Upheaval Over Race Reaches Met Museum After Curator’s Instagram Post - The New York Times - "The turmoil coursing through cultural institutions around the country on the subject of race has made its way to the biggest museum of them all: the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A top curator’s Instagram post that seemed critical of protests over monuments and the Black Lives Matters movement — shared on Juneteenth — has ignited objections by staff members, and a larger internal critique. On Tuesday, 15 Met staff members sent a letter urging the museum’s leadership to acknowledge “what we see as the expression of a deeply rooted logic of white supremacy and culture of systemic racism at our institution.”... Met Museum employees are sounding their own alarm, prompted by a personal Instagram posting on Friday by the museum’s powerful chairman of European paintings, Keith Christiansen, who has worked at the Met since 1977. Below a pen-and-ink image of the French archaeologist Alexandre Lenoir, who devoted himself to saving France’s historic monuments from the ravages of the French Revolution, Mr. Christiansen wrote: “Alexandre Lenoir battling the revolutionary zealots bent on destroying the royal tombs in Saint Denis. How many great works of art have been lost to the desire to rid ourselves of a past of which we don’t approve. “And how grateful we are to people like Lenoir,” Mr. Christiansen continued, “who realized that their value — both artistic and historical — extended beyond a defining moment of social and political upheaval and change.” While Mr. Christiansen appeared to be arguing for the preservation of monuments, he also struck some as insensitive and tone deaf. The post was criticized in a tweet by the advocacy group of arts workers, Art + Museum Transparency: “Dear @metmuseum, one of your most powerful curators suggested that it’s a shame we’re trying to ‘rid ourselves of a past of which we don’t approve’ by removing monuments — and, worse, making a dog whistle of an equation of #BLM activists with ‘revolutionary zealots.’ This is not OK.”... “All of us were angered that the post seemed to equate Black Lives Matter protesters with ‘revolutionary zealots’ — a position made crueler by its posting on Juneteenth”"
From 2020. If you don't let zealots control your every move, you're racist
Clearly bullying people and an institution during a worldwide moral panic means you're not a zealot
Andrew Sullivan: You Say You Want A Revolution? - "One of the things you know if you were brought up as a Catholic in a Protestant country, as I was, is how the attempted extirpation of England’s historic Catholic faith was enforced not just by executions, imprisonments, and public burnings but also by the destruction of monuments, statues, artifacts, paintings, buildings, and sacred sculptures. The shift in consciousness that the religious revolution required could not be sustained by words or terror alone. The new regime — an early pre-totalitarian revolution imposed from the top down — had to remove all signs of what had come before. The items were not merely forms of idolatry in the minds of the newly austere Protestant vision; they also served to perpetuate the rule of the pope. They could be occasions for treason, heresy, and sin. The impulse for wiping the slate clean is universal. Injustices mount; moderation seems inappropriate; radicalism wins and then tries to destroy the legacy of the past as a whole. The Taliban’s notorious destruction of the great Buddhas of Bamian in Afghanistan was a similar attempt to establish unquestioned Islamic rule. “Muslims should be proud of smashing idols. It has given praise to Allah that we have destroyed them,” Mullah Mohammed Omar explained. This was the spirit of Paris in 1789 as well. “If we love truth more than the fine arts,” the Enlightenment figure Denis Diderot remarked, “let us pray to God for some iconoclasts.” (He was also the lovely chap who insisted that “humankind will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.” And in the French Revolution, of course, he almost got his way.) The Romans, for their part, eventually decided that the only way to govern Jews was to physically destroy their Temple in Jerusalem. Iconoclasm is not just vandalism and violence. It is a very specific variety that usually signifies profound regime change. That’s why the toppling of old Soviet monoliths in the 1989 liberation of Eastern Europe was so salient. They were important symbols of that sclerotic Soviet empire’s power. And for true revolutionary potential, it’s helpful if these monuments are torn down by popular uprisings. That adds to the symbolism of a new era, even if it also adds to the chaos. That was the case in Mao’s Cultural Revolution, when the younger generation, egged on by the regime, went to work on any public symbols or statues they deemed problematically counterrevolutionary, creating a reign of terror that even surpassed France’s. And Mao’s model is instructive in another way. It shows you what happens when a mob is actually quietly supported by elites, who use it to advance their own goals... By the end of the revolution, almost two-thirds of Beijing’s historical sites had been destroyed in a frenzy of destruction against “the four olds: old customs, old habits, old culture, and old ideas.”... Similarly, in late-19th-century Russia, much of the intellectual elite also found themselves incapable of drawing a line when it came to revolutionary behavior — and so they tolerated violence that eventually swept everything away in terror... Revolutionary moments also require public confessions of iniquity by those complicit in oppression. These now seem to come almost daily. I’m still marveling this week at the apology the actress Jenny Slate gave for voicing a biracial cartoon character. It’s a classic confession of counterrevolutionary error: “I acknowledge how my original reasoning was flawed and that it existed as an example of white privilege and unjust allowances made within a system of societal white supremacy … Ending my portrayal of ‘Missy’ is one step in a life-long process of uncovering the racism in my actions.” For Slate to survive in her career, she had to go full Cersei in her walk of shame. If you find this creepy, but don’t want to say that out loud, just know that you are not alone... Revolutions also encourage individuals to take matters in their own hands. The distinguished liberal philosopher Michael Walzer recently noted how mutual social policing has a long and not-so-lovely history — particularly in post–Reformation Europe, in what he has called “the revolution of the saints.” “The ‘saints’ were very strong on the work of neighborhood committees. In Calvin’s Geneva, law and order were maintained through ‘mutual surveillance.’ Church members (ideally all Genevans were church members) ‘watched, investigated, and chastised’ each other.” Imagine what these Puritans could have done with cell phones and Twitter histories. Revolutionaries also create new forms of language to dismantle the existing order. Under Mao, “linguistic engineering” was integral to identifying counterrevolutionaries, and so it is today. The use of the term “white supremacy” to mean not the KKK or the antebellum South but American society as a whole in the 21st century has become routine on the left, as if it were now beyond dispute. The word “women,” J.K. Rowling had the temerity to point out, is now being replaced by “people who menstruate.” The word “oppression” now includes not only being herded into Uighur reeducation camps but also feeling awkward as a sophomore in an Ivy League school. The word “racist,” which was widely understood quite recently to be prejudicial treatment of an individual based on the color of their skin, now requires no intent to be racist in the former sense, just acquiescence in something called “structural racism,” which can mean any difference in outcomes among racial groupings. Being color-blind is therefore now being racist. And there is no escaping this. The woke shift their language all the time, so that words that were one day fine are now utterly reprehensible. You can’t keep up — which is the point. (A good resource for understanding this new constantly changing language of ideology is “Translations From the Wokish.”) The result is an exercise of cultural power through linguistic distortion. So, yes, this is an Orwellian moment. It’s not a moment of reform but of a revolutionary break, sustained in part by much of the liberal Establishment... The movement’s destruction of even abolitionist statues, its vandalism of monuments to even George Washington, its crude demonization of figures like Jefferson, its coerced public confessions, its pitiless wreckage of people’s lives and livelihoods, its crude ideological Manichaeanism, its struggle sessions and mandated anti-racism courses, its purging of cultural institutions of dissidents, its abandonment of objective tests in higher education (replacing them with quotas and a commitment to ideology), and its desire to upend a country’s sustained meaning and practices are deeply reminiscent of some very ugly predecessors. But the erasure of the past means a tyranny of the present. In the words of Orwell, a truly successful ideological revolution means that “every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”"
Violent Protest and the Intelligentsia - WSJ - "The similarities between this week’s riots and the Los Angeles riots of 1992 are obvious. Both were occasioned by appalling video images, and both divided the nation along partisan and ideological lines. The differences between the two events, however, are more revealing. The violence in 1992 came after a court verdict; the beating and arrest of Rodney King had happened more than a year before. This year’s riots came within days of George Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis officers. The riots of 1992 were mostly confined to poor and working-class areas of Los Angeles. This week saw mayhem all over America, and in Los Angeles, New York and elsewhere the rioters targeted wealthy streets and neighborhoods. But perhaps the most striking difference is the rationalization, and sometimes full-throated defense, of violence from left-wing elites: the glorification of havoc, the vilification of cops and their middle-class admirers, highfalutin defenses of vandalism. The sense of revolution and class warfare was everywhere this week: the cognoscenti and underclass arrayed against the petty bourgeois shop owners; the elite and those they claim to represent against everybody else. Gary Saul Morson says he has no special insight regarding police actions and the death of George Floyd. But he does have a provocative thesis about America’s current political moment: “To me it’s astonishingly like late 19th-, early 20th-century Russia, when basically the entire educated class felt you simply had to be against the regime or some sort of revolutionary.”... well-intentioned liberal people often can’t bring themselves to say that lawless violence is wrong... In late czarist Russia, some political parties and other groups—the Social Democrats, the anarchists, the Marxists—explicitly endorsed terrorism. “The liberal party—the Constitutional Democrats, they called themselves—did not condone terrorism,” Mr. Morson says. “But they refused to condemn it. And indeed they called for the release from prison of all terrorists, who were pledged to continue terrorism right away. . . . A famous line from one of the liberal leaders put it this way: ‘Condemn terrorism? That would be the moral death of the party.’ ” The lesson seems highly relevant today. “When you’re dragged along into something you don’t really believe yourself—because otherwise you are identified with those evil people, and your primary identity is being a ‘good guy,’ not like those people—you will wind up supporting things you know to be wrong. And unless there is some moral force that will stop it, the slide will accelerate.”... many of today’s revolutionaries are wildly successful and privileged. Take Colinford Mattis and Urooj Rahman, both New York lawyers in their 30s, who have been criminally charged for attempting to firebomb a police vehicle with a Molotov cocktail. Mr. Mattis was educated at Princeton and New York University, Ms. Rahman at Fordham. Why do people at the top want to destroy the system that enabled them to get there? “No,” Mr. Morson says, “you have it wrong. When you’re such a person, you don’t feel you’re at the top. The people at the top are wealthy businesspeople, and you’re an intellectual. You think that people of ideas should be at the top.” The word “intelligentsia,” he notes, comes from Russian. In the classic period, from about 1860 to the First Russian Revolution in 1905, “the word did not mean everybody who was educated. It meant educated people who identified with one or another of the radical movements. ‘Intelligents’ believed in atheism, revolution and either socialism or anarchism. “The idea was that since they knew the theory, they were morally superior and they should be in charge, and that there was something fundamentally wrong with the world when ‘practical’ people were. So what you take from your education would be the ideology that would justify this kind of activity—justify it because the wrong people have the power, and you should have it. You don’t feel like you’re the establishment.”... The danger begins, he thinks, when complex social and political problems can’t be debated any longer. “You get into a revolutionary situation because people can’t hear,” he says. “Can there be a dialogue on important questions, or is there only one thing to say about every question? Are people afraid to say, ‘Well, yes, but it’s not quite as simple as that’? . . . When you can’t do that, you’re heading to a one-party state or a dictatorship of some sort. If one party is always wrong and another always right, why not just have the right one?” Mr. Morson speaks with conviction about the peril of “ideological segregation”: “It was very easy for white people to believe evil things of black people when they never met any. But when you live with somebody, you realize that they’re no worse than you are. . . . We’ve increasingly had ideological segregation on both sides. Each side has caricature views of the other.” The assumption of historical inevitability may play a part here. You hear it in our political language: A favored policy is “an idea whose time has come,” a disfavored one is “on the wrong side of history.” This sort of teleological thinking—history has a direction, and that direction is identical with our political views—is fervently, if unconsciously, embraced by highly educated people today. It was also “one of the central arguments of late-19th-century Russian thought”... “Does history have a direction? And is later necessarily better? The greatest thinkers—Tolstoy, Alexander Herzen—answered no, later is not always better. They believed that sort of thinking was an importation of religious providentialism into history—the determinism of Hegel and Marx. The difficulty of this form of thinking is that it paralyzes you from acting. Between the wars, it was common for people to say: ‘Yes, you may like liberal democracy, but that’s of the past. We fascists are of the future.’ Or ‘We communists are of the future.’ People would resign themselves to the inevitable and conclude, ‘Well I can’t fight the future, I can’t resist the fascists or the communists.’ ”... Another marker of the Russian intelligentsia was the sheer contempt its members had for the peasants and workers they claimed to represent... history can unfold in unpredictable ways. Who would have guessed 20 years ago, he asks, that the First Amendment’s free-speech guarantee would become passé on the liberal left? “I used to get a laugh from students by quoting a Soviet citizen I talked to once. He said to me, ‘Of course we have freedom of speech. We just don’t allow people to lie.’ That used to get a laugh! They don’t laugh anymore.”"
From 2020. Related: Suicide of the Liberals
PETER HITCHENS: I've seen hamsters more intimidating than this mob who shouted at me - "in the 1960s the wild Left were still the outsiders, the weird nuisances with their funny ideas and their long hair, shouting their radical slogans. I remember it well. Now they have come into their own. Then, they wanted to communicate their ideas to those on the pavement as they passed. Now they get angry if anyone on the street does not assent to their views. Then they regarded the police with something close to hostility. Now they see them as their protectors. (On Tuesday, I watched them actually ask the police to ‘keep an eye’ on a drunk who had been following the protest and annoying people.)... for a moment or two, my living figure was far more objectionable to them than Cecil Rhodes’s stone effigy. They wished that they were powerful, as they had claimed to be a few minutes earlier. They had absolutely no desire to influence me or debate with me. I was an enemy, not an opponent, and so I should not have dared to be there. My actual existence infuriated them, and possibly so did my refusal to be scared of them. They would have liked it if I could have been made to disappear or, as they put it, ‘cancelled’. The marcher who posted the video of the event on Twitter thought (and presumably hoped) it would in some way diminish me... it is not enough to keep quiet. If you are suspected of thinking the wrong thing, they will come and cancel you anyway. I now think this is just a matter of time. Prepare to be cancelled."
From 2020
memetic_sisyphus on X - "Progressives accidentally agreed with police on a much needed reform that completely vindicated their political enemy: the police. It turns out having detailed footage of police encounters just shows how often police are dealing with the worst members of society and the vast vast majority of time doing so with restraint while following the law. Now that this has blown up in their face, many progressives are trying to turn bodycams into a conspiracy theory. It’s certainly easier than admitting they were fundamentally wrong about the police."
wanye on X - "Incidentally, the body cam discourse demonstrates that progressives are true believers. They really thought that body cams were going to show that the police were the more aggressive party in countless interactions, so I think they were genuinely confused by this outcome."
Jeremy Kauffman 🦔 on X - "Body cams were supposed to prove there were lots of shitty cops. Body cams actually proved cops are mostly good but there are a lot of shitty people. Progressives will now be against body cams, because their fundamental aim is to help shitty people at expense of good people."
Thread by @CovfefeAnon on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Hilarious thread by a guy who noticed that body cams undermined the leftist narrative about cops so he searches for a way to oppose them without saying that it's because they destroy the left's narrative You get the vague hand-waving that uses prog coded phrases - "they said it was about *transparency* [prog good word] but it was *actually* about *reducing liability* [prog boo word because it implies cutting off the ghetto lottery]" - in reality the cops realized that *increasing transparency did decrease liability* Of course, the cops were giving far too much credit to progs for being sane - recall that there's a video of a cop shooting a black woman *who was in the process of trying to stab another black woman* and the prog response was to say that knife fights are a part of their culture Video evidence of actual happenings makes progessives quite angry because even though they'll continue to believe the party line they'll feel uncomfortable because the cognitive dissonance is more powerful when they know that others knows they don't care about truth
It's an interesting 🧵 b/c you can see the full progressive verbal fog on display - he's coming out against better and more evidence - he can't just say "it makes it harder for us to control the narrative" and *he might not even know that's why it bothers him* - he just recoils. This kind of thing goes throughout the thread - no, he doesn't consider that possibility because he wants to enforce the Narrative - not to think through the consequences. Hilarious example of this was FBI belatedly providing the high definition video of the Kenosha riot to the Rittenhouse defense team Likely that was the work of some individual who made a "mistake" because he had some residual sense of justice...
The OP is much more on the veil-production side - he's working to produce thought-terminating cliches for progs to use when they want to dismiss body cam evidence from a case. Success is if progs repeat those to dismiss a Narrative-undermining video... It is actually vital that progressives *not* be seen as individuals. They operate as a team and they have very clear ways of identifying each other so they can coordinate without direct communication"
Castellammarese War Vet on X - "No no no you see, body cams were Acshually about using facial recognition to identify left wing protestors who never seem to go to jail even when they light cop cars on fire."
Wally Lipton on X - "THREAD. I didn't fully know what I'd find when I looked into who was stealing packages on Ring doorcams, but it turns out it was disproportionately minorities, so we should ban them."
Meme - Black Man to Cop in Uniform with Gun: "STOP! DON'T SHOOT!!"
Sneering Police Officer: "...Nice try..."
*Basketball game between black men and police officers*
France defends colonial-era statues in the face of anti-racism protests - ""The republic will erase no trace or names of its history, (...) it will overturn no statue," Macron said in a televised address on Sunday, resisting pressure from anti-racism activists to tear down statues considered offensive. "We must instead lucidly look together at our history, all our memory," he argued, referring to France's colonial relationship with Africa... While Macron recognized that some French citizens continue to face discrimination because of their race, in a country that bans racial statistics, he warned against separatism, accusing a small minority of trying to hijack the struggle for equality. This "noble struggle" against discrimination risks being led astray by "communitarianism," he said, referring to the practice where communities identify with their own culture at the expense of national unity. It risks becoming a "hateful, false rewriting of the past," he argued, saying that under no circumstances should France "revisit or deny what we are."... former Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault called for rooms and monuments named after Colbert to be renamed. That call was dismissed on Monday by Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire. The finance ministry will "continue to be called the Colbert building," Le Maire said. "He is not the one who wrote the Code Noir," he argued, reminding the public that the legal framework for slavery was promulgated two years after Colbert's death. "I understand that he may be an unsavory character, but Colbert is also the one who reinvented industry and brought finances under control," Le Maire said. Colbert’s statue and others like his are offensive because they "celebrate the men who made their countries rich through the slave trade," admits historian Pascal Blanchard, a specialist on France's colonial history... However, for Blanchard, removing them would be to forget or erase part of French history, however painful. "These statues and sculptures have a pedagogical value. If you start erasing the past, one day people will say it was all a fantasy and history could repeat itself," he told RFI. For Blanchard, who is also the co-author of the book La fracture coloniale or the colonial fracture, the controversial monuments are vital in raising public awareness. "Children cannot go to museums to find out about France's colonial past because none exist. The topic is still a taboo. These statues allow us in a certain way to discuss history."... the former slave port town began hanging signs and plaques next to five streets bearing the names of slave traders. It is a crucial step in more accurately framing France's past Diallo reckons. Now he wants the debate to go further in eradicating the legacy of slavery. "It is not enough to tear down statues, we have to get rid of the violence and brutality that these statues represent," he said."
From 2020
In defence of liberalism: resisting a new era of intolerance | The Spectator - "It has become fashionable in recent years to talk of the death of liberalism. But as crowds high on the octane of generational self-righteousness rampage through major cities, the evidence mounts. The growing intolerance of freedom of thought, the inability to talk across divides, the way that most of the British establishment, police included, feels the need to pledge fealty to the cause — as though all terrified of ending up on the wrong side — points to a crisis of more than confidence. It is evidence of an underlying morbidity. Each day the cultural revolution is picking up a pace, with the iconoclasts who attacked the Cenotaph and the statue of Winston Churchill looking for new focuses for their rage. The University of Liverpool has announced that its Gladstone halls of residence will be renamed after protestors pointed out that the former prime minister’s father had owned slaves. So there goes the ‘sins of the father’ ethic too... What we are seeing is nothing more or less than the death of the liberal ideal. Of course ‘liberalism’ was always a broadly defined term; a definition made only vaguer by Americans making it synonymous with ‘left-wing’. But in the truest political sense it encapsulates most of the foundations of our political order, including (though not limited to) equality, the rule of law and freedom — including the freedom of speech that allows good ideas to win out. In the past few years, left-wing critics have been keen to identify what they see as the erasure of liberal democracy by popularly elected leaders on the political right. But in our own country, the much more serious assault on political liberalism comes not from the conservative right, but from the radical left. Over the past couple of weeks, well-meaning people have poured almost a million pounds into the coffers of Black Lives Matter UK in the belief that they are helping a movement that will help black people. In fact they have funded a deeply radical movement. On its own fundraising page, BLM UK describes its aims as: ‘to dismantle imperialism, capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy and the state structures.’ So as well as dismantling a nonexistent menace (‘imperialism’) it intends to bring down the economy and completely alter relations between the sexes (negatively characterised as ‘patriarchy’). This is not liberalism, but far-left radicalism of a kind that has become very familiar of late. Some people watching events of recent days will have been surprised by how far and fast such sentiments have run. By the sight of a mob in Bristol tearing down a statue and then jumping on it. By a Labour MP saying: ‘I celebrate these acts of resistance. We need a movement that will tear down systemic racism.’ By the ranks of British police who could find no way to respond to this behaviour other than (in a newly invented act of faith) to ‘take the knee’ before it. And then there is the media, which has chosen to provide cover for such violence and purge from their ranks not just people who dissent from it but, in the case of the New York Times a few days ago, anyone who helps publish someone who dissents. As one of the last liberals left at that newspaper, Bari Weiss, explained it last week, the over-forties in the news business (like so many others) imagined that the people coming up under them shared their liberal worldview. Then they discovered that these young people believed in ‘safetyism’ over liberalism, and ‘the right of people to feel emotionally and psychologically safe’ over ‘what were considered core liberal values, like free speech’. Actually the divide is even bigger than that, and now encompasses nearly everything. Where the liberal mind is inquiring, the woke mind is dogmatic. Where the liberal mind is capable of humility, the woke mind is capable of none. Where the liberal mind is able to forgive, the woke mind believes that to have erred just once is cause enough to be ‘cancelled’. And while the liberal mind inherited the idea of loving your neighbour, the woke mind positively itches to cast the first stone. Readers of The Spectator have known this was coming. When this magazine first wrote about the Stepford Students, it was asked why we take this so seriously — surely the students would grow up? And they did: but they didn’t change. The virtue-signalling of large corporations — the growing legions of diversity officers and ‘implicit bias training’ — was also written off as the silliness of the corporate world. When we described the mandatory requirement in government to prove a ‘commitment to diversity’ in order to be eligible for any public appointment, it was greeted with the same dismissal. As the American journalist Andrew Sullivan (himself now seemingly muzzled, if not cancelled) put it two years ago: ‘We all live on campus now.’ Step by step, the UK came to have a public and private sector dedicated to the implementation of views which are barely distinguishable from those of the protestors who took to the streets in the past week or two. It’s an ethic which demands that our society play a set of impossible, unwinnable games of identity and ‘privilege’ that not only subvert but end any idea of tolerance. All of this emanates from those who come out of university educated to loathe our society, believing it to be characterised by the oppression of certain groups by other groups: a shameful history and a shameful present. Today these people head into professions where their language of aggressive superiority (‘Educate yourself’) is used to intimidate their elders, force every-one to agree with their point of view and otherwise make themselves unsackable... every inequity that exists (financial, familial, social, neurological) is the result of the same thing: discrimination. A thing we must ‘tackle’, ‘eradicate’ and otherwise cleanse from existence. There’s an awful lot of work to do. Even the woke analysis of history that now sees them scouring the land for more statues to assault is radically different from that of the liberal mind. Liberals understand that people in history acted with the knowledge they had at the time, and that the task of those looking back is to look on it with understanding, not least in the hope of being understood in turn. The woke mind abhors this. It knows that it is right, and that everybody before this year zero was a bigot... It is hard to imagine a more divisive programme, all carried out in the name of anti-racism. What they are actually doing is busily re-racialising our societies. Which is how you come to the situation where a cabinet minister is quizzed on Sky News about the precise ethno-racial composition of the British cabinet and certain ‘anti-racists’ can be found on social media noting with disapproval the number of people of Asian descent in the cabinet. Any movement that says ‘Things are so bad that this whole thing needs to be pulled down’ should be encouraged to realise, before they have to experience it, the cost of what they are abandoning. And to remember the central truth about how much easier it is to pull down than it is to build."
From 2020
