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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   27236 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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I don't know if I'm an "SJer" but I'm probably to the left of like 90% of the userbase here so:

The culture war doesn't have to end, at least not anytime soon. The left-right culture war has consumed western civilization since the French Revolution. To the extent it will end, it will be because new issues come to prominence and the old ones come to seem less relevant, rather than a clear and total victory of either 'side.' And anyway, left and right are moving targets. A victory of today's 'left' or 'right' wouldn't necessarily look like a victory to the 'left' or 'right of fifty years ago, or fifty years in the future.

Frankly, the Blue Tribe's been writing all the history books since before I was born, so it's hard for me to even picture it.

When would you say the left started writing all the history books?

When would you say the left started writing all the history books?

1930s, with the rise of the British Marxist Historians.

Hobsbawm is the name I know because he's pretty much the most famous, but there are some stonking examples such as this gentleman (I have no idea why it's obligatory for historians to have at least three names or sets of initials, and Hobsbawm bucked that trend):

Geoffrey Ernest Maurice de Ste. Croix, FBA (8 February 1910 – 5 February 2000), known informally as Croicks, was a British historian who specialised in examining Ancient Greece from a Marxist perspective.

When would you say the left started writing all the history books?

I don't know; I haven't read enough of them.

Definitely after WW2 and Mid cold-war to late cold-war and beginning of post cold-war.

This question tends to be a good barometer for how far-right somebody is. The most anodyne of normiecons will say things went wrong in the 90s or even the 2000s and on the other end of the spectrum you've got Yarvinite types who will say that the left has been on a winning streak since 1789.

On the specific question of US history books, Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States is the first woke history to be widely adopted as a high school textbook, and was published in 1980. The first serious pushback against the Dunning School (the academic version of the Birth of a Nation/Gone with the Wind school of history) is by Kenneth Stampp, who published The Era of Reconstruction in 1965.

I have a cousin who will use any opportunity to blurt out that Constantine fucked it all up when making Christianity the state religion

Where would you place Carol Zimmerman and his thesis of western civilization being in a recurring cycle of degeneration, only to rise phoenix-like from the ashes?

I guess it depend on when he reckons the current cycle to have started.

Or 0, if you're Nietzschean or Gibbonian. After all, their statue avatars aren't from the renaissance. Some go as far back as pericles. A true rightist would tell you it was all over by middle kingdom egypt. A real masculinity appreciator knows that when man domesticated animals, he domesticated himself. Conservatives worthy of the name would consider the first instance of gardening as the seminal defeat. While serious traditionalists point to the start of gathering as the crowning triumph of Left, inc.

Conservatives worthy of the name would consider the first instance of gardening as the seminal defeat.

The true sin of Cain the farmer as distinct from his brother Abel the shepherd!

The agricultural revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

Did Zog put rocks around fire? That nanny state bullshit!

Zog make fire like soft weak collectivist instead of waiting for lightning god to strike tree and set it on fire? Pah!

It has been said, both disapprovingly and otherwise, that Satan was the first revolutionary.

Sure, according to the internal chronology. Not so sure as to publication order.

Marx certainly seems to have had some sympathies:

Till heart’s bewitched, till senses reel:

With Satan I have struck my deal.

He chalks the signs, beats time for me,

I play the death march fast and free.

And less directly:

Worlds I would destroy forever,

Since I can create no world

and

So a god has snatched from me my all

In the curse and rack of destiny.

All his worlds are gone beyond recall!

Nothing but revenge is left to me!

I shall build my throne high overhead,

Cold, tremendous shall its summit be.

For its bulwark—superstitious dread,

For its Marshall—blackest agony.

which eloquently expresses a certain kind of Satanic sentiment.

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