Month: September 2022

Caitlin Johnston: The Trouble with ‘Western Values’ is that Westerners Don’t Value Them

The Australian blogger/journalist Caitlin Johnston encourages her readers to reproduce and circulate her writing free of charge. Regular readers of this blog will know that I cite Ms. Johnston regularly.

Here is one of her recent articles pointing out the hypocrisy pervading so much of Western — read American — foreign policy. The piece is titled “The Trouble with ‘Western Values’ is that Westerners Don’t Value Them.”

The anti-democratic actions that Ms. Johnston discusses are bipartisan in nature. Both parties are equally guilty. Both Democrats and Republicans are in lock-step in their calls for censorship and the silencing of anyone who criticizes and opposes US foreign policy.

When was the last time you saw a major news network host a guest critically analyzing the war in Ukraine, explaining how the USA provoked Russia’s attack and why Russia will eventually win?

Here is Caitlin’s article:

Have you ever noticed how those who shriek the loudest about tyranny in foreign countries are always the same people calling for the censorship and deplatforming of anyone who criticizes the western empire?

It’s a ubiquitous mind virus throughout western society. Anyone — and I do mean anyone — who aggressively and consistently criticizes the foreign policy of the US and its allies in front of a sizeable audience gets branded a Russian agent by empire apologists, and this consensus is accompanied by the steadily growing opinion that Russia’s operatives and useful idiots should be banned from western platforms.

Defenders of the western empire won’t admit to wanting all empire critics silenced, but that’s what you get when you combine (A) the fact that they view everyone who criticizes the empire with sufficient aggression as a Russian agent with (B) their opinion that those given to Russian influence ought to be censored. Whenever I criticize the foreign policy of the western empire I get its apologists telling me I’d never be allowed to criticize my rulers like that if I lived in a nation like Russia or China, when they know full well that if it were up to them I wouldn’t be allowed to criticize the western empire here either. They are the same as the tyrants they claim to despise.

The trouble with “western values” is that westerners don’t value them. They think they value them, but all that reverence for free expression and holding power to account with the light of truth goes right out the window the second they see someone saying something that sharply differs from what their rulers and their propagandists have told them to think. Then they want that person silenced and shut down.

In truth, the most forceful critics of the western empire actually embody these western values infinitely more than empire apologists do. It is the critics of empire who value free speech and holding the powerful to account. It’s the brainwashed bootlickers of the US-centralized empire who are calling for censorship and shouting down anyone who directs fierce oppositional scrutiny toward the most powerful people in the world.

People tell me “Move to Russia!” or “Move to China!” depending on what aspect of the empire’s global power agendas I happen to be criticizing at the moment, and I always want to tell them, no, you move to Russia. You move to China. You’re the one trying to suppress dissent and criticism of the powerful. I’m the one who is living by western values as they were sold to me and demanding normal scrutiny of the most powerful empire that has ever existed. You don’t belong here.

In school we are taught that our society values truth, free speech, equality, accountability for the powerful, and adversarial journalism, then we grow up and we see everyone rending their garments because institutions like CBS News or Amnesty International let slip one small report which doesn’t fully comply with the official line of our rulers. We see Russian media banned and censorship protocols expanded to the enthusiastic cheerleading of mainstream liberals. We see astroturf trolling operations used to mass report and shout down those who scrutinize the establishment line about Ukraine on social media. We see Julian Assange languishing in Belmarsh Prison for the crime of unauthorized journalism.

It’s obvious with a look around that the “western values” we’re all told about are not actually terribly common in the west. Look at the west’s major media platforms and they virtually never platform anyone who is meaningfully critical of the real centers of power in western civilization. Look at western governments and they continually dance to the beat of oligarchy and empire regardless of how people vote in their supposedly free democratic elections. Look at the internet and it’s actually very difficult to find authentic criticisms of imperial power unless you already know where to look.

Some of us bought into those western values we were taught about in school, but it’s not the people you’ve been trained to expect. It’s we marginalized outsiders who are adamantly opposing censorship, propaganda and the empire’s war on the press while continuously working to shine the light of truth on the mechanisms of power from the fringes, while we are being yelled at and accused of treason by mainstream sycophants who have far more in common with the autocrats they claim to oppose than with the western values they purport to uphold.

There is No Such Thing as Healthy Nationalism

Advocates for American nationalism, including explicit Christian nationalism, are becoming louder and more numerous in this country, a development that every follower of Jesus can only criticize and resist.

I am increasingly convinced that there is no such thing as an “acceptable” brand of nationalism. All nationalisms want (1) to elevate one group of people, one national body, above all others (2) while claiming some divinely ordained mission in the world.

That way of thinking is always a recipe for disaster, not to mention that it is antithetical to life in the kingdom of God.

Of course, the most disastrous expression of nationalism in modern history appeared in twentieth century Germany during the rule of the Nazi National Socialist party.

Remembering the adage that “those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it,” I think it is worth recalling one particular criticism of

German poet Heinrich Heine

German nationalism offered by the German Jewish poet, Heinrich Heine.

Heine fled Germany for Paris a full century before the Nazis came to power because even then he could foresee the inevitable dangers of an increasingly robust German nationalism.

As you read the excerpt below, substitute the words America and American for Germany and Germans. Heine’s insights remain remarkably contemporary.

This excerpt is from the work of the German historian Götz Aly titled Why the Germans? Why the Jews? Envy, Race Hatred, and the Prehistory of the Holocaust (pages 59-60):

Heine despised what he called “the jingoistic champions of nationality, our nationalists, so-called patriots, whose heads are full only of race, blood, [that is, national identity markers] and similar idiocies.” The appeal of these “so-called ultra-Germans”. . . Heine wrote, could be traced back to powerful formulas with which one could excite a mob: “The words fatherland, Germany, faith of our fathers, etc., always electrify the muddled minds of the masses far more than the words, humanity, cosmopolitanism [today think of multiculturalism], reason, and truth!” . . .

 . . . German advocates of liberty and democracy, cloaking themselves in the flag of nationalism, were among those who originally blazed the paths that would eventually lead to catastrophe. They promulgated the German nation as a unity based on mythic origin [think of our Founding Fathers], religion [Right-Wing Christianity], and language [English only; no bilingual education]. They elevated the value of national particularity, of an ethnically defined popular identity, above that of universal human rights. As a result, in the name of national unity, they excluded others.

The Challenge of Non-Conformity and Its Implications

The following excerpt is from a fascinating book titled Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism, by George L. Mosse (University of Wisconsin, 1978, 2020).

Mosse traces the various currents of cultural, social, and political European history that eventually culminated in the rise of Adolf Hitler, the Nazi party, and the Holocaust.

The most interesting element in Mosse’s analysis, to my mind anyway, is the fact that none of these factors had anything to do with Christian theology or the Christian church.

Yes, many self-professed “Christians” and church leaders participated in the rise of anti-Jewish racism throughout post-Enlightenment Europe, but their arguments for eliminating the Jews had nothing to do with religion.

However, that does not mean they were not racists; many continued to despise the Jews.

The medieval Christian, anti-Jewish tropes and accusations were nowhere to be found in the new brand of post-Enlightenment, secular racism that was forged in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries throughout Europe.

I have a lot more to say about this, but I am still doing my research. Maybe I will post more about this in the future.

In any case, here is the excerpt from Mosse followed by a few of my observations for today’s church. When Mosse refers to “racism” he is thinking about all forms of racial prejudice and discrimination. Antisemitism is only one possible example of such racism. (All emphasis is mine):

Racism had no founding father, and that was one of its strengths. It made alliance with all those virtues that the modern age praised so much. Racism picked out such qualities as cleanliness, honesty, moral earnestness, hard work, and family life – virtues which during the nineteenth century came to symbolize the ideals of the middle class. . . Racism was associated with these virtues rather than with any single philosopher or social theorist of importance. . . Racism was not merely one form of social Darwinism, but instead, a scavenger ideology, which annexed the virtues, morals, and respectability of the age to its stereotypes and attributed them to the inherent qualities of a superior race.

 If racism annexed the virtues of the age, it also condemned as degenerate all that was opposed to such respectability. Not to exemplify the ideal-type of “clean-cut American” or “right-living Englishman” was a sign of an inferior race. Though racism was often vague, it clearly embraced all the values of middle-class respectability and claimed to be their defender. To be sure, few people at first went along with such a claim; to the vast majority of Europeans, it sufficed to be a Christian gentleman. But even here racism so infected Christianity that, in the end, no real battle between racism and Christianity ever took place. Both supported the same middle-class virtues and saw the enemy in the same nonconformists – be they Bohemians, Freemasons, or Jews. The support racism gave to ideals which were opposed to a threatened degeneracy was in practice more important than any differences between racism and Christianity.

 . . . The perimeters of racial thought are as elusive and slippery as the ideology as a whole. And yet, for all that, the myth was transformed into reality, not just during the Holocaust and the camps, but whenever ordinary people made judgments upon others based upon the implications of the racial stereotype.

 The Holocaust has passed. The history of racism which we have told has helped to explain the Final Solution. But racism itself has survived. As many people as ever before think in racial categories. There is nothing provisional about the lasting world of stereotypes. That is the legacy of racism everywhere. . . Blacks on the whole remained locked into the same racial posture which never varied much from the eighteenth century to our time. Practically all blacks had been outside Hitler’s reach; consequently, there was no rude awakening from the racial dream in their regard. Moreover, nations which had fought against National Socialism continued to accept black racial inferiority for many years. . . (They) did not seem to realize that all racism, whether aimed at blacks or Jews, was cut of the same cloth. (209-211).

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The intense, perennial pressures of cultural conformity are no more “provisional” today than are the ever-present stereotypes of racial prejudice. Yep, we got 21st century racists, too. Many of them within the Christian church.

Pressures for conformity continue to press against God’s people now just as they did in Nazi Germany and medieval Europe. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Sadly, the Christian church – but especially its more conservative membership. . . can you spell MAGA? – is always inclined to endorse the cultural, social status quo, even if our preferred status quo is defined by a sub-culture.

Today’s (sub-)cultural norms are always more popular than Jesus.

For instance, studies consistently reveal that evangelical Christians share the same political priorities, endorse the same social, cultural agendas, and vote for the same political candidates as their non-Christian, non-church going neighbors – wherever they happen to live.

Is this an accident?

The evangelical wing of the Christian church fought against racial integration and condemned the civil rights movement as loudly and vociferously as did the worst racist politicians in the deep South. Men like governors Lester Maddox and George Wallace armed themselves with long, wooden ax handles while blocking the doorways to keep black students out of white, public schools.

And, yes, the southern, conservative church applauded both Maddox and Wallace and their violent racism.

Similar instincts are at play today when Christians join in the condemnation of Critical Race Theory, while not having the slightest inkling of what CRT really is.

What other sorts of violence, racism, bigotry, and close-mindedness are evangelicals, who claim the name of Jesus, following after today?

Pay attention to how closely “acceptable” church leadership conforms itself to the standard, middle-class, cultural virtues of the friendly, well-dressed, patriotic American. How much of this social conformity is the fruit of genuine Christian discipleship, following hard after Jesus, and how much of it is merely the required uniform expected of us by the world at large?

Neither the dangers of racism, in all of its various shades, nor the moral compromises on display when the Christian church surrenders itself to cultural conformity have changed all that much over time.

The pressure to conform never goes away.

The crucial question is: to whom or to what are we conforming? Middle-class values? Or Jesus of Nazareth?

Enough Already with the Royal Family

The Harvard history professor, Maya Jasanoff, has written three books about the British Empire. Over at the Washington Post, she has published an

Professor Maya Jasanoff

article discussing the recent coverage of the death of Queen Elizabeth II. It is titled, “Mourn the Queen, Not the Empire.”

Similar articles can be written — actually, many have been written already — about the long history of the American Empire.

Below is an excerpt (all emphasis is mine):

“The end of an era” will become a refrain as commentators assess the record-setting reign of Queen Elizabeth II. Like all monarchs, she was both an individual and an institution. She had a different birthday for each role — the actual anniversary of her birth in April and an official one in June — and, though she retained her personal name as monarch, held different titles depending on where in her domains she stood. She was as devoid of opinions and emotions in public as her ubiquitous handbags were said to be of everyday items like a wallet, keys and phone. Of her inner life we learned little beyond her love of horses and dogs — which gave Helen Mirren, Olivia Colman and Claire Foy rapt audiences for the insights they enacted. . .

. . . What you would never know from the pictures — which is partly their point — is the violence that lies behind them. In 1948, the colonial governor of Malaya declared a state of emergency to fight communist guerrillas, and British troops used counterinsurgency tactics the Americans would emulate in Vietnam. In 1952 the governor of Kenya imposed a state of emergency to suppress an anticolonial movement known as Mau Mau, under which the British rounded up tens of thousands of Kenyans into detention camps and subjected them to brutal, systematized torture. In Cyprus in 1955 and Aden, Yemen, in 1963, British governors again declared states of emergency to contend with anticolonial attacks; again they tortured civilians. Meanwhile, in Ireland, the Troubles brought the dynamics of emergency to the United Kingdom. In a karmic turn, the Irish Republican Army assassinated the queen’s relative Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last viceroy of India (and the architect of Elizabeth’s marriage to his nephew, Prince Philip), in 1979.

We may never learn what the queen did or didn’t know about the crimes committed in her name. (What transpires in the sovereign’s weekly meetings with the prime minister remains a black box at the center of the British state.) Her subjects haven’t necessarily gotten the full story, either. Colonial officials destroyed many records that, according to a dispatch from the secretary of state for the colonies, “might embarrass Her Majesty’s government” and deliberately concealed others in a secret archive whose existence was revealed only in 2011. Though some activists such as the Labour M.P. Barbara Castle publicized and denounced British atrocities, they failed to gain wide public traction.

Click here to read the entire article.

Lessons from “One of the Most Brutal Military Tyrannies in the World” — Israel

Israeli journalist Gideon Levy critiques the work of Israel’s spy agency, Shin Bet in the most recent edition of the Jerusalem daily, Haaretz. The article is

Israeli journalist, Gideon Levy

titled “Israel’s Stasi Preaches Morality.”

Below is an excerpt explaining why Palestinians living under military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza will forever resist Israeli oppression:

. . . It is difficult to assess the real balance – how many terror attacks the Shin Bet thwarts and how many attacks it motivates with its unchecked activities. But when Bar boasts of 2,000 recent arrests, it’s clear there are more than a few innocent people among them, and people who will be radicalized by their very detention.

In a reality in which every night, soldiers accompanied by dogs terrorize people sleeping in their homes and snatch citizens from their beds at the behest of the Shin Bet, without any legal supervision of course, and in a reality where hundreds of people are detained without trial for months and years, also by order of the Shin Bet, it is clear that the damage is enormous. The most serious consequence is turning Israeli democracy into one of the most brutal military tyrannies in the world, even if only in its own backyard.

The Shin Bet barely operates in sovereign Israel. But what it is doing in the occupied territories, which are an inseparable part of Israel, apparently forever, makes it impossible to define Israel as a democracy anymore, certainly not when it is clear that this is not a temporary situation. There is no evil with which the Israeli Stasi – in the territories the Shin Bet is the Stasi in every way, with more advanced technology than the infamous East German organization had – is unfamiliar.

Just this week I met, at the Al-Arroub refugee camp, an 11-year-old boy who lost an eye to an IDF bullet. Now he has also been defined as a security risk, who is barred from entering Israel for treatment at Jerusalem’s Hadassah Medical Center on the order of the Shin Bet. Last week, two cancer patients in the Gaza Strip died; they were unable to receive treatments in Israel in time because the Shin Bet denied them entry for two months.

Click here to read the entire article.