Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat Mar 05, 2022 5:48 pm
Hardly desperation: more like an action of moral integrity and principle, a courageous action, a multicultural action (rather than one of universal cultural liquidation), a natural and proper assertion of the value of each culture and each person's unique identity, and of our basic right to choose our own course and have input in deciding our own destination.
These things become impossible where Globalism exists. For in the interests of centralized control, it must eventually make all things into mere indifferent "counters" to be moved around at its pleasure. It has no tolerance for identity, uniqueness, or even personhood.
For the one thing Globalism hates above all is...individuality.
Since 'desperation' was the word I chose (there are other possible words, and a group of words, to describe better what I meant) I will make an effort to defend my use of it.
But first I have to explain that I have been reading Susannah Heschel's book
The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany. The reason I desire to research in this area is logical and coherent (to me) and also odd and I must say also questionable. It is a very strange and difficult area to research but I would also have to say that this is so because the shadow of Nazism, and the projection of the worst form of evil onto the Nazis, is so predominant today because all the same issues are just as present as they were in the Interwar years. A very strange circle has been completed. Or a whole range of currents has circled back around.
If you (I mean if anyone) pays attention to the rising Right-leaning dissident movement that is active today you will not be able to avoid noticing that there, on the fringe but very close indeed, are people who are adamant in their concerns about rising social decadence and the destruction of religious identification that they see as upholding time-honored social and cultural values, but whose ideas and language have very strong relationships to all that formerly concerned radical Right factions as well as fascists. The Interwar period in Europe is where all the same prevailing discourses and arguments can be found (1920s and 1930s more or less).
Within this context, and this was certainly true in Germany (and I suppose in Italy and other countries too), it became a matter of real concern how to define Christianity. In this sense Christianity served the function or had ties to a universalism that corresponds to the communicated meaning in the term 'globalism' today. I do not necessarily mean what I understand Christianity to really be, but something far more general: a general set of assumptions, perhaps even badly conceived. There is no way that I can see not to pick apart and closely analyze the term 'globalism' because it is laden with all sorts of different, and I think often obscured and clandestine, meaning.
In Germany -- and I mean in the broader Germanic world of Northern Europe -- some things need to be understood. One is that Protestantism arose in a
mood, if I can use that word, deeply oppositional to what was perceived as Catholic but also Jewish influence. Germanic Christianity, and Germanic Protestantism, is a rebellion against a certain 'imposition' on the cultural and also the psychic world of Northern Europe -- and it became apparent that this had to be thrown off. This reaction-process' can be examined. Northern European and Germanic Christianity (Germanic in the widest sense), according to one interpretation, received Christianity but modified it:
This inquiry [The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity by James C. Russell] seeks to apply insights from the behavioral sciences and from the history of religions to the pivotal religio-cultural transformation which occurred as a result of the encounter of Christianity with the Germanic peoples. It is proposed herein that Christianization efforts among the Germanic peoples resulted in a substantial Germanization of Christianity. The fundamental distinction which became apparent from this approach was that the Germanic world-view was essentially folk-centered and "world-accepting," while the Early Christian world-view was essentially soteriological and "world-rejecting."
So in this sense the Germanic world, through Protestantism, undertook to throw off the influence and the yoke of a Universalizing Roman Church and to assert itself in a range of ways in direct opposition. True, some part of this was 'reasoned' and 'logical' but on another level it was deeply psychological and reactive.
It is very curious to see and understand how important it was, and it still may be of course, to separate Christianity from Judaism. There are two strains of this, or two poles, that can easily be discerned in our modern today. One is the side that aligns itself with Judaism and Israel, and seems to define Christianity as a branch of Judaism; and the other which sees Christianity, and indeed the God that Christianity defines, as uniquely distinct from 'Yahweh' and the Judaic God that Jesus opposed. It is a very curious problem and it is completely central to Christianity: Jesus's direct opposition to Judaism and to a 'structure' which he opposed. But to say 'he' must mean to say, quite literally, what God opposed. Whatever that was -- it is very hard to define because Christianity is so bound up in mythic notions -- was toppled, again by God's will. The Jewish diaspora, according to Christian view, was a result of that toppling.
“And behold, the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. And the earth shook, and the rocks were split.”
What happened here? It was, according to Christian definition, the end of one thing (Judaism) and the beginning of another (Christianity).
These are the fundamental ideas that have always operated in Christianity . . . up to fairly recently when another interpretive version was proposed (the dual-dispensation theory). The idea of Antisemtism -- opposition to Jews and Jewish machination -- had been the core idea that ran through all of post-Exile history and certainly of the Jewish diaspora in Europe. There is, that I can see, no way around this.
So as I have examined the movements that define themselves as 'anti-globalist' I have no choice but to say that there are all manner of strange strains of idea that one encounters in those who embrace this posture. And there is no way not to see, and therefore not to talk about, a mood that I named 'desperation' where people who do not seem to have very clear and coherent ideas about the world, or who see it through a limited and reduced framework, try in intellectual, psychological and personal desperation to make sense of what is going on around them, and which
determines them, by undertaking a forced and desperate interpretation. So interpretation, and the wielding of interpretation, become weapons of offense and defense. If I say it is a desperate effort I do not mean that it may not be necessary and even moral. I mean that it is undertaken in a certain desperation and internal conflict.
For all that I have many different sympathies, let's say, with the populist Trump movement, it is not at all hard for me to see that Trump as a demagogic populist is obviously working angles in his stimulation of reaction that has ties, ties that can be described, to fascist incitement. Now, the people who notice this -- the NY Intellectual Establishment -- are those with a decided 'historical perspective' and by that I mean that they are aware of what happened just a few decades back in Europe (and from which many escaped).
The entire idea of
The Frankfurt School is a reference and a term that has many many different levels of meaning. And what I refer to is a movement that seeks to, what is the right way to put it, undermine or render impossible a fascistic reaction in common people who react, without perhaps knowing fully why, against forces, factions and powers that control and determine them. And here I will reintroduce the term 'globalism'. Populism, in America, is reactive and also 'desperate'. It seeks to locate the enemy and to define the enemy, and then to discover a way to oppose the defined enemy.
If I use the term 'desperation' I do not mean in any sense to imply that I do not think returning to and rediscovering *Identity* in cultural and also, problematically, in racial and ethnic identification is a 'bad thing'. In fact it has seemed to me something necessary and perhaps also inevitable. But if this is so then America's multi-culturalism project must be and perhaps will be undone and dismantled because it is an improper imposition.
So here again I refer to the undoing of various sorts of 'glue' that held the Republic together which, from where I sit, sure look like it is unbinding.
So the term 'desperation' is not a bad one to use in a time in which people have become, or seem to become, disassociated from themselves as their former identifications are coming unglued.
However, the term 'defiance' of impositions -- such as is multi-culturalism -- I would also say is valid. But the undoing of the systems that have been created, as we all notice, will be anything but easy.
(I could edit this better and add more to it but it would take more time than I have. We are discussing Christianity here, and I am very interested in Christianity in a modern cultural context, so all that I bring up interests me and seems relevant indeed).
