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Reading dry academic books so you don’t have to… :) Niebuhr tackles what he sees as contradictions in the base make up of American culture. He uses a plethora of words to say what he means, but importantly, he zeros in how important collective action is – even in a society that claims to be ruggedly individualistic.
“Sometimes the irony in our [US] historic situation is derived from the extravagant emphasis in our culture upon the value of dignity of the individual and upon individual liberty as the final value of life. Our cherished vales of individualism are real enough; and we are right in preferring death to their annulment. But our exaltation of the individual involves us in some very ironic contradictions.
On the one hand, our culture does not really value the individual as much as it pretends; on the other hand, if justice is to be maintained and our survival assured, we cannot make individual liberty as unqualifiedly the end of life as our ideology asserts.”
[…]
If the academic thought of a scientific culture tends to obscure the mystery of the individual’s freedom and uniqueness, the social forms of a technical society frequently endanger the realities of his life. The mechanistically contrived togetherness of our great urban centers in inimical to genuine community. For community is grounded in personal relations. In these the individual becomes most completely himself as his life enters organically into the lives of others. Thus our theory and our practice tend to stand in contradiction to our creed.
But if our academic thought frequently negates our individualistic creed, our social practice is frequently better than the creed. The justice we have established in our society has been achieved, not by pure individualism, but by collective action. We have balanced collective social power with collective social power. In order to prevail against our Communist foe we must continue to engage in vast collective ventures, subject ourselves to far-reaching national and international disciplines and we must moderate the extravagance of our theory by the soberness of our practice. Many young men, who have been assured that only the individual counts among us, have died upon foreign battlefields. We have been subjected to this ironic refutation of our cherished creed because the creed is too individualistic to measure the social dimension of human existence and too optimistic to gauge the hazards to justice which exists in every community, particular in the international one.
-Reinhold Niebuhr. The Irony Of American History p.7, p.10.
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops”
Context is nice with regards to where we are and what we are doing in the world. Predictably, the religious find a great deal wrong with this video as it is based on reality as opposed to magic. :)
From Wikipedia:
“Eugene Victor “Gene” Debs (November 5, 1855 – October 20, 1926) was an American union leader, one of the founding members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or the Wobblies), and five times the candidate of the Socialist Party of America for President of the United States.[1] Through his presidential candidacies, as well as his work with labor movements, Debs eventually became one of the best-known socialists living in the United States.
Early in his political career, Debs was a member of the Democratic Party. He was elected as a Democrat to the Indiana General Assembly in 1884. After working with several smaller unions, including the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, Debs was instrumental in the founding of the American Railway Union (ARU), one of the nation’s first industrial unions. After workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company organized a wildcat strike over pay cuts in the summer of 1894, Debs signed many into the ARU. He called a boycott of the ARU against handling trains with Pullman cars, in what became the nationwide Pullman Strike, affecting most lines west of Detroit, and more than 250,000 workers in 27 states. To keep the mail running, President Grover Cleveland used the United States Army to break the strike. As a leader of the ARU, Debs was convicted of federal charges for defying a court injunction against the strike and served six months in prison.
In jail, Debs read various works of socialist theory and emerged six months later as a committed adherent of the international socialist movement. Debs was a founding member of the Social Democracy of America (1897), the Social Democratic Party of America (1898), and the Socialist Party of America (1901).
Debs ran as a Socialist candidate for President of the United States five times, including 1900 (earning 0.63% of the popular vote), 1904 (2.98%), 1908 (2.83%), 1912 (5.99%), and 1920 (3.41%), the last time from a prison cell. He was also a candidate for United States Congress from his native Indiana in 1916.
Debs was noted for his oratory, and his speech denouncing American participation in World War I led to his second arrest in 1918. He was convicted under the Sedition Act of 1918 and sentenced to a term of 10 years. President Warren G. Harding commuted his sentence in December 1921. Debs died in 1926, not long after being admitted to a sanatorium due to cardiovascular problems that developed during his time in prison. He has since been cited as the inspiration for numerous politicians.”
The history that we’re not told about, the history that we need to know. Twenty five minutes of what we are not supposed to know.
Nick Turse describes the horror that is war.
Seventy two years (+) of struggle just to get right to vote, and an uphill battle *all* of the way. Now who exactly was creating such resistance to positive social change? Hmm… now that is quite the puzzle now isn’t it.
Those in power will never willingly concede their power. Not ever. What it takes – organizing, resistance, community are the factors that feminism built up until roughly the end of the Second wave. With the influx of po-mo theory and men – the feminist root manifesto i.e. the liberation of women from the oppressive structures of society – has been all but lost.
So much time has been lost to endless debates over empowerment and identity politics, the entire project steadfastly nonthreatening to the status quo. The radical feminist message is starting to get out again, despite the best efforts of the establishment to silence women who look to the root causes of the oppression of women. The task ahead is, as always, daunting but community is being formed, women are organizing and of course the status quo – is to be questioned, analyzed and ultimately rejected.
It takes dedicated effort to remove these sorts of fiery speeches from the history of women. Oratory like this somehow doesn’t make it into the classrooms, or history lectures. So the lessons need to be discovered, theorized, and fought for in each generation of women making progress glacially slow. Yet we have helpful mnemonics for the British Monarchy, US presidents and Canadian PM’s that we teach to children. Yet nothing for the bold female speakers of the 60’s and 70’s who set their minds to one of the most important projects facing humankind – the dismantling of patriarchy.
Unless you seek information like this out, you won’t be told about it by your choice of news station, you most likely won’t hear it on the radio and I’m almost certain you wont get this in secondary school. The exclusion of feminist history in the mainstream is not an accidental omission, but a tactical choice.
– [Source:Notes from the Third Year]
bleatmop
Mystro
The Arbourist
Dead Wild Roses 
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