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Post by hibernicus on Mar 31, 2021 2:02:06 GMT
They're drawing up the list. To be fair, I suspect some Trot groups would probably put their Trot rivals on the list if they could get away with it. The PHOENIX picks up on this item in its current issue, and highlights the inclusion of Renua. (I'm not sure whether Renua actually exists any more.) What is extremely revealing is that no rationale is offered for the inclusion of individual groups. While some of them are indeed nasty pieces of work who ought not to be touched with a bargepole (personally I think that - for example - neo-nazis and holocaust deniers ought to be shunned, and one of the principles of this forum is that anti-semitism gets you banned immediately) the way this is being done seems to establish a blank-cheque precedent for allowing groups to be banned on the SU's say-so.
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Post by hibernicus on Apr 18, 2021 23:23:50 GMT
Have been reading a book about Late Victorian Salford. (This is Manchester's twin city, across the River Irwell - though the two are a single built-up area. The Catholic diocese covering Manchester is called Salford because the C of E established a Manchester diocese a few years before the Restoration of the Hierarchy.) The subject is explored through a series of profiles of local radicals, businessmen, politicians and clerics. The chapter on the Rev Hugh Stowell, a Manxman who was Victorian Salford's principal No-Popery crusader, is startling in its revelation of how strong that tradition was - I know it was very strong in Liverpool but was less acquainted with the situation in Manchester/Salford. The Catholic Church is covered through a chapter on Fr Schaffenreuther, a German priest working in the diocese, who frequently clashed with the Irish clergy - who had an abiding grievance that non-Irish priests were given preference in promotions to the equivalent of PP. (Formal parishes weren't established for another couple of decades.) What is really shocking is the account with which the book ends of how he was dismissed as workhouse chaplain after severalgirl inmates accused him of molesting them. (I should mention that the book appeared in 2000, before the full wave of contemporary clerical abuse scandals hit.) The historian, who seems a fairminded man, states that although the report of the evidence blurs over what Schaffenreuther was actually accused of doing, the girls' accounts appear quite convincing. Nevertheless because the local No Popery types habitually held forth on the "horrors of the confessional" and the like, the bishop backed Fr Schaffenreuther, refused to appoint a replacement chaplain to the workhouse (so the inmates suffered), held an indignation meeting at which he personally denounced the condemnation of a respectable priest on the evidence of mere "workhouse girls" and moved Schaffenreuther to a new parish where he officiated until his death four years later. Sound familiar? Just a reminder of how living in a state of siege can create pressure for solidarity with someone who doesn't deserve it, and a reminder that in remembering and honouring the saints and heroes of the past, known and unknown, we ought never to assume that everyone then was a hero any more than everyone now is a villain.
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Post by hibernicus on Apr 22, 2021 0:27:50 GMT
This review of Hilary Mantel's third Thomas Cromwell novel, THE MIRROR AND THE LIGHT, may slightly exaggerate the extent to which the reader is supposed to endorse Cromwell (since the novel is told through his consciousness, and what happens to him at the end can be seen as a comment on his belief that he can control everything for the best). Nonetheless, it is certainly clear that the reader is meant to identify with Cromwell, and the review makes two points of interest: (1) It gives some examples of Mantel playing fast and loose with facts; for example, Cromwell's correct statement in the trilogy that not all the monasteries ran schools is presented in such a way as to imply (incorrectly) that none of them did. (2) Mantel's Cromwell is presented as admirable because he stands for a bureaucratic meritocracy as opposed to feudalism and to the Church as a rival to the state. What the reviewer notes is that this includes a dismissive attitude to the law as simply a shield for vested interests which must be brushed aside if anything is to be achieved, and to individual conscience as a personal eccentricity getting in the way of the greater good. I might add that the reviewer is somewhat mistaken in implying that this is a purely leftist phenomenon - the American managerialist ideology that management must be free to manage and that enforceable rights for employees are merely a hindrance to the survival of the enterprise, or Margaret Thatcher's use of state power to break "vested interests" wider social consequences be damned, fit the bill as well. (One study of Thatcherism is called THE FREE ECONOMY AND THE STRONG STATE.) This last example is particularly ironic since Mantel hates Thatcher and has published a fantasy about helping the IRA to assassinate her. lawliberty.org/book-review/a-wolf-for-all-seasons/
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Post by hibernicus on Apr 29, 2021 23:50:15 GMT
An interesting discussion of the tendency of some present-day literary fiction to be simplistic, sanctimonious and politically correct. The exhibits include the writings of Sally Rooney; the widespread publicity given to the soft-porn aspects of the TV adaptation of her novel ORDINARY PEOPLE has obscured the fact that the novel also includes sympathetic characters declaring themselves Marxists (as the author herself has done) and a debater who advocates free speech and the discussion of controversial issues is treated as self-evidently malign and beyond the pale. [Personally I would say it depends on the issues - holocaust denial, for example, should be beyond the pale - but I suspect Ms Rooney's blacklist is extensive.] libertiesjournal.com/now-showing/sanctimony-literature/
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Post by maolsheachlann on Apr 30, 2021 14:47:13 GMT
An interesting discussion of the tendency of some present-day literary fiction to be simplistic, sanctimonious and politically correct. The exhibits include the writings of Sally Rooney; the widespread publicity given to the soft-porn aspects of the TV adaptation of her novel ORDINARY PEOPLE has obscured the fact that the novel also includes sympathetic characters declaring themselves Marxists (as the author herself has done) and a debater who advocates free speech and the discussion of controversial issues is treated as self-evidently malign and beyond the pale. [Personally I would say it depends on the issues - holocaust denial, for example, should be beyond the pale - but I suspect Ms Rooney's blacklist is extensive.] libertiesjournal.com/now-showing/sanctimony-literature/Why should holocaust denial be beyond the pale? Why should anything be beyond the pale? There's no argument that could be made that couldn't apply just as well to almost any other opinion, potentially. Certainly anyone on this forum would hold views which many people would quite happily see termed "hate speech".
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Post by hibernicus on May 5, 2021 20:49:43 GMT
Holocaust denial is not merely an eccentricity. It is based on the claims that (a) the Nazis were a much-maligned band of heroes (b) their present disrepute is the result of a conspiracy by the Jews to slander those noble martyrs. As such, its aim is to enable a Nazi revival. Moreover, most of those who propound it are demonstrably in bad faith (cf Richard J Evans TELLING LIES ABOUT HITLER, Michael Shermer DENYING HISTORY) and its claims have been refuted over and over again. I was thinking not so much of actual legal prohibition of holocaust denial (though there's a case for that) but the reasons why it is legitimate for deniers to be "no platformed" in the sense of people refusing to debate them or allow them venues to speak. Their distortions are so numerous that a certain degree of expertise on the history of the Third Reich (which not everyone possesses) is required to recognise the tricks they are playing; they are deliberately slandering the living and the dead for malign political purposes; it is a waste of precious time to deal with them (except indirectly for purposes of refutation), just as it is pointless to debate people who are not interested in truth but only in using rhetorical tricks to make opponents look foolish. I remember once trying to read Butz's HOAX OF THE C20 and giving up after about fifty pages because the high moral tone in which he denounced the supposed slandering of the Nazis, the self-presentation as a Fearless Investigator discovering the Nefarious Conspiracy, and the occasional veiled sneers which seemed to intimate that the author knew well he was lying but despised his victims were so disgusting that I simply couldn't continue. Life is short and there are so many better things to do.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Jun 3, 2021 15:20:50 GMT
I'm reading The New Republic by William Hurrell Mallock, a book I came across on the library shelves randomly. It's a kind of latter-day Plato's Symposium, published in 1877, composed of a series of discussions between guests at a country house, many of whom represent famous intellectuals of the time (for instance, Thomas Carlyle, Walter Pater and Bejamin Jowett). What makes it notable is that it's written from a conservative perspective; High Church Anglican and Tory. It satirises much of the scientism and religious liberalism of the day. At one point, the figure who represents Jowett (a famous liberal Anglican theologian of the time) preaches a sermon (all of the guests, no matter how atheistic, attend service on a Sunday) in which he preaches partly from a Koran text. Ironically, he then gives a discourse on the inspiration of Holy Scripture which is obviously a satire on the Higher Criticism but is not very far, for the most part, from Dei Verbum-- a document, I hasten to add, that I entirely accept. Although I'm told the sympathies of Mallock were conservative (he was even mistaken to be Catholic by many), so far I haven't really encountered a rebuttal to any of the progressive ideas which have been presented. Apparently it was Ronald Knox's favourite secular book.
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Post by hibernicus on Jun 5, 2021 21:52:20 GMT
Mallock is reported to have converted to Catholicism on his deathbed after spending much of his life flirting with it. He's an example of someone who mixes desire for authority and deep scepticism. (I suspect the wise old man who appears in the introductory chapter of RH Benson's LORD OF THE WORLD was meant to be Mallock, though I'm not sure where I got this impression.) The climax of THE NEW REPUBLIC is a sermon by the character who is supposed to be Ruskin, lamenting both modern irreligion and the extent to which everyone, himself included, is affected by it. I didn't realise until I looked up his Wikipedia entry just now that Mallock was a nephew of Hurrell Froude (Newman's frind and co-founder of the Oxford Movement, who died young of TB) and the militantly Protestant agnostic historian James Anthony Froude: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Hurrell_Mallock
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Post by hibernicus on Jun 18, 2021 22:35:46 GMT
THE NAZI CONSCIENCE by Claudia Koonz. This book, which is centred on the peacetime years of the Nazi regime, is a really chilling account of how the Nazis accentuated "positive" elements - a sense of ethnic solidarity and love for "us" - with systematic hatred of "them" (the book focusses on anti-semitism in particular, rather than on the whole range of those hated by the Nazis). Some of the themes include the way in which "vulgar" antisemitism made "scientific" anti-semitism appear reasonable by comparison even though they both led to the same destination, how the Nazis tracked the effectiveness of their message and emphasised or toned down certain elements based on feedback through a network of observers, and how a significant number of well-meaning persons could be rendered passive by the dominance of racial propaganda and the presence of a core of active racists and bullies. The description of Jewish children at school being systematically squeezed out of the community by bullies and malevolent teachers, who could set the tone even where they were a minority, is really chilling for anyone who knows how easily children can bully and ostracise.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Jun 19, 2021 13:14:29 GMT
Do we really need more books saying the Nazis were bad? Today they seem to serve as ideological justification to make all the opposite mistakes, for instance, brutal alienation and homogenization.
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Post by hibernicus on Jun 19, 2021 15:03:33 GMT
The point of the book is not somuch that the nazis were bad - it is to explore how they convinced themselves and their followers that they were good. Think of it as a case study of what "formation of conscience" - in this case, deformation - actually means, and where "values clarification" can lead. BTW the Nazi concept of the volkish community was all about homogenisation within the chosen group - they liked to emphasise how modern technology such as radio could be used to promote this by having everyone listening to the same thing at the same time. A lesson worth learning when we consider - e.g. - the political and social agendas of popular TV shows.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Jun 19, 2021 17:29:21 GMT
I meant global and international homogenization.
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Post by Young Ireland on Jun 19, 2021 18:57:34 GMT
I meant global and international homogenization. Homogenisation can take place at the national level too: Many nationalist movements have favoured erasing regional differences in place of national ones, Revolutionary France being one example. This isn't solely caused by the right BTW: the left are quite willing to do so too even if their stated justifications are different. Stalin's mass deportations of ethnic minorities and the concentration camps in Xinjiang are just some examples.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Jun 19, 2021 20:13:57 GMT
I agree nationalism has sometimes been an engine of domestic homogenization. Even today that can be present, for instance, Irish nationalists who don't accept Irish Travellers as a distinct ethnicity.
It's also true that contemporary populist nationalists are so fixated on genetics that they don't really pay much attention to culture and tradition, which are the real bulwarks against homogenization. Ironically it tends to be leftists who actually speak the Irish language, play Irish traditional music, etc.
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 6, 2021 22:09:24 GMT
Oh, the Nazis believed in homogenisation as well. Their plans for Eastern Europe and European Russia after their imagined victory make what they actually did in those places look like a flea-bite - and I don't make that comparison lightly. They wanted to exterminate whole ethnic groups, to enslave the Slavic peoples and exterminate any of them who could count beyond ten (Really) and to move populations around like the ancient Assyrians did. The fixation on genetics over culture was pretty common in early C20 Waspdom in the US, and indeed in other historically dominant groups (attempts to revive Russian cultural nationalism after the fall of the USSR had pretty mixed results). This is because such groups are used to taking for granted that the dominant culture is theirs without needing to say so, so when things change they are either left high and dry or try to fetishise ancient customs without really understanding them. (The second is not necessarily inauthentic - you often have to pass through a period of blind imitation before you begin to understand it - but it easily becomes kitsch or a sterile form of purism.)
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