Preying on white fears worked in Georgia in the ’60s −and is working there for Trump today

Lester Maddox is sworn in as governor of Georgia on Jan. 11, 1967. 

Bettmann/Getty Images

The Conversation

May 17, 2024

In January 1967, after a gubernatorial election that saw neither candidate gain enough votes to win, the Georgia Legislature was faced with a vital decision: the selection of the state’s 75th governor during the height of the Civil Rights Movement.

Legislators chose the candidate who earned the least number of votes and was an ardent segregationist – Democrat Lester Maddox, owner of a chicken restaurant and a perennial candidate.

That transformation of Maddox from racist, eccentric business owner to governor was a historical note amid a backdrop of Southern politics and the region’s resentment of Black political gains. Southern politics was and is replete with colorful characters, hucksters, showmen and demagogues who managed both to shock and engender fierce loyalty among their followers.

Maddox showed that it was politically profitable to play on the fears and anxieties of white people, who were afraid of the political power of Black voters. And what was true in Georgia in the 1960s turns out to be true throughout the South today, as Maddox’s victory based on racism holds lessons for the 2024 presidential election.

To understand the popularity of Donald Trump and the Republican Party in Southern states such as Georgia, it’s crucial to understand the racial divisions that preceded him.

As a civil rights historian, I believe that Trump can be placed among a long line of demagogues who possess the skills needed to tap into the fears and anxieties of a group of people that perceives itself as marginalized, at risk and not in control.

Maddox was one of the first to do so in his successful gubernatorial campaign in 1966.

For ‘the little people’

In his book “The Demagogue’s Playbook,” law professor Eric Posner defined a demagogue as a “charismatic, amoral person who obtains the support of the people through dishonesty, emotional manipulation, and the exploitation of social divisions.”

For Maddox, a Democrat in the era when Southern Democrats were the segregationist party, the social division he could exploit was a rapidly changing South, where political and cultural conventions were turned upside down by the successes of the Civil Rights Movement. No longer was the white race the master of the social order.

During his campaign, Maddox used class warfare to frame his GOP opponent, millionaire textile heir Bo Callaway, as an elite integrationist who was out of touch with white voters – or as Maddox called them, “the little people.”

 Atlanta cafeteria owner Lester Maddox, left, shoves one of several Black men who attempted to integrate his restaurant in 1964. Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

Maddox used newspaper advertisements for his chicken restaurant, the Pickrick, to rant about political grievances and target his political enemies.

But his primary weapon of choice was the race card. He celebrated his aggression toward Black people by brandishing axe handles as he stood in the doorway of his restaurant in downtown Atlanta.

A crass businessman, Maddox called his axe handles “Pickrick Drumsticks,” which he also sold for US$2 apiece.

Such brazen behavior earned Maddox the admiration of many white Georgians uneasy about the pace of racial integration. His popularity was solidified after he refused to allow Black people to eat in his chicken restaurant, as required under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and literally chased them away from his front door.

At one point during the scuffle, Maddox was heard calling to the Black customers, “You no good dirty devils! You dirty Communists! Get the hell out of here or I’ll kill you.”

 Lester Maddox autographs one of the axe handles that he sold for $2 in 1964. Bettmann/Getty Images

When a Georgia court ordered Maddox to obey the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Maddox chose to shut down his business. For him, the issue was a matter of the rights of private property owners.

“This property belongs to me,” Maddox once said, “and I’ll throw out a white one, a black one, a red-headed one or a bald-headed one. It doesn’t make any difference to me.”

Maddox denied being a racist and defended his segregationist views by arguing he believed in separate but equal facilities for white and Black people.

Maddox served only one term as governor because state law prevented any governor serving two successive terms. Instead, he ran for lieutenant governor in 1970 and won.

Georgia on Trump’s mind

Much like Maddox, Trump has tapped into white resentment and anger to gain popularity in a state that he won in 2016 but barely lost in the 2020 presidential election.

In her book “Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump,” American rhetoric historian Jennifer Mercieca explains that Trump is “a leader who makes use of popular prejudices and false claims and promises in order to gain power.”

That is an effective strategy, she argued, especially with a frustrated and polarized electorate.

 Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally in Rome, Georgia, on March 9, 2024. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Nowhere is that more evident than in Georgia. In a state that saw nearly 5 million voters cast ballots, Joe Biden beat Trump by only 11,779 votes in 2020.

In a campaign stop in Georgia in March 2024, Trump chose to hold a rally in the small city of Rome, located in the district of one of his most die-hard supporters, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right Republican U.S. representative.

In 2020, voters in the metro Atlanta area and other larger cities voted for Biden. But in more rural areas such as Rome, voters cast their ballots for Trump – and appear in polls to be giving Trump an edge over Biden in the 2024 race.

One of the major issues is U.S.-Mexico border security and Trump’s views on immigration, which critics have characterized as racist.

During the rally, Trump blamed Biden for the death of 22-year-old Georgia nursing student Laken Riley. An immigrant from Venezuela who entered the U.S. illegally has been arrested and charged with her murder.

“What Joe Biden has done on our border is a crime against humanity and the people of this nation for which he will never be forgiven,” Trump said as he promised to start the largest deportation of immigrants in American history.

Such proposed policies – and thinly veiled racist messages – play well in a political district represented by a far-right extremist.

Much like Maddox did nearly 60 years ago, Trump uses fear of other racial groups to gain support among white voters.

Racial demagoguery in the U.S. was once largely limited to Southern politicians who sometimes used their folksy, homespun charms as champions of the little guy to stoke racial and economic grievances. Though Trump is a wealthy businessman, he is able to convince working-class white voters that he is not only one of them but also a victim, too, of the “liberal elites.”

Donald Trump appears to have successfully translated this approach to the national stage.

David Cason, Associate Professor in Honors, University of North Dakota

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

How Trump’s second term would echo Mussolini’s 'fascist strongman leadership': historian

Alex Henderson

ALTERNET

May 16, 2024

The New Republic has published a series of articles focusing on presumptive 2024 GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump's plans for a second term if he defeats President Joe Biden in November, and the series' theme is "What American Fascism Would Look Like."

The series tackles a variety of ways in which the writers believe authoritarianism would imperil the United States if Trump returns to the White House in 2025, from immigration policies and the country's borders to public education to severe restrictions on the media. Columbia University professor Kian Tajbakhs, in one of the articles, focuses on the challenges Americans would face managing their day-to-day lives during an authoritarian crackdown.

The series also includes an in-depth essay/think piece by historian/author Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who delves into the history of fascism — including the rise of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, a.k.a. Il Duce, during the 1920s — and emphasizes that Trumpism has many fascist elements.

READ MORE: Trump's plan to 'aggressively' reshape government would create 'army of suck-ups': report

"During his 21 years in power, 18 of them as dictator, Il Duce framed fascism as a revolution of reaction against the left, against liberal democracy, and against any group that threatened the survival of white Christian civilization," Ben-Ghiat explains in her article, published on May 16. "Carrying out a violent destabilization of society in the name of a return to social order and national tradition, fascism pioneered the autocratic formula in use today of disenfranchising and repressing the many to allow the few to exploit the workforce, women's bodies, the environment and the economy."

The historian/author continues, "Trumpism is in this tradition. It started in 2015 as a movement fueled by conservative alarm and white rural rage at a multiracial and progressive America. It continued as an authoritarian presidency envisioned as 'a shock to the system' that unleashed waves of hate crimes against nonwhites and non-Christians. It culminated in the January 6 assault on the Capitol, which was a counterrevolutionary operation in the spirit of fascism."

Ben-Ghiat lays out some reasons why she finds Project 2025, Trump allies' blueprint for a second term, so disturbing.

"The fascists believed that you have to destroy to create, and this is what a second Trump Administration would do," Ben-Ghiat warns. "Project 2025 is a plan for an authoritarian takeover of the United States that goes by a deceptively neutral name…. The plan promises the abolition of the Department of Education and other federal agencies."

READ MORE: 'Essence of authoritarianism': Expert warns 'Project 2025' would create a Trump 'autocracy'

Ben-Ghiat adds, "The intent here is to destroy the legal and governance cultures of liberal democracy and create new bureaucratic structures, staffed by new politically vetted cadres, to support autocratic rule. So new agencies could appear to manage parents' and family rights, Christian affairs, and other pillars of the new order. The Department of Health and Human Services is poised to have a central role in governance, given the priorities Trumpism places on policing sexuality, weaponizing motherhood, persecuting transgender people and LGBTQ communities, and criminalizing abortion."

The historian notes that Mussolini, during the 1920s, enacted "public security" laws that "justified the arrest of anyone deemed a security threat — meaning anyone who opposed fascism from a liberal democratic or leftist point of view." And she believes that Project 2025 has similar aims.

"Given Trump’s repeated threats to carry out 'retribution' against his enemies," Ben-Ghiat warns, "expect prompt and showy announcements of trials and investigations of the political opposition, members of the January 6 Select Committee, and anyone who sought to hold him accountable….. Trump has worked hard since 2015 to condition the public to see the strongman brand of leadership as the only choice for America."

READ MORE: Mary Trump: Here's why Ivanka and Don Jr. haven't showed up to their father’s 'tawdry' trial

Ruth Ben-Ghiat's full essay for The New Republic is available at this link.

Historian gives ‘Union Joe’ a higher grade than any president since FDR

U.S. President Joe Biden addresses union workers at Sheet Metal Workers Local 19 on September 4, 2023 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 

(Photo by Mark Makela/Getty Images).

Erik Loomis
The Conversation

May 17, 2024



Joe Biden has pledged repeatedly to go further than any of his predecessors with his support for U.S. labor rights.

“I intend to be the most pro-union president leading the most pro-union administration in American history,” Biden said at a White House meeting in September 2021 that brought together ordinary workers, labor leaders and government officials.

He has expressed this intention many times, sometimes clarifying his goals.

For example, in 2023 he said in Chicago that his administration was “making it easier to empower workers by making it easier to join a union.”

Based on my research regarding the history of organized labor in America, I would give Biden an A-minus for his record on workers rights. In my view, the man dubbed “Union Joe” has lived up to the claim, with one notable error.
4 years of sticking to that message

Biden has set many precedents related to organized labor.

In 2021, Biden encouraged workers at an Amazon facility in Alabama to vote in favor of joining a union. In a video message, he asserted that there should be “no intimidation, no coercion, no threats, no anti-union propaganda” from employers toward unionizing efforts.

Although those workers chose not to join the union, this address marked a milestone. No president had ever issued such a statement on behalf of a union during an organizing campaign.

In 2022, Biden used executive orders to improve conditions for work on federal projects, including the use of project labor agreements for federal construction projects, which requires the hiring of unionized workers. His administration also created new rules around pay equity for federal workers.

And a Biden labor task force also released a report laying out 70 policies the government could implement to strengthen labor unions.

In 2023, he became the first president to walk a picket line, which happened during the most effective United Auto Workers strike in decades. The historical record indicates that no prior president had ever even considered taking such an action.

In 2024, the Biden administration has picked up the pace.

In the month of April alone, it banned the noncompete clauses that can stop workers from taking another job in their same line of work if they quit, expanded eligibility for overtime pay to people making up to US$58,656 a year, up from its current cap of $35,568, and pushed pension funds to only invest in companies that adhere to high labor standards. Joe Biden reiterated a campaign promise to support the right to organize unions during a 2021 address that warned against employer intimidation.
Coordinated policy

Under the leadership of Biden’s appointees, the National Labor Relations Board – an independent agency charged with protecting workplace rights – has investigated allegations that Starbucks, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and other companies have intimidated their employees to discourage unionization drives.

Biden also supports the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, better known as the PRO Act. Lawmakers have introduced this measure three times since 2019, and the House of Representatives has passed it twice.

Among other things, this bill would impose significant financial penalties on companies that illegally interfere with their employees’ union rights and would speed up the collective bargaining process after workers win a union election. 

In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the law that led to the creation of the National Labor Relations Board. AP Photo

Public sentiment

Biden’s administration’s pro-union stance is in tune with public sentiment: Approval ratings for unions are higher than they’ve been in several decades.

About 7 in 10 Americans say they support unions, according to polls commissioned by Gallup and the AFL-CIO.

This public support might be buoyed by current events.

High-profile campaigns among workers employed by Amazon, Starbucks, show business studios, hospitals and automakers have kept unions in the news – regardless of what the White House is doing.

A wide array of workers, from strippers to UPS truck drivers, have made big gains in pay and benefits by flexing their collective power.

Teachers were already going on strike before the COVID-19 pandemic. They have continued to assert their right to do so around the country.
On the other hand …

To be sure, some of Biden’s aspirations to improve the lot of workers remain unfulfilled.

The share of U.S. workers who belong to unions has continued to fall, slipping to 10% in 2023. The buying power of the federal minimum wage, stuck at $7.25 per hour since 2009, has been further eroded due to inflation.

Several states, meanwhile, have weakened their child labor laws even as the numbers of undocumented children and teens holding dangerous jobs that are off-limits for minors rise.

In terms of Biden’s actions, the low point came in 2022, when he used the Railway Labor Act of 1926 to stop the railroad union from striking for better sick leave. Biden officials argued that the economy could not afford a rail shutdown, but political considerations around inflation before the midterm elections probably contributed to the administration’s response.

At the same time, the Biden administration continued working behind the scenes to pressure rail companies to grant the workers their demands, and they largely did. Union leaders credit Biden for helping them get this victory for their workers.
Congress and the Supreme Court

There is only so much any president can do to promote labor rights. As with any other cause, they’re limited by the broader political climate and economic realities.

Given the generally weak track record of his predecessors going back to the late 1940s, I would argue that Biden is the most pro-union president since Franklin D. Roosevelt.

FDR, however, had enormous majorities in Congress when he signed into law two measures that safeguard U.S. labor rights to this day: the National Labor Relations Act, which protects the right of private sector workers to organize unions without fear of retaliation, and the Fair Labor Standards Act, which established a minimum wage and made most child labor illegal.

Biden, in contrast, has had to contend with a narrow Democratic majority in the Senate throughout his presidency, and the Republicans gained a slim House majority in the 2022 midterm elections.

He’s also seeking to expand labor rights at a time when the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has been consistently ruling against unions.

To be sure, there are several significant labor cases that could potentially land on the Supreme Court’s docket. It will take time to see if unions become more powerful thanks to Biden’s actions and their own organizing, or whether the court continues to erode labor laws.

That’s because, historically, U.S. judges have had at least as much say in determining labor rights as presidents.

Erik Loomis, Professor of History, University of Rhode Island

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

Bollywood is playing a large supporting role in India’s elections

Photo by Vinatha Sreeramkumar on Unsplash
woman in yellow dress standing on pink flower field during daytime

The Conversation

April 14, 2024

As the largest electorate in history goes to the polls in India from April 19 to June 1, 2024, political parties are seeking to influence voters’ decisions – through cinema.

The incumbent Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, seeking a third term in office under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has deployed the medium of cinema, more than others, to spread the party’s goals and ideas.

The BJP claims India as a Hindu nation. The Modi government openly supports films that promote the BJP ideology through providing tax breaks and removing regulatory restrictions, especially when such films are strategically timed to release in theaters ahead of the elections. “Swatantrya Veer Savarkar,” a biopic on an ardent advocate of a purely Hindu nation, was released a few weeks before polling begins for the 2024 elections.

India’s entertainment film industry is a complex behemoth with an output of about 1,500 releases per year and a base of fans that extends around the world. Fabulously choreographed dance routines, catchy lyrics, memorable dialogue and historical and religious imagery make it a favored medium of communication – even for political parties.

The use of Indian popular cinema for political ends has a long history – one that predates Indian independence. As an art historian, I documented how cinematic imagery was used to produce a heroic aura around political figures in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu in my 2009 book “Celluloid Deities: The Visual Culture of Cinema and Politics in South India.”

The connection between cinema and politics made it the primary vehicle for the lengthy careers of numerous charismatic politicians – some of them screenwriters and film producers, others leading actors and actresses. Since the 1980s, it also set in motion a nationwide trend of using cinematic means to capture the attention of voters.

Mobilizing film fans for electoral campaigns

Viewing movies in theaters is an eventful and enjoyable experience that draws a mass audience. As sociologist Lakshmi Srinivas describes in her 2016 book “House Full,” the release of highly anticipated blockbusters is much like a festival. Most striking is the excitement of audiences as they recite the dialogues, dance to the lyrics and hail stars as they appear on the screen.

In an Indian context, cinema’s impact extends from the movie theater to the street in the form of advertisements, fashion and film music that dominate public spaces. Art historian Shalini Kakar argues that the spectacle of cinema brings forth passionate responses from viewing masses that are much like religious emotion. She discusses case studies of film fans who even worship their favorite celebrities as deities by creating temples to these stars within residential and commercial spaces. These fans conduct religious ceremonies and organize public festivities for their favored stars.

But more often, fans are part of a large and vocal collective. Media theorist S.V. Srinivas found that film fans can make or destroy the careers and lives of stars. If a star decides to venture into politics, these film fans can become active participants in the star’s political campaigns. But if the star does something that the fans disapprove of, they will as easily boycott his films and even destroy the star’s career.

An alignment of cinema and politics

The cinema industry in Tamil Nadu, more than any other in India, has evolved closely with political and social developments in the region since the 1940s. The ideals of Tamil nationalism, a political movement that changed the course of history in Tamil Nadu, were powerfully communicated through the medium of entertainment films. Often, the personalities associated with these films were physically present alongside politicians at party meetings.


Voters’ choices can be influenced by popular films in India.
AP Photo/Ajit Solanki

In my research, I found that the alignment of cinema and politics in Tamil Nadu was helped by the use of identical advertising media. Political parties regularly commissioned advertisers to produce “star images” of politicians. A favored publicity medium of both the cinema industry and party members was the hand-painted plywood cutout. These full-length portraits, 20 feet to 100 feet in height, featured charismatic leaders of Tamil nationalist parties such as M. Karunanidhi, a prolific and influential scriptwriter, and J. Jayalalithaa, a famous film star turned politician.

Though these political portraits were meant to be realistic rather than melodramatic, the style and scale of these portraits resembled the cinematic star image. In this way, they helped to transfer the power of the cinematic star image to the image of the leader.

I argued that these advertisements played an important role in visualizing, and shaping, the identity politics of Tamil nationalism.

The audience for these images numbered in the millions. When these vibrantly colored portraits of film stars and political leaders appeared side by side in public spaces, they soared above the skyline like celestial beings. Often, the images became the focus of adulation. They were feted and garlanded, people danced, burst crackers, cheered and crowded around these images, and posed next to them for photographs.

The charismatic politicians of the Tamil nationalist movement set the trend of combining the sheen of the star image, the power of political portraiture and the divine aura of icons in their advertising.

Cinema’s role in divisive politics

Under Modi’s leadership, three themes emerge in a cluster of films that favor the BJP’s goals and policies and are endorsed by the party: claiming credit for welfare initiatives, instilling Hindu nationalist beliefs in society, and heightening tensions between the Hindu majority and Muslim minority communities.

For example, a film released in 2017, “Toilet: Ek Prem ki Katha,” or “Toilet: A Love Story,” tells the story of a couple whose marriage starts to fall apart over the lack of a toilet within the home. At the beginning of the film, which is an entertaining musical melodrama, viewers are informed that while Mahatma Gandhi championed for a clean environment, it is Modi who is making that dream a reality through budgeting for the construction of toilets nationwide.

Another series of films in the biopic genre showcases the historical legacy of right-wing Hindu nationalist organizations and their leaders. “PM Narendra Modi,” which reminded voters of the prime minister’s rise from poverty, was scheduled for release just before the 2019 elections. But the Election Commission of India, an independent body charged with ensuring free and fair elections, ordered that the film could be released only after the elections.

A third and more troubling genre is politically polarizing films. Drawing on ethnically charged actual events in which communities of Hindus and Muslims clashed, the scripts for these films dramatize highly biased narratives in which Hindus are cast as the victims while Muslims are the villainous perpetrators.

Widely viewed examples of this genre include “Kashmir Files,” which shows the mass exodus of Hindus from the north Indian state of Kashmir in the early 1990s when they were targeted by a pro-Pakistan armed uprising of Kashmiri Muslims. The film, which demonizes Muslims and shows them committing extremely barbaric and cruel acts, is among those publicly endorsed by the prime minister himself.

Film producers and distributors I interviewed for my research were unanimous that it was impossible to accurately predict whether a film would succeed at the box office, as are the results of the elections.

Should the BJP succeed, however, it would be fair to conclude that one element in the hat trick was a clever endorsement of cinema as a vehicle for party propaganda.

Preminda Jacob, Associate Professor of Art History and Museum Studies, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

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

AMERIKA

The number of religious ‘nones’ has soared — but not the number of atheists
Image via Shutterstock.

The Conversation
May 07, 2024

The number of individuals in the United States who do not identify as being part of any religion has grown dramatically in recent years, and “the nones” are now larger than any single religious group. According to the General Social Survey, religiously unaffiliated people represented only about 5% of the U.S. population in the 1970s. This percentage began to increase in the 1990s and is around 30% today.

At first glance, some might assume this means nearly 1 in 3 Americans are atheists, but that’s far from true. Indeed, only about 4% of U.S. adults identify as an atheist.

As sociologists who study religion in the U.S., we wanted to find out more about the gap between these percentages and why some individuals identify as an atheist while other unaffiliated individuals do not.
Many shades of ‘none’

The religiously unaffiliated are a diverse group. Some still attend services, say that they are at least somewhat religious, and express some level of belief in God – although they tend to do these things at a lower rate than individuals who do identify with a religion.

There is even diversity in how religiously unaffiliated individuals identify themselves. When asked their religion on surveys, unaffiliated responses include “agnostic,” “no religion,” “nothing in particular,” “none” and so on.

Only about 17% of religiously unaffiliated people explicitly identify as “atheist” on surveys. For the most part, atheists more actively reject religion and religious concepts than other religiously unaffiliated individuals.

Our recent research examines two questions related to atheism. First, what makes an individual more or less likely to identify as an atheist? Second, what makes someone more or less likely to adopt an atheistic worldview over time?
Beyond belief – and disbelief

Consider the first question: Who’s likely to identify as an atheist. To answer that, we also need to think about what atheism means in the first place.

Not all religious traditions emphasize belief in a deity. In the U.S. context, however, particularly within traditions such as Christianity, atheism is often equated with saying that someone does not believe in God. Yet in one of our surveys we found that among U.S. adults who say “I do not believe in God,” only about half will select “atheist” when asked their religious identity.

In other words, rejecting a belief in God is by no means a sufficient condition for identifying as an atheist. So why do some individuals who do not believe in God identify as an atheist while others do not?

Our study found that there are a number of other social forces associated with the likelihood of an individual identifying as an atheist, above and beyond their disbelief in God – particularly stigma.

Many Americans eye atheists with suspicion and distaste. Notably, some social science surveys in the U.S. include questions asking about how much tolerance people have for atheists alongside questions about tolerance of racists and communists.

This stigma means that being an atheist comes with potential social costs, especially in certain communities. We see this dynamic play out in our data.

Political conservatives, for instance, are less likely to identify as an atheist even if they do not believe in God. Just under 39% of individuals identifying as “extremely conservative” who say they do not believe in God identify as an atheist. This compares with 72% of individuals identifying as “extremely liberal” who say they do not believe in God.

We argue that this likely is a function of greater negative views of atheists in politically conservative circles.
Adopting atheism

Stating that one does not believe in God, however, is the strongest predictor of identifying as an atheist. This leads to our second research question: What factors make someone more or less likely to lose their belief over time?

In a second survey-based study, from a different representative sample of nearly 10,000 U.S. adults, we found that about 6% of individuals who stated that they had some level of belief in God at age 16 moved to saying “I do not believe in God” as an adult.

Who falls into this group is not random.

Our analysis finds, perhaps unsurprisingly, that the stronger an individual’s belief in God was at age 16, the less likely they are to have adopted an atheistic worldview as an adult. For instance, fewer than 2% of individuals who said that “I knew God really existed and I had no doubts about it” as a teenager adopted an atheistic worldview later on. This compares with over 20% of those who said that “I didn’t know whether there was a God and I didn’t believe there was any way to find out” when they were 16.

However, our analysis reveals that several other factors make one more or less likely to adopt an atheistic worldview.

Regardless of how strong their teenage belief was, for instance, Black, Asian and Hispanic Americans were less likely to later identify as an atheist than white individuals. All else being equal, the odds of individuals in these groups adopting an atheistic worldview was about 50% to 75% less than the odds for white individuals. In part, this could be a product of groups that already face stigma related to their race or ethnicity being less able or willing to take on the additional social costs of being an atheist.

On the other hand, we find that adults with more income – regardless of how strong their belief was at 16 – are more likely to adopt the stance that they do not believe in God. Each increase from one income level to another on an 11-point scale increases the odds of adopting an atheistic worldview by about 5%.

This could be a function of income providing a buffer against any stigma associated with holding an atheistic worldview. Having a higher income, for instance, may give an individual the resources needed to avoid social circles and situations where being an atheist might be treated negatively.

However, there may be another explanation. Some social scientists have suggested that both wealth and faith can provide existential security – the confidence that you are not going to face tragedy at any moment – and therefore a higher income reduces the need to believe in supernatural forces in the first place.

Such findings are a powerful reminder that our beliefs, behaviors and identities are not entirely our own, but often shaped by situations and cultures in which we find ourselves.

Christopher P. Scheitle, Associate Professor of Sociology, West Virginia University and Katie Corcoran, Associate Professor of Sociology, West Virginia University

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

Ancient scroll reveals new story of Plato’s death – here’s why you should be suspicious of it

Plato and his students at his school, where he is believed to have been buried. Wikimedia

The Conversation

May 06, 2024

Plato of Athens (429-347BC) may be one of the most famous philosophers of all times. He was the thinker who came up with the “theory of forms” and founded the first academic institution. Yet we know little about his life, such as how he died, or where he might be buried, even.

But spectacular new recent research on papyri from Herculaneum by The Greek Philosophical Schools-project in Italy has provided new answers to those questions.

Carbonised papyrus scrolls, discovered in the 18th century in a Roman villa located near Herculaneum (between Naples and Pompeii) and known as the Villa dei Papyri, contain so much knowledge we have yet to uncover.

The library’s owner appears to have had a great interest in Greek philosophy, especially that of Epicurus, and had collected a substantial library of papyrus scrolls. But reading the 1,800 scrolls has proved quite challenging. While their carbonisation after the eruption of Vesuvius in AD79 preserved the scrolls, they are very brittle and very problematic to unroll.

Among these scrolls is a book by the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus of Gadara (1st century BC) about the history of Greek philosophy, with the title Arrangement of the Philosophers.

Over the last two centuries, various editions of Arrangement of the Philosophers have been published, though great portions of the texts remained illegible. But thanks to hyperspectral imagining it has become possible to distinguish between the black ink and the dark surface of the carbonised papyrus. We can now read approximately 30% more than we previously could.

This newly accessible portion on the history of Plato’s school, the Academy, includes information on the location of Plato’s tomb and his death around 348BC.

From other sources, we had already gathered that Plato was buried somewhere on the grounds of the Academy, a semi-public park-like area outside the city walls of ancient Athens that Plato had bought and where he had his school. From the new edition of the papyrus, it seems that Plato “was buried in the garden near the mouseion”. This garden was a more private part of the Academy, while the mouseion refers to a shrine of the Muses, the goddesses of music and harmony, that Plato himself had erected.

Before people rush out to dig for Plato’s grave, however, a word of caution is in order. As the editor of the text, Italian classicist Kilian Fleischer, admits with academic candour, his reading of the crucial Greek word etaphê (“was buried”) is by no means certain.

Be this as it may, a location near the mouseion would be quite fitting, as music plays an important role in Plato’s philosophy. In his great work The Republic, Plato insists on the place of music in the education of the young.

Listening to the right sort of music and especially to the right rhythms would have a beneficial influence on the soul, he posited. In his final work, The Laws, Plato uses the expression “mousikos anêr”, literally “a man of the Muses”, to refer to a man in possession of an elite education, such of the sort that was promoted by the Academy.

Plato’s fondness for the Muses throws light on Philodemus’s story about the death of Plato, another bit of the papyrus that we can now read much better.

According to Philodemus, at the end of Plato’s life he developed a fever and fell into a delirious state. When a Thracian girl, who was playing the flute – perhaps to comfort him – got the rhythm wrong, Plato appeared to regain consciousness and complained that the girl, because of her barbaric (by which he probably meant non-Greek) background, was unable to get it right.

This exchange was much to the delight of Plato’s companion, who from this brief revival concluded that Plato’s condition was not that critical after all. Even so, he died shortly after.

This is not the only story we have about Plato’s death. According to Diogenes Laertius, author of another history of Greek philosophy entitled Lives of Eminent Philosophers (3rd century AD), Plato died either at a wedding feast, or, alternatively, because of lice.

So, how likely is Philodemus’s particular story, for which we know of no other sources, to be true?

There are reasons to be suspicious. The death of ancient philosophers was meant to reflect their lives and teachings. If not, posterity was quite happy to invent an appropriate deathbed scene.

Thus, this newly discovered story about how Plato, even in his feverish condition, remained a discerning judge of all things musical, a true servant of the Muses, probably tells us more about how the Academy wished to remember its founder than how he actually died.

Bert van den Berg, Lecturer in Classical Languages and Culture, Leiden University

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

Palestinian Feminists Speak Out Against Reproductive Genocide

Decolonial feminism forcefully opposes the colonial politics of death, says the Palestinian Feminist Collective.

By Susana Draper , Belén Marco , Ana María Morales ,

TRUTHOUT

May 15, 2024

A protester in a keffiyeh holds a sign reading "STOP BOMBING CHILDREN" during an outdoor protest in London, England, on March 8, 2024.

MARK KERRISON / IN PICTURES VIA GETTY IMAGES

For over 220 days Israel has been carrying out what Palestinians have been calling a second Nakba since October. Nearly 35,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed by Israel and at least 1.7 million have been displaced.

As members of a feminist platform called La Laboratoria, we reached out to initiate a conversation with members of the Palestinian Feminist Collective out of a desire to amplify the voices of feminists who are fighting for a free Palestine. The collective, which coordinated several actions in Chicago, Detroit, New York and San Francisco, has insisted on the need to build a popular, grassroots, anti-racist, anti-colonial and anti-imperialist feminism. Within this framework, the collective deploys a feminist lens to understand the complexity of sustained violence against the Palestinian people. In this exclusive interview with Truthout, members of the Palestinian Feminist Collective engage in conversation with a group of us from La Laboratoria to talk about Palestine, feminism, internationalism and the question of reproductive genocide.

La Laboratoria: Tell us about the Palestinian Feminist Collective. How did you come together, and in what context? What are some of the values of your collective? How do you understand Palestine as a feminist issue?

Sarah Ihmoud: The Palestinian Feminist Collective is a body of Palestinian and Arab feminists who are primarily located on Turtle Island, the unceded lands of America. We are an intergenerational collective of activists, organizers, practitioners, creators, thinkers, artists, scholars, healers, Water and Land Protectors, life givers and life sustainers. We’re committed centrally to achieving Palestinian social and political liberation by confronting systemic gendered, sexual and colonial violence, and oppression and dispossession. We came together to really think about how colonial and patriarchal violence are interconnected and how they manifest in our own lives as Palestinian women and queer folks. There is no liberation of women or queer or gender nonconforming people without our broader liberation as a people from settler colonialism, so we are obviously inspired by and come from a long ancestry of social movement building.

In Palestinian feminist history, we look back toward over 100 years of organizing against colonial and imperial violence on our lands and territories. We also build on and borrow from other Arab, Black, Indigenous and Third World Feminist movements. We work to advance Palestinian feminism as a liberatory philosophy and praxis that’s necessary not only for us as Palestinians, but also as interconnected with other struggles to create the world that we want to live in.

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We formed in 2019, when a young woman named Israa Ghrayeb, who was 21 years old, was killed in her village near Bethlehem. That ushered in the birth of a new feminist movement in Palestine called Tal’at, which was a network of Palestinian feminists and organizers who called for accountability for her killing under the slogan “no free homeland without the freedom of women.” Organizing against femicide was a sort of impetus for this new wave of feminist movement and organizing from the homeland. It inspired us as Palestinian feminists based in what we call shatat, which is not a direct translation of the term “diaspora”; in Arabic it really refers to dispersal. As Palestinians, this difference is important because we’re still a people that are being dispersed and that are contending with dispersal. So, in this space of dispersal, we created this movement organization in part in response to and in conversation with our sisters in the homeland, who were organizing against gender violence in our own communities in relation to these broader formations of colonial violence.

We started to work with and build the first national network of Palestinian and Arab feminists on Turtle Island, and we launched our first campaign, which was called “Palestine is a Feminist Issue” in March 2021. The aim was to mobilize feminism as a lens through which we can reunderstand and recenter the urgency of Palestinian liberation in feminist political agendas. Part of it involved strengthening Palestinian feminist kinships and dialogues between movement spaces. Another part of it was about strengthening our relationships with feminist organizers in the homeland. On another level, it was about holding the feminist movement here accountable to the Palestinian liberation agenda, and understanding the specificity of our role as feminists from Palestine in the heart of the U.S. empire. We also sought to understand what that means in terms of transnational feminist organizing.

Tara Alami: Building off of the first campaign in 2021 and 2022, we spent about five or six months working on a calendar called the Palestinian Feminist Futures Calendar and Program. Besides the feminist pledge — the “Palestine is a Feminist Issue” statement — it was the first comprehensive public-facing embodiment of the Palestinian Feminist Collective’s principles. We had 13 principles in that calendar and while working on it, we were asking ourselves: What does it mean for us to envision a Palestinian feminist future from within the belly of the beast — one that connects us, as the attacked in this state of dispersal, to our people on the ground in our homeland, the people who are resisting settler-colonial violence in Palestine and otherwise? So, we came up with this calendar as an embodied feminist grammar of life, love and liberation. In those 13 principles, we centered our anti-colonial and life-affirming decolonial vision and praxis.

Eman Ghanayem: I was thinking about how Palestinian people have always used all the tools afforded to us to create, and feminism is one of those tools. In our collective, we don’t think of it as a tool in isolation of others, but as one that includes others. So, the violence experienced by Palestinian women is something that we don’t see in isolation from violence experienced by our people across the spectrum of our social class, our gender and our age. I was talking to someone recently about how the feminist movement can do more work to incorporate children in our struggle, in our fight, because we think about things in very isolated ways in the Global North. Everything has to have a compartmentalization. So, if a feminist movement in very traditional conventional terms in the U.S. is only concerned with specifically women’s rights or cis women’s rights, where do children go? What is our role toward our community? So, the Palestinian Feminist Collective has been messaging around what we can do. In many ways, the Third World, the Indigenous world, the colonized world and the post-colonial world have always found ways to create, to make these terms very capacious and very inherent to our ways of being. A lot of the struggle we face as the Palestinian Feminist Collective sometimes is defining and redefining terms to work for us in a way that challenges limited and very dated ways of thinking about gender and rights.

Ihmoud: Feminism has a bad name in the SWANA [Southwest Asia and North Africa] region for a reason. We’ve seen the ways that colonial feminist discourses have been used and mobilized in previous wars and genocides as a way to justify U.S. military and imperial intervention in the region. This can be under the guise of liberating Arab women either from an oppressive Arab culture or Muslim culture in particular, or from our supposedly dangerous, Indigenous men. We saw this in Afghanistan and in Iraq. And we’re seeing these kinds of discourses resurface now with the genocide in Gaza. It’s important to contend with why feminism still has a bad name in our community. Part of what we are also doing in our own community is pushing against those colonial understandings of feminism and reimagining what alternative forms of feminism mean. We are doing this both collectively and from the grassroots spaces that we’re working to build.

These values are embodied in the fact that we are a collective. One of the things that settler colonialism has done to our people for almost a century is attempt to disconnect us, to fragment us into these separate geographies. We are here in the U.S. for different reasons, but many of us are here because our families were displaced. Part of building collective spaces is a practice of reconnecting the fabrics of our intimacies as an Indigenous people. And part of building a feminist collective is also to rebuild that space, to think, to dream together, to build friendships with one another, to love each other and to create spaces of belonging. This is important in a context like the United States or Canada, which have shown us so much hate. And we’re seeing that hate resurface in this moment, too. In this moment when we really feel like we need each other, our spaces and our collective have been a sanctuary.

How do you frame your work and collective in the language of reproductive justice and in a feminist anti-colonial understanding of peace?

Ihmoud: Israel is a settler-colonial project, and settler colonization necessarily implies the elimination of native people from their Indigenous lands and territories. A feminist lens invites us to understand the gender and sexual politics of that project. As Palestinian feminists, we name the gender and sexual violence of reproductive genocide as central to this larger structure of settler colonial power and its racialized machinery of domination. So, this includes rape and sexual violence, which were systematically weaponized against Palestinian women at the onset of the Nakba in 1948, when 750,000 Palestinians were removed from their ancestral lands and territories. That politics gives broader shape to the logic of settler-colonial power and how it operates today.

Over 30,000 Palestinians have been killed in this genocidal escalation in Gaza, of whom 70 percent are women and children. A million women and girls have been displaced multiple times by foot. There’s a 300 percent increase in the miscarriage rate among pregnant women. Pregnant and lactating women are at a severe, obvious disadvantage within this broader machinery of violence and power. A recent UN press release called attention to deliberate targeting and extrajudicial killing of women and children in places where they sought refuge or were fleeing. The UN also noted instances of rape, instances of sexual violence and even the “forcible transfer” of at least one Palestinian child by the Israeli army in Gaza.

So, we have to ask ourselves: How do we understand attacks on Gaza specifically as gendered assaults on women’s bodies, sexualities and life-giving capacities? In other settler-colonial contexts, bodies, sexualities and reproductive capacities are targeted in particular ways because of what they represent — land, which is reproduction; Indigenous kinship and governance; and the possibility of alternatives. In this case, it’s the possibility of Palestinian sovereignty. We must understand the question of reproductive justice in this broader context.

Alami: Incarceration and the violence of the nation-state, of a settler-colonial nation-state, is an attack on the generationality of the native people and the land. As the settler state develops into different stages (for example, on Turtle Island) it becomes an attack on the nationality of all oppressed people, oppressed or underrepresented genders, and people who are living in deliberately precarious material conditions. (By “deliberately” I mean “designed by the state”.)


People are calling what’s happening in Gaza right now a genocide. But the truth is that it’s an escalation.

This includes being unhoused or impoverished or starved, not having access to education, living in a food desert, not having access to equitable and affordable health care, and much more. The attack on Palestinian generationality and the ability to reproduce and sustain life in Palestine is part and parcel of the Zionist settler-colonial design. It’s in the fabric of Zionist genocide. In the context of Gaza right now, we know that around 5,000 women have had to give birth under the most unsafe conditions, under constant bombardment. These conditions are also unhygienic. They lack access to proper health care. During pre- and postpartum conditions, they are starved, malnourished, unable to sustain life after giving it. There are pictures of the premature babies in the ICU who were killed because they were starved, because there’s no electricity in the hospital, because their machines were not working anymore.

We saw an acute need to define “reproductive genocide” in the context of Palestine during the past five or six months, as well as during the last 100 years of resistance against colonialism and imperialism, whether it was British or American. The attack on generationality can take different forms. It can take the form of really violent night raids by the Israeli Occupation Forces on villages and, literally, attacks on the homes where children are kidnapped from their parents or vice versa. Parents are kidnapped from their children and taken away and put in Zionist dungeons. It can take the form of being a Palestinian political prisoner. We know that wherever there is oppression (and in this case, a genocidal attack on generations), there will be resistance. This is where, for example, sperm smuggling emerged as a form of anti-colonial resistance against this ongoing genocide. People are calling what’s happening in Gaza right now a genocide. But the truth is that it’s an escalation. It’s a massive escalation of a genocide that’s been happening for decades and decades.

So, it’s not just about the past few months, or just about Gaza, but about all of Palestine. The statement that we wrote and released recently defines reproductive genocide maybe more concretely as policies — and even discourses and material practices — that deliberately restrict, target or attack life-giving and sustaining capacities, choices and access of Palestinians; or, more broadly, communities that are made vulnerable by systemic military violence, occupation, besiegement, settler colonialism or colonial and imperialist warfare. In our definition we include incarceration, psychological warfare, collective punishment, ethnic cleansing, and gendered and sexual violence against women, girls and men by an occupying state or a military force that enforce conditions of unlivability. You’re just unable to sustain a life in these conditions. And we’ve seen, in Gaza in the past few months, an escalation of this enforcement. But we must also remember that Palestinians in Gaza have been living under an air, land and sea blockade for 17 years now, and an occupation before the Israeli occupation forces withdrew. I think people sometimes forget that for decades Gaza had actual settlements in it before the military blockade and siege.

Right now, we’re seeing deliberate control and cutting off of vital resources like water, fuel, electricity and food. Just recently, we saw that part of the U.S. aid (if you can call it that) was actually dropped on the solar panels of a hospital and ended up destroying the source of electricity for that hospital. It’s a clear attack on life-sustaining sources, a denial of whatever remains of lifesaving medical resources. This also includes the collective starvation of all people, and especially of disabled children in northern Gaza who have specific dietary requirements that must be met in order for them to live. We’ve also seen the eradication of entire genealogies of Palestinians in Gaza. Christian families of Gaza have been targeted by airstrikes. We’ve seen mass murder of children and babies, the obliteration of medical institutions by airstrikes and ground invasion, and the annihilation of sources of agriculture harvests. Gaza is famous for strawberries. Airstrikes on Palestinian farms and life target the source of labor and the fruits of that labor, the vital food infrastructures. It creates a very toxic environment where people without the most basic health care infrastructure are being exposed on a daily basis to toxic waste and materials, and exposed to viral and bacterial infections that can impact the health of future generations.

We saw this in Iraq, where women in Fallujah are still giving birth to children with fatal and congenital conditions because of attacks by the U.S., the U.K. and Canada in 2003. That’s over 20 years ago, and we’re still seeing their effects on children and on babies that are being born right now in 2024.

Part of our mission and our values is to hold so-called feminist spaces or groups and women’s rights institutions here accountable, and also to counter their efforts at either weaponizing the language of women’s rights or completely erasing the reproductive genocide that is happening in Palestine. An example of that is the Planned Parenthood statement in December of 2023, which completely failed to mention pretty much anything about Palestine and Palestinians, or anything about Zionist settler colonialism. The Zionist state requires the annihilation of the Palestinian people and our removal from our land. In Planned Parenthood’s statement, we saw clearly an orientalist framework of Palestinians as violent, aggressive sexual deviants that are animalistic and savage. The statement attempted to deflect from the ongoing escalation of genocide and also to help manufacture consent for the current attacks on Gaza. As a collective of Arab and Palestinian feminists who are informed by Indigenous, ecofeminist and Third World feminist thought and frameworks, we completely reject this statement and others that follow the same framework.

Ihmoud: I’ll just make a couple of points about peace. I think we’re in a moment where we’re witnessing the implosion of the Zionist project. And part of that is a broad recognition that the peace process has failed. I think we have to understand that Palestinians have broadly rejected the liberal peace paradigm and what’s broadly understood as the Middle East peace process. This liberal peace paradigm seeks to transform our anti-colonial liberation movement into a state-building project that benefits colonial powers. This state-building project ends up supporting the settler-colonial project in its ongoing processes of land confiscation and carceral control of our mobility. It also supports broader forms of violence and control, including, centrally, the Palestinian Authority’s participation in security coordination with Israel. We have to understand that this liberal paradigm of peace has failed us. It has become a tool of further entrenching Israeli colonial violence, and it has enabled the reconsolidation of a predominantly male Palestinian ruling class that is committed to maintaining the status quo.

But again, this moment shows us how the ground is really ripe for alternatives. And this is a moment that invites us to really think with the possible alternatives that are not vested in this hegemonic language of liberal peace and that are instead about reenvisioning our liberation project as an anti-colonial project. And as feminists, we have to think about what that means in terms of what our role is in that envisioning process.

What are forms of international solidarity and struggle that you feel are most needed at this moment?

Ghanayem: You know, we’re all inspired by Audre Lorde. We’re all inspired by Black, Indigenous and Latinx feminists who say that there is no point in singular struggles. And I think that the colonized are good at being in solidarity with each other. We just need to remember to make people who are invisible visible. Our role as the Palestinian Feminist Collective is to make women visible, to make children visible, to make queer Palestinians visible, and to share love toward Palestinian men. I think this resonates with a lot of people and other liberation struggles, because we are tired of being told how community should look when we already know what it should look like.

Ihmoud: We have to continue to uplift the voices of Palestinian women in this moment, especially in Gaza, which is really the front line of our liberation movement right now. And part of that requires rejecting the colonial narratives that are being used to justify the exterminatory policies of the Israeli state right now. It requires that we reject the broader politics of death that’s being waged on our people, on our homeland and on our entire ecosystems of life as Indigenous people. Decolonial feminism, on the one hand, rejects, interrupts and forcefully opposes these colonial politics of death. And at the same time, it uplifts alternative visions that affirm our lives and the potential futures of our people on our homeland. We have to continue to uplift those life-giving visions at the same time that we reject this colonial politics of death. We are implicated in each other’s survival. I like this idea of us being co-conspirators in each other’s liberation, and I think that is a way to think about our transnational solidarity politics as well.

Note: This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.