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trans-advice · 2 years

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Hey :)

I need some advice on how to talk to my stepmom. I’m not out to any of my family yet, and I know they’d be supportive, but I’m not sure if I’m ready.

Where I really need the advice is with Harry Potter. My stepmom grew up with the books and my little brother got REALLY into them too. He’s seen a couple of the movies and read all the books and everything, and has some HP merch. I talked to my stepmom on the phone the other day and asked if she was aware of JKR and her transphobia and what she thought of it. She said she was aware but didn’t know specifics or the severity, and that she’d do some more thinking and researching, but that when it comes to things like that it’s hard because my brother is so into it. She’s keeping him from reading any of her opinion pieces, which I appreciate, but I can’t help but be a little upset by their continued support of her work. I know that they would never intentionally upset me, and I do get how it’s a difficult decision (I suspect my brother is autistic, as am I, so I don’t want to take a special interest away from him) but should I try talking to my stepmom about it again? Is it worth coming out to her so she can see how it’s affecting me emotionally on a personal level? Should I just get over it? I can’t help but feel like I’m overreacting. Thanks in advance :)

There are at least a couple things to say, the JKR gets so focused on is because she's a billionaire collecting royalties from Harry Potter via intellectual property. Her royalties then fund promotion of transphobia, antisemitism, etc. Unfortunately, her antisemitism, her pro-slavery, her transphobia, her pro-imperialism, has many different clones, as bell hooks critiqued in December 2003 in chapter 3 of "The Will To Change".

Ever since masses of American boys began, in the wake of the civil rights struggle, sexual liberation, and feminist movement, to demand their right to be psychologically whole and expressed those demands most visibly by refusing to fight in the Vietnam War, mass media as a propaganda tool for imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy have targeted young males and engaged in heavy-handed brainwashing to reinforce psychological patriarchy. [...]

In the wake of feminist, antiracist, and postcolonial critiques of imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy, the backlash that aims to reinscribe patriarchy is fierce. While feminism may ignore boys and young males, capitalist patriarchal men do not. It was adult, white, wealthy males in this country who first read and fell in love with the Harry Potter books. Though written by a British female, initally described by the rich white American men who "discovered" her as a working-class single mom, J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books are clever modern reworkings of the English schoolboy novel. Harry as our modern-day hero is the supersmart, gifted, blessed, white boy genius (a mini patriarch) who "rules" over the equally smart kids, including an occasional girl and an occasional male of color. But these books also glorify war, depictedas killing on behalf of the "good."

The Harry Potter movies glorify the use of violence to maintain control over others. In Harry Potter: The Chamber of Secrets violence when used by the acceptable groups is deemed positive. Sexism and racist thinking in the Harry Potter books are rarely critiqued. Had the author been a ruling-class white male, feminist thinkers might have been more active in challenging the imperialism, racism and sexism of Rowling's books.

Again and again I hear parents, particularly antipatriarchal parents, express concern about the contents of these books while praising them for drawing more boys to reading. Of course American children were bombarded with an advertising blitz telling them that they should read these books. Harry Potter began as national news sanctioned by mass media. Books that do not reinscribe patriarchal masculinity do not get the approval the Harry Potter books have received. And children rarely have an opportunity to know that any books exist which offer an alternative to patriarchal masculinist visions. The phenomenal financial success of Harry Potter means that boys will henceforth have an array of literary clones to choose from.

The reason I mention this is that it means that the goal should also be to prevent merch acquistions from being ones that pay JKR royalties. For example, no streaming & no on-demand. Pirating would be more ethical in this case. I also mention this because there's at least 2 other problems: the media overall still supports white bourgeois patriarchy & your brother is likely getting targeted by the school to prison pipeline, which assimilation basically says on average you either have to step on other demographics (such as students of color, poor students, & or tgnciq students, etc) & break solidarity in order to avoid getting targeted, or you get more policing sicced on you.

To summarize there’s 3 goals regarding your brother:

1. do not give JKR money,

2. make sure he starts to become anti-sexist, anti-racist, etc.

3. protect him from the school-to-prison pipeline.

She said she was aware but didn’t know specifics or the severity, and that she’d do some more thinking and researching, but that when it comes to things like that it’s hard because my brother is so into it. She’s keeping him from reading any of her opinion pieces,

The mind can only handle what the butt can stand. She hasn't said which sources she's going to research. Further just because she changes her mind about JKR doesn't mean she'll be able to teach your brother. For example, parents can't censor everything, especially as kids learn to evade censorship, or teachers, students, adults at school & in other social settings expose them to various works including hate speech. What parents can do is control their own wallets.

For example of people at school & other social settings promoting hate speech, some special needs establishments use neurosexism to promote myths such as “only males can have autism”. I literally had teachers use neurosexist myths on entire mainstream classrooms in order to promote other neuromyths like the visual-audio-kinesthetic (VAK) model of learning models. (Like seriously, these teachers would tailor their lesson planning to accommodate these 3 styles. Neurosexism got used to sometimes segregate people by gender marker.) If you need more insight, I recommend Cordelia Fine’s “Testosterone Rex” & “Delusions of Gender”, along with reading up on the school-to-prison pipeline. Schools tend to attack/thwart student solidarity/activism & they are legally allowed to on the basis of preventing “disruptions to education”. This means that on average faculty will reward students who suck up by attacking other students who are either: disabled students, students of color, tgnciq+ students, and or poor students, because this helps break up solidarity. Seriously, I don’t know how your brother’s school’s faculty acts, but consider that your stepmom also has to deal with them & will need support dealing with them.

So no, I don’t know if you coming out will actually do anything. You family is maybe supportive, and even consent to back you up, but are they able to back it up? I don't know your family's situation. I think y’all need help dealing with sexism, dealing with the school-to-prison pipeline, etc. To raise a child, it takes a village, so to combat the racist capitalist anti-TGNCIQ+ patriarchy also takes a village. Make sure your stepmom & family & brother has the support to help your brother learn that sexism, racism, etc, are bad.

Good Luck, Peace & Love,

Eve

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if-you-fan-a-fire · 3 months

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"PREMIER AGAINST DEMONSTRATIONS," Montreal Star. July 10, 1934. Page 3. ---- Labor Delegates Confer With Taschereau on Conditions of Work ---- Premier Taschereau will encourage organization of labor and even approve of strikes in certain instances, but he will not stand for foreign propaganda, detrimental to Canadian industry. He is firmly opposed to all agitation or demonstrations. This was what he told a delegation of the Canadian Labor Defence League at local provincial offices today.

Accompanied by Hon. C. J. Arcand, Minister of Labor, the delegation complained of treatment received by strikers in the Northern mining district of the Province of Quebec, demanded fair wages for employes of all industries and protested against the allegedly unfair trials undergone by certain strikers in certain Quebec courts. To this Premier Taschereau said that he would do his duty to the finish and would not tolerate members of the provincial police being called "thugs."

LASTS ONE HOUR The discussion lasted fully one hour, but not to the entire satisfaction of the delegation, as Premier Taschereau recommended that labor organizations confer with Mr. Arcand so that minimum wage sales be observed and demonstrations and agitation be completely avoided. He abruptly left his offices for an unknown destination compelling delegations from Les Propriétaires de l'Est and La Jeunesse Libérale to return tomorrow to make their quests.

Premier Taschereau was informed that deplorable hygienic conditions prevailed in the mines, with the result that after a stay of five or six years, underground workers were totally incapacitated. He was told that in view of present low wages, men went on strike and picketed, since there is no law against this. But they were arrested and some of them have been waiting for trial for some time. These conditions. were very unjust, the delegation contended.

NO AGITATIONS. The delegation also protested against Premier Taschereau's statements to the effect that he would not stand for the agitation or propaganda on the part of foreigners. It was stated that at one of the strikes the majority were French-Canadians, to which the Premier replied that they were misinformed and that out of 34 strikers, 33 were foreigners. But it was not so much this point to which he referred when he attacked foreign propaganda. What he meant. he stressed, was that he would firmly oppose and energetically fight propaganda by foreigners who were seeking to close down Canadian mills so that less competition would be given to American concerns.

SIX CENTS AN HOUR. The discussion then pivotted about certain industries which paid wages. as low as six cents an hour. The Province of Quebec wage scales are the lowest and adequate legislation should be enacted to do away with such conditions, the delegates claimed. Premier Taschereau, in referring to conditions at the mines, said he thought things were just the opposite, as he had recently visited the mines and investigated conditions.

Mr. Arcand said he favored decent wages in all branches of industry. but thought it ridiculous that a strike should be called for a difference of less than two cents an hour. "So far as conditions in mines are concerned. I have much more experience than many persons may think. I was underground for six years and we were often brought out unconscious in those days. Yet. I am still living in good health," he stated.

INTERVIEW CLOSES. Concluding the interview, Premier Taschereau said that he would not be dictated to by foreigners and would not stand for any agitations. He advised the delegation to confer with Mr. Arcand on the matter. He added that he had been the recipient. of many insulting communications from as far as British Columbia, but thought it better to throw these letters into the wastepaper basket where they belonged. Other provinces had sufficient difficulties with- out seeking to solve those of Quebec.

#montreal #canadian labor defence league #premier of quebec #strike #labour organizers #union organizing #crackdown #xenophobia in canada #communists #anti-union propaganda #working class struggle #great depression in canada #northern quebec #rouyn #noranda

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ruby-whistler · 3 years

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i made a list of the vibes of the hermits i watch, so you might want to check some of them out! this is just mostly jokes, but i thought all of the more “serious” propaganda was missing something, so have what truly makes hermitcraft worth it; the players’ unique styles!

will be back on my dsmp stuff asap but it’s the first day of season 8 and i would really appreciate if you checked them out through the links provided :]

Grian; [ episode one link ]

vibes of a 17 year old mcyter, is actually 27 and married

noo not my red jumpah!

chaotic capitalist

someone is making the server better through order? *starts another war* whoops, hand slipped :D

he built a- he rebuilt his entire megabase in survival, above a giant lake of lava, in the nether, on hard mode, upside down??

“watching as scar dies over and over in my trap is peak comedy and i’m tired of pretending it’s not” but it happens like 5 times i every season

video editing is very main-stream and good for short attention spans!

*sad montage over losing stuff he’ll get back in 15 minutes because he’s rich*

pesky birdd! great elytra flier! amazing builder! will tnt your house! poultrymannn!!

wholesome, chaos incarnate, talented architect

why won’t mumbo respond to my messages it’s been two weeks :[ (clingy)

doors???????????? your house has doors???? no doors for you good sir!

will laugh a lot at a lot of things, esp when he’s with his friends

genuinely just so fun to watch

Mumbo Jumbo; [ episode one link ]

perfect british accent

mustache man (warning: he has no mustache irl)

*fails ten businesses in a row* iskall please help

redstone is his element

“it’s actually quite simple” i like your funny words magic man, now can you repeat how in the hell you made a that fancy vault work-

filmographer?? i think? met up with grian irl

him and grian have a robot son named grumbot. that has nothing to do with the vibes but i had to mention him because he means a lot to me.

tries to stay out of wars and server politics until someone (grian) drags him into them

minigame maker, makes the hermits competitive and that is scary (also very funny) e. g. button, hermit challengesss!

“it’ll be fineee” *que shot of everything on fire behind him*

makes his base a living being and then all his neighbors end up feeding it instead of him

conspiracy theorist. bumbo baggins. the usual.

very entertaining videos that help you learn more about minecraft mechanics!

GoodTimesWithScar; [ episode one link ]

wheelchair creator with literally the best vibes

so wholesome i. he is so cool he makes me so happy :’D

*extremely cool announcer voice* ooooo hello there my fellow miners and crafters, good timeees with scar heree, and welcome backk to the wonderful world of hermits and crafting, and we’re flying over-

commentates everything extremely well

spends tenths of hours on builds within a single video and doesn’t bat an eye

lore for all of his builds! he builds these amazing bases to tell a story!

“i wanna see white flags! white flags, outside your base, by-“ wait no wrong anti-rebellion army leader

all videos have a clear objective

mostly building, but he loves hanging out/helping his friends!

loves disney movies! wants to go to space! :D

kind-hearted, always makes everyone else smile

can be chaotic but usually just tries to have fun and make sure everyone else has fun too

*flies into a tree on half a heart* wait what why did i die D:

scar. scar please eat. you’re going to die for the tenth time this video-

the non-chaotic capitalist, has extremely creative shop designs

a danger to himself, but also the kind of person you can’t be angry at for long

BdoubleO100; [ episode one link ]

the guitar music at the beginning of his videos brings a smile to my face, it just has such an immaculate mood

*camera pans over him as said music plays* ladies and gentlemen welcome to another episode of hoimycraffff

the way he talks is extremely endearing

one of the best builders on the server - probably best builder of interiors in existence

able to make a palette using any number of strange blocks and then make amazing builds using it

built a whole castle as a backdrop, then built an entire giant mountain for said castle

extremely sensitive to short jokes, usually gets pranked by others because his reactions are always so funny

his daughters show up from time to time in his room while he’s recording and it’s so cute

*has no way to see the sun but still knows it’s nighttime* gotta go schleep!

scar, pointing at him “this is why we can’t have nice sunsets”

(scar dies because of mobs every time bdubs isn’t on the server to sleep)

likes to be accomplice because he isn’t the one being made fun of (/lh)

*shoots himself in front of a confused grian because he thinks the guy wants his face again when he’s actually just looking for a netherportal*

is usually the underdog so it feels good when he wins

they’re all actually such great friends so it’s genuinely funny to watch

he himself is amazing at entertainment and just a very cool guy

ImpulseSV; [ episode one link ]

what’s going on everyone, my name is impulse and welcome back to hermitcraft!

always speaks with a smile in his voice

has a good dynamic with basically everyone

great co-worker and always helps out if he can

had his base turned pink during the swap, and instead of changing it back afterwards, he dyed his skin’s hair and clothing pink to match it

very cool and original building style!

makes a lot of farms and sells what he gets in his few shops

makes money to be able to do more stuff and make more farms

blows up most his base ever so often to rebuild parts. you know, like a normal person does in minecraft survival.

the grind is never over

the guy who always gets all of the work done on the school project and proceeds to be chill about it

always has very cool side-projects going on and puts his heart into all of them

pog timelapses!!

Rendog; [ episode one link ]

*short, funny scene from the video at the beginning slowly fades out into great music

dogs howling as the half-dog half-cog logo comes up*

greetiiings cyberdogs and citizens of the interbubs! this is ren diggity dawg coming atcha, in another minecraft episodes varuuummm the hermit. craft. server. (hey!)

we’re kicking things off today my friends, from the- *location name on screen*

that intro gets me hyped every time

he’s a furry who talks in bro language it’s great i swear - very atypical but fun

he transformed an entire biome into a star wars planet for his base

his building skills and dedication are incredible

horny (just a little bit)

the only person who cared about mycelium in the whole rebellion

does a lot of roleplay-themed stuff and mysteries to be solved

“b-dubba-dubs one hundred”

extremely upbeat & sweet guy

adds -age after everything “biddage” “flyage” to make it sound Cooler

amazingly positive always and funny as hell

mcc winner!! wooooooooo :D

always tries to be where stuff is happening and interact with people

very entertaining editing style

Iskall85; [ episode one link ]

drives joke into the mud and then picks them up and does it again which is funny

starts videos with one-off bits

iskallman!!! the superhero literally no one needed and yet there he is

only has one (1) braincell when with mumbo

they both do and they’re hilarious together every time

like when they laughed at squeaky noises for ten minutes straight. guys please you’re adult men

bernie the leaf master

omega (something) of doom!!

encourages gambling (in a videogame)

he has so many jokes he keeps using i can’t possibly fit them all in here

basically a wildcard

i have no idea what he’s doing this season

i have no idea what he’s doing ever actually

tame chaos, confusing to the point when it’s funny again

really great builder as well!

mostly for younger audiences but his videos are a good watch in general

feel free to send asks about hc! i’m already loosely involved in hermitblr but yeah, my dsmp followers aren’t immune :] /lh /j

#long post #hermitcraft #hermitcraft s8 #hermitblr #ruby's rambles #:]#all my personal opinions #just wanted to add to the hype lol

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ladyfl4me · 5 years

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A,E,F,G,I,J,K,L,M,N,O,P,Q,R,S,T,U,V,W,X,Y,Z ;o

Okay *cracks knuckles* let’s go! F, M, and S have already been taken from this list, so feel free to send in... B, C, D, or H, I guess. Yeehaw. This is really fucking long.

A: How did you come up with the title to [TMWCIFTC]? -- It started, as many things do, as a bad pun. The novel The Spy who Came In from the Cold was a cold-war spy thriller, about a British spy who goes over to East Germany as an apparent defect, except he’s actually there to spread misinformation and fuck shit up. He falls in love, becomes disillusioned with his superiors, and is shot dead over the corpse of his lover after climbing over to the east side of the wall. Needless to say, this is nowhere close to what happens in TMWCIFTC. I chose it early on because of the literal meaning: there’s a moth(man), he’s coming in from the cold WV weather, boom shaka laka, we have a title. Over time, though, it’s evolved into another meaning. Indrid himself is coming in from an isolated, lonely existence: he’s rejoining the family that cut ties with him, he’s in love, he’s warm and safe. The moth sure did come in from the cold, and hopefully he stays that way.

E: If you wrote a sequel to [TMWCIFTC], what would it be about? -- Hm. Considering my entire TAZ fic career is a tangled hairball of sequels and prequels, I kind of have this base covered. At the moment, TCOS - aka The Children of Sylvain, the sequel to TMWCIFTC - is about three things: a Pine Guard road trip race against time and the feds, the Spanish Sylvan Inquisition That Nobody Expected (least of all Jake and Hollis, who have to set aside their differences and past conflicts to save Kepler - and who knows, maybe they’ll fall in love along the way), and Alexandra the Interpreter getting woke to Sylvan politics and doing what she can from the inside to change them. In other words, it’s going to be a massive sequel that is the finale of the Amnesty alternate universe I’ve created. It’s this series’ Endgame. (That reminds me, I need an actual title for this collection of stories I’m writing. The “Tin Cinematic Universe” doesn’t quite have the ring to it that I’d like.)

G: Do you write your story from start to finish, or do you write the scenes out of order? -- eh, it kind of depends. It’s like a buffering bar on Youtube videos. I outline what I can until I run out of ideas, then start writing, then add outlines to the end, until the outline is complete and I just have to keep writing.

I: Do you have a guilty pleasure in fic (reading or writing)? -- I don’t have one for reading, but for writing, I fucking love structuring chapters around songs. Classical or otherwise, I love music. All my stories play in my head like a movie screen, and I just do my best to describe what I’m seeing in my head with an accompanying score. It’s not so much a guilty pleasure as it is a writing process. Frankly, I don’t think I actually have a guilty pleasure; the act of writing itself is all the happiness I need.

J: Write or describe an alternative ending to [insert fic]. -- An alternate ending for The Devil Went Down To Georgia would be... interesting. It ended with Boyd-as-Jersey-Devil scaring the pants off some poor broke college kid, who stole his worthless fiddle; then he changed back, and he and Ned went on their merry way to go break into Aubrey’s house and send everything down the drain. If there was one thing that I could change in there, it would be how fast Ned ran. If he ran a little faster, he would have seen the alley; he would have witnessed Boyd turning into the Jersey Devil, or at least turning back into himself; and he’d get a very rude awakening as to what Sylvans are and that his partner (in crime, and everything that mattered) was a fucking cryptid. God, that’d be a fun AU to write. Who knows, I might go do that someday.

K: What’s the angstiest idea you’ve ever come up with? -- At the moment, the only angsty idea that I’m actually conceptualizing is a Hollis/Jake angsty breakup for TSG. (Spoilers, I guess.) I once wrote a very grimdark ending to TMWCIFTC where everyone fell through the ice and drowned. It wasn’t fun. I’ve also mentally killed off each Amnesty protagonist and NPC in various ways, but I never felt comfortable writing them down. I only write angst with a happy ending because those are the kinds of stories I need to hear.

L: How many times do you usually revise your fic/chapter before posting? -- 9 times out of 10, I just throw it into the void. I write as much as I can in big chunks, and then kind of hope for the best. TMWCIFTC, for example, is a completely unedited, unbetaed vomit draft. I usually do a quick reread of my oneshots to catch grammar and spelling errors, but other than that I just trust myself that it’s fine.

N: Is there a fic you wish someone else would write (or finish) for you? -- Can I get some kind of resolution for To the Edge of Night? Can I please get some kind of resolution for To the Edge of Night??? I was 14 chapters into that bastard before I a) became a more casual MCU fan and b) discovered TAZ. It was such a niche fic with such a niche structure - LOTR as galactic Asgardian propaganda to cover up Odin’s mistakes - that at some point I lost interest in it. I just saw Endgame though, so now I might get some inspiration for stuff to bastardize.

O: How do you begin a story–with the plot, or the characters? -- Characters. When coming up with character backstories, I can usually find ways to slot their lives together that necessitate a plot. I love character-driven stories, where their actions actually do shit and their words actually mean something, in favor of getting dragged along behind the plot like tin cans behind a car.

P: Are you what George R. R. Martin would call an “architect” or a “gardener”? (How much do you plan in advance, versus letting the story unfold as you go?) -- I’m definitely an architect, but in a really messy way. My friends can attest that I do an insane amount of planning for each story - often in their DMs, sorry about that, Fae, Cro, Indy and Aline 😬 - and all that usually ends up in a stream-of-consciousness rant outline on Google Drive. Knowing where the story is going helps me a lot, but the planning I do is definitely just building flower beds in which to sow seeds. Or building a greenhouse. I plan the bare bones of a story, and things get really wild within it, but it does follow a logical plot structure.

Q: How do you feel about collaborations? -- I have a lot of respect for the people who can successfully pull it off, but idk if i’d ever want to do one myself. I get really possessive of my stories and ideas and like to be the one in charge of their execution. That being said, some collabs have produced amazing stories. I don’t mind reading collab fics, but actually being in a collab grates on me more than it should.

R: Are there any writers (fanfic or otherwise) you consider an influence? -- I’m definitely influenced heavily by Neil Gaiman. I read American Gods and Good Omens a lot while I was trying to write TMWCIFTC; not only was it a good brain break, but I was able to pick up a lot of tips on scene pacing, concise yet expressive language, and character interactions. My creative wriitng professors have always told us to read so we know what to steal - not in terms of content, but in execution.

On the fanfic side, @miamaroo is a huge inspiration for me. I’ve been reading Northern Migration a lot recently, and I love how its canon divergence is so worldshaking and so complex, but is still familiar in nostalgic yet terrifying ways. I read it back in October, went, “Huh, I wanna do something that wild. And if miamaroo can do it then I sure as fuck can too,” and I started planning TMWCIFTC during that one month dead zone the McElroys took last year. Northern Migration is one of the best, most coherent, most stunning, and most incredibly written TAZ Balance AUs I’ve ever read, and if I hadn’t read it, I wouldn’t have been inspired to take the fuckall huge plunge into TMWCIFTC.

S: Any fandom tropes you can’t resist? -- Bed sharing and cuddling, hand kissing, wrist kissing, whump, sympathetic villains. Canon divergent AUs are my absolute favorite things to both read and write. Anything that would turn me into Charlie Kelly slamming his finger on a bulletin board screaming, “CAROL,” is a fic I would give my life for.

T: Any fandom tropes you can’t stand? -- Not a fan of a) woobification and b) flat villain characterization, to the point where the story is riding on villain tropes instead of an actual person or plot. Character nuance is always something I look for when I read. I don’t usually get bitter about tropes, though; some stuff, when subverted, works really well. I fully subscribe to don’t like, don’t read, don’t write, which is why I don’t write anything that warrants AO3 content warning tags or an Explicit rating, in favor of focusing on plot. Every author has a reason for what they write and how - be it their level of experience, personal preference, or simply the joy of writing something and getting it out there - and I respect that. Within reason, of course.

U: Share three of your favorite fic writers and why you like them so much. --

@miamaroo, for reasons I’ve already discussed. My favorite TAZ Balance author hands down. Read Northern Migration and give it the love it deserves, or I’m replacing all the faucets in your house with silly straws.

@transagentstern. Fae has a bunch of absolutely incredible fics and an amazing grasp on characterization. We come from the same place with AUs, in that canon is but the bare planks on which we put the drywall of our plot an characterization. They structure AUs and character backstories from the ground up in believable and emotionally raw ways. Also they have great music taste. I especially like their interpretation of Indrid in Moth to the Flame; he, like all the other characters in the story, is far from perfect, and his character arc is explored in relatable ways that I love to read.

@keplersheetz. Aline - theneonpineapple on AO3 - researches like a motherfucker and has a wealth of knowledge/experience/viewpoints to draw on, making author-author interactions with her an absolute delight. She’s also doing the lord’s work with rarepairs. Spin a wheel, find a ship, and she’s probably written for it or at least conceptualized it. Reading her character studies and stories of the old Pine Guard - aka Mama’s original crew, before the current PCs joined - is always a delight. I’ve also hashed out a lot of details for The Children of Sylvain, especially for Mr. Boyd Mosche, guilt-wracked Jersey Devil extraordinaire, with her help.

V: If you could write the sequel (or prequel) to any fic out there not written by yourself, which would you choose? -- Not gonna lie, I’m fine with a lot of stuff that’s out there right now. It’s been a hot few months since I’ve actually stopped to read fic, but from what I recall, most of the fics I’ve read have done a good job of keeping things intact.

W: Do you like more general prompts, or more specific ones? -- The vaguer, the better. With really specific prompts, it usually feels as if the story’s been written for me already; with vague, general prompts, I have more agency to explore my own ideas. Some accompanying detail is usually nice, though. For example, the coffee shop/college/flower shop AUs that @transagentstern wrote are my ideal prompt for drabbles: premise, a little bit of open-ended detail, clear explanation of what’s going to happen while leaving the rest up to the imagination. Good stuff. If it’s for a long-form piece, though, I prefer full agency, or even just some time to lie facedown in the dirt and wait for an idea to strike me.

X: A character you enjoy making suffer. -- Yes.

Y: A character you want to protect. -- Tim.

Z: Major character death–do you ever write/read it? Is there a character whose death you can’t tolerate? -- I do read lots of major character death, yeah, though not always for TAZ. There’s something cathartic about seeing a character die, but sometimes it sits wrong with me in ways that I don’t like. As for writing, I’d rather kill a character for a reason rather than for shock value/for the Feels, though said Feels can accompany the reason.

#anon please dm me so i know who u are #please #i'm begging you #i'm in hell #asks #anon #ask game

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disuv · 3 years

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Black Hole of Calcutta ?

Delhi/20-06-2020

On this day history has an incident which is known as "Black Hole tragedy or Black Hole of Calcutta". From the article and resources what I got I am here under sharing . It's very interesting incident which I do think is a cooked up story but somewhere do feel might be correct . Let's read .

he Black Hole tragedy took place at Fort William in Calcutta in the year 1756.

Brief overview:

The Nawab of Bengal gave The East India Company certain special rights as traders in Calcutta and allowed them to build a small fort (the Company named it Fort William) and maintain a small army. A few years later, the Britishers, fearing an aggression from the French, started to strengthen the fortification of Fort William. They also started to increase their army and mounted guns on the walls of the fort.

Siraj-ud-daula, who was the Nawab of Bengal at that time, did not like it. He asked the Britishers to stop the fortification and scale down their military. They plainly refused the Nawab’s request. Seeing his authority being flouted, that too in his own dominions, further compounded the Nawab’s anger.

He launched an attack against the Britishers. After a feeble resistance of five days, the Britishers surrendered. By that time, most of them had managed to escape. Those few, who remained, were caught and taken as prisoners.

The Black Hole Tragedy:

These English prisoners, which included some women and children too, were lodged in the prison room of the fort for a night.The prison room was 18 feet long and 14 feet wide. The number of prisoners is told to be 146 and clearly the room was too small to hold such a large number of people.

Yet Nawab’s army shut up these many prisoners in the room. They cramped for space. In the scorching heat of June, excessive perspiration and suffocation took a heavy toll. Many died in the night itself. The next morning, when the prison window was opened, these suffocating prisoners trampled one over another to get near the window.

It is said that out of 146, only 23 came out alive.

According to J Z Holwell, one of the survivors, those who came out alive were “either stupefied or raving. The remaining were corpses who were thrown into a ditch.”

The East India Company used this episode as a propaganda device to further win support of the British public in favour of their war of aggression in Indian lands.

I have read somewhere that this incident was an inspiration behind NASA scientists naming the black holes in space as black holes.

There has been a lot of controversy regarding the number of prisoners being 146. This number is believed to be far lower. Many historians are of the opinion that JZ Holwell’s account is too exaggerated. And he was further encouraged by the British government as they were just looking for an excuse to wage war against the Nawab.

A few months later, Robert Clive and his troops were sent to ‘retaliate’. They fought a war (which we know as battle of Plassey) and defeated the Nawab. This marked the beginning of British rule in India as in the coming years they slowly expanded their hold to the rest of the Indian land.

Unfortunately, apart from Holwell’s account, no other source mentioning the incident exists. But many historians believe that the number of prisoners was far lower than what Holwell claimed.

~disuv , sources - internet !

#india #disuv #दिशव #भारत #journal #indian history #black hole of calcutta #black hole tragedy

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topmixtrends · 7 years

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WHEN I STARTED my MA in creative writing at the University of East Anglia in the fall of 1990, Kazuo Ishiguro had graduated from the program a decade earlier, but his presence was like the truth in his novels — invisible and persistent. The previous year his third novel, The Remains of the Day (1989), had won the Booker Prize. In workshop, Malcolm Bradbury told us the genesis story of Ishiguro’s fiction (or a version of it): how his initial submissions had featured a familiar British reality, and how it had taken half the first semester for the class to get him to pay notice to his name (Ishiguro was born in Japan but moved to Britain with his family when he was five). That fall was the 20th anniversary of the course, co-founded by Bradbury and fellow novelist Angus Wilson. At a weekend of readings and festivities, one alumnus introduced herself to a classmate of mine by stating her name and adding simply, “Ishiguro’s year.”

2017 was once again Ishiguro’s year. On October 5, the Swedish Academy announced that “English author Kazuo Ishiguro” had won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The citation, in its trademark italics, lauded him for “novels of great emotional force,” in which Ishiguro “has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.” That is, I think, an eloquent and useful description of Ishiguro’s inimitable fictions. But it’s incomplete. Those novels also have a sturdy connection with the world. Ishiguro possesses an acute sense of the political and historical forces at work in the lives of his deluded narrators, forces with which they often conspire. Subsequently, these bit players in history retreat from the real — and, by means of fantasy and forgetting, help dig that abyss.

For more than 30 years, Ishiguro’s work has taken a quiet, clear-eyed stand against extremism and intolerance. His first three novels form a loose “shadow of fascism” trilogy. Another destructive shadow hangs over his 1982 debut, A Pale View of Hills, which flits between contemporary England and the city of Ishiguro’s birth, “Nagasaki, after what had gone before.” What had gone before was, of course, the Bomb. It’s apt, therefore, that Ishiguro became the Nobel laureate in a year when vintage evils that we thought — or fooled ourselves into believing — that we had left behind in the 20th century, such as Nazis and the threat of nuclear war, came stomping back into view.

Now we are on guard against any of this becoming normalized. That need for vigilance, I’d argue, makes some of Ishiguro’s work required reading. His novels are often cautionary tales of normalization. As Etsuko, the narrator of that first novel, warns us, “it is possible to develop an intimacy with the most disturbing of things.” It’s a lesson borne out by her sister-in-suffering, Ruth, part of the love triangle at the heart of Never Let Me Go (2005), another novel set in a deceptively tranquil England. Ruth’s upbringing — and that of her intimates, Tommy and narrator Kathy — gives us a chilling new sense of the phrase “formative years”: these twentysomethings are clones; their education has inoculated them against the horror of their raison d’être: they are the human equivalent of Kobe cows — relatively pampered and designed for doom. In their prime, with clinical savagery, the trio’s organs will be harvested to prolong the lives of ailing “normals.” Ruth’s acceptance of this fate has a terrifying carapace of rationality:

I think I was a pretty decent carer. But five years felt about enough for me. I was like you, Tommy. I was pretty much ready when I became a donor. It felt right. After all, it’s what we’re supposed to be doing, isn’t it?

A Pale View of Hills is also concerned with the costs of an education deficient in critical thinking. Etsuko’s father-in-law, Ogata-San, was a prominent teacher and proselytizer for the imperialist cause. Now in restless retirement, he is preoccupied with a denunciation of himself and an ally that he has come across in a professional journal. The article’s author is Shigeo Matsuda, a former protégé and childhood friend of Etsuko’s husband. In a deftly turned scene, Ogata-San has a most courteous confrontation with Shigeo, from which he receives no satisfaction. At last, the verbal gloves come off, and the old teacher gets a lecture to remember:

In your day, children in Japan were taught terrible things. They were taught lies of the most damaging kind. Worst of all, they were taught not to see, not to question. And that’s why the country was plunged into the most evil disaster in her entire history.

Ogata-San is the pivot between Pale View and Ishiguro’s second novel, An Artist of the Floating World (1986). Here an Ogata-San-like character, complicit in the imperial regime, takes center stage. In the case of Masuji Ono, not seeing and not questioning are acute failures, given his vocation as a serious painter. In his admission early in the book that “I have never had a keen awareness of my own standing,” he speaks more truth than he knows, or is willing to admit. What he has lacked in spine he has made up for in ego.

Living in an unnamed Japanese postwar city, another uncomfortable retiree, Ono, goes through a tortuous self-assessment. In the end, we get a sense that, more than anyone else, Ono, author of no “grand catastrophe,” has betrayed himself, betrayed his talent. Intoxicated with “the new patriotic spirit” of the 1930s, Ono broke his implicit vow to dedicate his working life to capturing “fragile beauty” on canvas and produced crass propaganda posters instead. In a silent storm of a paragraph, Ishiguro brings together Ono’s moral failings and his squandered eye. He has literally turned his back on a former student, Shintaro, whose hopes for a teaching post under the new dispensation appear to depend upon Ono writing a curious letter of recommendation, one that will claim that Shintaro did not share his master’s enthusiasm for Japanese expansionism:

I went on gazing at my garden. For all its steady fall, the snow had settled only very lightly on the shrubs and branches. Indeed, as I watched, a breeze shook a branch of the maple tree, shaking off most of the snow. Only the stone lantern at the back of the garden had a substantial cap of white on it.

Moments like this are when the Japanese sensibility of this “English author” is apparently at its most pronounced. It’s a quality found in the music of Toru Takemitsu, another artist whose work is an intricate synthesis of East and West. Writing about the composer in the Guardian back in 2013, Tom Service related this aesthetic to “the Japanese word ‘ma,’ which suggests the concept of a void that isn’t empty, an absence that is really a presence, a space between things that is full of energy.”

Ishiguro himself is passionate about music, particularly Americana, as the account he gave during his Nobel Lecture about the influence of a Tom Waits song on the emotional dynamics of The Remains of the Day testifies. Back in 2002, playing the role of the “castaway” on that wistful British institution, the BBC radio show Desert Island Discs, Ishiguro chose a wide range of records, everything from an Emmylou Harris ballad to a Chopin nocturne. The latter music he picked for its “quiet, introspective surface, but with very strong emotions underneath,” a description that the alert host, Sue Lawley, related back to her guest’s novels. In response, Ishiguro not only agreed but also cited other examples of work he admires that maintains the same tension: the short stories of Anton Chekhov and the films of Yasujirō Ozu. In Ishiguro’s work, East blends with West; indeed, the two become inseparable.

His tip of the hat toward Ozu, however, is particularly relevant to Ishiguro’s first two novels. Ozu’s canonical Tokyo Story (1953) dramatizes the same post-1945 milieu — a rapidly recovering, and rapidly forgetting, Japan; we are 40 minutes into the film before someone directly references the war. The hallmark of this unapologetically human-scale movie is, in the words of critic David Bordwell, Ozu’s “compassionate detachment,” a phrase that also serves as a good measure of Ishiguro’s distance from his characters.

The most prominent of these is Stevens, the pitiful, culpable butler from The Remains of the Day. Returning to the novel after Anthony Hopkins’s masterful big-screen portrayal of the character, and years of small-screen mansion-house shenanigans on Downton Abbey, one is struck by what a political book it is, with its allegorical suggestiveness about the ordinary citizen’s relationship to power. The novel has a lot to say not only about the pre- and postwar Britain in which the story is set, and the Thatcher-Reagan 1980s in which it was written, but also about our present global moment. “Democracy is something for a bygone era,” declares Lord Darlington, Stevens’s fascist-infatuated employer. “The world’s too complicated a place now for universal suffrage and such like.”

Stevens, in all senses of the word, caters to Darlington’s political meddling. He’s reminiscent of J. Alfred Prufrock: “an easy tool, / Deferential, glad to be of use…” and indeed thinks of himself as the kind of Polonius figure Eliot’s poem evokes: “It’s a great privilege, after all,” Stevens says, “to have been given a part to play, however small, on the world’s stage.” In reality, he has, like Ono, exaggerated his role in worldly affairs. He was Polonius’s valet, Prufrock’s stooge. Of course, a minor participant in a “grand catastrophe” is still a participant. Stevens is on the wrong side of history by one of the country miles he travels on during the motoring trip that frames the story.

The Remains of the Day is one of several novels in which Ishiguro makes a subtle rhetorical move: the presumptive “you.” Just as Kathy assumes her readers are fellow victims and Ono assumes our familiarity with his city, Stevens thinks we are as willing to be duped as he was. It’s an unsettling gesture, but by no means Ishiguro’s most radical strategy. With Stevens, Ishiguro perfected his demonstration of the unreliable narrator, so much so that in his smart, accessible 1992 book The Art of Fiction, critic and fellow novelist David Lodge used The Remains of the Day as his model of excellence in explaining that technique. In that essay, Lodge makes the perfectly sensible argument that

a character-narrator cannot be a hundred per cent unreliable. If everything he or she says is palpably false, that only tells us what we know already, namely that a novel is a work of fiction. There must be some possibility of discriminating between truth and falsehood within the imagined world of the novel, as there is in the real world, for the story to engage our interest.

Three years later, Ishiguro published a monster of a novel, The Unconsoled (1995), which reads like a defiance of Lodge’s artistic logic. Is Ryder, the internationally renowned pianist meandering through a provincial city in Mitteleuropa, 100 percent unreliable? No, but maybe 90 percent. We never sound out the floor of “reality” in this fiction. Even the city, with “utterly preposterous obstacles everywhere,” seems to have been designed by a committee of surrealists. The normally solid elements of narrative — point of view, character, time itself — turn to jelly. It’s as if we have come across the implosion of a more conventional novel, the kind of novel that Ishiguro himself had written back in the 1980s. For that reason, Ishiguro fans tend to think of The Unconsoled as either the black hole or dark star at the center of his oeuvre.

I’m in the latter camp. Yes, the novel breaks Lodge’s law, but there’s ample compensation for that. What we get from The Unconsoled is not so much a story as an experience, one that uncannily replicates Ryder’s own lucid dream of a city sojourn. When he has a “vague recollection,” so do we. When he is lost, so are we. The length of the book is not an indulgence but an essence. Finishing it, we have been homeless for days, and our next stop is Helsinki. No truer word is spoken when one of the city dignitaries remarks, a 100 pages in, “[I]t’s so difficult to see in this light.” Indeed it is. The apotheosis of the unreliable narrator has given birth to the unreliable reader.

For all its defiant oddness, The Unconsoled is still decidedly an Ishiguro novel; you can see the watermark of his persistent concerns. A monument to a figure named Max Sattler suggests that the city has a fascistic past. Moreover, demagogic control seems dangerously close at hand. At one point, Ryder observes an alternative self, a conductor named Brodsky: “Something about him suggested a strange authority over the very emotions which had just been running riot in front of him — that he could cause them to rise and fall as he pleased.”

This concern about how the political atmosphere can revert to the past is at the forefront of Ishiguro’s most recent book, The Buried Giant (2015). The novel is his most historically distant fiction, set all the way back in a post-Roman Britain that is a foggy combination of chronicle and myth; it’s a landscape populated by ogres and dragons as well as Saxons and Britons. But Ishiguro was prompted to write the book by the much more recent killing fields of Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. “Who knows,” frets Axl, the elderly hero, “what will come when quick-tongued men make ancient grievances rhyme with fresh desire for land and conquest?”

In that question I hear a reversal of the lines, made famous during the peace process in Northern Ireland, from The Cure at Troy (1991), Seamus Heaney’s adaptation of Sophocles’ Philoctetes: “once in a lifetime / The longed-for tidal wave / Of justice can rise up / And hope and history rhyme.” Both poetry and peace, of course, require patience and the delicate use of language. Damage and rancor can happen in the blink of an eye — or a tweet.

A dragon of a different kind, “the Great Opium Dragon,” stalks early 20th-century China in Ishiguro’s 2000 novel When We Were Orphans. Of all his books, Orphans best exemplifies the point I made earlier — that there is such a gulf between Ishiguro’s heroes and the world because they’ve had a bad tangle with that world. Here Ishiguro makes inspired use of his own cultural duality. The foundation of the book is the relationship, in Shanghai’s International Settlement, between narrator Christopher Banks and his childhood friend Akira, a Japanese boy who fears he is not Japanese enough. Shipped “home” after the disappearance of his parents, Christopher tries to allay his own cultural anxieties by wearing the houndstooth costume of that very British role, the consulting detective.

Investigation, “the task of rooting out evil in its most devious forms,” is more of a coping mechanism than a vocation for Christopher. Real evil in the novel does not take the form of the butler in the study with the candlestick. Its scale is industrial, not domestic (though it may be familiar): “the British in general, and [my father’s company] especially, by importing Indian opium into China in such massive quantities had brought untold misery and degradation to a whole nation.” When Christopher returns to Shanghai in 1937 to investigate the persistent mystery of his parents’ fate, another industrial evil looms on the horizon: the Japanese imperial war machine. It’s the dawn of the “grand catastrophe.”

When We Were Orphans, in other words, is set in a world, less than 20 years removed from “the war to end all wars,” on the verge of repeating the folly of the past. It’s a time for vigilance and prudence. “Tensions continue to mount,” Christopher notes; “knowledgeable people liken our civilisation to a haystack at which lighted matches are being hurled.” That passive verb gives the scenario a portability: fresh hay, new hurlers.

In the course of his myopic investigations, Christopher meets many of his kind, justifying the plural of the title. Ishiguro is performing one of his favorite maneuvers, a device he has used to devastating effect as far back as A Pale View of Hills: the collapse of characters into each other. Somewhere along the way, the reader may fall in there, too. When were we orphans? Then. Now.

Robert Cremins is a novelist who teaches in the Honors College at the University of Houston. In 2015, he conducted an onstage interview with Kazuo Ishiguro as part of an Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series event at Houston’s Wortham Center.

The post Ishiguro’s Orphans appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books http://ift.tt/2GKrzYJ

#Los Angeles Review of Books #topmixtrends

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ramonaillustrationtwo · 5 years

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Research: Us and Them

I found it difficult at first to approach this research exercise as many illustrations depicting ‘otherness’ especially historical are wholly intentional. For example, illustrations of the British Empire where British people are being served by Indian people is what happened. Illustrations from freak shows, political propaganda or natural history books that conveyed different ethnicities as subhuman couldn’t be changed to represent the subject differently as that was not the narrative that was desired.

After much searching I settled on looking at the following images.

(Buttignol, 2019)

This illustration by Michela Buttignol is from an editorial piece titled ‘For autistic children, emotional problems may hinder social success’ featured on the website Spectrumnews.org. The article discusses the barriers faced by Autistic people in forming friendships. The illustration shows an Autistic child in emotional distress which is conveyed with a flurry of line work around them. The child depicted as huge and is huddled over with their peers looking on. It is important to acknowledge the intention and context of the illustration. I believe that Buttignol is exaggerating the child’s size not to dehumanise them but to address the sense of ‘otherness’ that Autistic individuals may feel especially when trying to relate to their peers. However, the image could also been interpreted as the Autistic child being ‘othered’.Their behaviours unusual, disruptive, taking up too much space and not being a relatable character, not part of society. I showed this illustration to my Autistic partner and his interpretation of the image was very different to mine. Whereas I viewed the image as conveying the viewpoint of the child, he saw it as the on lookers perspective viewing the child as a freak. He commented ‘I don’t think the illustrator is an Autistic person’. He explained, ‘When you feel overwhelmed you feel small, or like everything around you is too much’.

To reduce the distance between the onlookers and the autistic child I would change the scale so that the child appears the same as their peers. This would reduce the ‘freakishness’ of the character and show them for what they are, a child, the same as other children just with a different perspective and experiences.

(Jain, n.d.)

The second illustration I looked at is from the book ‘A Mind of Gold’ by Param Jain which I accessed via Bēhance. The book is broken up into different sections, the above section a narrative about a child with Dyslexia. Unlike Buttignol’s illustration in this instance it is the onlooking who appear odd. Despite being in black and white the central character is depicted with facial features whereas the other characters are essentially featureless with oddly shaped heads.

I believe the Jain is using the faceless onlookers to convey the isolation felt by the protagonist. ‘I can’t read and write like the other kids. I feel alone’. Being Dyslexic myself I can relate to the image however in order to create a more reassuring depiction Jain could have shown the onlookers as normal and not starring. This would change the message to highlight that it is the character’s perspective of themselves and not the true perception of others.

(Grafton, 1980)

For the final image I looked at an illustration published in Harper’s Weekly; August 1,1863, depicting the Draft Riots. Rioting began when a new military draft law was due to go into effect. Many of the people who opposed the law were immigrants, some who had left their own countries to avoid military service. It is believed that immigrant population of New York were also opposed to the draft as they resented freed slaves competing with them for labouring jobs and the ability the upper classes had of avoiding the draft by paying a substitute to be drafted for them.

The key thing that stands out is the difference in how the police and the rioters are depicted. Outside of their uniform their head shape is distinctly different, the police have a typical ‘roman’ noses and defined sharp jawlines. In contrast the rioters, have rounder head shapes with a more slopped brow. The features are more animalistic suggesting a less developed ergo less intelligent group of people. Without the illustration specifying I would assume that the immigrants depicted are meant to be Irish.

This was common practice in the 1800s to represent the Irish as being subhuman and a less evolved ‘race’. By dehumanising a group of people it becomes much easier to marginalise and repress them. This was a conscious action by the illustrator, either to comply with the trend at the time or actively to promote the narrative of the ‘stupid Irish’. Although I don’t believe the artist would have wanted to, to create a less ‘us and them’ feeling to the illustration they could simply have depicted the individuals with better accuracy, as people upset at the prospect of fighting and dying in a war they didn't believe in.

(Harper’s Weekly, 1899, n.d.)

(G Smith, 2016)

References

Behance.net. (n.d.). Behance. [online] Available at: https://www.behance.net/gallery/42185675/A-Mind-of-Gold [Accessed 21 Feb. 2020].

Buttignol, M. (2019). [image] Available at: https://www.spectrumnews.org/opinion/for-autistic-children-emotional-problems-may-hinder-social-success/ [Accessed 21 Feb. 2020].

G Smith, C. (2016). Irish Apes: Tactics of De-Humanization. [online] Thewildgeese.irish. Available at: https://thewildgeese.irish/forum/topics/irish-apes-tactics-of-de-humanization [Accessed 21 Feb. 2020].

Grafton, J. (1980). New York in the nineteenth century. New York: Dover publications, Inc., p.19.

Harper’s Weekly, 1899. (n.d.). [image] Available at: https://thomasnastcartoons.com/irish-catholic-cartoons/irish-stereotype/ [Accessed 21 Feb. 2020].

Illustrating Chinese Exclusion. (n.d.). Irish Stereotype. [online] Available at: https://thomasnastcartoons.com/irish-catholic-cartoons/irish-stereotype/ [Accessed 21 Feb. 2020].

Jain, P. (n.d.). [image] Available at: https://www.behance.net/gallery/42185675/A-Mind-of-Gold [Accessed 21 Feb. 2020].

Neuhaus, E. and Webb, S. (2020). For autistic children, emotional problems may hinder social success. [online] Spectrum | Autism Research News. Available at: https://www.spectrumnews.org/opinion/for-autistic-children-emotional-problems-may-hinder-social-success/ [Accessed 21 Feb. 2020].

Purdy, C. (2019). An Illustrated Book Looks at Dyslexia in a New Light | Create. [online] Create.adobe.com. Available at: https://create.adobe.com/2019/6/6/an_illustrated_book_.html [Accessed 21 Feb. 2020].

#Part2 #us

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plusorminuscongress · 5 years

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Picture This: In the Aftermath of the Boston Tea Party: British and American Perspectives

In the Aftermath of the Boston Tea Party: British and American Perspectives By Melissa Lindberg

The following is a guest post by Sara W. Duke, Curator of Popular and Applied Graphic Arts, Prints and Photographs Division.

As a curator of historical prints, one of the first questions I ask myself is, “Why does this print exist?” It is an essential question to ask when trying to use pictures to explain the past.

Take, for example, the Boston Tea Party, which occurred when angry colonists, dressed as American Indians, destroyed 342 chests of tea on December 16, 1773 to protest recent tax hikes imposed by the British Parliament. For nearly a century, the only contemporary depictions of the reaction to the Boston Tea Party that the Library of Congress had to offer researchers were those created in England for a British audience. An example is the mezzotint print attributed to Philip Dawe, The Bostonians in Distress, which was published in London in the wake of the Intolerable Acts, which the British Parliament passed to punish Boston.

The Bostonians in Distress, Attributed to Philip Dawe. Printed in London for R. Sayer and J. Bennett, Map & Printsellers, No. 53 Fleet Street, as the Act directs, 19 Novr. 1774. From the British Cartoon Prints Collection. https://ift.tt/2t99zVw

One of the Intolerable Acts was the Boston Port Act, enacted by the British Parliament on March 31, 1774 which closed the port to everything except food and fuel. However, the print was published several months later in London, on December 16, 1774.

When The Bostonians in Distress appeared on the British market, it reflected wishful thinking and may have served as pro-government propaganda to encourage the British populace to see the expense of military intervention in the colonies as effective and worthwhile. The British image shows a starving city surrounded on all sides by the British Army and Navy and depicts a few rough British sailors offering fish and kindling in exchange for “Promises” from the colonists. The cartoonist quotes Psalm 107, further giving the British god-like power over the transgressions of Massachusetts.

In reality, the Boston Port Act united colonial support for the suspension of trade with Great Britain and led to the founding of the First Continental Congress, which met on September 1, 1774. By the time it disbanded on October 26, 1774, the leaders had organized resistance to the Intolerable Acts and issued the Declaration of Rights. Another notable event which occurred just before the publication of The Bostonians in Distress was the 1774 British election, a victory which gave the previous Prime Minister, Frederick, Lord North, another term.

As a counterpoint, in 2016 the Library acquired a print produced in either Philadelphia or New York and attributed to Henry Dawkins, Liberty triumphant; or the downfall of oppression, also printed in 1774.

Liberty triumphant; or the downfall of oppression. Engraving by Henry Dawkins, circa 1774. https://ift.tt/2smGbuG

This complicated cartoon shows the major players in the American conflict: the Sons of Liberty, the Loyalists, and the British, as if one were looking down from the far north, so that England is on the left and the American colonies on the right. Although there is no date of publication on the print, it refers to events that occurred between the Boston Tea Party and April 1774, and reflects the British and the American response to the Intolerable Acts.

Dawkins offers some clues as to why he created his cartoon. Fame and Liberty, two allegorical figures in the upper right, celebrate the actions of the Sons of Liberty. On the left, the cartoonist places noted Philadelphia Loyalist, Dr. John Kearsley, in the clutches of Belzebub, a devil. Nearby boxes of tea that have been rejected by colonists, have returned to England. Across the ocean, America, represented as an American Indian woman, aims her arrow demanding that the Sons of Liberty help her maintain her freedom. The Sons of Liberty are feather-clad, a visual reference to the Boston Tea Party. The Loyalists, standing below the Sons of Liberty, are determined to behave as if they, too, did not want trade or tea from England. Most British prints fail to reflect the real division in the colonies; some people wanted to remain loyal to the crown but were under intense pressure to declare independence. Dawkins, on the other hand, understood the nuances between rebellion and conciliation in the British colonies in the continuum of reaction to the Intolerable Acts.

Together, these two images tell part of the story of the reaction to the Boston Tea Party and the Intolerable Acts.

Learn More:

The bloody massacre perpetrated in King Street Boston on March 5th 1770 by a party of the 29th Regt. . Engraving by Paul Revere, 1770. https://ift.tt/2PiQIjo

Explore the British satirical print collection. While only a selection have been digitized for online access, most of the images that relate to the American Revolution have been scanned and may be downloaded free of charge.

View images included in The American Revolution in drawings and prints; a checklist of 1765-1790 graphics in the Library of Congress / Compiled by Donald H. Cresswell, with a foreword by Sinclair H. Hitchings. Washington : [For sale by the Supt. of Docs., U.S. Govt. Print. Off.], 1975.

Check out the Prints & Photographs Division’s collection of American cartoon prints.

See this guide to the American Revolution on the Library of Congress website. You may also want to consult resources on the American Revolution designed for teachers.

Published December 13, 2019 at 05:36PM Read more on https://loc.gov

#Library of Congress #PlusOrMinusCongress #±Congress #Indega±#IndegaPlusOrMinus

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newstfionline · 6 years

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Infinite War: The Gravy Train Rolls On

By Andrew J. Bacevich, TomDispatch, June 8, 2018

“The United States of Amnesia.” That’s what Gore Vidal once called us. We remember what we find it convenient to remember and forget everything else. That forgetfulness especially applies to the history of others. How could their past, way back when, have any meaning for us today? Well, it just might. Take the European conflagration of 1914-1918, for example.

You may not have noticed. There’s no reason why you should have, fixated as we all are on the daily torrent of presidential tweets. But let me note for the record that the centenary of the conflict once known as The Great War is well underway and before the present year ends will have concluded.

Indeed, a hundred years ago this month, the 1918 German Spring Offensive--codenamed Operation Michael--was sputtering to an unsuccessful conclusion. A last desperate German gamble, aimed at shattering Allied defenses and gaining a decisive victory, had fallen short. In early August of that year, with large numbers of our own doughboys now on the front lines, a massive Allied counteroffensive was to commence, continuing until the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, when an armistice finally took effect and the guns fell silent.

In the years that followed, Americans demoted The Great War. It became World War I, vaguely related to but overshadowed by the debacle next in line, known as World War II. Today, the average citizen knows little about that earlier conflict other than that it preceded and somehow paved the way for an even more brutal bloodletting. Also, on both occasions, the bad guys spoke German.

So, among Americans, the war of 1914-1918 became a neglected stepsister of sorts, perhaps in part because the United States only got around to suiting up for that conflict about halfway through the fourth quarter. With the war of 1939-1945 having been sacralized as the moment when the Greatest Generation saved humankind, the war-formerly-known-as-The-Great-War collects dust in the bottom drawer of American collective consciousness.

From time to time, some politician or newspaper columnist will resurrect the file labeled “August 1914,” the grim opening weeks of that war, and sound off about the dangers of sleepwalking into a devastating conflict that nobody wants or understands.

Yet a different aspect of World War I may possess even greater relevance to the American present. I’m thinking of its duration: the longer it lasted, the less sense it made. But on it went, impervious to human control like the sequence of Biblical plagues that God had inflicted on the ancient Egyptians.

So the relevant question for our present American moment is this: once it becomes apparent that a war is a mistake, why would those in power insist on its perpetuation, regardless of costs and consequences? In short, when getting in turns out to have been a bad idea, why is getting out so difficult, even (or especially) for powerful nations that presumably should be capable of exercising choice on such matters? Or more bluntly, how did the people in charge during The Great War get away with inflicting such extraordinary damage on the nations and peoples for which they were responsible?

For those countries that endured World War I from start to finish--especially Great Britain, France, and Germany--specific circumstances provided their leaders with an excuse for suppressing second thoughts about the cataclysm they had touched off.

Among them were:

* mostly compliant civilian populations deeply loyal to some version of King and Country, further kept in line by unremitting propaganda that minimized dissent;

* draconian discipline--deserters and malingerers faced firing squads--that maintained order in the ranks (most of the time) despite the unprecedented scope of the slaughter;

* the comprehensive industrialization of war, which ensured a seemingly endless supply of the weaponry, munitions, and other equipment necessary for outfitting mass conscript armies and replenishing losses as they occurred.

Economists would no doubt add sunk costs to the mix. With so much treasure already squandered and so many lives already lost, the urge to press on a bit longer in hopes of salvaging at least some meager benefit in return for what (and who) had been done in was difficult to resist.

Even so, none of these, nor any combination of them, can adequately explain why, in the midst of an unspeakable orgy of self-destruction, with staggering losses and nations in ruin, not one monarch or president or premier had the wit or gumption to declare: Enough! Stop this madness!

Instead, the politicians sat on their hands while actual authority devolved onto the likes of British Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, French Marshals Ferdinand Foch and Philippe Petain, and German commanders Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff. In other words, to solve a conundrum they themselves had created, the politicians of the warring states all deferred to their warrior chieftains. For their part, the opposing warriors jointly subscribed to a perverted inversion of strategy best summarized by Ludendorff as “punch a hole [in the front] and let the rest follow.” And so the conflict dragged on and on.

Put simply, in Europe, a hundred years ago, war had become politically purposeless. Yet the leaders of the world’s principal powers--including, by 1917, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson--could conceive of no alternative but to try harder, even as the seat of Western civilization became a charnel house.

Only one leader bucked the trend: Vladimir Lenin. In March 1918, soon after seizing power in Russia, Lenin took that country out of the war. In doing so, he reasserted the primacy of politics and restored the possibility of strategy. Lenin had his priorities straight. Nothing in his estimation took precedence over ensuring the survival of the Bolshevik Revolution. Liquidating the war against Germany therefore became an imperative.

Allow me to suggest that the United States should consider taking a page out of Lenin’s playbook. Granted, prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, such a suggestion might have smacked of treason. Today, however, in the midst of our never-ending efforts to expunge terrorism, we might look to Lenin for guidance on how to get our priorities straight.

As was the case with Great Britain, France, and Germany a century ago, the United States now finds itself mired in a senseless war. Back then, political leaders in London, Paris, and Berlin had abrogated control of basic policy to warrior chieftains. Today, ostensibly responsible political leaders in Washington have done likewise. Some of those latter-day American warrior chieftains who gather in the White House or testify on Capitol Hill may wear suits rather than uniforms, but all remain enamored with the twenty-first-century equivalent of Ludendorff’s notorious dictum.

Of course, our post-9/11 military enterprise--the undertaking once known as the Global War on Terrorism--differs from The Great War in myriad ways. The ongoing hostilities in which U.S. forces are involved in various parts of the Islamic world do not qualify, even metaphorically, as “great.” Nor will there be anything great about an armed conflict with Iran, should members of the current administration get their apparent wish to provoke one.

Today, Washington need not even bother to propagandize the public into supporting its war. By and large, members of the public are indifferent to its very existence. And given our reliance on a professional military, shooting citizen-soldiers who want to opt out of the fight is no longer required.

There are also obvious differences in scale, particularly when it comes to the total number of casualties involved. Cumulative deaths from the various U.S. interventions, large and small, undertaken since 9/11, number in the hundreds of thousands. The precise tally of those lost during the European debacle of 1914-1918 will never be known, but the total probably surpassed 13 million.

Even so, similarities between the Great War as it unspooled and our own not-in-the-least-great war(s) deserve consideration. Today, as then, strategy--that is, the principled use of power to achieve the larger interests of the state--has ceased to exist. Indeed, war has become an excuse for ignoring the absence of strategy.

For years now, U.S. military officers and at least some national security aficionados have referred to ongoing military hostilities as “the Long War.” To describe our conglomeration of spreading conflicts as “long” obviates any need to suggest when or under what circumstances (if any) they might actually end. It’s like the meteorologist forecasting a “long winter” or the betrothed telling his or her beloved that theirs will be a “long engagement.” The implicit vagueness is not especially encouraging.

Some high-ranking officers of late have offered a more forthright explanation of what “long” may really mean. In the Washington Post, the journalist Greg Jaffe recently reported that “winning for much of the U.S. military’s top brass has come to be synonymous with staying put.” Winning, according to Air Force General Mike Holmes, is simply “not losing. It’s staying in the game.”

Not so long ago, America’s armed forces adhered to a concept called victory, which implied conclusive, expeditious, and economical mission accomplished. No more. Victory, it turns out, is too tough to achieve, too restrictive, or, in the words of Army Lieutenant General Michael Lundy, “too absolute.” The United States military now grades itself instead on a curve. As Lundy puts it, “winning is more of a continuum,” an approach that allows you to claim mission accomplishment without, you know, actually accomplishing anything.

It’s like soccer for six-year-olds. Everyone tries hard so everyone gets a trophy. Regardless of outcomes, no one goes home feeling bad. In the U.S. military’s case, every general gets a medal (or, more likely, a chest full of them).

“These days,” in the Pentagon, Jaffe writes, “senior officers talk about ‘infinite war.’”

I would like to believe that Jaffe is pulling our leg. But given that he’s a conscientious reporter with excellent sources, I fear he knows what he’s talking about. If he’s right, as far as the top brass are concerned, the Long War has now officially gone beyond long. It has been deemed endless and is accepted as such by those who preside over its conduct.

In truth, infinite war is a strategic abomination, an admission of professional military bankruptcy. Erster General-Quartiermeister Ludendorff might have endorsed the term, but Ludendorff was a military fanatic.

Check that. Infinite war is a strategic abomination except for arms merchants, so-called defense contractors, and the “emergency men” (and women) devoted to climbing the greasy pole of what we choose to call the national security establishment. In other words, candor obliges us to acknowledge that, in some quarters, infinite war is a pure positive, carrying with it a promise of yet more profits, promotions, and opportunities to come. War keeps the gravy train rolling. And, of course, that’s part of the problem.

Who should we hold accountable for this abomination? Not the generals, in my view. If they come across as a dutiful yet unimaginative lot, remember that a lifetime of military service rarely nurtures imagination or creativity. And let us at least credit our generals with this: in their efforts to liberate or democratize or pacify or dominate the Greater Middle East they have tried every military tactic and technique imaginable. Short of nuclear annihilation, they’ve played just about every card in the Pentagon’s deck--without coming up with a winning hand. So they come and go at regular intervals, each new commander promising success and departing after a couple years to make way for someone else to give it a try.

No, it’s not the generals who have let us down, but the politicians to whom they supposedly report and from whom they nominally take their orders. Of course, under the heading of politician, we quickly come to our current commander-in-chief. Yet it would be manifestly unfair to blame President Trump for the mess he inherited, even if he is presently engaged in making matters worse.

The failure is a collective one, to which several presidents and both political parties have contributed over the years. Although the carnage may not be as horrific today as it was on the European battlefields on the Western and Eastern Fronts, members of our political class are failing us as strikingly and repeatedly as the political leaders of Great Britain, France, and Germany failed their peoples back then.

Congressional midterm elections are just months away and another presidential election already looms. Who will be the political leader with the courage and presence of mind to declare: “Enough! Stop this madness!” Man or woman, straight or gay, black, brown, or white, that person will deserve the nation’s gratitude and the support of the electorate.

Until that occurs, however, the American penchant for war will stretch on toward infinity. No doubt Saudi and Israeli leaders will cheer, Europeans who remember their Great War will scratch their heads in wonder, and the Chinese will laugh themselves silly. Meanwhile, issues of genuinely strategic importance--climate change offers one obvious example--will continue to be treated like an afterthought. As for the gravy train, it will roll on.

#war #US wars #infinite war

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avanneman · 7 years

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The Cold War: A Tale of Two Joes

I’ve been reading Norwegian historian Odd Arne Westad’s vastly ambitious and very largely successful The Cold War A World History.1 One of the great advantages of reading a European’s take is that he has a much more nuanced understanding of what was happening in Europe during the Cold War than an American historian would. He’s writing history that he himself has lived through and can rely on “original sources” of a variety and scope that no mere foreigner ever could.

The downside, of course, comes when Westad is writing about the United States, where the shoe is on the other foot. Here is what Westad says about Joe McCarthy:

“Joseph McCarthy, the demagogic and hyperbolic Wisconsin senator who through his speeches on the Senate floor came to symbolize anti-Communist paranoia, did more damage to US interests than any of Stalin’s covert operations. In February 1950 McCarthy declared that he had evidence of 205—later correct to 57—Communists working in the State Department, and denounced the president as a traitor who “sold out the Christian world to the atheistic world.” The series of hearings and investigations, which accusations such as McCarthy’s gave rise to, destroyed people’s lives and careers. Even for those who were cleared, such as the famous central Asia scholar Owen Lattimore, some of the accusations stuck and made it difficult to find employment, as Lattimore said in his book title from 1950, Ordeal by Slander. For many of the lesser known who were targeted—workers, actors, teachers, lawyers—it was a Kafkaesque world, where their words were twisted and used against them during public hearings by people who had no knowledge of the victims or their activities. Behind all of it was the political purpose of harming the Administration, though even some Democrats were caught up in the frenzy and the president himself straddled the issue instead of publicly confronting McCarthy. McCarthyism, as it was soon called, reduced the US standing in the world and greatly helped Soviet propaganda, especially in western Europe.”

Well, very largely true, but Westad fails to provide sufficient context. He gives the reader no information whatsoever on Soviet espionage in the U.S., never even mentioning either Alger Hiss or the Rosenbergs. Historian John Earl Haynes, in his essay “An Essay on Historical Writing on Domestic Communism and Anti-Communism”, gives a little more detail: “Hundreds of Americans, most Communists, assisted Soviet espionage and Soviet intelligence sources included dozens of mid-level government officials but also impressively high level ones as well: not only Alger Hiss but also Lawrence Duggan, long-time head of the State Department Division of the American Republics; Lauchlin Currie, a senior White House aide to President Roosevelt; Duncan Lee, a senior officer in the Office of Strategic Services; and, most significantly, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Harry White.”

It is, in fact, “arguable” that the course of the Cold War was significantly shaped for the worse by the theft of America’s atomic secrets by Soviet espionage, although this was largely due to the British spy Klaus Fuchs rather than the spy ring organized by Julius Rosenberg. If the Soviets had not obtained the bomb in 1949, it’s possible that Stalin would not have given the green light to North Korea’s invasion of the South in 1950. A Cold War without the Korean War would have been a different beast. How different I cannot imagine, but the course of American politics would have been far smoother without the rancor induced both by the theft of the secrets and the war.

Fortunately, Westad is more clear-eyed when it comes to the other Joe:

“The alarm that the Cold War created in the United States paled in comparison to the spasms that the Soviet Union and eastern Europe went through. Up to Stalin’s death in 1953, denunciations, purges, and show trials were the order of the day. … The first problem was the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who returned from German prison camps; could they be trusted? More than a third of them were marched straight from German to Soviet prison camps. Then there were those who had lived under German occupation; most were investigated and many, including all Communist Party officials there, were sent to the camps. Even victorious Red Army soldiers returning from the battlefield were seen as suspect. They may have glimpsed ways of life abroad that were inconsistent with Soviet visions of the future.”

Westad describes the enormous transfers of populations that occurred both during and after World War II as the Soviets’ “worst crime”. At the start of the war, more than a million Germans living in the USSR were transported into eastern Russia, along with a million Muslims in the Caucasus and Crimea. About 20 percent of these people would die within three years of their departure from what was once their home. As the war closed, mass deportations from the reconquered territories—the Baltic states, Ukraine, Belorussia, and Poland began. There were also mass transfers of populations from the other end of the Soviet Union. When Japan absorbed Korea into its empire, hundreds of thousands of Koreans fled into Russia. When conditions between the USSR and Japan worsened, Stalin moved these people into central Asia. By the time Stalin died, the Soviet GULag prison system held over two and half million inmates.

The U.S., of course, had its own relocation program—over 110,000 Japanese Americans living on the West Coast were removed to internment camps in remote locations. But these relocations, though brutal (and racist) enough, only lasted for three years and in fact a quarter of those relocated left the camps before they closed to live freely in other parts of the U.S., where they would not be a “danger”.

The “death toll” for the McCarthy era amounted to two persons, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. McCarthy, of course, played no role in their prosecution or their execution, which appears to have been the decision of one man, Judge Irving Kaufman, who went out of his way to preclude the U.S. attorneys who tried the case from giving him recommendations for sentencing. President Eisenhower rejected suggestions from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover that he commute Ethel Rosenberg’s sentence.2

Afterwords Very unfortunately for his party, Franklin Roosevelt would not have cared if there were 57 communists in the State Department (205 might have been too much). While many New Deal liberals, like Hubert Humphry, were knowledgeable and bitter anti-communists, thanks to long struggles for control in the labor movement, many, like Roosevelt, were not, and insisted on thinking of communists as “progressive”—progressives who just seemed to have the strange habit of murdering anyone they disagreed with. Roosevelt honestly hated the Nazis, with their cult of war and bloodshed, but the communists were different! They said so themselves! Perhaps most of all, Roosevelt hated the red-baiting of the right wing, who insisted on labeling any liberal proposal as a communist plot, and, as a consequence, he reflexively rejected any accusations of communist “penetration” out of hand. Even if it was true it didn’t matter, so why admit that it was true?

Rather remarkably, I don’t think Roosevelt’s rosy vision of the Soviet Union led him to give Stalin anything Stalin didn’t already have. At the Yalta Conference, the Red Army was already the sole military power in eastern Europe. Roosevelt (and Churchill) ratified an existing reality. At the same time, Roosevelt obtained Stalin’s pledge to join in the war against Japan, causing the notoriously hard-boiled Ernie King to exclaim “We just saved a million American lives!”3 However clear-eyed Roosevelt was about Stalin personally, he should have made others more aware of the true nature of Stalin’s plans for eastern Europe. It’s painful to learn that someone as shrewd as Harry Hopkins believed, as he did believe, that Stalin could be trusted to bring democracy to Poland.

Westad appears to have written the book in English. He once uses “weariness” when he meant “wariness” (probably a typo), but used “prevaricate” when he means “procrastinate” three or four times. ↩︎

I’ve talked about the McCarthy era in a number of posts labeled soviet spies ↩︎

King, the second highest ranking U.S. naval officer in World War II, was described by Eisenhower as “a mental bully, the kind of man I hate!” King, like many U.S. naval officers, was a compulsive Anglophobe, and Eisenhower would often say that the greatest contribution anyone could make to Allied unity would be to kill Ernie King. ↩︎

#odd arne westad #Cold War #Joe McCarthy #Joe Stalin #communism

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jeremywarmsley · 7 years

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Eric / Voices Of Britain

Eric / Voices Of Britain by Jeremy Warmsley

BBC 4 / Wingspan Productions commissioned a whole series of short films inspired by the classic 1942 propaganda film Listen To Britain. By chance I happened to be asked to contribute score to two of these films. Funnily enough, they couldn't be more different! The films will be broadcast on BBC4 this Sunday the 24th September at 9pm, but here's a little info: The first is 'Eric', a wonderful character study of a much-loved therapist... who happens to be a border collie. Here's the trailer:

vimeo

Eric - Listen to Britain 2017 on BBC Four from Florence Kennard on Vimeo.

Directed by the very talented Florence Kennard who I met working on Carnage, this film is a real feelgood treat. Eric actually attended a recent screening of the film at the BFI, but I"m sorry to report he was rather badly behaved - every time the audience applauded the end of one of the short films, he got very excited and started barking. Apparently, as an ex-Crufts contestant, he assumed the applause was for him. Chill out, Eric! The score is minimal but hopefully somewhat effective. I had a lot of fun making a drumkit out of bashing the innards of my piano - in fact almost every sound in the score is made out of different piano treatments. The second film is 'Voices Of Britain', directed by the award-winning Alex J Campbell with assistance from Sam Boullier (a fine filmmaker in his own right!) A chorus of voices from all over Britain talk about their lives and how they feel about their country - about their homes, and about what it is to belong, over a beautiful multi-media collage of footage from every corner of the island. My score had to help glue together these two elements and I thought that a nice way to do that would be to include remixed elements from the most British pieces of music I could think of. So there's a bit of Jerusalem in there, a bit of Jupiter (AKA 'I Vow To Thee...') and some Britten ('Listen To Britten...?') too. It just acts as an atmospheric, subliminal layer rather than anything too intrusive. (Paulstretch to the rescue!) I was also inspired to write a (hopefully) stirring theme for brass which recurs throughout. In other news, Fish Story has been nominated for a Grierson Award!

#blog #listen to britain #voices of britain #eric #florence kennard #alex j campbell #sam boullier #fish story #grierson

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djgblogger-blog · 7 years

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In censoring a 'Queer Museum,' Brazil edges closer to authoritarianism

http://bit.ly/2wE22PF

LGBTQ activists protest the Queermuseu's closing. Editorial J/flickr, CC BY-ND

An art show has become Brazil’s latest political battleground. For those who didn’t get to see the 270 LGBTQ-themed works that comprise “Queer Museum,” good luck: You may never see them. The exhibition, until recently on display at the Santander Cultural Center in Porto Alegre, was abruptly closed on September 10, fully one month early.

The Spanish bank pulled the plug in response to a national campaign waged by the Movimento Brasil Libre (Free Brazil Movement), a right-wing pressure group that accused the sexually explicit, gender-bending material of promoting blasphemy, pedophilia and bestiality.

“We understand that some of the works of the Queermuseu disrespect symbols, beliefs and people, which is not in line with our worldview,” the Santander Cultural Center said in a statement, using the Portuguese-language name of the exhibition. “If art is not capable of generating inclusion and positive reflection, it loses its greater purpose, which is to elevate the human condition.”

The exhibit’s closure is only the latest conservative coup in a country that has been tacking markedly rightward since 2013.

Fascism and art

The impeachment of the democratically elected Workers Party president Dilma Rousseff in September 2016, which many saw as an unconstitutional ouster, marked a turning point in Brazil’s strained and polarized politics.

In bowing to reactionary pressure, Santander has turned Porto Alegre, once a bastion of left-wing politics, into yet another site of protest and partisan divide.

Under the conservative and scandal-beset government of President Michel Temer, the evangelical-dominated Congress has criticized the freedom of expression, stacked the judiciary in its favor, sought to curtail women’s rights and slashed budgets.

Now, conservatives have set their sights on art, in a moral crusade with distressingly fascistic undertones. As discussed in my book, “Como conversar com um facista” (How to talk with a Fascist), the combination of unfettered sex and art is often a focal point for authoritarian regimes and autocratic-leaning leaders.

A protester proclaiming that ‘Pedofilia isn’t art, it’s a crime!’ queries the reasons for the Queermuseu exhibition’s shuttering. Clara Godinho for Editorial J/flickr, CC BY-ND

In July 1937, Adolf Hitler undertook a purge of German art museums, launching the now-famous Entartete Kunst, or “Degenerate Art” exhibition, which presented 650 works that the Nazis said represented cultural disintegration, the products of “chatterboxes, dilettantes and art swindlers.”

Hitler, himself a frustrated artist, understood that to create a Nazi aesthetic, his political movement would also need art – also known as propaganda. But first he had to tame artistic production in Germany, making most other art seem like the work of crazy, immoral and evil people.

Where Brazil’s headed

In 1999, artist British artist Chris Offili’s controversial “Holy Virgin Mary” caused a Queermuseu-like commotion in New York City. In it, a black Virgin is surrounded by pornographic clippings and has elephant dung in place of one of her breasts.

New York’s Republican mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, called the piece “sick stuff.” Citing Christians offended by this portrayal of a holy figure, he famously threatened to evict the Brooklyn Museum if it didn’t pull the plug on the show.

Guiliani also saw fit to make pronouncements about the definition of art, saying that, “Anything that I can do isn’t art…And I could figure out how to put this together. You know, if you want to throw dung at something, I could figure out how to do that.”

These days, Brazilian politicians have also turned into art critics. In mid-September, three diputados, or state assemblymen, from the state of Mato Grosso do Sul attempted to seize a painting by artist Alessandra da Cunha, asserting that her show “Pedofilia,” now up at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MARCO) in the city of Campo Grande, contains erotic content and represents an “apologia for pedophilia.”

Art is open to interpretation, of course, but this “interpretation” is totally unfounded. Da Cunhua’s show critiques the violent consequences of machismo culture. It is only one piece that includes the word “pedophilia.” This must be what angered the conservative politician, because it is literally the show’s only pedophilia reference.

Fascism on the rise

The Queermuseu controversy reopens an age-old debate: What is the social function of art? For the Free Brazil Movement, evidently, art exists to reinforce social norms about human sexuality.

I disagree on the merits, but I also think this utilitarian query is entirely the wrong question. Why should art be assessed based on society’s preconceived – and often politically motivated – moral and aesthetic values?

Reversing the question is more revealing. Rather than ask what art’s social function is, why not query the social role of groups that, like Free Brazil, censor art?

This reframing exposes why fascist movements have always sought to quash art when it makes people think. To better manage citizens’ desires – including the desire to push back against political overreach – authoritarian states must repress analytical and critical thinking. It happened in Hitler’s Germany, Franco’s Spain and Mussolini’s Italy. Sadly, it seems Brazil has now arrived at this point.

But desire only intensifies when it can’t be satisfied. Since the Queermuseu debacle, Brazilian social media has gone wild, with users flooding Facebook (Brazilians’ most beloved network) and Twitter with images from the show and other works of art sure to offend the sensibilities of the anti-Queer Museum crusaders.

The attempted censorship of da Cunha’s MARCO exhibition has also set social media ablaze, as art critics decry the aesthetic and mental deficits of the public officials who, they say, have confused art with propaganda.

Galdêncio Fidelis. Clara Godinho for Editorial J/flickr, CC BY-ND

I don’t know if Gaudêncio Fidelis, a respected curator in the Brazilian art world, envisioned any of this when he assembled this show. Could he have imagined that even marquee names like Adriana Varejão, Cândido Portinari and Lygia Clark would prove unable to survive Brazil’s rough political climes?

It is worth noting here that Queermuseu was opened in the context of extremely high rates of hate crimes against LGBTQ people in Brazil. When even art shows on sexual diversity become intolerable, it shows just how deeply ultraconservatism has penetrated Brazilian society.

As the late Harvard Professor Arthur Danto affirmed, art is the “transfiguration of the commonplace,” the object that makes visible what is often dismissed as normal or swept under the rug. In this case, I would argue that Queermuseu shines a light on Brazil’s insidious slide toward fascism. That makes art an elementary form of resistance. And, clearly, Queer Museum came not a moment too soon.

Marcia Tiburi does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

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viralhottopics · 8 years

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Robert Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media

With links to Donald Trump, Steve Bannon and Nigel Farage, the rightwing American computer scientist is at the heart of a multimillion-dollar propaganda network

Just over a week ago, Donald Trump gathered members of the worlds press before him and told them they were liars. The press, honestly, is out of control, he said. The public doesnt believe you any more. CNN was described as very fake news story after story is bad. The BBC was another beauty.

That night I did two things. First, I typed Trump in the search box of Twitter. My feed was reporting that he was crazy, a lunatic, a raving madman. But that wasnt how it was playing out elsewhere. The results produced a stream of Go Donald!!!!, and You show em!!! There were star-spangled banner emojis and thumbs-up emojis and clips of Trump laying into the FAKE news MSM liars!

Trump had spoken, and his audience had heard him. Then I did what Ive been doing for two and a half months now. I Googled mainstream media is And there it was. Googles autocomplete suggestions: mainstream media is dead, dying, fake news, fake, finished. Is it dead, I wonder? Has FAKE news won? Are we now the FAKE news? Is the mainstream media we, us, I dying?

I click Googles first suggested link. It leads to a website called CNSnews.com and an article: The Mainstream media are dead. Theyre dead, I learn, because they we, I cannot be trusted. How had it, an obscure site Id never heard of, dominated Googles search algorithm on the topic? In the About us tab, I learn CNSnews is owned by the Media Research Center, which a click later I learn is Americas media watchdog, an organisation that claims an unwavering commitment to neutralising leftwing bias in the news, media and popular culture.

Another couple of clicks and I discover that it receives a large bulk of its funding more than $10m in the past decade from a single source, the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer. If you follow US politics you may recognise the name. Robert Mercer is the money behind Donald Trump. But then, I will come to learn, Robert Mercer is the money behind an awful lot of things. He was Trumps single biggest donor. Mercer started backing Ted Cruz, but when he fell out of the presidential race he threw his money $13.5m of it behind the Trump campaign.

Its money hes made as a result of his career as a brilliant but reclusive computer scientist. He started his career at IBM, where he made what the Association for Computational Linguistics called revolutionary breakthroughs in language processing a science that went on to be key in developing todays AI and later became joint CEO of Renaissance Technologies, a hedge fund that makes its money by using algorithms to model and trade on the financial markets.

One of its funds, Medallion, which manages only its employees money, is the most successful in the world generating $55bn so far. And since 2010, Mercer has donated $45m to different political campaigns all Republican and another $50m to non-profits all rightwing, ultra-conservative. This is a billionaire who is, as billionaires are wont, trying to reshape the world according to his personal beliefs.

Donald Trumps presidential campaigned received $13.5m from Robert Mercer. Photograph: Timothy A Clary/AFP/Getty Images

Robert Mercer very rarely speaks in public and never to journalists, so to gauge his beliefs you have to look at where he channels his money: a series of yachts, all called Sea Owl; a $2.9m model train set; climate change denial (he funds a climate change denial thinktank, the Heartland Institute); and what is maybe the ultimate rich mans plaything the disruption of the mainstream media. In this he is helped by his close associate Steve Bannon, Trumps campaign manager and now chief strategist. The money he gives to the Media Research Center, with its mission of correcting liberal bias is just one of his media plays. There are other bigger, and even more deliberate strategies, and shining brightly, the star at the centre of the Mercer media galaxy, is Breitbart.

It was $10m of Mercers money that enabled Bannon to fund Breitbart a rightwing news site, set up with the express intention of being a Huffington Post for the right. It has launched the careers of Milo Yiannopoulos and his like, regularly hosts antisemitic and Islamophobic views, and is currently being boycotted by more than 1,000 brands after an activist campaign. It has been phenomenally successful: the 29th most popular site in America with 2bn page views a year. Its bigger than its inspiration, the Huffington Post, bigger, even, than PornHub. Its the biggest political site on Facebook. The biggest on Twitter.

Prominent rightwing journalist Andrew Breitbart, who founded the site but died in 2012, told Bannon that they had to take back the culture. And, arguably, they have, though American culture is only the start of it. In 2014, Bannon launched Breitbart London, telling the New York Times it was specifically timed ahead of the UKs forthcoming election. It was, he said, the latest front in our current cultural and political war. France and Germany are next.

But there was another reason why I recognised Robert Mercers name: because of his connection to Cambridge Analytica, a small data analytics company. He is reported to have a $10m stake in the company, which was spun out of a bigger British company called SCL Group. It specialises in election management strategies and messaging and information operations, refined over 25 years in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan. In military circles this is known as psyops psychological operations. (Mass propaganda that works by acting on peoples emotions.)

Cambridge Analytica worked for the Trump campaign and, so Id read, the Leave campaign. When Mercer supported Cruz, Cambridge Analytica worked with Cruz. When Robert Mercer started supporting Trump, Cambridge Analytica came too. And where Mercers money is, Steve Bannon is usually close by: it was reported that until recently he had a seat on the board.

Last December, I wrote about Cambridge Analytica in a piece about how Googles search results on certain subjects were being dominated by rightwing and extremist sites. Jonathan Albright, a professor of communications at Elon University, North Carolina, who had mapped the news ecosystem and found millions of links between rightwing sites strangling the mainstream media, told me that trackers from sites like Breitbart could also be used by companies like Cambridge Analytica to follow people around the web and then, via Facebook, target them with ads.

On its website, Cambridge Analytica makes the astonishing boast that it has psychological profiles based on 5,000 separate pieces of data on 220 million American voters its USP is to use this data to understand peoples deepest emotions and then target them accordingly. The system, according to Albright, amounted to a propaganda machine.

A few weeks later, the Observer received a letter. Cambridge Analytica was not employed by the Leave campaign, it said. Cambridge Analytica is a US company based in the US. It hasnt worked in British politics.

Which is how, earlier this week, I ended up in a Pret a Manger near Westminster with Andy Wigmore, Leave.EUs affable communications director, looking at snapshots of Donald Trump on his phone. It was Wigmore who orchestrated Nigel Farages trip to Trump Tower the PR coup that saw him become the first foreign politician to meet the president elect.

Wigmore scrolls through the snaps on his phone. Thats the one I took, he says pointing at the now globally famous photo of Farage and Trump in front of his golden elevator door giving the thumbs-up sign. Wigmore was one of the bad boys of Brexit a term coined by Arron Banks, the Bristol-based businessman who was Leave.EUs co-founder.

Cambridge Analytica had worked for them, he said. It had taught them how to build profiles, how to target people and how to scoop up masses of data from peoples Facebook profiles. A video on YouTube shows one of Cambridge Analyticas and SCLs employees, Brittany Kaiser, sitting on the panel at Leave.EUs launch event.

Facebook was the key to the entire campaign, Wigmore explained. A Facebook like, he said, was their most potent weapon. Because using artificial intelligence, as we did, tells you all sorts of things about that individual and how to convince them with what sort of advert. And you knew there would also be other people in their network who liked what they liked, so you could spread. And then you follow them. The computer never stops learning and it never stops monitoring.

Steve Bannon, Donald Trumps chief strategist, is an associate of Robert Mercer. Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP

It sounds creepy, I say.

It is creepy! Its really creepy! Its why Im not on Facebook! I tried it on myself to see what information it had on me and I was like, Oh my God! Whats scary is that my kids had put things on Instagram and it picked that up. It knew where my kids went to school.

They hadnt employed Cambridge Analytica, he said. No money changed hands. They were happy to help.

Why?

Because Nigel is a good friend of the Mercers. And Robert Mercer introduced them to us. He said, Heres this company we think may be useful to you. What they were trying to do in the US and what we were trying to do had massive parallels. We shared a lot of information. Why wouldnt you? Behind Trumps campaign and Cambridge Analytica, he said, were the same people. Its the same family.

There were already a lot of questions swirling around Cambridge Analytica, and Andy Wigmore has opened up a whole lot more. Such as: are you supposed to declare services-in-kind as some sort of donation? The Electoral Commission says yes, if it was more than 7,500. And was it declared? The Electoral Commission says no. Does that mean a foreign billionaire had possibly influenced the referendum without that influence being apparent? Its certainly a question worth asking.

In the last month or so, articles in first the Swiss and the US press have asked exactly what Cambridge Analytica is doing with US voters data. In a statement to the Observer, the Information Commissioners Office said: Any business collecting and using personal data in the UK must do so fairly and lawfully. We will be contacting Cambridge Analytica and asking questions to find out how the company is operating in the UK and whether the law is being followed.

Cambridge Analytica said last Friday they are in touch with the ICO and are completely compliant with UK and EU data laws. It did not answer other questions the Observer put to it this week about how it built its psychometric model, which owes its origins to original research carried out by scientists at Cambridge Universitys Psychometric Centre, research based on a personality quiz on Facebook that went viral. More than 6 million people ended up doing it, producing an astonishing treasure trove of data.

These Facebook profiles especially peoples likes could be correlated across millions of others to produce uncannily accurate results. Michal Kosinski, the centres lead scientist, found that with knowledge of 150 likes, their model could predict someones personality better than their spouse. With 300, it understood you better than yourself. Computers see us in a more robust way than we see ourselves, says Kosinski.

But there are strict ethical regulations regarding what you can do with this data. Did SCL Group have access to the universitys model or data, I ask Professor Jonathan Rust, the centres director? Certainly not from us, he says. We have very strict rules around this.

A scientist, Aleksandr Kogan, from the centre was contracted to build a model for SCL, and says he collected his own data. Professor Rust says he doesnt know where Kogans data came from. The evidence was contrary. I reported it. An independent adjudicator was appointed by the university. But then Kogan said hed signed a non-disclosure agreement with SCL and he couldnt continue [answering questions].

Kogan disputes this and says SCL satisfied the universitys inquiries. But perhaps more than anyone, Professor Rust understands how the kind of information people freely give up to social media sites could be used.

Former Ukip leader Nigel Farage is a friend of the Mercers. Photograph: Oli Scarff/AFP/Getty Images

The danger of not having regulation around the sort of data you can get from Facebook and elsewhere is clear. With this, a computer can actually do psychology, it can predict and potentially control human behaviour. Its what the scientologists try to do but much more powerful. Its how you brainwash someone. Its incredibly dangerous.

Its no exaggeration to say that minds can be changed. Behaviour can be predicted and controlled. I find it incredibly scary. I really do. Because nobody has really followed through on the possible consequences of all this. People dont know its happening to them. Their attitudes are being changed behind their backs.

Mercer invested in Cambridge Analytica, the Washington Post reported, driven in part by an assessment that the right was lacking sophisticated technology capabilities. But in many ways, its what Cambridge Analyticas parent company does that raises even more questions.

Emma Briant, a propaganda specialist at the University of Sheffield, wrote about SCL Group in her 2015 book, Propaganda and Counter-Terrorism: Strategies for Global Change. Cambridge Analytica has the technological tools to effect behavioural and psychological change, she said, but its SCL that strategises it. It has specialised, at the highest level for Nato, the MoD, the US state department and others in changing the behaviour of large groups. It models mass populations and then it changes their beliefs.

SCL was founded by someone called Nigel Oakes, who worked for Saatchi & Saatchi on Margaret Thatchers image, says Briant, and the company had been making money out of the propaganda side of the war on terrorism over a long period of time. There are different arms of SCL but its all about reach and the ability to shape the discourse. They are trying to amplify particular political narratives. And they are selective in who they go for: they are not doing this for the left.

In the course of the US election, Cambridge Analytica amassed a database, as it claims on its website, of almost the entire US voting population 220 million people and the Washington Post reported last week that SCL was increasing staffing at its Washington office and competing for lucrative new contracts with Trumps administration. It seems significant that a company involved in engineering a political outcome profits from what follows. Particularly if its the manipulation, and then resolution, of fear, says Briant.

Its the database, and what may happen to it, that particularly exercises Paul-Olivier Dehaye, a Swiss mathematician and data activist who has been investigating Cambridge Analytica and SCL for more than a year. How is it going to be used? he says. Is it going to be used to try and manipulate people around domestic policies? Or to ferment conflict between different communities? It is potentially very scary. People just dont understand the power of this data and how it can be used against them.

There are two things, potentially, going on simultaneously: the manipulation of information on a mass level, and the manipulation of information at a very individual level. Both based on the latest understandings in science about how people work, and enabled by technological platforms built to bring us together.

Are we living in a new era of propaganda, I ask Emma Briant? One we cant see, and that is working on us in ways we cant understand? Where we can only react, emotionally, to its messages? Definitely. The way that surveillance through technology is so pervasive, the collection and use of our data is so much more sophisticated. Its totally covert. And people dont realise what is going on.

Public mood and politics goes through cycles. You dont have to subscribe to any conspiracy theory, Briant says, to see that a mass change in public sentiment is happening. Or that some of the tools in action are straight out of the militarys or SCLs playbook.

But then theres increasing evidence that our public arenas the social media sites where we post our holiday snaps or make comments about the news are a new battlefield where international geopolitics is playing out in real time. Its a new age of propaganda. But whose? This week, Russia announced the formation of a new branch of the military: information warfare troops.

Sam Woolley of the Oxford Internet Institutes computational propaganda institute tells me that one third of all traffic on Twitter before the EU referendum was automated bots accounts that are programmed to look like people, to act like people, and to change the conversation, to make topics trend. And they were all for Leave. Before the US election, they were five-to-one in favour of Trump many of them Russian. Last week they have been in action in the Stoke byelection Russian bots, organised by who? attacking Paul Nuttall.

Politics is war, said Steve Bannon last year in the Wall Street Journal. And increasingly this looks to be true.

Theres nothing accidental about Trumps behaviour, Andy Wigmore tells me. That press conference. It was absolutely brilliant. I could see exactly what he was doing. Theres feedback going on constantly. Thats what you can do with artificial intelligence. You can measure ever reaction to every word. He has a word room, where you fix key words. We did it. So with immigration, there are actually key words within that subject matter which people are concerned about. So when you are going to make a speech, its all about how can you use these trending words.

Wigmore met with Trumps team right at the start of the Leave campaign. And they said the holy grail was artificial intelligence.

Who did?

Jared Kushner and Jason Miller.

Later, when Trump picked up Mercer and Cambridge Analytica, the game changed again. Its all about the emotions. This is the big difference with what we did. They call it bio-psycho-social profiling. It takes your physical, mental and lifestyle attributes and works out how people work, how they react emotionally.

Bio-psycho-social profiling, I read later, is one offensive in what is called cognitive warfare. Though there are many others: recoding the mass consciousness to turn patriotism into collaborationism, explains a Nato briefing document on countering Russian disinformation written by an SCL employee. Time-sensitive professional use of media to propagate narratives, says one US state department white paper. Of particular importance to psyop personnel may be publicly and commercially available data from social media platforms.

Yet another details the power of a cognitive casualty a moral shock that has a disabling effect on empathy and higher processes such as moral reasoning and critical thinking. Something like immigration, perhaps. Or fake news. Or as it has now become: FAKE news!!!!

How do you change the way a nation thinks? You could start by creating a mainstream media to replace the existing one with a site such as Breitbart. You could set up other websites that displace mainstream sources of news and information with your own definitions of concepts like liberal media bias, like CNSnews.com. And you could give the rump mainstream media, papers like the failing New York Times! what it wants: stories. Because the third prong of Mercer and Bannons media empire is the Government Accountability Institute.

Bannon co-founded it with $2m of Mercers money. Mercers daughter, Rebekah, was appointed to the board. Then they invested in expensive, long-term investigative journalism. The modern economics of the newsroom dont support big investigative reporting staffs, Bannon told Forbes magazine. You wouldnt get a Watergate, a Pentagon Papers today, because nobody can afford to let a reporter spend seven months on a story. We can. Were working as a support function.

Welcome to the future of journalism in the age of platform capitalism. News organisations have to do a better job of creating new financial models. But in the gaps in between, a determined plutocrat and a brilliant media strategist can, and have, found a way to mould journalism to their own ends.

In 2015, Steve Bannon described to Forbes how the GAI operated, employing a data scientist to trawl the dark web (in the article he boasts of having access to $1.3bn worth of supercomputers) to dig up the kind of source material Google cant find. One result has been a New York Times bestseller, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, written by GAIs president, Peter Schweizer and later turned into a film produced by Rebekah Mercer and Steve Bannon.

This, Bannon explained, is how you weaponise the narrative you want. With hard researched facts. With those, you can launch it straight on to the front page of the New York Times, as the story of Hillary Clintons cash did. Like Hillarys emails it turned the news agenda, and, most crucially, it diverted the attention of the news cycle. Another classic psyops approach. Strategic drowning of other messages.

This is a strategic, long-term and really quite brilliant play. In the 1990s, Bannon explained, conservative media couldnt take Bill Clinton down becausethey wound up talking to themselves in an echo chamber.

As, it turns out, the liberal media is now. We are scattered, separate, squabbling among ourselves and being picked off like targets in a shooting gallery. Increasingly, theres a sense that we are talking to ourselves. And whether its Mercers millions or other factors, Jonathan Albrights map of the news and information ecosystem shows how rightwing sites are dominating sites like YouTube and Google, bound tightly together by millions of links.

Is there a central intelligence to that, I ask Albright? There has to be. There has to be some type of coordination. You can see from looking at the map, from the architecture of the system, that this is not accidental. Its clearly being led by money and politics.

Theres been a lot of talk in the echo chamber about Bannon in the last few months, but its Mercer who provided the money to remake parts of the media landscape. And while Bannon understands the media, Mercer understands big data. He understands the structure of the internet. He knows how algorithms work.

Robert Mercer did not respond to a request for comment for this piece. NickPatterson, a British cryptographer, who worked at Renaissance Technologies in the 80s and is now a computational geneticist at MIT, described to me how he was the one who talent-spotted Mercer. There was an elite group working at IBM in the 1980s doing speech research, speech recognition, and when I joined Renaissance I judged that the mathematics we were trying to apply to financial markets were very similar.

Bannon scorns media in rare public appearance at CPAC

He describes Mercer as very, very conservative. He truly did not like the Clintons. He thought Bill Clinton was a criminal. And his basic politics, I think, was that hes a rightwing libertarian, he wants the government out of things.

He suspects that Mercer is bringing the brilliant computational skills he brought to finance to bear on another very different sphere. We make mathematical models of the financial markets which are probability models, and from those we try and make predictions. What I suspect Cambridge Analytica do is that they build probability models of how people vote. And then they look at what they can do to influence that.

Finding the edge is what quants do. They build quantitative models that automate the process of buying and selling shares and then they chase tiny gaps in knowledge to create huge wins. Renaissance Technologies was one of the first hedge funds to invest in AI. But what it does with it, how its been programmed to do it, is completely unknown. It is, Bloomberg reports, the blackest box in finance.

Johan Bollen, associate professor at Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing, tells me how he discovered one possible edge: hes done research that shows you can predict stock market moves from Twitter. You can measure public sentiment and then model it. Society is driven by emotions, which its always been difficult to measure, collectively. But there are now programmes that can read text and measure it and give us a window into those collective emotions.

The research caused a huge ripple among two different constituencies. We had a lot attention from hedge funds. They are looking for signals everywhere and this is a hugely interesting signal. My impression is hedge funds do have these algorithms that are scanning social feeds. The flash crashes weve had sudden huge drops in stock prices indicates these algorithms are being used at large scale. And they are engaged in something of an arms race.

The other people interested in Bollens work are those who want not only to measure public sentiment, but to change it. Bollens research shows how its possible. Could you reverse engineer the national, or even the global, mood? Model it, and then change it?

It does seem possible. And it does worry me. There are quite a few pieces of research that show if you repeat something often enough, people start involuntarily to believe it. And that could be leveraged, or weaponised for propaganda. We know there are thousands of automated bots out there that are trying to do just that.

THE war of the bots is one of the wilder and weirder aspects of the elections of 2016. At the Oxford Internet Institutes Unit for Computational Propaganda, its director, Phil Howard, and director of research, Sam Woolley, show me all the ways public opinion can be massaged and manipulated. But is there a smoking gun, I ask them, evidence of who is doing this? Theres not a smoking gun, says Howard. There are smoking machine guns. There are multiple pieces of evidence.

Look at this, he says and shows me how, before the US election, hundreds upon hundreds of websites were set up to blast out just a few links, articles that were all pro-Trump. This is being done by people who understand information structure, who are bulk buying domain names and then using automation to blast out a certain message. To make Trump look like hes a consensus.

And that requires money?

That requires organisation and money. And if you use enough of them, of bots and people, and cleverly link them together, you are whats legitimate. You are creating truth.

You can take an existing trending topic, such as fake news, and then weaponise it. You can turn it against the very media that uncovered it. Viewed in a certain light, fake news is a suicide bomb at the heart of our information system. Strapped to the live body of us the mainstream media.

One of the things that concerns Howard most is the hundreds of thousands of sleeper bots theyve found. Twitter accounts that have tweeted only once or twice and are now sitting quietly waiting for a trigger: some sort of crisis where they will rise up and come together to drown out all other sources of information.

Like zombies?

Like zombies.

Many of the techniques were refined in Russia, he says, and then exported everywhere else. You have these incredible propaganda tools developed in an authoritarian regime moving into a free market economy with a complete regulatory vacuum. What you get is a firestorm.

This is the world we enter every day, on our laptops and our smartphones. It has become a battleground where the ambitions of nation states and ideologues are being fought using us. We are the bounty: our social media feeds; our conversations; our hearts and minds. Our votes. Bots influence trending topics and trending topics have a powerful effect on algorithms, Woolley, explains, on Twitter, on Google, on Facebook. Know how to manipulate information structure and you can manipulate reality.

Were not quite in the alternative reality where the actual news has become FAKE news!!! But were almost there. Out on Twitter, the new transnational battleground for the future, someone I follow tweets a quote by Marshall McLuhan, the great information theorist of the 60s. World War III will be a guerrilla information war, it says. With no divisions between military and civilian participation.

By that definition were already there.

Additional reporting by Paul-Olivier Dehaye

Carole Cadwalladr will be hosting a discussion on technologys disruption of democracy at the bluedot festival, Jodrell Bank, Cheshire, 7-9 July