Portland, Oregon – woke city central
Portland used to be a pretty nice town. What happened?:
…[S]omewhere around the time of the Ford administration…Portland reinvented itself as the Pyongyang of the Pacific Northwest, if with a few more trendy artisanal coffee bars than Kim Jong-un has to offer. With astonishing speed it rebranded itself as a bastion of progressive values, with a commission-based council and the only directly-elected metropolitan planning organization in the United States. In 1993, it also became the first American city to unveil a Climate Action Plan, with a whole raft of subsequent environmental measures designed to fight what was then called global warming — a commendably disinterested gesture on the part of a city where rain falls on around 170 days a year and the average high temperature in July struggles to get out of the seventies.
It’s surely an ‘only in America’ story, where you can go from gritty, end-of-the-line Western outpost, to something out of Norman Rockwell, and then embark on a headlong rush to mirror the Chinese cultural model of 1966-76, all in the space of a citizen’s lifetime. Add the presence of a 40,000-strong downtown university — and, perhaps not coincidentally, a thriving drug scene — and you get some of the flavor of the place.
I’ve been to Portland several times, mostly on my way to the Columbia River Gorge (highly recommended). Once I went there to see the rose garden, which was also great.
But I’d steer clear now, and for the foreseeable future. Because of all the cities whose government officials – and perhaps inhabitants – have lost their minds, Portland is probably the leader right now.
Since the demonstrations/riots began post-Floyd, Portland has been a scene of almost nonstop violence:
Portland celebrated Independence Day this year in unusual style. The police twice declared a downtown demonstration to be a riot over the July 4 weekend. In the measured words of Chief of Detectives Chuck Lovell, ‘Officers responded when [protesters] threw bricks, mortars, M-80 firecrackers, and other flammables toward them.’ He added: ‘Portland deserves better than nightly criminal activity that destroys the value and fabric of our community.’
These are words of wisdom unlikely to pass the lips of Portland’s current mayor Ted Wheeler. He blames the continuing violence squarely on the presence of plainclothes officers of the US Customs and Border Protection, among other federal agencies. ‘This is not the America we want,’ Wheeler rousingly announced. ‘We’re demanding that the President remove these troops [sic] that he sent to our city. It is not helping to contain or de-escalate the situation.’ I’m reliably told that the mayor’s tone while privately viewing televised scenes of masked rioters being arrested as they threw rocks through the windows of Portland’s downtown courthouse this week was considerably more colorful, and perhaps betrayed some of his youthful experience in the Oregon logging industry. ‘It’s a f***ing nightmare,’ he remarked…
…Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon said the other day that the main problem currently facing his state’s biggest city wasn’t the presence of bomb-wielding radicals, but that of ‘paramilitary figures that you expect in a banana republic.” For her part, Oregon’s Gov. Kate Brown characterizes the situation as ‘very challenging’ — but, again, it’s all down to the feds. ‘Trump needs to get his officers off the streets,’ she declared this week.
The article points out that in Portland, the demonstrators/rioters are mostly white and male. That makes sense, I suppose, because Portland has a population that’s only about 6% black (see this), and actually the bulk of the BLM demonstrators in many cities have been reported to be predominantly white and young. It’s also not clear that in Portland it is BLM rather than Antifa – I suspect mostly the latter, because Portland is the de facto national headquarters of Antifa and has been for years.
I wonder what the goals of the elected officials in Portland are, really. Is opposition to Trump the guiding principle, and will it all end if he’s defeated in November? Do they not care at all if the tax base of the city starts to leave and tourism also fails to provide revenue? Do they think it more important to satisfy their hard-left constituents, who may constitute the bulk of the city’s voters? Is the whole thing just a kind of guerilla theater, a playing at revolution?
Do they have a clue what they’re doing, or why?
Those last two questions put me in mind of this quote from the book Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi:
When in the States we had shouted Death to this or that, those deaths seemed to be more symbolic, more abstract, as if we were encouraged by the impossibility of our slogans to insist upon them even more. But in Tehran in 1979, these slogans were turning into reality with macabre precision. I felt helpless: all the dreams and slogans were coming true, and there was no escaping them.
Leftists are making much of the foolish stunt in Portland (the mayor of which is in close contention with De Blasio for the stupidest leader of any city in the country) by the woman dubbed “The Naked Athena”, as though it were an act of courage and not of foolishness. Several nights ago a young woman completely disrobed and (wearing only a mask) performed some movements (apparently borrowed from yoga practice) before a crowd of law enforcement, who maintained stoical silence. Meanwhile, in Denver, the police failed to protect Michelle Malkin from an angry mob of Antifa/BLM thugs at a rally during which her group had every right to expect protection from the mob.
I understand the need to protect federal property, but I think Trump is making a mistake here. First, it could be a trap to goad the feds into a Kent State response. Second, I think the better route is what Art has suggested: pull out entirely and take the federal dollars with them. They hate the feds so much, then fine, live without it. I for one don’t want my tax dollars going to that cesspool. And, third, if the above history of the city is any indication, let them build their utopia and live in it. To hell with all these progressive cities. Let them burn.
RE: Azar Nafisi quote:
Azar Nafisi, meet George Orwell:
— George Orwell, “Inside the Whale”
It is a 7 minute video clip, and some of you have likely read, or even seen brief video speculating some of this, but the Chicago PD do a great job here of showing the incredible, multi-level organization of a recent attack on the Police force. They will only grow more and more coordinated if they are not stopped, now. The citizens in these cities have got to rise up and demand their leaders defend them, or begin circulating the proper paperwork to have supporters legally removed from office. This is literal treason at the civic level. The video presentation by the Chicago Police Department shows it is organized, very well organized, armed insurrection.
https://youtu.be/FhpRgLajlfk
The hard left now holds sway over these politicians. They thought they were riding the tiger but they were wrong, now they are clinging desperately to the tip of the tail. This will not end well.
rcat:
Funny thing – when I wrote this post I was originally going to use the Orwell quote about playing with fire. But I decided the Nafisi quote was less well-known and more personal, so I used that instead.
To hell with all these progressive cities. Let them burn.
Stop sounding like Ymar. There’s already a Ymar here.
What’s going to burn down is public education, including the tenure and university indoctrination system. Time to find another work for a living.
The video presentation by the Chicago Police Department shows it is organized, very well organized, armed insurrection.
Your nation has been destabilized. It is too late. Welcome to Yuri Bezmenov’s world.
I moved from southern California, where I was born and raised, to Portland in 1983, when I was 26. When my then husband and I were driving all of our belongings up in a truck, we saw more people leaving Oregon than going and we wondered if we were crazy.
We had two children there (the oldest of which I have written about in comments–college English professor in TX), and it was truly a beautiful place to live. Note that I lived in a suburb of Portland, not the actual city, about 20 minutes west.
I even worked downtown for a couple of years before my first son was born. The downtown area had recently been somewhat revitalized and a lot of construction was going on. Yes, there were a few panhandlers, but they seemed mostly harmless.
The weather here is incredible, mild most of the time…and there are virtually no bugs! I truly do not think many places can boast of a better climate.
Oh, and when I first moved to the NW, the governor of Oregon was a Republican, as were the two senators. True, they were all somewhat liberal, but still…
Now I live up north a bit in Vancouver WA, which is of course similar in climate. I work about 20 miles from downtown Portland, but if I didn’t read about what’s going on in PDX I wouldn’t know it.
It breaks my heart what is happening here. Like Neo I wonder, what in the world do the politicians want? How long would they let this go on? To what end? My husband and I used to go downtown to have dinner every few weeks, and I’ve been to plays and musicals there many times.
You wouldn’t catch me down there now for anything! I’m disgusted, mystified, horrified, and like you all, just want to know what the end game is.
It is easy to say, let it all burn down & Trump should pullout, but how will that play out during the upcoming elections? If Trump is going to run on a law and order platform he has to appear to be be doing something along those lines.
It is amazing to see the transformation of CA and Oregon. They went from a place that epitomized rugged individualism to this. The history of Portland itself is amazing in context of the behaviour of Whites there less than 100-years ago. See https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/07/racist-history-portland/492035/
“When the state entered the union in 1859, for example, Oregon explicitly forbade black people from living in its borders, the only state to do so.”
Looking at the list of colleges and universities in Oregon on Wiki is somewhat enlightening. Portland Community College claims 83,000 students in the 5 county metro area, and Portland State has 24,000. There is a plethora of schools in Portland, the 5 county population being 1.9 million. I’ve not run totals, but it’s my impression that total college enrollment likely exceeds 10% of the population.
So Portland is a college town, with educational (ahem), drug and booze costs largely relying on Other People’s Money.
Portland is predominantly white.
Being white today seems to be associated with a propensity for disordered thinking.
For example, Duluth MN is about 95% white, but its city council has decided to make a couple of changes. (1) Dropping “chief” from job titles such as “chief financial officer”, disregarding the word derives from the Latin, caput (head), via the French, chef. It community relations officer said that chief is “a racial epithet, and it turns into a microaggression.” (2) Duluth is redesigning the city flag (!) as being insufficiently inclusive, so added the so-called African word Umoja as an “African principle meaning unity” blah blah blah. I guess the city council believes that “African” is a language.
I thank RR Reno at First Things magazine for the Duluth info.
I grew up in Portland. I moved out in 2016. The details are too painful for me to go into here.
Reading Lolita in Tehran is, simply, one of the most thought provoking books I have ever read. I cannot laud it enough.
And if, as Neo suggests, it describes what is coming next, we should all be very, very worried.
I certainly do not agree with the federal government “pulling out” when under attack in an American city. What a terrible precedent.
I would support withholding any federal funds that can be whithheld by Executive Order when a city reneges on its responsibilities and openly sides with the forces of chaos.
I visited Portland several times as my granddaughter was a collegiate athlete at a small University near by. I never had a good feeling about the place at all–and that was before BLM and ANTIFA were house hold terms. Glad I have no reason to return.
Much of my wife’s extended family lives in Portland/Vancouver and up until the virus, we would head down there every other month or so. In my experience, most of the city is quite safe and quite mundane; indeed, probably a bit safer and cleaner than a comparably sized city. It’s the downtown and the Pearl District that are the hotbeds of most of the civil disturbance, which is very depressing and aggravating, but it shouldn’t cast a pall over the city as a whole.
I have also found many Portlanders are fairly moderate, center-left in their socio-political views. However, they are also incredibly passive. The hard left may be small in numbers, but it’s larger (and better organized) there than almost anywhere else in the country. And, unfortunately, it is easy to intimidate the majority of well-meaning moderate liberals into submission, particularly when race is invoked/exploited.
My wife’s family are perfect examples: they are all white, college educated, middle to upper middle class, polite and well-meaning folk (of primarily Norwegian ancestry). They are almost all Democrats, but not radical by any means and, in any case, fairly apolitical. 10-15 years ago they would have recoiled at the avalanche of “woke” absurdities infecting the zeitgeist. Today, they go along passively to be polite and not cause any discord… entirely oblivious to the fact that doing so only moves the Overton window further left…well beyond anything they were comfortable with in the recent past. I think many, many Portlanders (including most politicians) are of a similar mindset.
The federal courthouse in Portland is this century’s Ft. Sumpter and last century’s school house doors in the South. The Dems have been on the wrong side in all three cases.
I follow Andy Ngo on Twitter. These rioters are idiots. It should be easy to tear out that plywood and break the windows.
Trump should have them all arrested. Use overwhelming force. High bail. Or no bail.
I guess I am a deplorable, I favor high velocity lead injections over rubber bullets. Kill a few dozen and the rest stay in mom’s basement being pretend warriors.
My give a damn is busted.
The Marxist/anarco/racialists have repeatedly called the countrywide violence a “rebellion.” Since they know no history, they are unaware that the United States has an unbroken record, dating back to the Whisky Rebellion, of crushing rebellion. Too bad, so sad.
Note: The rally where M. Malkin was not protected by the police was a rally to SUPPORT THE POLICE. The police just stood around and did nothing to maintain law and order.
The rally had a permit from the city of Denver.
Beyond pathetic.
What’s the matter with Berkeley? How could Portland steal a radical march over dear old Berserkeley?
Standards have dropped. That’s what I say.
I’m beginning to wonder whether Trump isn’t playing three-dimensional chess with his leftist politician opponents. I suspect he rightly views these riots as a potential opportunity.
I too don’t see how he can pull out and retain his credibility as a supporter of Law & Order. To maintain his credibility Trump has no choice but to protect Federal property and personnel. And have Federal agents arrest rioters who engage in rioting that threatens said property and personnel.
That said, political ads with video of the rioters actions and speech will drive voters into Trump’s camp because nothing beats a personal threat to get people’s attention.
So it’s in Trump’s political interest to allow the dem Gov. & Mayors to continue to enable the riots. Political ads can also show those dem Govs & Mayors refusing and rejecting federal help.
After reelection, then Trump can impose the Insurrection Act and charge both the rioters and the Gov. & Mayors who assisted rioters and insurrectionists with;
18 U.S. Code§2383.Rebellion or Insurrection
The only way to stop the activist Left is to impose commensurate consequence for their actions because if not, they will impose upon us the harshest of consequences. We are perilously close to it becoming a fight to the death because they are committed to the destruction of America.
“The rally where M. Malkin was not protected by the police was a rally to SUPPORT THE POLICE. The police just stood around and did nothing to maintain law and order.
The rally had a permit from the city of Denver.
Beyond pathetic.” Francesca
It was not just Malkin that was assaulted. Two others were as well, one of which was the person who facilitated the event. I strongly suspect that the police in attendence were carefully selected to be hostile to the attendees and were ordered not to interfere with any violence. No way did those attackers not know beforehand that they’d have a free hand and not face arrest.
Ackler observed, “I have also found many Portlanders are fairly moderate, center-left in their socio-political views. However, they are also incredibly passive.”
I fear this now characterizes the majority of white Americans, and, come November, they will let this country slide into Bidenland. Whiteness has indeed become fragile after decades of giving away the store to Affirmative Action and hearing anti-white racist charges like constant rain patter on the roof. Passivity of intellect and reason leads to no good end.
I note in my daily readings that Black is now often capitalized and white is in lower case.
I just got a newsflash that 9 people were shot this evening in South Chicago. Race was not specified, though we all know. And the night is still young.
I note in my daily readings that Black is now often capitalized and white is in lower case.
Cicero: That’s now official guidance from the freakin’ “Associated Press Stylebook.” No small thing.
https://pjmedia.com/columns/matt-margolis/2020/07/20/the-associated-press-stylebook-is-now-officially-racist-n664984
If I were capable of disbelief at this point, I would not believe it.
They’re in dire need of Parkerizing. After poor Andy Ngo gets a few free whacks at them with a concrete milkshake.
Or we could do a Rhyming Replay of the Vendée in the Columbia River. Nice scenic spot, plus bet you a lot of those #$%@ers are into rafting as a hobby.
Still, I’d massacre the population of Olympia first. Just as a matter of principle. I’ve got some, you know.
I’m with Parker and Cornhead. But physicsguy worries that this will backfire.
Meanwhile, young Tim Pool, a leftist mugged by reality a few years ago, wonders about the opposite, as he covers violence in Portland. He believes Trump has set a trap for Leftists.
Have a look
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1486&v=Rz6uv5cvSK0&feature=emb_logo
I think he’s correct! Have a look, physicsguy.
For example, I did not know that 53 days were the violence in Portland, that states of emergency were declared in Georgia and Utah.
People are voting by buying guns. At record levels.
As it happens, I live in the Columbia River Gorge, a little over an hour away from Portland. Based on events, we are in the process now of selling off and moving elsewhere (Florida). I won’t wait until the signs are so obvious that property values collapse all over the state.
Wow, Roy. I’m sure that is bittersweet.
Best of luck in Florida!
TJ, youtube must have censored that video, ti keeps bouncing to a different one.
OK, you all have convinced me that protecting federal property should be done. BUT, nothing beyond that. The soft liberals and so-called decent people of Portland, and other cities, need to be shown up close and personal how their votes affect them directly. So if all that remains of Portland is the fed courthouse and the rest a smoldering ruin, so be it.
And another crystal-clear reminder from the “Psychopaths ‘R Us” Dept.—this one from the East Coast (just to provide a little balance, a bit of symmetry):
https://nypost.com/2020/07/21/de-blasio-threatens-to-sue-if-trump-intervenes-in-crime-surge/
H/T Instapundit.
File under: You had better let me destroy MY city MY WAY (you bad, bad, bad, Orange man!)
https://tinyurl.com/y4gbjza2
Neo wonders what the goal of the Portland city officials is — why are they trashing their city? What kind of politician would do that? What kind of people would re-elect those who did?
Well, I wonder what kind of presidential campaign runs on raising taxes, forcing low income housing into all neighborhoods, giving citizenship to illegals, “redirecting” police funding, abolishing bail, etc.?
What kind of corporations put front and center divisive political sloganeering, guaranteed to alienate half their customers?
It’s an overwhelming tour de force, meant to demoralize. Some of it is to make people want to “make it stop.” The unbearably bitter, miserable, evil political atmosphere that has cloaked the US since Trump’s election would at least be relieved by a Dem. victory in Nov (and the naked politicization of Covid might mean the pandemic will go away too). A “new normal” will prevail.
But I think the endgame for the Dems (and for most Republicans, but that is too much to argue in a single comments post) is basically the same as under Obama: a kind of left fascism, where big companies will flourish (but only if they are friends of the government), the rest of the population will be clientele, and the opposition will be beggared into submission: no jobs, high taxes, Chinese social credit system. Populist theater will continue, as “Occupy” was under Obama.
Not even most leftists want it: viz the popularity of Bernie Sanders over both Hillary and Biden (remember that Biden as nominee was supposedly because the party wouldn’t risk a far left candidate?!). But the Dems have their clients: government workers and gov. dependents, minorities who will get further enhanced set asides, working women, big corporations with guaranteed monopolies or contracts.
It’s possible, as discussed on this site, that the Dems will lose control over their far-left theater and the country will collapse. I don’t know. I do know that I moved from Washington, DC to Florida (I posted here about that last month): I couldn’t stand political commissar/neighbors enjoining our street to put signs up and kneel nightly in the street. I didn’t like the nearby looting of shopping districts. I didn’t want to live where the mayor called the National Guard “occupying forces” and just by fiat renamed lower 16th St. (and what memo caused mayors all over the country to paint giant BLM slogans on the streets? Mayor Bowser, who I think was the first, wouldn’t have had the imagination to do that herself). I was afraid of the coming Covid/riot collapse in property values.
Our house, fwiw, sold immediately for more than $100,000 over its asking price. The nomenklatura is not worried.
Roy Nathanson:
Hood River is not the same as the rest of Oregon beyond the Willamette Valley IMO. But the wilted rose of Multonoma may cast a large shadow. Good luck in Florida.
Roy Nathanson:
Geoffrey Britian recently moved from Florida to Bend OR so his take is probably needed here. Bend is a recreation/retirement town (?) with lots of scenery and poor locals to service the more affluent IIRC.
Nancy, a brilliant description of the Democratic Party’s Insanely (not so) Great! political strategy….
Capturing its meticulous crafting, professionally execution and wall-to-wall, in unison collusion. (They do, undeniably, have the knack for certain things.)
But will the strategy work like it’s supposed to?
(It shouldn’t, of course. No way. Buuuut…)
We’ll just have to wait until the dust clears after the next great battle in the CW2 escapades—i.e., mail-in-balloting—is joined.
If the Democrats get what they want (and one should view the current onslaught—directed, staged, choreographed and encouraged by the Democratic Party—as directly linked to THAT campaign), then ALL bets are off.
Nancy, Barry,
Or is it Cloward Piven?
“Capturing its meticulous crafting, professionally execution and wall-to-wall, in unison collusion.”
I’ve commented many times about this, but it still amazes me the level of complete coordination that the Dems/Left have. No one thinks for themselves; all must be in total lockstep. It is very creepy. I believe last night the wonderful mayor of Chicago was repeating the current party line of “federal dictatorship and tyranny” because of fed officers in cities to prevent violence just as 14 people were gunned down at a funeral. You can’t make this stuff up as the saying goes.
“Our house, fwiw, sold immediately for more than $100,000 over its asking price. The nomenklatura is not worried.”
We are in prep for the Florida move in about year as the house gets painted etc now. Unfortunately, I’m stuck in Connecticut. We will, most likely, have to take a loss on the house just to get it sold.
“…repeating the current party line…”
They work out the party phrases in advance (Nancy’s moonlighting again, no doubt) and then send out those smoke signals to the faithful. So in Portland it’s something like Federal government “Gestapo” or “SS” or—well you get the idea; while in the Windy City it’s “Federal dictatorship and tyranny”—so original; I wonder who writes her lines? (You know it’s not her because of the absence of obscenities); and in the Big (Rotten) Apple, well, whatever de Blasio’s slogan du jour might be.
All in glorious sync. Sort of like a scene out of “Chorus Line” or the Yes-we-can-can! Moulin Rouge. (You can almost see them high stepping it….)
The coordination of Dem talking points and strategy began back in the Clinton years. I noticed it then that all the Dems on talk shows and TV used the same words and phrases. They now have a widespread organization that extends further down the chain. They use Goebbels’ guiding principle – keep repeating a slogan or idea until people accept t as truth.
It does appear that they are trying to flood the zone with “protests” which are all labeled as “peaceful” to try to overwhelm public opinion with the idea that Trump can do nothing, but if he does try to stop the protests he is acting “unlawfully or as a dictator.” Heads they win, tails they win. Or so they think.
Wow, Roy and Nancy are getting out. I understand the impulse. If my wife and I were ten years younger we night be heading for Idaho, Wyoming, or South Dakota. Good luck in Florida.
My observation is that most people who are staying are arming themselves. Go to a gun store. They have no inventory, or very little, of both guns and ammo. It exceeds anything seen, even during Obama’s years. Of course, the progs are planning to confiscate the guns once they get control again. (Beto O’Rourke is Biden’s point man on that.) My guess is that all the gun buyers are open to a law and order, pro Second Amendment, pro business, secure borders, pro-life, and pro-choice in education platform. They won’t get those things by voting for Democrats of any stripe and they know it. The “silent majority” is voting with their dollars at the gun stores and I expect them to vote in huge numbers in November.
Portland … Seattle …
In my view, since the time said cities entered my mind, Upper NW cities seemed to have their own strange liberal bent to them; a different type of liberalism than what’s found in larger, more densely populated cities on the west coast like SF (slightly larger) and even LA (not really a “city”, more like a large sprawling suburb connected by highways).
One of the things I have noticed in Minneapolis is that none of the city council or mayor (or governor) have ever owned a business. Most are professional activists of one form or another. But it didn’t used to be this way. Minneapolis was run by people who had names like Pillsbury, Dayton, Donaldson, and so on. All local business people who served part time on the council.
But Dayton’s became Marshall Field’s became Macy’s, and so did Donaldson’s, or a similar path. Local drugstores are now CVS and Walgreens. Clothing stores are now national chains. Even a metro area chain like Frattalone Ace Hardware is really a corporate creature.
Now, local business people have no influence. The bicycle mafia does, the new urbanists do, the gays, the other sexual peculiars. A huge number of jobs in the Twin Cities are now nonprofits which give away money, sometimes to each other. If the people running them know the right folks, more money comes in.
Wells Fargo bank is headquartered here (it only pretends to be in San Francisco). They’ll throw money at BLM in hopes of buying a bit of space. But they’re national corporations. They have no interest in local affairs.
The funny thing is, all of these lefty types cannot help but decry all of the big corporations. But they owe their power to the fact that big corporations stopped paying attention to who runs a city.
gwynmir and physicsguy
A fresh link to Tim Pool on Feds to protect
Gwen: some though re your son Robert.
We forget that science and the enlightenment gave us Locke and Jefferson, individual rights, Republican democracy, literacy, the end of slavery. But it awaited the revival of Christian humanism to give us the expansive ideal — and more controversial — human rights.
These proruptions of Enlightenment needed activist moral vitalisation in order to create our modern world. And between the three subjects of Christian Eric Metaxis three supreme biographies teaches us this truth, as well a popular historian and libertarian Arthur Herman’s recent books.
(See Metaxis interview from 2018 with former Deputy Prime Minister of Australia, John Anderson https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQBSIZylGVk)
The desiccation of the modern Enlightenment is seen in Jeremy Bentham. This great utilitarian was more about efficiency in his prison reform, not humane treatment of prisoners as people. This view is found in Charles Dickens in general, but specifically in “Hard Times.”
But when The great Christian Protestant traditions (Martin Luther’s justification by Faith alone generating ultimate individual responsibility to Our Creator, and Jefferson and the Declaration) coalesce in later great reformers.
William Wilberforce revitalises Christian moralists to go into the public sphere. Belief was enervated in Britain. But Wilberforce argued that the invisible slave trade was a great moral stain on the British People.
While the Us Constitution ended US slave trade (1807?), the much more horrendous black slave trade serving Caribbean Sugar Plantations continued. This shall not stand, said Wilberforce! And thus it was abolished by 1816 in the UK, and in much of the Atlantic in decades later — by force if necessary, as seen by the US Civil War.
Metaxis biography of Wilberforce in “Amazing Grace” (also a riveting Hollywood movie), his biographies of Martin Luther and Dietrich Bonhoeffer on how Christian humanism ought have saved Germany and the world from the scourge of Hitler’s Nazism.
Yet in between Wilberforce and Bonhoeffer’s time, we see more effects of the spread of Christian humanism with the rise of the middle class through industrialisation and capitalism: namely, the expansion of the vote, or universal suffrag; the forced end of Suttee (ritual widow burning under Hinduism in India); humane treatment of prisoners in Australia, as mentioned by John Anderson; and finally, the rise of celebration of middle class generosity, as seen by Christ’s-mass or Christmas.
This minor holiday in the Biblical tradition thus became a major brotherly love festival during the Victorian Era. Rising incomes and the spread of love for life was made possible by shorter word days and weeks (cf, Dickens). Rising wealth meant looking after the unfortunate, the orphans, the lame or halt. Hospitals arose, and healthier lives through sanitary care became possible as disease control became doable; homes lived with nourishing sunlight and warmth (because windows were taxed as a luxury good, earlier, not a public good).
Good will toward men became normative during the long nineteenth century. As Arthur Herman argues, under nationalism, necessary wars for the state under Bismarck killed thousands. But not the millions dead in the unnecessary wars of the twentieth century fought for -isms and ideologies.
Today, ridiculously, the young are taught the reverse: that nationalism is a great evil, against the post-Cold War proof of its beneficence, and in ignorance of the real peaceful gains it’s spread consolidated.
As blooming law prof Glenn Reynold’s daughter said of High School history indoctrination: she learned that slaver ended yesterday, but the Cold War happened a million years ago.
By contrast, historian Arthur Herman completes the impact of Metaxis’ heroes, Luther, Jefferson, Wilberforce, and Bonhoeffer, with a different set of people and leaders: “How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe’s Poorest Nation Created Our World & Everything in It.” The American founding being its finest flowering (but also “Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways” by David Hacket Fischer, which traces the continuing sociopolitical and cultural impact of Great Britain on US down to today).
But Herman turns the picture to the international level of Christian and British thought in “Gandhi & Churchill: The Epic Rivalry that Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age.” And also, “1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder.” Thus, people make history, or else are called upon, like Lincoln, to respond to the historical turning points that press them into important leadership roles.
Finally, the geostrategic realism of Peter Zeihan (three books in the last 6 or 7 years), but his history of the post-British Empire, post-WWII world made by the US is close to the themes quantified in a fine book from 2004, “America’s Inadvertent Empire” by William Odom, et al.
Zeihan’s many graphical big talk seminars given to large groups are on YouTube, reflecting each of his futuristic books (a new one out this year, but the new virus crisis now requires a fourth one by 2022, he admits). Although, since March, he makes due with long interviews.
(You can get an compelling overview of his books theses by taking in Zeihan’s video live talks from 2014, then 2018 to late 2019, and now, since February. His focus is on the real economic and political drivers of global change.)
I find his hardcore economic and demographic and political realism to be a powerful antidote to our preoccupations here: depressing cultural declinism.
For example, he states “We have tried to mess this up…” but definite geographical fortune or technological invention (or economic success as a capitalist stronghold) keeps the US favoured for success! For now.
What I’m getting at is the Big Picture view of five centuries of change from the Middle Ages forward that is typically missing from the indoctrination camps of the young, today — not to add, refreshers that us elders can enjoy.
Hence, the biographies of the deep Christian Metaxis, and the more recent histories about Western Civ by Arthur Herman, all topical, thoughtful, and compellingly relevant to today.
I’m abroad, gynmir, but I think we can continue a useful dialogue about you and your son (my Big Bang Theory type of nerd group youth all became scientists or professors, too). Why don’t you email me at ullr2007 attt yahoo dottt com?