Talk of ‘Christian nationalism’ is getting a lot louder – but what does the term really mean?

Photo by Edward Cisneros on Unsplash

School lunch, Christian Nationalism and Jesus

The Conversation

September 30, 2024

According to a May 2022 poll from the University of Maryland, 61% of Republicans favor declaring the United States a Christian nation – even though 57% recognized that it would be unconstitutional. Meanwhile, 31% of all Americans and 49% of Republicans believe “God intended America to be a new promised land where European Christians could create a society that would be an example for the rest of the world,” a recent survey from the Public Religion Research Institute found.

Those statistics underscore the influence of a set of ideas called “Christian nationalism,” which has been in the spotlight leading up to November 2022 midterm elections. Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has openly identified as a Christian nationalist and called for the Republican Party to do the same. Others, like Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert and Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano, have not claimed that label but have embraced its tenets, such as dismissing the separation of church and state.

Few Americans use the term “Christian nationalist” to describe themselves, but many more have embraced some aspects of this worldview. There is widespread confusion over what the label really means, making it important to clearly explain. My work on how race and religion shape Americans’ attitudes toward government led me to study Christian nationalism, and to co-write a book detailing how it shapes Americans’ views of themselves, their government and their place in the world.

Christian nationalism is more than religiosity and patriotism. It is a worldview that guides how people believe the nation should be structured and who belongs there.

Mission from God

The phenomenon of white Christian nationalism has been studied by historians, sociologists, political scientists scholars of religion and many others. While their definitions may differ, they share certain elements.

Christian nationalism is a religious and political belief system that argues the United States was founded by God to be a Christian nation and to complete God’s vision of the world. In this view, America can be governed only by Christians, and the country’s mission is directed by a divine hand.

In my recent book “The Everyday Crusade: Christian Nationalism in American Politics,” written with fellow political scientists Irfan Nooruddin and Allyson Shortle, we demonstrate that this worldview has existed since the Colonies and played a central role in developing American identity. During the American Revolution, political and religious leaders linked independence from the British as part of God’s plan to set the world right.

‘Apotheosis of Washington,’ by John James Barralet, imagining the first president rising from his tomb. Heritage Art/Heritage Images via Getty Images

From then on, many Americans’ belief that God favors their nation has guided their view of pivotal events – such as supporting Manifest Destiny, the idea that the U.S. was destined to expand west across North America; or framing the “war on terror” as a conflict between Christians and non-Christians in the 21st century.

Today, only about 4 in 10 people in the U.S. are white Christians. The thought of no longer being the majority has prompted some of them to see Christian nationalism as the only way to get the nation back on the right track. Christian nationalism typically restricts adherents’ view of who can be considered a “true” American, limiting it to people who are white, Christian and U.S.-born, and whose families have European roots.
Dissidents, disciples and laity

The majority of Americans do not embrace Christian nationalism. Even so, its echoes appear everywhere from American flags in church pulpits, to the Pledge of Allegiance, to “In God We Trust” on money, license plates and government vehicles.

My book co-authors and I argue that Christian nationalist ideas exist along a spectrum. For our book project, we developed a measure we refer to as “American Religious Exceptionalism” and used it to analyze nationally representative and state surveys from 2008 to 2020. Based on that data, we categorized U.S. citizens into three groups: dissidents, laity and disciples.

“Dissidents” reject the idea of the U.S. having a divine founding and plan, and express a more open understanding of what it means to be an American. Among the nationally representative samples, the proportion of dissidents ranges from 37% to 49% of the population.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, the “disciples” strongly believe in the divine founding and guidance of the U.S. and express more restrictive ideas about who can be a “real” American and who should be allowed to enter the country. Disciples, who represent between 10% and 14% of the population, are more likely to see immigrants as a threat to American culture, and to express concern about the decreasing percentage of Americans who are white and Christian.

Those in the “laity” in the middle represent between 37% and 52% of the population. They demonstrate support for many of the same views the disciples do, such as anti-immigrant, anti-Black, and anti-Muslim attitudes, but less intensely.

Master salesman

Politicians can be thought about as entrepreneurs constantly looking for new consumers. Some of them have found a devoted audience among the disciples, who tend to be politically engaged and eager to vote for a candidate who will advance their view of the nation.

Former President Donald Trump has been particularly successful at attracting voters who are sympathetic to Christian nationalist ideas, by portraying himself as a defender of Christians “under siege.” In June 2020, in the midst of upheaval over police killings of unarmed Black Americans, tear gas was used to disperse protesters to allow then-President Trump to have his picture taken holding a Bible in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C. His open animus toward Muslims has also helped bring Christian nationalists from the fringes into the mainstream. Supporters of then-President Donald Trump pray outside the U.S. Capitol Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C. Win McNamee/Getty Images

Images linking Christianity with the nation and with Trump, as part of a larger divine mission, were on full display during the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. In the most extreme Christian nationalist views, the government must be brought into alignment with this ideology – even if force is necessary.

Our research found that 68% of disciples agree that force may be necessary to maintain the traditional American way of life. Most disciples express strong support for representative democracy; however, 48% of disciples support the idea of military rule, compared with 6% of dissidents.

Heading to the polls

Christian nationalism’s movement toward the mainstream is evident in the 2022 midterms, as several candidates have announced their support for Christian nationalism or made statements highly in line with it. Not only does such rhetoric mobilize disciples, but it has the potential to persuade the laity that these candidates will best represent their interests. An atmosphere of increasing partisan polarization, where political debates are sometimes portrayed as between angels and demons destroying the country, provides a fertile environment.

What this means for American democracy is unclear. But as some white and Christian Americans fear a loss of status, I believe Christian nationalism is coming back – attempting to reclaim its “holy land.”

Eric McDaniel, Associate Professor of Political Science, The University of Texas at Austin

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

Americans are suffering a hidden ‘depression’ and economic hell in 2020 — and it could get even worse: report

Meaghan Ellis
Retail workers have a different reason to dread the Black Friday rush this year

Alex Henderson

December 04, 2020

ALTERNET


Even in the worst of economic times, some Americans will continue to prosper — for example, the corporatists who made a fortune during the Great Depression of the 1930s while millions of other Americans were out of work. The coronavirus recession of 2020 has left parts of the U.S. economy unscathed — many online businesses are turning huge profits — while creating economic hell for others. And the latter is the focus of an article published by Axios on December 4.

Axios' Dino Rabouin breaks it down when it comes to who is faring well economically during the coronavirus recession and who is suffering economic hell. The journalist explains, "Big business, investors and the wealthy are thriving. But restaurant and bar employees, hotel and airline staff and other service workers are in a pretty hopeless situation right now. A 'depression' is an apt description of what they're facing — especially folks in rural and middle America who are parents."

Rabouin adds, "700,000 Americans have been filing unemployment insurance claims every week for 37 weeks — nine months. Plus, 20 million people are still on the pre-pandemic unemployment rolls. That's unheard of, and incredibly bad."

The coronavirus pandemic is the world's deadliest health crisis since the so-called "Spanish flu" pandemic of 1918/1919. According to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, COVID-19 has killed more than 1.5 people worldwide and over 276,000 in the United States. And Dr. Anthony Fauci, expert immunologist, is warning that the worst is yet to come as the U.S. moves from late autumn into early winter.

From a business and economic standpoint, the U.S. was much different during the 1918/1919 pandemic — there was no such thing as the "digital economy" when Woodrow Wilson was president. But during the 2020 pandemic, the U.S. has digital-oriented workers who have the ability to earn a great living without leaving home and workers who have to physically go their brick-and-mortar jobs — and those brick-and-mortar jobs might have ceased to exist because of the pandemic.

"President-elect Biden faces a fragile recovery that could easily fall apart, as the economy remains in worse shape than most people think," Rabouin observes. "Why it matters: there is a recovery happening, but it's helping some people immensely and others not at all. And it's that second part that poses a massive risk to the Biden-Harris Administration's chance of success."

In November, the United States' official unemployment rate was 6.7%, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. But one thing unemployment figures don't reflect, as Rabouin points out, is the pandemic's effect on the gig economy — that is, freelancers who don't have a full-time job, but survive through freelance gigs.

Rabouin reports, "The official unemployment rate has been dropping, but that's because: (1) It never really counted gig economy workers well in the first place. (2) Its data collection abilities have been severely crimped by the pandemic. (3) Lots of people are falling out of the labor force — not working and not looking. What's next: 13.4 million people are on pandemic unemployment programs that expire at the end of the year — 27 days from now."

FOR PROFIT HEALTHCARE & PRICE COUGING

Greed is immoral — but health care greed is worse

Donald Trump looks on as Pennsylvania Republican U.S. Senate candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz speaks at a pre-election rally to support Republican candidates in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, U.S., November 5, 2022. REUTERS/Mike Segar/File Photo
Donald Trump looks on as Pennsylvania Republican U.S. Senate candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz speaks at a pre-election rally to support Republican candidates in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, U.S., November 5, 2022. REUTERS/Mike Segar/File Photo

Jim Hightower

December 23, 2024

Greed Is Immoral. Health Care Greed Is Abominable.

America has endured a long panorama of corporate greed -- from the East India Trading Company to the Robber Barons, Gordon Gecko Wall Streeters to Elon Musk. But down at the bottom of raw greediness today, you'll find the insatiable profiteers of the private nursing home industry.

Of course, many providers deliver honest, truly caring service (especially nonprofit and publicly owned community centers). But as a whole, this essential service has fallen into the clutches of money-hustling corporate chains and Wall Street speculators. Their goal is not to maximize grandma's care but to minimalize her cost to faraway rich shareholders.

Their most common profiteering ploy is to understaff their facilities, leaving vulnerable residents unattended ... and often, dead. Federal law, though, lets corporate owners define "sufficient" staff levels, which is why so many are grossly insufficient. One profit-padding tactic is called "tunneling" -- the chain sets up a dummy staffing agency to provide employees for the chain's nursing homes. That agency then charges greatly inflated to provide employees. But the chain doesn't complain, since it owns the agency ... and since unknowing customers end up paying the jacked-up tab.

President Joe Biden has proposed new rules to stop the gouging and improve care, including a requirement that each "nursing" home actually keep at least one nurse on staff. One! But, oh, the squeals by billionaire owners! "Cost prohibitive," they howl! So, instead of hiring nurses, they're hiring high-dollar lobbyists and lawyers to kill this little bit of health care fairness for people who are near the end of life.

These multimillionaire executives and billionaire investors are not only gouging families but profiteering on the health of people's loved ones. In case they care, that is why the public despises them.

WHY SHOULD WE ALLOW FOOD MONOPOLIES? LET'S BUST THE SYSTEM!

How are monopolistic corporations able to gain their economic dominance? By getting politicians to give it to them.


Consider the old robber barons. They weren't brilliant investors or managers but ruthless exploiters of government giveaways and bribers of officials who permitted their monopolistic thievery.

Likewise, today's monopoly players have captured local, state and national markets -- not through honest competition but by getting public officials to subsidize their expansion and to rig the rules against small competitors. Monopolizers buy this favoritism with the legalized bribes of campaign donations they lavish on compliant lawmakers.

Investigative digger Stacy Mitchell recently documented how this corrupt political favoritism has allowed massive retail chains like Walmart, Kroger and Dollar Tree to crush thousands of local grocers. This has left millions of Americans living in "food deserts" -- poor and rural communities with no food store.

What happened? As grocery chains spread from local to regional to national, they demanded that food manufacturers give them big discounts, giving them a dramatic monopoly pricing advantage over independent rivals. So, hometown grocers began hemorrhaging customers ... and going broke.

This raw, anti-competitive price discrimination was a flagrant violation of America's anti-monopoly law -- but here came Big Money to protect the monopolists. In 1980, as President Ronald Reagan was railing against "silly" consumer protection laws, supermarket lobbyists poured campaign cash into top officials of both parties. What they bought was bipartisan agreement to simply stop enforcing the "fusty" old antitrust law that had protected a competitive grocery economy for nearly 50 years.

But good news! That useful, highly effective law is still on the books, so let's build a long-term grassroots campaign to rejuvenate it and re-outlaw monopolization, redlining and price gouging by food giants. For more information, go to Institute for Local Self Reliance: ilsr.org

The moral dimension to America’s flawed health care system

Photo by Aaron Sousa on Unsplas

The Conversation

December 21, 2024

The killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson has set off soul-searching among many Americans. Part of that reflection is about the public reaction to Thompson’s death and the sympathy the suspect received online, with some people critical of the insurance industry celebrating the assailant as a sort of folk hero.

As many observers have pointed out, frustrations are no excuse for murder. But it has become a moment of wider reflection on health care in America, and why so many patients feel the system is broken.

Philosopher Nicole Hassoun researches health care and human rights. The Conversation U.S. spoke with her about the deeper questions Americans should be asking when they discuss health care reform.

We’re seeing an outpouring of anger about health care in the United States. Your work deals with global health inequality and access – can you help put the U.S. system in perspective?

If we compare ourselves to other rich countries, we don’t do very well. We spend much more money – about double per patient, on average, compared with other OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries – and get much less in return. In a study of 10 wealthy nations, including New Zealand, Sweden and Canada, The Commonwealth Fund – a private foundation for health care research – ranks the U.S. last overall.

About 90% of Americans have some kind of health insurance. Still, 10% lack insurance entirely, and even some of those who are insured can’t afford the co-pays or medication costs.

And there is a great deal of inequality in the U.S.: both disparities in access to health care and disparities in outcomes. Black infants die at a rate nearly 2.5 times higher than white babies do, for example, and diabetes rates are 30% higher among Native Americans and Latinos than white Americans. People of color tend to have lower rates of coverage as well.

Before the Affordable Care Act, the situation was really dire. It’s likely many of us will get some terrible health condition like cancer during our lifetime, even when we’re relatively young. And what that meant before the ACA was that, if you got sick enough to lose your job – and so, your health insurance – new insurers could charge high rates because of your “preexisting condition.”

You’ve argued there’s a universal right to health. What does that mean, and what would it look like?

I think that people everywhere should have a legally enforced right to health – and in many countries, such as Germany and Norway, they do. In about half the world’s countries, that right is spelled out in the constitution.

But the United States has not ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, which includes a right to health. Morally, I think that the U.S. ought to have signed on to that. People should be able to live minimally good lives, and health is really important to do that. Countries should protect their citizens’ human rights, and health is fundamental to other human rights, like the right to life.

When I say people have a right to health, I mean they have a right to the socially controllable determinants of health. This includes a clean and safe environment, health care and adequate food, water and social support. I am not saying that they have a right to be healthy, because you can’t guarantee that for anybody.

What I mean is that society should do what it can so that everybody has health care at a reasonable cost. Good governments and their social support systems help everyone secure the health they need to contribute to society.

The alternative is costly for everybody, not just people who are sick. Nearly half of the health problems in the U.S. stem from preventable diseases. As a wealthy country, we should have the resources to address those problems – including steps as simple as making sure people have high blood-pressure medicine, or regular primary-care visits. Everybody should be getting that kind of care, because otherwise, people certainly end up in the emergency room. Even ER visits that do not result in hospitalization cost an immense amount of money, ratcheting up the costs for everyone in the system, and often patients still don’t get the care that they need. According to a 2020 study published in The Lancet, a single-payer system could save the U.S. 13% savings in health care spending or US$450 billion each year.

It’s a matter of how we want to be as a country. We can make health a right, but that is a decision that the American population has to make. We’re all in this together. We’re all trying to make this country work. And it’s a lot harder to do that when you’re sick.

You mentioned an interesting phrase: the idea of the “minimally good life.”

I just wrote a book on the minimally good life, and the main question it grapples with is this: What do we owe each other as a basic minimum? What kind of social safety net will suffice for everyone?

I argue that respect for humanity requires people to help others live “minimally good lives” when that help does not sacrifice our own reasonably good quality of life.

But how should we define that minimum? How should the country decide what kind of social welfare system to have? The basic idea is this: Put yourself in other people’s shoes and think, “There but for the grace of God go I.” What would I need to live a good-enough life as that person? What would I need if I were them?

Maybe you don’t have cancer right now, or heart disease, or anything else. But someday you might. Empathy lets us think about how we can create the kind of security that will help us all flourish and live good lives.

It’s also part of being a good-enough person. I think we live better lives when we help each other. When we think about what we want, what policies and laws we want to vote for, we have to put ourselves in others’ shoes and consider what would be good enough for all of us.

Nicole Hassoun, Professor of Philosophy, Binghamton University, State University of New York

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

Prince Andrew and the British establishment’s ‘target-rich environment’ for spies

Britain's Prince Andrew leaves Westminster Abbey following the coronation ceremony of Britain's King Charles and Queen Camilla, in London, Britain May 6, 2023. REUTERS/Toby Melville/Pool/File Photo

The Conversation

December 23, 2024

A ruling by the UK’s Special Immigration Appeals Commission has revealed that a Chinese businessman with links to King Charles’ younger brother, Prince Andrew, has been banned from Britain. The commission was upholding a decision originally taken in 2023 by the then home secretary, Suella Braverman, to exclude a man subsequently named as Yang Tengbo.


Britain’s Security Service, MI5, had advised the commission that Yang posed “a risk to UK national security”. Reports have noted Yang’s visits to royal events at the request of the prince and his communications with one of Andrew’s senior advisers, Dominic Hampshire.

That Andrew might have been cultivated by an agent of the Chinese government will come as no surprise to anyone who has studied the work of intelligence agencies. Their ideal target will not necessarily be someone who sympathises with the regime they serve. Indeed with the collapse of the ideological certainties of the cold war, this has become increasingly unlikely.

Rather, a target will probably be someone who has particular weaknesses that can be exploited, often revolving around money or sex. They are seldom at the very pinnacle of power. But that, in itself, can leave them resentful and hungry for affirmation.

An exaggerated sense of self-importance can render them even more pliable. This can make for a complex relationship between intelligence predator and their prey.

In Andrew’s case, there are indications that members of his circle actually talked up the prince’s importance as a political contact. The commission’s ruling quoted a message from Hampshire to Yang in March 2020 after the latter had been invited to attend the Prince’s 60th birthday party.

Hampshire told Yang: “I also hope that it is clear to you where you sit with my principal and indeed his family. You should never underestimate the strength of that relationship. …outside of his closest internal confidants, you sit at the very top of a tree that many, many people would like to be on.”

Those more familiar with the workings of the British government might be sceptical about the height of the branches Yang had reached. King Charles is, after all, a constitutional monarch with few formal powers. And Andrew has become an increasingly marginalised figure within the royal family.

A steady stream of revelations about his relationship with sex-trafficker and paedophile Jeffrey Epstein has left him increasingly out in the cold. He was stripped of his role as UK trade envoy in 2011 and was then forced to step down from public duties in 2019. So why bother trying to court him?

Clues are provided in an important survey of the links between the royal family and the intelligence community published by international history specialists Richard Aldrich and Rory Cormac in 2021. As they note, before 2011, Andrew had enjoyed a long career in the royal navy and then as a British trade envoy, becoming closely involved in the sensitive and secretive world of UK arms sales.

In 2010, the Wikileaks revelations suggested Andrew had been fiercely critical of the Serious Fraud Office for almost derailing a deal with Saudi Arabia and that his inside knowledge might have extended to some dark corners of the arms trade and its methods. There were also reports that the UK’s foreign intelligence service, MI6, was concerned that a former US deputy police chief close to the investigation into the Epstein affair might have leaked details to Russia, leaving Andrew open to blackmail.

So Andrew probably was a tempting target, combining personal vulnerability with knowledge that could, at the very least, be embarrassing to the UK. But then, to borrow former US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s vivid phrase about Iraq, the British establishment has long provided foreign intelligence agencies with “a target-rich environment”. And the waters tend to be muddied by the ease with which legitimate contacts based on cultural and trade diplomacy can morph into something more sinister.
Broader concerns

The ruling of the Special Immigration Appeals Commission quoted from a statement by the director-general of MI5 from July 2022 which distinguished between legitimate diplomacy and “what we call interference activity – influencing that is clandestine, coercive or corruptive”. Yet, in practice, the distinction is often opaque.

When darker forces are at work, it often only becomes apparent as a result of prolonged surveillance of those involved. And that, in turn, assumes Britain’s spies are actually doing their job. Various bodies have questioned whether they are.

In a July 2020 report, the parliamentary intelligence and security committee criticised the intelligence community for not being more curious about certain aspects of Russian activity. The possibility of Kremlin interference in the 2016 Brexit referendum was a significant concern.

The implication – that intelligence officials had been nervous about getting involved in such a sensitive political issue – was rather borne out by the fate of the committee’s report itself. It was delivered to then prime minister Boris Johnson in October 2019 but was not released to the public until well after his pro-Brexit government had won the general election of December that year.

Nor is the Labour party without questions to answer. At the same time as the Prince Andrew scandal was unfolding, Christine Lee, who donated £584,177 to the office of the Labour MP Barry Gardiner, lost a claim against MI5 which had accused her of engaging in political interference on behalf of China. Gardiner has said in response that none of the donations “according to MI5, came from an illegal source” and that he has “ceased all contact” with Lee following the MI5 warning.

Prince Andrew’s behaviour is part of a wider picture and speaks to the general need for higher standards in British public life. Stricter rules on political donations to prevent foreign interference in British politics are long overdue. And people of political influence, including members of both houses of parliament, should be far more closely scrutinised over their relationships with foreign officials and business people. National security, as the term implies, very much begins at home.

Philip Murphy, Director of History & Policy at the Institute of Historical Research and Professor of British and Commonwealth History, School of Advanced Study, University of London

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

POSTMODERN FEUDALISM

Europe’s microstates: The medieval monarchies that survive in our midst

Photo by Amy W. on Unsplash

The Conversation

December 23, 2024

Continental Europe is home to four microstates with populations of between 30,000 and 80,000 people: Andorra, on the border between France and Spain; Liechtenstein, nestled between Switzerland and Austria; Monaco, which sits on the French Riviera; and San Marino, which is surrounded by northern Italy.

These states have existed since the medieval period and their tiny size has enabled them to develop and maintain singular constitutional arrangements. They have all developed original solutions to the problems of state architecture, many of which survive today.

All four of these microstates participate in the Council of Europe (Europe’s human rights organisation) and have therefore had to modernise to meet international standards of governance. This includes the independence of the judiciary.

However, all four have also implemented these reforms without altering their institutional identity. Their commitment to preserving their distinctiveness from other countries prevents wider reform to their institutions. For them, the protection of national tradition and identity is a form of self-preservation rather than a mere expression of ideology.

The distinctiveness of the four microstates lies in the survival of institutional arrangements that can no longer to be found practically anywhere else in the world. In the principalities of Liechtenstein and Monaco, for example, the monarchy still has a central role in the constitution.

Unlike in most European states with a monarchy, in Liechtenstein and Monaco, the royal head of state continues to exercise meaningful power. Andorra and San Marino, meanwhile, operate under a dual head of state arrangement. They effectively have two monarchs.

 

The populations of Europe’s medieval microstates.

World Bank/ Data Commons, CC BY-ND

Institutional arrangements in these principalities has been shaped by their diminutive size, both in terms of territory and population, and their geographical location. And these arrangements have survived since the middle ages because they have become their identity. While national tradition is an ideological debate in other nations, in these, preserving the past is a survival mechanism.

Liechtenstein and Monaco

Liechtenstein and Monaco are constitutional monarchies of the kind that offer substantial power to the royal family. Everything is organised around a prince, who exercises the executive power. Contemporary monarchies in the western legal tradition generally have a ceremonial king or queen but the executive power is held by an elected government. Liechtenstein and Monaco have maintained their historical organisation of government, centred on a very powerful monarch.

Although his powers are not unlimited, in Monaco, the prince is not even accountable to the parliament for the powers he does hold. Liechtenstein’s prince enjoys even more powers, including the right to appoint half of the members of the constitutional court.

However, the prince of Liechtenstein’s sovereign power is held in partnership with the people of Liechtenstein. The institutional architecture is built as to allow a system of checks and balances between the prince and the people.

Since a 2003 constitutional amendment, for example, the people can table a motion of no-confidence in the prince if more than 1,500 citizens are in agreement to do so, which triggers a referendum on confidence in him. The same number of citizens can mount an initiative to abolish the monarchy entirely, should they choose to do so.
Andorra and San Marino

The principality of Andorra should more properly be called co-principality, because of its co-princes arrangement. One of the princes is the bishop of Urgell – from Catalonia – and the other is the president of the French Republic (and previously the French king or emperor). So another Andorran peculiarity is that neither of the princes are Andorran nationals.

Following a 1993 reform that established a fully fledged constitution, neither prince holds sovereign power. Their present constitutional role is almost entirely ceremonial. However, concerns remain over the fact that they are not nationals of the state and that the heads of state are selected neither by the Andorran people nor by their representatives. The historical reason for a foreign head of state is the geographical location of Andorra – wedged between Catalonia and France. Allowing itself to be put under this double sovereignty was a guarantee of survival.

San Marino also has a two-headed state but both leaders, called the Captains Regent, are Sammarinese nationals. They are elected by the Grand and General Council (the Sammarinese legislative body) and their distinctive trait is that they serve only a six-month term of office.

The reason for such a short tenure is that San Marino has a population of just under 34,000 people. Everyone knows everyone else, which is a situation that can be detrimental to the independence of elective offices.

Captains Regent can’t shore up enough power in their short time in office to be able to overthrow the republic. The Captains Regent were first established in 1243, shortly before a number of Italian republics were overthrown by wealthy families. One of the reasons why San Marino has been able to survive is because it has prevented one family from being more powerful than the others for centuries.

Microstates are, therefore, not like Europe’s regular-sized states. They have distinctive institutional architectures – and often for understandable reasons.

Elisa Bertolini, Associate Professor of Comparative Public Law, Bocconi University

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

Peace on earth doesn’t look very likely any time soon

Image via Free Malaysia Today/Creative Commons.

While Putin has 'taken a serious hit' — Trump could save him: report

The Conversation

December 23, 2024

They don’t make world leaders like they used to, as far as Vladimir Putin is concerned. Talking to a Kremlin-friendly gathering of journalists at his traditional end-of-year press conference earlier today, the Russian president spoke with fond nostalgia of the old gang, saying he’d like to spend more time with “people close to me”, such as the former German chancellor Helmut Kohl, the former French president Jacques Chirac and Silvio Berlusconi, late prime minister of Italy. High office aside, these men have another thing in common: they are all now dead.

Whether this was Putin’s way of saying that the only good European leader’s a dead European leader or whether it was an arch reflection on having outlasted all three is not clear. What is clear, though, is that if he were to visit the countries they led next week, he’d be liable for arrest under the warrant issued by the International Criminal Court in 2023 on charges concerning the alleged illegal deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia.

Stefan Wolff, of the University of Birmingham, watched Putin’s press conference as it unfolded. He reflects here on what it tells us about his intentions for the war in Ukraine in 2025 and how that contrasts with the messages emerging from meetings between Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, and top EU leaders, including European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, and the new president of the European Council, Antonio Costa.

Wolff observes that the rhetoric from both camps continues to insist on their maximalist war aims. Putin vows to get rid of “the neo-Nazi regime in Kiev, which seized power back in 2014” and “to drive the enemy out from our territory”. EU leaders, meanwhile, are talking of upping aid to Kyiv to enable Ukraine “not just to hold on, but to tilt the balance to their favour because Putin will not stop, unless he’s stopped”.

But of course all that could change “in one day”, if incoming US president Donald Trump is as good as his word. And this, says Wolff, is the spectre that looms ever larger. A Trump-brokered peace deal, he says, “carries too many risks” including the “prospect of Putin using a mere break in the fighting to regroup and rearm and then posing an even greater threat to European security in the future”.

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Putin’s war machine, meanwhile, lost a key figure this week when the man in charge of its Radiation, Chemical and Biological Protection Forces, Lt Gen Igor Kyrillov, was killed in a bomb blast outside his Moscow home. Ukraine’s security agency, the SBU, was quick to claim responsibility, saying that Kirillov had been charged in absentia for war crimes over what it said were 4,800 instances of Russia using chemical weapons since the war in Ukraine began in February 2022.

Anneleen van der Meer is an expert in chemical warfare at Leiden University. She’s been tracking reports of chemical weapons use in Ukraine and believes that the invading forces have used both tear gas and chloropicrin, a toxic nerve irritant. While not being as deadly as the sarin allegedly used by the Assad regime in Syria, both will have made things much more unpleasant for the Ukrainian defenders.

Meer also believes that Russia’s use of chemicals – if accurately reported – are likely to have served a dual purpose. On top of any actual military advantage, the use of chemicals – in spite of a ban ratified by almost every country in the world – is designed to send the threatening message that Russia doesn’t feel bound by any of the rules of war: “This has effects beyond the battlefield, provoking fear in Ukrainian defenders but also challenging Ukraine’s own commitment to play by the rules,” she concludes.
View from Washington

One thing on which Putin and the incoming US president Donald Trump would appear to have in common is their attitude to the news media. If they aren’t compliant, they must be enemies of the people.

Trump will at least expect to have a modicum of control of the agenda through his close (for the time being) relationship with Elon Musk, whose social media site X has gradually morphed into what appears to be a personal propaganda machine. Musk has also been tasked, alongside fellow billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy, with heading up a new department of government efficiency, which appears not to be a department at all but feels more like a kind of management consultancy group.

It’s a fair assessment of the quality of Trump’s initial appointments that the two billionaires are by no means the most curious choices. Not when compared to former Fox News host Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee for defense secretary, who has been accused of sexual assault (which he denies) as well as – by his own admission – having once had an over-fondness for self-medication with alcohol.

Or there’s RFK Jr., Trump’s vaccine-sceptical nominee for health secretary. Or Jared Kushner’s dad, Charles, a lawyer disbarred in three states and real-estate developer, who has been picked as ambassador to France. Kushner senior served time for what the prosecutor called “one of the most loathsome, disgusting crimes” he had prosecuted. You can look up Charles Kushner for yourself. Bring a strong stomach to the exercise.

The list goes on. Barbara Yoxon, an expert in international politics at Lancaster University, has been scratching her head on our behalf at Trump’s picks. This looks like something out of the authoritarian leaders’ playbook, whereby he appoints a cabinet whose inexperience is matched only by their loyalty, in order to insulate himself from any potential plotting among his subordinates.

But, loyalty aside, Yoxon believes that picking a cabinet of none of the talents could be a risky business for Trump 2.0. Yes-men tend to tell a leader what he or she wants to hear, rather than what is sensible. With a trade war looming with Mexico, Canada and – possibly most consequential of all – China, as well as major wars in Ukraine and the Middle East and flashpoints pretty much everywhere you look around the globe, this could lead to problems. She concludes: “In this highly dangerous new world, it is even more important than ever that he choose advisers wisely.”

When it comes to Ukraine, as we know Trump has promised an immediate end to the conflict. It’s clear that all parties to the war are now watching Trump very carefully for clues as to how he might seek to achieve this. On a recent visit to Europe, he caught up with the Ukrainian president who reported their meeting to have been “good and productive”. For his part, Trump posted after the meeting on his Truth Social website that: “There should be an immediate ceasefire and negotiations should begin,” – adding that: “China can help.”

Writing with his regular collaborator, Tetyana Malyarenko of the University of Odesa, Stefan Wolff notes that while Trump may be keen to involve China in any peace negotiations, the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, has his own agenda. And this may not favour bringing hostilities in Ukraine to a swift ending. Tying the US up in a war in Europe plays into China’s hands, they write. Not only will it detract from Washington’s planned military pivot towards Asia, it also suits China to pit Russia and the west against each other in Europe.

The damage the war is doing to Russia’s economy can only serve Beijing’s interests. The “no-limits friendship” between Russia and China is fairly lopsided at present, with Beijing as very much the senior partner. That’s unlikely to change while Russia is mired in Ukraine and that suits XI just fine, Wolff and Malyarenko conclude.
The true meaning of genocide

Leaders across the Middle East will also be factoring in Trump’s imminent inauguration to their calculations. It’s too early to make any kind of informed prediction as to how the situation in Syria might play out. The latest announcement from Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS), the rebel group which led the offensive that ousted Bashar al-Assad, is that rather than aiming for a federal set-up which might give Kurds in the country’s north a degree of autonomy, the HTS preference is for a unified state which would require Kurdish armed groups to disband and disarm, including the US-backed coalition, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). This will please Turkey, but it won’t go down well in Washington. We’ll have more on this in the new year.

One of our other focuses this week has been on a spat between the Irish and Israeli governments which led Israel to withdraw its ambassador to Ireland. Ireland has formally applied to intervene in South Africa’s case in the International Court of Justice over whether Israel is in fact committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Ireland says current international law concerning what comprises genocide has far too narrow a definition – which, it says could lead to a “culture of impunity in which the protection of civilians is minimised”.

International legal scholar James Sweeney of Lancaster Law School explains here how the law of genocide works and how it has been applied in the past.

Jonathan Este, Senior International Affairs Editor, Associate Editor, The Conversation

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

Reel resistance and Netflix’s removal of Palestinian films

A scene from BonBoné with lead actor Rana Alamuddin. The short film, previously available on Netflix, shows a middle-class Palestinian couple trying to connect even though one of them is in jail. (Groundglass235 + Koussay Hamzeh)


Chandni Desai, Assistant professor, Education, University of Toronto
The Conversation

December 23, 2024

Netflix faces calls for a boycott after it removed its “Palestinian Stories” collection this October. This includes approximately 24 films.


Netflix cited the expiration of three-year licences as the reason for pulling the films from the collection.

Nonetheless, some viewers were outraged and almost 12,000 people signed a CodePink petition calling on Netflix to reinstate the films.

At a time when Palestinians are facing what scholars, United Nations experts and Amnesty International are calling a genocide, Netflix’s move could be seen as a silencing of Palestinian narratives.

The disappearance of these films from Netflix in this moment has deeper implications. The removal of almost all films in this category represents a significant act of cultural erasure and anti-Palestinian racism.

There is a long history of the erasure of Palestine.

Cultural erasure

 

Book cover: ‘The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine’ by Ilan Pappe, professor of history at the College of Social Sciences and International Studies at the University of Exeter. (Simon & Schuster)

Since the Nakba of 1948, Zionist militias have systematically ethnically cleansed Palestinians and destroyed hundreds of cities, towns and villages, while also targeting Palestinian culture.

Palestinian visual archives and books were looted, stolen and hidden away in Israeli-controlled state archives, classified and often kept under restricted access. This targeting of visual culture is not incidental. It is a calculated act of cultural erasure aimed at severing the connection between a people, their land and history.

Another notable instance of cultural erasure includes the thefts of the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s (PLO) visual archives and cinematic materials. In 1982, the PLO Arts and Culture Section, Research Centre and other PLO offices were looted during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The Palestinian Cinema Institutions film archives were moved during the invasion and later disappeared. Theft and looting also occured during the Second Intifada in the early 2000s and recurrent bombardments of Gaza.

This plundering of Palestinian cultural institutions, archives and libraries resulted in the loss of invaluable cultural materials, including visual archives.

To maintain Zionist colonial mythologies about the establishment of Israel, the state systematically stole, destroyed and holds captive Palestinian films and other historical and cultural materials.

Palestinian liberation cinema

By the mid-20th century, Palestinian cinema emerged as a vital component of global Third Worldism, a unifying global ideology and philosophy of anticolonial solidarity and liberation.

Palestinian cinema aligned with revolutionary filmmakers and cinema groups in Asia, Africa and Latin America, all seeking to reclaim their histories, culture and identity in the face of imperial domination.

This photo is taken by Hani Jawharieh, a Palestinian filmmaker who was killed in 1976 while filming in the Aintoura Mountains of Lebanon. CC BY

The PLO’s revolutionary films of the 1960s and 1970s were driven by the national liberation struggle and the desire to document the Palestinian revolution. Created as part of a broader campaign against colonialism and imperialism, PLO filmmakers aimed to rally international solidarity for the Palestinian cause through Afro-Asian, Tricontinental and socialist cultural networks.

Censorship

Censorship became one of the primary mechanisms for repressing cultural production in the Third World. Colonial and imperial powers, as well as allied governments, banned films, books, periodicals, newspapers and art that conveyed anti-colonial and anti-imperialist sentiments. Their films and cultural works were denied distribution in western and local markets.

Settler colonial states such as Israel rely on the destruction and suppression of the colonized narratives to erase historical and cultural connections to land. By doing so, they undermine Indigenous Palestinian claims to sovereignty and self-determination.

Many Palestinian cultural workers including writers, poets and filmmakers were persecuted, imprisoned, exiled, assassinated and killed.

In an essay about the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the Sabra and Shatila massacres, the late Palestinian American literature professor, Edward Said, explained how the West systematically denies Palestinians the agency to tell their own stories. He said the West’s biased coverage and suppression of Palestinian narratives distorts the region’s history and justifies Israeli aggression. For a more truthful understanding of history, Palestinians needed the right “to narrate,” he said.

Resistance

Despite the denial to narrate, generations of Palestinian filmmakers, including Elia Suleiman, Michel Khleifi, Mai Masri, Annemarie Jacir and many others, have contributed to and evolved this cinematic tradition of resistance.

Their films centre the lived experiences of Palestinians under settler colonialism, occupation, apartheid and exile.

By capturing the Palestinian struggle, freedom dreams, joy, hopes and humour, they help to humanize a population.

 A scene from TIFF selection, Farha, about a girl trying to pursue her education in 1948 Palestine just before the Nakba.

After Netflix first launched the Palestinian Stories collection in 2021, the company was criticized by the Zionist organization, Im Tirtzu. They pressured Netflix to purge Palestinian films.

A year later, Netflix faced more pushback — this time from Israeli officials — when it released Farha, a film set against the backdrop of the 1948 Nakba. Israeli Finance Minister Avigdor Lieberman even took steps to revoke state funding from theatres that screened the film.

The Israeli television series Fauda, produced by former IDF soldiers Lior Raz and Avi Issacharoff, remains on the platform. Fauda portrays an undercover Israeli military unit operating in the West Bank. The series has faced significant criticism for perpetuating racist stereotypes, glorifying Israeli military actions, and whitewashing the Israeli occupation and systemic oppression of Palestinians.

Such media helps to legitimize and normalize violent actions committed against Palestinians.

Suppression in the time of genocide

In a time of genocide, Palestinian stories, films, cultural production, media and visual culture transcend being mere cultural artifacts. They are tools of defiance, sumud (steadfastness), historical memory, documentation and preservation against erasure. They assert the fundamental right to Palestinian liberation and the right to narrate and exist even while being annihilated.

As such, in the past 400+ days, Israel has intensified its systematic silencing and erasure of Palestinian narratives.

One hundred thirty-seven journalists and media workers have been killed across the occupied Palestinian Territories and Lebanon since Israel declared war on Hamas following its Al-Aqsa Flood Operation on Oct. 7, 2023. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, there are almost no professional journalists left in northern Gaza to document Israel’s ethnic cleansing. It has been the deadliest period for journalists in the world since CPJ began collecting data in 1992.

Israel has also targeted, detained, tortured, raped and killed academics, students, health-care workers and cultural workers; many who have shared eyewitness accounts and narrated their stories of genocide on social media platforms.

Israel has censored and silenced Palestinian narratives through media manipulation, digital censorship and the destruction of journalistic infrastructure. Palestinian cultural and academic institutions, cultural heritage and archives have also been bombed and destroyed in Gaza, termed scholasticide. The aim of this destruction is to obliterate historical memory, and suppress documentation of atrocities.

The genocide and scholasticide will prevent the Palestinian people’s ability to fully preserve centuries of history, knowledge, culture and archives.

Netflix’s decision to remove the Palestinian Stories collection and not renew the licences of the films during this time makes it complicit in the erasure of Palestinian culture.

Chandni Desai, Assistant professor, Education, University of Toronto

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

Behind the pagan roots of modern Christmas traditions

Thom Hartmann
December 25, 2024 
ALTERNET


Santa Claus (Shutterstock)



Today is Christmas Day, a connection to some of the most ancient of all known northern European shamanic traditions. Like people living in the north

for millennia, we continue to embrace them with regional, national, and religious tweaks.

It occurs during the week of the shortest day and longest night of the year in the northern hemisphere, when ancient holy men and women lit “yule logs” to push back the darkness and implore the gods or nature to bring back the light of summer.

As Henry Bourne wrote in 1725:

“For as both December and January were called Guili or Yule, upon Account of the Sun’s Returning, and the Increase of the Days; so, I am apt to believe, the Log has had the Name of the Yule-Log, from its being burnt as an Emblem of the returning Sun, and the Increase of its Light and Heat.”


When Louise and I lived in Stadtsteinach, Germany, Herr Mueller led us up a mountainside deep into the Franconian forest on Christmas eve in 1986 where our community had covered a pine tree with candles: we sang carols and he read aloud several bible verses.

He later told me that in ancient times the German shamans would set the tallest tree afire to re-ignite the sun and bring back longer days.

This concern with the shortest day of the year and being able to identify when the sun would begin to lengthen the days, heralding the return of the growing season (and food!), probably accounts for the “calendar stone” arrangements found across every northern hemisphere continent. The most recent was found under 40 feet of water in Lake Michigan and dates back 9,000 years.


Many traditions that tie Christmas back to the earlier “pagan” European religions it co-opted still exist.

Christmas carols, for example, started out as a pagan winter ceremony called “wassailing” to help fruit trees survive the winter and insure a good harvest the following year. By the middle ages it had turned into a Christmas-associated version of trick-or-treat where poor people would sing a song and demand money or food from their wealthy neighbors. As British historian and jurist John Seldon (1584-1654) wrote:
“Wenches … by their Wassels at New-years-tide ... present you with a Cup, and you must drink of the slabby stuff; but the meaning is, you must give them Moneys.”


Which gave further ammunition to Oliver Cromwell in justifying his 1647 ban on Christmas celebrations. (Some argue he’s been reincarnated as a Texas Republican politician. /s)


Another European tradition has to do with mistletoe, one of the few plants that actually stays alive and bears fruit through the winter. Because of its ability to defy the dark days, it was thought to increase fertility and put in the beds of couples hoping to conceive. From this came the tradition of “kissing under the mistletoe.”

Christmas itself is supposed to be the celebration of the birth of Jesus, but if you match up the times of events associated with his birth it’s a virtual certainty it wasn’t in the winter. But indigenous people from every northern hemisphere continent had shamanic ceremonies and celebrations associated with pushing back the winter darkness and returning the sun to full illumination.

Early Christian governments, seeing it was impossible to stamp out these holidays and celebrations, simply overlaid them with the Christ story, bringing us the celebrations and traditions we have today.


For example, Norwegians tell the story of their 10th century King Hákon the Good, who’d been raised as a Christian in England and wanted to bring that religion to his homeland. As Norwegian historian Snorri Sturluson wrote in his book Heimskringla: History of the Kings of Norway:
“He had it established in the laws that the Yule celebration was to take place at the same time as is the custom with the Christians.”


For millennia across the European arctic circle around the North Pole, from Scandinavia through Siberia, indigenous shamans sought out red-and-white mushrooms (amanita muscaria) and dried them in socks hanging from their fireplaces.

The mushrooms contain a powerful psychedelic, Muscimol, but are also laced with compounds poisonous to humans. Reindeer, however, love to eat these mushrooms and, when they do, they behave oddly, as if their names were Dancer and Prancer.


Their reindeer livers metabolize and thus neutralize the compounds that poison humans, but leave the psychedelic Muscimol largely untouched. Thus, reindeer urine on fresh snow is powerfully psychedelic.

Arctic shamans, around this time of the year, would leave batches of dried amanita mushrooms out in the snow for the hungry reindeer, who consider them a delicacy. The shamans would then follow the reindeer as they danced and played (high on the ’shrooms), gathering the fresh yellow snow to make into a holiday grog.

This was also the time of the year that the father of the gods in Norse religion, the long-white-bearded Odin, would ride his eight-legged horse Sleipnir (pronounced “sleigh-near”), bringing good people small gifts made by “Odin’s men” in Asgard, his arctic retreat. The story seems to have morphed as it traveled out of Norway and Sweden from men to elves, and from eight legs to eight reindeer.


Odin controlled the powers of Thunder and Lightning, “Donner” and “Blitzen” in today’s Germanic and Scandinavian languages.

There are also multiple goddess connections to this holiday, reindeer, and the Santa story, as Judith Shaw documents here.

The indigenous people of northern Scandinavia, the Saami, believed that when the sun — characterized as a female deity named Biewe — went dim in the winter she was sick. They put fat over their doorways to nourish Biewe and bring the sun back to its full glory; they also sacrificed white reindeer in the hope the ceremony would revive Biewe. When white reindeer weren’t available, they sacrificed other animals decorated with white ribbons.


The reindeer’s favorite food, the amanita mushrooms, look like the clothing shamans (and Santa!) wore, red with white trim and white spots. They’re rotund: you could call them “chubby.” Thus, Santa represents the mushrooms in arctic cultural lore.

Amanitas grow under pine trees because their mycorrhizae or fungal filaments that extend underground transport minerals from the soil into the roots of the pine trees, who return the favor by transporting carbohydrates from year-round photosynthesis in their needles back down through their roots into the mycorrhizae to nourish the mushrooms.

Amanitas are only found under pine and spruce trees because of this symbiotic relationship that keeps them both healthy. And to this day pine and spruce are pretty much the only trees we use to decorate our homes this time of year.

While Christmas Eve was the darkest of times in the northern hemisphere, it also held the greatest promise for an entire new year to come.

Indigenous European and Siberian Shamans and their communities would light their pine trees with candles, put a light symbolizing the north star (identifying the axis around which our world revolves) atop their trees, and consume their reindeer’s-yellow-snow drinks on these darkest nights.

Intoxicated — or allowed to enter the spiritual realms — by the amanita psychedelic from the reindeer urine, these ancient shamans used the powers of spirit and nature to fly into the sky to visit the spirit world and resurrect the longer and warmer days for their people, bringing back the “gifts” of spiritual illumination, healing, and the renewal of life.

Several of our modern religions, including Judaism and Christianity, hold this survival and renewal of light and life at the core of their winter solstice holy days.


During these short, dark days and long nights let’s remember this ancient knowledge that illumination always follows darkness, and that with love and compassion we will re-light our nations and lives.

Merry Christmas and warmest regards for whatever holidays you and yours may celebrate (or not) during this holy and transformational season.

May all your dreams and good works be realized as our sun’s eternal energy returns to full life in our part of Earth this coming New Year…

The Christmas album that heralded the end of a folk musical era

A formal publicity shot of the second troupe of The Kingston Trio (l-r) John Stewart, Nick Reynolds, Bob Shane; used as a model for a painting that appeared as an album cover for album Sunny Side (1963), Image via Wikimedia Commons.

Kit Macfarlaneand
The Conversation

December 23, 2024

For those looking to introduce some musical conflict into the holidays, Bob Dylan’s Christmas in the Heart remains a great choice in its 15th anniversary – like it or not.

Before Dylan really got started, an iconic group opened the door to mainstream folk success for Dylan and his contemporaries. And at the height of their popularity, they also released an unexpected Christmas album.

But instead of becoming a perennial classic, it seemed to foreshadow the approaching end for the group’s dominance at the peak of popular music.

That album was The Kingston Trio’s ill-fated The Last Month of the Year from 1960.

The ‘hottest act in show business’

The Kingston Trio are often remembered as a clean-cut, sanitised and goofy footnote in musical history. Their matching striped shirts may be a difficult fashion choice to rehabilitate today, but the trio’s impact on popular music was explosive.

Popular performances in 1957 San Francisco led quickly to their self-titled first album the following year. Reshaping folk music for a mainstream audience energised professional and amateur performers.

Critic Greil Marcus describes their breakthrough hit, 1958’s Tom Dooley, as having “the same effect on hearts and minds in 1958 that Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit and Nevermind did in 1991”.

By the time they released their Christmas album, they were the “hottest act in show business”.

In the previous two years, they’d had five number one albums on the Billboard charts. Four of their albums were in the top ten at the same time. They reportedly generated 15% of Capitol Records’ annual sales.

Following that phenomenal success, one early response to their Christmas album noted:
By now it’s fairly well established that the Kingston Trio could record Row, Row Your Boat in 12 languages, put it on wax, and the album would sell a half-million copies. As a consequence, there’s little doubt that The Last Month of the Year will be one of the big sellers this Christmas.

Instead, The Last Month of the Year became their first studio album not to reach number one.

Although still successful, their later albums never reached number one or Gold Album status again. Founding member Dave Guard left in 1961. A new lineup with replacement John Stewart had peaks of success, enduring in a changing folk scene – but never quite recapturing those initial years.

‘Perhaps the most unusual set of the year’

The Kingston Trio were lambasted, then and now, for their commercial focus. Nevertheless, The Last Month of the Year stands in contrast to many enduring commercial norms.

Contemporary responses to The Last Month of the Year noted “a number of almost unknown Christmas songs instead of the usual diet of standard carols” and “perhaps the most unusual set of the year”.

There are none of the 1940s and 1950s staples that have persisted through the decades. Nat King Cole opened his 1960 album The Magic of Christmas with a spirited Deck the Halls. Both Ella Fitzgerald (on Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas) and Peggy Lee (on Christmas Carousel) opened their Christmas albums of the same year with Jingle Bells.

In contrast, The Kingston Trio’s opening track is a subdued version of the 16th century Coventry Carol, a lullaby for the children Herod ordered to be killed. The restrained use of a celeste, or bell-piano, summons Christmas vibes but largely augments the sombre harmonies.

Opening with the biblical Massacre of the Innocents was certainly one way to set The Last Month of the Year apart from its jolly competitors.
Range, energy and appropriation

Other songs include delicate folk (All Through the Night), traditional rounds (A Round About Christmas), historical carols (Sing We Noel) and uncharacteristic original lyrics (The White Snows of Winter).

Spirituals Go Where I Send Thee and The Last Month of the Year (What Month Was Jesus Born In) allow the trio to focus on the kind of energy (and appropriation) that had defined much of their previous output.

Goodnight My Baby charms as a Christmas Eve lullaby that’s too excited to lull anyone to sleep.


Adding oddness, Mary Mild reshapes the strange apocryphal The Bitter Withy where a child Jesus creates “a bridge of the beams of the sun” to encourage children to play with him. The Kingston Trio only hint at the song’s common outcome that leaves his playmates dead and Mary meting out some corporal punishment.

Perhaps more restrained than their usual performances, the album nevertheless guides listeners through some of the styles and sources that the Trio’s brand of popular folk could draw on.

A Christmas album that still has something to offer

The Last Month of the year wasn’t the cause, but it occupies a turning point where The Kingston Trio’s cultural dominance began to slip

. 

The Kingston Trio in 1957. The Kingston Trio/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

Soon after, Bob Dylan’s song Blowin’ in the Wind (published in 1962) and album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963) marked a new era of folk that revived its political energy (for a while).

As folk music further solidified its place in the civil rights movement, the Kingston Trio’s collegiate party vibes and perceived apoliticism seemed out of step.

When Dylan released his Christmas album in 2009, one critic asked “Is he sincere? Does he mean it?”

That’s also a question that defined and dogged The Kingston Trio from the outset of the folk revival they ushered in. Are these goofy guys serious?

The Last Month of the Year is an intriguing and ambitious album by a group that, for a short but influential time, reshaped popular music.

It’s a forgotten Christmas album that might still have something new to offer a Christmas-weary listener.

Kit MacFarlane, Lecturer, Creative Writing and Literature, University of South Australia

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