged in front of the Maury County Courthouse.

At least 20 other Black men were lynched in Maury County alone, and more than 230 Black people across Tennessee between 1877 and 1950, according to the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit, social justice organization.
Armed resistance and racist attacks

Along with lynchings, white supremacists had another way to suppress attempts by Black citizens to exercise their full rights: large-scale attacks by white law enforcement officials on Black neighborhoods.

One such attack occurred on the night of Feb. 25, 1946, near the Maury County Courthouse.

A fight between a 19-year-old Black U.S. Navy veteran and a white radio repairman eventually led to an armed standoff between police and the 3,000 Black citizens who lived in a racially segregated section of the town known as the Mink Slide district.

When four local police tried to enter the neighborhood, Black men determined to prevent another lynching fired their weapons at the white officers, leaving all of them wounded.


Police searching Black men during the riots in Columbia, Tenn., on Feb. 27, 1946.
Fox Photos/Getty Images

It didn’t take long before local police called in several dozen state police to help subdue the unrest. Armed with machine guns, white police officers shot out the windows of shops, arrested 62 Black people and charged 12 of them with the shootings of the local police officers.

“The Mink Slide area,” the local paper reported, “was cleared out.”

To add further humiliation to residents of the thriving Black community, the commander of the state police then rode through the neighborhood the next morning in an open car broadcasting through a loudspeaker, “Let me see you smile. Come on, smile.”

The next day, hundreds of deputized white men systematically searched Black homes and businesses, breaking things, looting and confiscating 300 weapons.

The most notorious of these large-scale attacks was the Elaine Massacre of 1919 in Arkansas. As the NAACP’s Walter White reported, hundreds of Black farmers, some of them military veterans, decided to form a labor union to escape Jim Crow’s peonage system of sharecropping.

Organizing workers might fly in the city, but not in rural Arkansas.

On Sept. 30, the farmers met in a church outside Elaine to discuss strategy and had armed guards stationed outside. A sheriff’s deputy and other white men confronted the Black men standing guard. The ensuing fight escalated until white vigilantes roamed the farmland, ransacking houses, confiscating arms and killing Black men, women and children on the slightest pretext.

Arkansas Gov. Charles H. Brough called the War Department for help. About 600 federal troops were sent to the area, and once there, they used machine guns to spray the the fields and woods. When the gun smoke cleared, at least 200 Black people were dead, and the only people held to account were a dozen Black men convicted of murder and sentenced to death.
Small-town nationalism

Aldean’s song paints a picture of a renewed culture war between urban and rural versions of America.


Jason Aldean performs onstage in Wisconsin on July 22, 2023.
Joshua Applegate/Getty Images

In my view, Aldean’s song expresses a deep sense of grievance among some white Americans and a suspicion that urban America is scornful and even hostile to the rural way of life.

In a recent concert, while addressing accusations of racism, Aldean said he only wants to “restore” the nation to “what it once was before all this bullshit started happening to us.”

But his lyrics remain unnerving:
Got a gun that my granddad gave me/ They say one day they’re gonna round up.

Joseph Patrick Kelly, Professor of Literature and Director of Irish and Irish American Studies, College of Charleston

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

One privileged white dude's awakening to fascism's racist and misogynist subtext

Jeremy Sherman

November 18, 2023

It's the patriarchy, stupid.

I'm not a fan of kitchen sink political strategy. Just throwing every issue out unprioritized dilutes us. It feeds the right’s caricature of us as chicken littles running round with our heads cut off, bleeding hearts leaking out every which way

I recognize that life is inherently unfair and that making any little part of it fair takes effort we each have in limited supply. I don't want us whipsawed from one unfairness to the next. We have to fight smart which means prioritizing – triage, focusing on what we can improve. Like triage nurses, we don’t want to waste effort trying to improve what can’t be improved even though it should be, nor wasting effort trying to improve what will improve on its own. Triage is guesswork. I have my guesses.

I've worried that gay and abortion rights might be killing our chances of addressing global priorities like the climate crisis. Though it’s heretical I’d be for surrendering on abortion rights if doing so takes the steam out of the right. I’ve worried about fighting the right-wing coup while fighting for a black or woman president. It could be like fighting the ultimate battle with one hand off doing something else.

Reading a recent book "How Fascism Works," by Jason Stanley, I now see how gay, racial and women's reproductive rights are always priority subtext

Fascism is borne of the have’s (by historical accident, us white male’s) natural progression from privilege to cozy detachment to annoyance with all obstacles to rationalized annoyance to delusional self-assertion as the chosen people, eternally entitled.

It’s a natural progression, just what you’d expect from an organism with language. What do you get when you cross emotions with language? You get language that rationalizes emotions. The haves justifying their having as though it were the natural order of things is just what you’d expect.

Fascism is the militant reassertion of paternalistic authority, a pecker-based pecking order with the fascist leader as the supreme father figure. Trump cult fascism fits Stanley’s diagnosis perfectly. No wonder it marginalizes civil rights for women, gays and minorities, all of which are at cross purposes to fascism’s goal: To rewrite history, making the white male great again by subordinating all to the father figure. It's the bible but not just – both secular or religious fascism are all about misogyny and xenophobia.

That diversity is a front-burner subtext doesn't compel me to drop strategic prioritizing. It's not like we have the power to bludgeon the backward right into accepting our diversity standards just because they’re urgent. I'm still no fan of “backfiring firebrands,” leftist radicals who set us back by pushing too hard too fast without attention to what's politically, even humanly possible.

Still, recognizing fascism as a militant absolutist reassertion of eternal god-ordained white male superiority gives me new context and appreciation for the front-burner subtext. The fascist’s fierce and fearful opposition to women, gays and minorities is part of a larger plan: to make us all the supplicating subordinates not to big brother but big daddy, the boorish, profligate, monster-man who thinks he can do no wrong and therefore does lots of it.

Economist Paul Krugman details how Republicans are still waging war on Social Security

Economist Paul Krugman with President Joe Biden on August 14, 2023 

(Creative Commons)

Alex Henderson

November 28, 2023

Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley's hardcore supporters have been touting her as the 2024 GOP presidential hopeful who would be the most difficult for President Joe Biden to beat in the general election. Poll after poll is showing former President Donald Trump as the Republican primary's clear frontrunner, but polls are also showing that Haley would be a tougher opponent for Biden.

But in a biting New York Times column published on November 27, liberal economist Paul Krugman emphasizes that Haley is campaigning on something unpopular: attacking Social Security.

"Anyone hoping that (Haley) would govern as a moderate if she should somehow make it to the White House is surely delusional," Krugman warns. "Haley has never really shown a willingness to stand up to Republican extremists — and at this point, the whole GOP has been taken over by extremists."

Haley, Krugman observes, "seems exceptionally explicit…. in calling for an increase in the age at which Americans become eligible for Social Security" — which the economist/columnist slams as "a bad idea that seems to be experiencing a revival" on the right.

Krugman goes on to point out that the right exaggerates Social Security's challenges.

"The first thing you should know about Social Security is that the actual numbers don't justify the apocalyptic rhetoric one often hears not just from the right, but from self-proclaimed centrists who want to sound serious," Krugman explains. "No, the exhaustion of the system's trust fund, currently projected to occur in roughly a decade, wouldn't mean that benefits disappear. It would mean that the system would need additional revenue to continue paying scheduled benefits in full."

Krugman argues that any Republican who, like Haley, wants to raise the Social Security age "is being oblivious, perhaps willfully, to the grim inequality of modern America" — as the poor are more likely to die younger.

READ MORE: 'Not just wrong but dangerous': How social media is warping Americans' view of the economy

"Less affluent Americans — those who depend most on Social Security — have seen little rise in life expectancy, and in some cases actual declines," Krugman observes. "So anyone invoking rising life expectancy as a reason to delay Social Security benefits is, in effect, saying that aging janitors must keep working — or be cast into extreme poverty — because bankers are living longer."

Bernie Sanders: America must 'revitalize democracy' — or suffer 'Trumpian, authoritarian-type change'

Sen. Bernie Sanders in the White House with President Joe Biden in August 2023 (Creative Commons)

Alex Henderson

November 30, 2023

When President Joe Biden announced that he was seeking reelection, it didn't take Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) long to give him an enthusiastic endorsement.

Biden and Sanders have plenty of political differences. The 81-year-president is a centrist, while the 82-year-old Sanders is a self-described "democratic socialist" — and they had some heated debates during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary.

But Sanders has made it clear that he won't be running for president in 2024 and that he considers Biden, disagreements and all, a much better option than GOP frontrunner Donald Trump.

In an op-ed/think piece published by The Guardian on November 30, Sanders emphasizes that the United States is facing a long list of "enormous" challenges and is at a crossroads. And it can respond to them by either "revitalizing American democracy" or taking a dark "Trumpian" turn.

Sanders never mentions Biden or his reelection campaign in his op-ed. Instead, the veteran U.S. senator identifies some of the many "challenges" the U.S. is facing — health care, education, climate change, income inequality, growing authoritarianism — and stresses that the U.S. can respond to them in either a positive or negative way.

"Donald Trump, who is becoming more right-wing and extremist every day, is leading many of the presidential polls," Sanders warns. "In a recent speech, using language that echoes Adolf Hitler, Trump stated: 'We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.' He also had strong praise for Hungary’s authoritarian leader, Viktor Orbán."

Sanders continues, "In an interview, Trump said migrants were 'poisoning the blood of our country,' promising in another speech that he would round up undocumented people on a vast scale, detain them in sprawling camps, and deport millions of people per year."

The senator stresses that in light of all these challenges, "the American people today are angry."

"Change is coming," Sanders writes. "The question is: what kind of change will it be? Will it be a Trumpian, authoritarian-type change that exploits that anger and turns it against minorities and immigrants, blaming them for the crises we are experiencing? Or will it be a change that revitalizes American democracy, unites and empowers working people of all backgrounds and has the courage to take on a corrupt ruling class whose greed is causing irreparable destruction in our country and around the world?"

 

Change is coming. The question is: what kind of change will it be?

The challenges we face are enormous – economic, environmental, political. Our future is at stake, so let’s come together and win

Bernie Sanders

Thu 30 Nov 2023 

We are living in the most difficult moment in modern history. If you feel anxious and overwhelmed about what’s going on, you’re not alone. The extraordinarily challenges we face are very real, but we can never let them become excuses for checking out of the political struggles that address these crises and will define our future.

Our nation and, indeed our planet, are at a critical juncture. It is imperative that we recognize what we are up against, and what we must do to move our politics toward justice and human decency. And we can start by acknowledging that the American people have been through a lot, and that their confidence in politics and in government has been shaken.

‘The odds are against us’: Democrats in once-blue West Virginia survey loss

The Covid pandemic, the worst public health crisis in 100 years, took over a million lives in our country, and millions more became ill. The pandemic created the most painful economic downturn since the Great Depression, disrupted the education of our young people, increased isolation, anxiety and mental illness.

The climate crisis is ravaging the planet. The last eight years have been the hottest on record and floods, droughts, forest fires and extreme weather disturbances have brought death and destruction to almost every part of the globe. Scientists tell us that unless there is a major reduction in carbon emissions over the next several decades, the planet will become increasingly uninhabitable.

Amid unprecedented income and wealth inequality, with three people owning more wealth than the bottom half of American society, a handful of oligarchs control the economic and political life of our nation for their own greedy ends.

With a dysfunctional government, and growing economic anxiety for millions of Americans, 60% of whom live paycheck to paycheck, faith that our flawed democracy can respond to the needs of working families is ebbing, and more and more Americans believe that authoritarianism might be the best way forward.

Artificial intelligence is exploding. There are deep concerns not only that this new technology will displace millions of workers but about the real possibility that human beings could actually lose control over the future of society.

The US healthcare system is broken beyond repair. Despite spending twice as much per capita as any other country, 85 million are uninsured or underinsured, our life expectancy is declining and we have nowhere enough doctors, nurses, dentists or mental health practitioners.

Our educational system is in crisis. Childcare is too often unaffordable and unavailable, many of our public schools are unable to attract the quality teachers they need, and 45 million Americans struggle with student debt. In 1990, the US led the world in the percentage of 25- to 34-year-olds who had college degrees. Today, in a competitive global economy, we are in 15th place.

‘This is a moment in history that cannot be ignored. This is a struggle that cannot be sat out.’ 

Photograph: Carolyn Kaster/AP

And, oh yes, Donald Trump, who is becoming more rightwing and extremist every day, is leading many of the presidential polls. In a recent speech, using language that echoes Adolf Hitler, Trump stated: “We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” He also had strong praise for Hungary’s authoritarian leader, Viktor Orbán. In an interview, Trump said migrants were “poisoning the blood of our country”, promising in another speech that he would round up undocumented people on a vast scale, detain them in sprawling camps, and deport millions of people per year.

Frighteningly, the growth of rightwing extremism is not just growing in the United States.

As the Washington Post reports, “far-right parties have taken power in Italy, extended their rule in Hungary, earned a coalition role in Finland, become de facto government partners in Sweden, entered parliament in Greece and made striking gains in regional elections in Austria and Germany”. Within the past few weeks, a far-right candidate was elected president of Argentina and a rightwing extremist party won the most seats in the election in Holland.

That’s the bad news. The very bad news. But there’s also good news.

The good news is that all across the country workers and their unions are fighting back against corporate greed. We are seeing more union organizing and successful strikes than we have seen in decades. Whether it’s the Teamsters at UPS, the UAW at the big three automakers, the Screen Actors Guild (Sag) at the large media production companies, Starbucks workers, graduate students on college campuses, or nurses and doctors at hospitals, working people are making it clear that they are sick and tired of being ripped off and exploited. They are no longer sitting back and allowing large corporations to make record breaking profits while they fall further and further behind. They will no longer accept CEOs making nearly 350 times more than the average worker.

The good news is that more and more Americans are making the connections between the reality of their lives and the corrupt and destructive nature of our uber-capitalist system which prizes greed and profiteering above any other human value.

Whether they are Democrats, Republicans or independents, Americans want change – real change.

They are disgusted by a political system which allows the wealthiest people in this country, through their Super Pacs, to buy elections. They want structural campaign finance reform based on the principle of one person, one vote.

They are outraged by billionaires paying a lower effective tax rate than they do because of massive tax loopholes. They want real tax reform which demands that the wealthy and large corporations start paying their fair share of taxes.

They are frightened for the future of this planet when they see oil companies make record-breaking profits as the carbon emissions they produce destroy the planet.

They are offended to see ten giant pharmaceutical companies making over $110bn in profits last year, while they cannot afford the outrageous price of prescription drugs they need to stay alive.

They are shocked as they see Wall Street investment firms buy up affordable housing, gentrify neighborhoods, while they are unable afford to afford the outrageous rents being charged by their unaccountable Wall Street landlords.

They are humiliated by having to stay on the phone for an hour, arguing with an airline company machine about a plane reservation, while the industry makes huge profits.

The American people today are angry. They are anxious about their present reality and worried about the future that awaits their kids. They know that the status quo is not working and that, in many respects, the system in breaking down.

Change is coming. The question is: what kind of change will it be? Will it be a Trumpian, authoritarian type change that exploits that anger and turns it against minorities and immigrants, blaming them for the crises we are experiencing? Or will it be a change that revitalizes American democracy, unites and empowers working people of all backgrounds and has the courage to take on a corrupt ruling class whose greed is causing irreparable destruction in our country and around the world?

There is no question but that the challenges we face today are enormous – economic, political and environmental. There is no easy path forward when we take on the oligarchs and the most powerful entities in the world.

But, in the midst of all that, here is the simple truth. If we stand together in our common humanity – Black, white, Latino, Asian American, Native American, gay and straight, people of all religions, there are enormous opportunities in front of us to create a better life for all. We can guarantee healthcare to every man, woman and child as a human right. We can create millions of good paying jobs transforming our energy system. We can create the best educational system in the world. We can use artificial intelligence to shorten our work-week and improve our lives. We can create a society free of bigotry.

But here is the other simple truth. None of that happens if we are not prepared to stand up and fight together against the forces that work so hard to divide and conquer us. This is a moment in history that cannot be ignored. This is a struggle that cannot be sat out. The future of the planet is at stake, democracy is at stake, human decency is at stake.

Let’s go forward together and win.

Bernie Sanders is a US senator, and chairman of the Senate health, education, labor and pensions committee. He represents the state of Vermont, and is the longest-serving independent in the history of Congress

 

PRO PALESTINE ANCHOR FIRED
'Outrage' after MSNBC cancels 'vital voice' Mehdi Hasan

MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan, Image via MSNBC/Twitter/Screengrab

David Badashand
The New Civil Rights Movement

November 30, 2023

It’s being called a “revamp,” an “overhaul,” and a “shakeup,” but media critics, journalists, and journalism experts are expressing outrage at MSNBC for its decision to cancel the weekend show anchored by Mehdi Hasan, who many see as an important voice against authoritarianism and the far-right.

Calling Hasan an “outspoken opinion host,” and “a cult favorite online for his tough interview style and impassioned monologues,” Semafor‘s Max Tani reported MSNBC “privately announced” the cancellation of Hasan’s show Thursday morning. Hasan “will become an on-camera analyst and fill-in host. The network plans to expand host Ayman Mohyeldin’s weekend program to two hours to replace Hasan’s show.”

MSNBC is also moving Jonathan Capehart’s show to 6 PM on Saturdays and Sundays, and is cancelling Yasmin Vossoughian’s weekend show.

The cable network will launch a new weekend show, “The Weekend,” which Mediaite reports “is billed as a politics and Washington-focused program. It will be hosted from Washington D.C. by MSNBC anchors Alicia Menendez, Symone Sanders-Townsend and Michael Steele on Saturdays and Sundays from 8 to 10 a.m. ET. Both Sanders-Townsend and Menendez will be leaving their weekend programs to join the new sho

“Hasan has come under fire recently over his coverage of the Gaza war, specifically from conservative critics angry over his pro-Palestinian stance,” The Daily Beast adds. “Last month, Semafor reported that Hasan was one of three Muslim broadcasters who had been quietly pulled from the anchor’s desk following the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack. A network official vehemently denied Semafor’s reporting that Hasan and others had been sidelined.”

“The same criticism Hasan has received over Israel-Hamas coverage from media rivals, however, has also followed fellow Muslim-American colleagues Velshi and Mohyeldin, who have retained their shows and even seen their roles expanded. Furthermore, as Confider reported in September, the revamped weekend lineup was already being hashed out prior to the start of the conflict in Gaza.”

Many, including those who have been critical of some of Hasan’s views, are expressing anger and outrage over the cancellation of his show, and concern for the direction of corporate media in general.

“This is an outrage,” declared journalist and media critic Dan Froomkin.

“As the warning signs for authoritarianism are going off, why demote a journalist who is really good on this topic?” asked Don Moynihan, professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy.

Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Wesley Lowery, now an associate professor of investigative journalism at American University, wrote on social media that Hasan “is the best on-camera newsmaker interviewer in journalism.” He suggested, “someone give him a livelier version of what Charlie Rose once did. If you vow to measure the impact of your investment based on the quality of the journalism, not ratings or clicks, I’ll EP the first season.”

“Without a doubt,” wrote former Chicago Tribune editor Mark Jacob, who writes a newsletter on politics and the media, Hasan “has been one of the most incisive anchors on MSNBC. The cancellation of his show is an outrage — and yet another example of how major media are failing us.”

“They still have a Republican former congressman hosting a show for like six hours every morning though right?” snarked political strategist, writer, and former Media Maters executive vice president Jamison Foser.

“Wow,” exclaimed Max Burns, a Democratic strategist and columnist. Hasan “is easily one of the sharpest, toughest, best-researched interviewers working today. His back-and-forths with politicians both left and right should be models for how to do the job effectively. What a ridiculous decision.”

Burns continued, writing: “I look at bizarre news like this and think to myself, if this industry is tossing aside singular forces of journalism like Mehdi, what hope is there for anyone? Clearly doing the job well isn’t protection from corporate decisions.

Sherrilyn Ifill, the civil rights attorney, professor of law and former Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF), wrote that Hasan “has shown over and over again that he is so good at his craft. His is the journalistic rigor we need in this age of misinformation, lies, and wanna be celebrities masquerading as public servants. I cannot imagine not wanting to elevate his platform.”

“Oh no,” declared David Rothkopf, the foreign policy, national security and political affairs analyst and commentator, calling Hasan a “vital voice.”

“This is MSNBC’s loss. This is a cowardly move,” wrote conservative and former GOP congressman Joe Walsh, who said he and Hasan “disagree on plenty, especially with what’s happening in the Middle East. But Mehdi is an important and valuable voice. And he’s damn good at what he does. It’s so important that ALL viewpoints get heard. Bad move.”

In September Hasan “grilled” GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. Watch that interview below or at this link.

    

The UAW won the strike — so why doesn’t Donald Trump want to talk about it?

President Donald J. Trump joined by Bernard Arnault, CEO of LVMH Moet Hennessy; Carlos Sousa the general manager of Louis Vuitton Manufacturing USA, and Advisor to the President Ivanka Trump, participate in a ribbon cutting ceremony Thursday, October 17, 2019, at the Louis Vuitton Workshop- Rochambeau in Alvarado, Texas. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead) / Flickr.

Susan J. Demas, Michigan Advance

November 28, 2023

After decades of eroding wages and benefits, UAW workers this month won blockbuster contracts with the Detroit Three that few thought possible.

During the “Stand Up Strike” — an homage to the Sit-down Strike against Ford in Depression Era Flint that spawned the first industry collective bargaining agreement — the union for the first time took on GM, Ford and Stellantis simultaneously, with plants being called up to the picket line at strategic times.

Workers will now see raises ranging from 33% to 160%, with less time needed to achieve the top pay rate, as well as strike pay and better retirement benefits. All three automakers agreed to bring thousands of electric vehicle and battery plant jobs under the union’s national agreements — a key concern for the bumpy transition to electric vehicles that’s often resulted in lower-paying, non-union jobs.

“There were many in the media and in the corporate class who were saying we didn’t know what we were doing, and they thought we’d never get a deal,” UAW President Shaw Fain said in Chicago this month. “But then we got all three. We weren’t going to stop short of pounding everything we could out of these companies.”

The UAW’s victory capped a huge year for organized labor, with unions winning big concessions from UPS, Kaiser Permanente and major Las Vegas resort companies.

With 76% of Americans siding with UAW workers in a CNN poll — and unions overall enjoying an 67% approval rating in a separate Gallup survey — even some Republicans took a break from their typical union-bashing to issue at least tepid support for the workers, while trashing environmentally friendly policies.

Members of the UAW picket line in Delta Township, Michigan on September 29, 2023. (Photo: Anna Liz Nichols)

“The all Electric Car is a disaster for both the United Auto Workers and the American Consumer,” former President Donald Trump declared on social media shortly after the strike began, darkly predicting that it will mean the union “will be wiped out.”

Trump’s sometimes populist rhetoric never translated to actual policy, with his much-ballyhooed 2017 tax cut resulting in headlines like: “Trump’s tax cuts helped billionaires pay less than the working class for first time.”

Still, when Trump announced he would head to Michigan shortly after the UAW launched its historic strike in September, it was hailed as a political masterstroke. Surely it meant the Republican was well on his way to winning the Rust Belt (Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin) like he did in 2016 (ignoring the fact that he lost them all in 2020).

Pundits largely ignored that Trump, who is facing 91 charges from his four indictments, was clearly looking to divert attention from that and his refusal to debate against other GOP presidential candidates who, unlike him, can recall that Barack Obama isn’t still president.

Trump ended up giving a speech at a non-union plant in Macomb County (apparently the only place in Michigan he’ll step foot in) — a giant slap in the face to striking workers (which some national media were painfully slow to realize).

While Trump told workers he supported them and their “goal of fair wages and greater stability,” he argued that any deal “doesn’t make a damn bit of difference” because EVs will kill the domestic auto industry anyway.

And as usual, he made the event mostly about him, announcing weirdly in the third person, “They [the UAW] have to endorse Trump, because if they don’t, all they’re doing is committing suicide.”

It’s easy to mix in some populist rhetoric in between hurling barroom-style insults at your enemies, but what is Trump actually offering working-class voters? What did they really win during his four years in office? Is he truly on their side when the chips are down?

– Susan J. Demas

It’s no wonder Fain refused to meet with Trump, telling CNN: “I don’t think the man has any bit of care about what our workers stand for, what the working class stands for. He serves the billionaire class and that’s what’s wrong with this country.”

Meanwhile, President Joe Biden showed he really has been a lifelong union supporter by being perhaps the first sitting president in modern history to walk a picket line — and he let Fain take the lead at the event.

“You deserve what you’ve earned,” Biden told workers, “and you’ve earned a hell of a lot more than what you’re getting paid now.”

Analysts weren’t nearly as sanguine on the way Biden was handling the labor dispute, as they unleashed a flood of takes on how the strike is Bad for Biden™ (part of the long-running genre of how anything — hurricanes, boffo job reports, the Detroit Lions being … good? — means the Democrat will surely lose next year).

In the end, the union stood strong for over 40 days and won the best deals in decades, with Fain vowing to organize non-union automakers like Honda, Toyota and Subaru next.

Biden and Fain reunited this month at Stellantis’ idled Belvidere Assembly Plant in Illinois — which is set to reopen under the UAW agreement. The president made it clear that he and Fain view economic progress the same way.

“I don’t look at the economy through the eyes of Wall Street or Park Avenue. I look at it through the eyes of the people I grew up with in Scranton, Pa., and Claymont, Del.,” Biden said. “My guess is that’s how Shawn looks at it, too — the people he grew up with in Kokomo, [Ind.].”

That will, no doubt, be a key campaign message for Biden next year.

Meanwhile, the UAW deals include the long-sought-after “just transition” to EVs for workers, which renders much of Trump’s hyperbolic criticism moot.

He’s been awfully quiet about the strike since his ego trip to Michigan a couple of months ago — he hasn’t bothered to cheer the contracts with big pay bumps, especially for newer workers who often took other jobs to make ends meet.

It’s easy to mix in some populist rhetoric in between hurling barroom-style insults at your enemies, but what is Trump actually offering working-class voters? What did they really win during his four years in office? Is he truly on their side when the chips are down?

Trump could end up prevailing in Michigan and other swing states anyway. But with workers winning record contracts by sticking together, they just might not feel they need to gamble on another four years of Trumpian turmoil.



Michigan Advance is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Michigan Advance maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Susan Demas for questions: info@michiganadvance.com. Follow Michigan Advance on Facebook and Twitter.

Solitary Confinement

Voluntary and involuntary psychic insulation

by T.P. Wilkinson / November 23rd, 2023

At least as one response to the perceived failures of the French Revolution, some of what became the Romantic movements in the 19th century turned away from social interaction, especially collective activity, and toward individual isolation. Such a reaction was not peculiar to this period. In fact, withdrawal from social contact was an established niche strategy throughout Latin Christendom. There were two broad views in the Church as to how sin was to be encountered. One was collective labour. The other was solitary penitence.

Solitude for the Romantic movements emerged as a process of disengagement. By withdrawing from the noise of society artistic (creative) potential could be enhanced. Contemplation was often focused on nature or introspection. The work produced in the process, whether in literature or visual arts, created an iconography for human isolation and alienation. At the same time, nature served as a source of potential redemption from all those sources of alienation found in society. Nature in various forms also became a repository of the divine. The paintings of Caspar David Friedrich are well-known examples for this process in the visual arts. The Prelude, by William Wordsworth, is certainly exemplary in the literary arts.

Wordsworth began The Prelude in 1799 and finished it in 1805, although he made several revisions in the course of his life. The poem can be understood as a literary investigation into the forces and events that shaped the personality of the author and his poetical labour. In Book Four he wrote:

When from our better selves we have too long
Been parted by the hurrying world, and droop,
Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired,
How gracious, how benign, is Solitude-
How potent a mere image of her sway!
Most potent when impressed upon the mind
With an appropriate human centre: hermit,
Deep in the bosom of the wilderness;
Votary (in vast cathedral, where no foot
Is treading, where no other face is seen)
Kneeling at prayers; or watchman on the top
Of lighthouse, beaten by Atlantic waves;
Or as the soul of that great Power is met
Sometimes embodied on a public road,
When, for the night deserted, it assumes
A character of quiet more profound
Than pathless wastes.[1]

Wordsworth began as a great supporter of the French Revolution and ended greatly disappointed by it. The poem examines the path that transformed him into a revolutionary and led him away from revolution in the end. The revolution had promised to reorganise society along principles of equality as articulated in the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Wordsworth and others felt it had failed. The dictatorship and imperial ambition of Napoleon Bonaparte were proof that it was impossible to create a society based on New Testament equality by removing the divinely ordained monarchy.

It is important to add here that these judgements were based on reports scarcely more circumspect than found in today’s mass media. Wordsworth would not have been able to see the results of the Jacobin societies in the provinces or to measure the violence with which the changes introduced were opposed by the counter-revolution with its foreign supporters. The rejection of the French Revolution by much of the English intellectual caste and England’s emergent cultural power in the 19th century constitute a bias which still overshadows the appreciation of the 1789 revolution beyond the English-speaking world. Even today very little attention is given to the counter-revolution and foreign intervention. Almost all school and university texts focus on the Jacobins and the so-called Terror, although the “White Terror” killed substantially more people.

At the same time the foundation of what we once recognized as modern science, evolving as it did from the same cultural context, emerged as the product of solitary investigation. In fact by the end of the 19th century the image of the scientist and the artist merged as solitary investigators, discoverers and innovators were ranked among the upper strata of Western society and the artistic creator/ scientific genius became clichés.

The solitude, whether in science or the arts, was in many ways a recovery of the penitentiary tradition in the Latin Church. In order to discover god and attain grace it was necessary to exercise as close to purity as possible. If artistic or scientific truth approached that of the divine or substituted for it, then it was also to be obtained by the investigator isolated from sources of corruption thus able to perceive pure data. The scientist sought this isolation in research performed in private laboratories that were sometimes associated with university faculties. The concept of academic freedom—a secularization of monastic privileges—was interpreted to assure the necessary solitude for unbiased research and pursuit of truth. Thus although scientific research is inevitably a collective activity, the fiction of solitary research was created by formally isolating the university from daily political and commercial interests.

The artist sought places in the countryside or abandoned his native land for a self-imposed exile or quest. George Gordon Byron’s death in the Greek war of independence in 1824 is only the most notorious.

By the end of the 19th century the literary-artistic and scientific-scholarly caste was endowed with its own ethic and processes for transforming the pure into the true. This ideal was based on a critique of society’s corruption and the striving to transcend it. The bearer of this ideal was to become the autonomous self, solitude incarnate.

Following the defeat of Napoleon the Congress of Vienna not only restored the monarchical system, if somewhat “embourgeoised”, it reinstalled the deification of truth and knowledge as something otherworldly in origin. As Nietzsche observed at the end of the century, god was restored in all but name, while the name of “god” became an empty category, a mere symbol for the will to power.

The emergence of the autonomous Self, whose access to identity and truth derived from exercises in solitude, derived from two traditions. One, already mentioned, was the penitentiary. The individual withdraws from society as a source of sin and by contemplation, absorption and submission to God attains a higher degree of grace and eventually redemption from the sins with which society has soiled him.

The other tradition is that of natural divinity. The individual withdraws in order to contemplate and then engage the creative forces of nature. By comprehending them the artist becomes an agent of creation. Like nature he becomes capable of producing exemplifications of truth. The truth-value of these exemplifications is claimed by virtue of the method applied to create them. This is sometimes called “scientific method” or “artistic creativity”. Until recently it has been assumed that integrity of the respective methods was essential to the value of the product.

The Romantics found that solitude created the conditions by which they could contemplate the problems with which they had been confronted in society. The psychic isolation of the countryside or a foreign environment permitted them to focus on what remained in them when they were no longer influenced by daily social interaction. The longer the isolation continued the more they were exposed to themselves. In some cases this resulted in a “stripping” of their personalities down to the basics, e.g. the interaction of the human with nature unmitigated by social instructions. At some point the artist or scholar would arrive at an essence from which his personality could be redesigned, primarily through the creative or investigative work. The principle can be illustrated simply enough. If anyone has been left alone with a problem long enough, especially one which is highly conventionalized but for which there is no external solution available, there is at least a tendency for the person to use whatever means are at his disposal to solve the problem—even if they are unconventional. If a person is left in a group with the same problem and attempts to use that unconventional method, he will likely feel enormous pressure to abandon it in favour of the approach used by everyone else in the group.

One of the additional products of this solitude, voluntary psychic isolation, is to develop the strength of persona necessary to reproduce the solution created even under social pressure. Thus solitude is not only a strategy for stripping but for clothing the Self. There is certainly enough anecdotal evidence to justify statements like “he is too headstrong because he has been working alone too long.” One of the Romantic contributions to cultural transformation has been the adaptation of solitude to the modern scientific construction of the Self.

The Self as envisioned by the Romantics was a liberated personality, freed from the oppressive social structures and thus able to act as an agent of social transformation. However another Self was developed in response to the revolutionary impulses.

In 2002, British filmmaker Adam Curtis produced a television documentary, roughly based on a book by Stuart Ewen, called The Century of the Self. [2] Curtis’ central thesis is that the nephew of Sigmund Freud, Edward Bernays, initiated and for a while led a movement that would turn the concept of the Self into the central instrument of social control in the West. In his study of public relations, the euphemism for propaganda Bernays introduced after World War I, Ewen explains how the culture of the Self was appropriated and exploited by corporate and political communications actors (Business and Government) to produce a society of individuals who believe themselves to be autonomous but are in fact manipulated in their every thought and move. Bernays drew on his uncle’s theories of the unconscious to show that control could be exercised over people by speaking to what they “really” thought and felt as opposed to what they actually said.

Instead of individuals—as the Romantics imagined—creating an authentic Self and entering society to act on the basis of this authenticity, Bernays and his successors devised methods they believed would suggest to the masses of isolated individuals ways they could reconstruct themselves in the interests of those who rule society. This presumed that one could create individuals in isolation that could be sufficiently alienated to engage in searching strategies. The aim was to exploit industrial and especially post-war psychic distress among masses of people whose lives had been irreversibly affected by the world war. These people would be encouraged in their sense of alienation. That alienation would be labelled individualism. The emotional duress would be sustained by graduated fear. This fear was sublimated in the reconstitution of groups of alienated individuals.

Curtis’s 4-episode film continues with a focus on commercial activity. Edward Bernays argued if he was able to produce advertising that would persuade people to go to war and fight he ought to be able to do this to sell products. After World War I ended the US was faced with massive overproduction. There were just too many goods that had been produced just to be wasted in war and now the plant lay idle and the goods collected dust in warehouses. Modern advertising was initiated to move those goods and restore the enormous profitability of wartime industrial manufacturing. He shows that creating desires and fears were complementary aims. On one hand the individual has to be freed from inhibitions like thrift, morality, social responsibility, or just a realistic assessment of his financial condition. The objective impositions of society are to be stripped from him so that he can feel his true nature as a desiring subject. Then he is intensively exposed to the prefabricated objects he ought to desire. This process is stimulated by fear, either the inability to satisfy those desires or the injection of ever more desires for which he has not yet the means of satisfaction. Dissatisfaction and fear are the constant state in which the individual is to be confined. Society does not offer him comfort, whether as routine or sustenance. Instead it exposes him to continuous competition for the satisfaction of the desires cultivated in him during his enforced isolation. Society becomes a machine for enforcing the private desires and the cycles of satisfaction – dissatisfaction, safety – fear that are translated into spending and consumption.

This process of alienation could not have become industrialized without political force. At the same time as individualism was being encouraged, Business and the State were waging vicious war against any genuinely autonomous collectivities like labour unions and popular movements, especially communism in the industrialized world and anti-colonialism/ nationalism among the peoples subjugated by colonial and imperial rule. Although Business was certainly enamoured with Bernays’ approach to mass marketing of products and services, there was also great demand for technologies of the “Self” by state actors.

The State’s interest in the Self, as opposed to the citizen, has not ceased. Curtis shows how the CIA and other covert agencies of the State promoted large-scale experimentation with the technology for creating or modifying the “Self”. One of the most notorious was the work of Dr Ewen Cameron at the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal during the 1950s and 1960s. There experiments were performed on people who were subjected to pharmaceutical treatment in combination with electro-shocks and various degrees of sensory deprivation. The principle driving this work was that humans could have their consciousness erased and be “reprogrammed” on demand.

Although the Allan Memorial was eventually closed and Dr Cameron’s work denounced, there is no evidence that this kind of involuntary psychic isolation for political and social engineering goals has discontinued. The rudimentary descriptions available of programs run by the CIA and US military at the Guantanamo Detention Center, US Naval Base Guantanamo Cuba since the beginning of the century bear similarities to those run by Dr Cameron so great that they ought to be equally disturbing. Yet despite numerous pledges this center remains in operation with some 700 persons incarcerated at last count.[3]

The mass incarceration, appropriately denoted with prison jargon as “lockdowns”, organized and enforced to varying degrees from March 2020 to the end of 2021 has been excused by medical grounds discredited almost as soon as the public health authorities proposed them. Studies are only beginning to emerge that raise the question: what were the real reasons for these forced isolations, in innumerable cases, solitude and involuntary psychic isolation.

One of Dr Cameron’s experiments was to use covert media, e.g. hidden audio recordings, to introduce thoughts and verbalization to the brain of his presumably erased subject. The recordings would be played during the sleep sessions.

When the first reports and complaints about torture in Guantanamo Detention Center became public there was frequent mention of forced exposure to loud music and audio-visual material the prisoner would presumably find offensive. Sensory deprivation was combined with saturation exposure to foreign stimuli.

During the so-called “lockdowns” I was particularly struck by the closures and domestic incarceration in Portugal. In 2005, I was in Fatima for the first time. My friend and I were amazed at the people assembling there. Cripples of all sorts, people visibly disfigured or disabled by every conceivable illness made their way to the sanctuary. They were on their way to ask for the blessing and healing power of the Holy Virgin, Mother of God. Who knows if any of them had infectious illnesses? The power of the Almighty was present and able to heal. Yet during the mass incarceration the Shrine of Fatima was closed. Had I still been a practicing member of the Latin Church I would have been in uproar. How could the State presume to be more powerful than Our Lord and the Mother of God? How could anyone presume to keep me from the omnipotent divine?

To end, again with Wordsworth:

Oh, yet a few short years of useful life,
And all will be complete, thy race be run,
Thy monument of glory will be raised!
Then, though (too weak to tread the ways of truth)
This age fall back to old idolatry,
Though men return to servitude as fast
As the tide ebbs, to ignominy and shame
By nations sink together, we shall still
Find solace—knowing what we have learnt to know,
Rich in true happiness if allowed to be
Faithful alike in forwarding a day

Of firmer trust, joint labourers in the work
(Should Providence such grace to us vouchsafe)
Of their deliverance, surely yet to come.
Prophets of Nature, we to them speak
A lasting inspiration, sanctified
By reason, blessed by faith: what we have loved,
Others will love, and we will teach them how;
Instruct them how the mind of man becomes
A thousand times more beautiful than the earth
On which he dwells, above this frame of things
(Which, mid all revolution in the hopes
And fears of men, doth still remain unchanged)
In beauty exalted, as it is itself
Of quality and fabric more divine.
(“The Prelude,” Book fourteen, 430-454)

ENDNOTES

[1] William Wordsworth, “The Prelude” cited from The Prelude and other Poems, Alma Classics (2019)

[2] Stuart Ewen, PR! A Social History of Spin, New York, 1996; Adam Curtis, The Century of the Self, originally released on BBC Two in 2002. Available on YouTube.

[3] From the time the US Government announced its program of “extraordinary renditions” and incarceration of “terrorists” at its illegally occupied south-eastern Cuba naval station, Guantanamo Bay aka as GITMO, there have been estimates and official claims ranging between 1,500 and 20 over the past two decades. Thus far there is no way to be certain exactly how many prisoners were or are held at this high security naval base. Therefore 700 is considered a conservative number, even if it may exceed current official claims.

Dr T.P. Wilkinson writes, teaches History and English, directs theatre and coaches cricket between the cradles of Heine and Saramago. He is also the author of Church Clothes, Land, Mission and the End of Apartheid in South Africa. Read other articles by T.P..