"Why is the US far right finding its savior in Spanish dictator Francisco Franco?" by Jason Wilson (#TheGuardian)
"Some US far-right figures have made renewed attempts to rehabilitate the 20th century Spanish dictator Gen Francisco Franco in recent months, praising him as an avatar of religious authoritarianism, and praising his actions during and after the Spanish civil war as a model for confronting the left in the US."
"The critics of this flurry of neo-Francoism say that the real target of this revisionism is domestic attitudes to US democracy."
"For Faber, parts of the the American right are captured by “the dream of order, where social order is more important than democracy, and democracy is a threat to social order”."
A very interesting article on the "re-emergence" of Franco in Spain: "Francisco Franco Is Back: The Contested Reemergence of a Fascist Moral Exemplar" by Francisco Ferrándiz (#OpenAccess, 2021).
Unfortunately, the idea of a society that must be "pure" (in its various variants) is very attractive to those people who seek above all Order and Hierarchy.
Can anyone share a reference (any discipline) to a definition or use of 'politics' / 'political' in the non-technical/metaphorical sense (i.e., not about government) to refer to ideological (or other?) underpinnings?
@serenissimaj
In Spain (and not only in Spain), politicians use the word "political" a lot to refer to "ideological" decisions. Both words (politics and ideology) have ended up having a negative meaning: fantasy, falsehood, partisan interests, etc. And there is no doubt that this way of using these words is contributing to the deterioration of political life.
Obviously, any opinion or decision about how things should be is political and ideological. The definition I like best is that of Chantal Mouffe (On the political, 2005, p. 9):
"I distinguish between 'the political' and 'politics': by 'the political I mean the dimension of antagonism which I take to be constitutive of human societies, while by 'politics' I mean the sets of practices and institutions through which an order is created, organizing human coexistence in the context of conflictuality provided by the political".
THE PERIPHERAL (William Gibson, 2014; Spanish edition 2017).
First novel of the trilogy (not yet finished) the Jackpot. In 2020 the second novel, "Agency" was published (I am reading it now). I haven't seen the Amazon Prime version and I'm not sure I'm going to see it. The reason is that I don't think it can live up to the novel. Perhaps one of the best novels translating today's complex reality (past, present, fact, fiction, economics, politics...).
PHILADELPHIA’S MÜTTER MUSEUM IS REVIEWING ITS COLLECTION OF HUMAN REMAINS. HERE’S WHY THAT MATTERS FOR DISABILITY REPRESENTATION by Riva Lehrer (Art in America, 2023).
"The Mütter joins medical and natural history museums around the world who are debating the ethical treatment of human remains. There is the question of provenance: at the Mütter, some specimens may have been accepted into the collection under dubious or outright unethical circumstances. Mütter curator Anna Dhoty has written about one unclear holding. Other provenance issues have recently been resolved after decades of negotiation. And in some instances, there is virtually no paper trail at all.
All this gets at a deeper, more troubling question: can it ever be ethical to own, or exhibit, someone else’s body? And if so, how should those bodies be displayed?"
THE CARE/REPATRIATION OF HUMAN REMAINS HELD IN MUSEUMS.
As @ricketson points out, this is a problem that has been tirelessly debated for many years. And it is a multifaceted problem. Some examples (there are, of course, many more):
I agree with your point of view, it is a question of context and a general rule cannot be established. It depends, among other factors, on the provenance and function of the human remains in the museum: whether they are only in the museum as a result of colonial brutality, whether they can provide significant knowledge, or whether they are only on display to sell tickets.
In Spain we have a very interesting case: that of the Guanche mummies.
In Spain, censorship of plays, films and publications is already beginning to take place at the local level (town councils where the extreme right is in power). These are still very anecdotal cases, but they sadly indicate the direction in which we are being dragged.
Transgression is an essential concept for understanding many of today's political dynamics.
POPULISM AS A TRANSGRESSIVE STYLE by Théo Aiolfi (2022).
"As a consequence of its performative turn, the critical literature on populism has dedicated increasing attention to its sociocultural and stylistic features. Among the most prominent concepts underpinning this approach is the notion that populism relies on the “flaunting of the low” or the use of “bad manners.” This article engages in an extensive discussion of the way this concept is used in the literature and showcases its main limitations. In replacement, I then suggest the alternative concept of transgression, understood as the violation of a norm, which has the substantial advantages of being more flexible and versatile as well as less reliant on a normative binary".
DONALD TRUMP AND THE RATIONALIZATION OF TRANSGRESSIVE BEHAVIOR: The role of group prototypicality and identity advancement by Ben Davies, Carola Leicht and Dominic Abrams (2022).
"Overall, the present study identifies the rationalization of transgressive leader behaviors as a novel pathway to their continued support. We also identify identity advancement as a key driver of this effect. These results provide an important extension of deviance credit and indicate that the role of group prototypicality in the context of group serving leaders may need to be reconsidered. These results also have worrying implications for the nature of transgressive leadership and demonstrate how unimpeachable such leadership may become once it is established."
AMERICA’S BIGGEST MUSEUMS FAIL TO RETURN NATIVE AMERICAN HUMAN REMAINS (ProPublica, by Logan Jaffe, Mary Hudetz and Ash Ngu, 2023).
"As the United States pushed Native Americans from their lands to make way for westward expansion throughout the 1800s, museums and the federal government encouraged the looting of Indigenous remains, funerary objects and cultural items. Many of the institutions continue to hold these today — and in some cases resist their return despite the 1990 passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act."
A very interesting source of information on the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) are the minutes of the Review Committee Meetings. They are available on this website:
The idea of a "moral decline" is linked to the narratives we create about the past, in which events are idealised or simplified. On the other hand, human beings have a tendency to analyse events in terms of how we would like things to be. This example was published last year in the Times of India Reader's Blog:
"Moral values are fading these days. […] The culture is degrading day by day due to the effect of the western influence and movies which often mislead the younger generation.
[…] The low moral values have created unrest and turmoil in society. […] We can dream of a kind and honest world only if we nurture moral values and keep our ethos."
Such arguments, with many variations, can be found everywhere nowadays. The only problem is that similar arguments can be found in texts from many other periods in the past.
THE MYTH OF “DECLINE AND FALL” by Edward Champlin (1996).
"Everyone knows that the Roman Empire “declined and fell.” The title of Edward Gibbon’s 18th-century masterpiece The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is part of Western cultural consciousness. There is something deeply thrilling about the notion: Rome, the largest political and economic unit in the world before the year 1000, fell; are we too doomed to lose our power, our culture, even our memory?"
"But the notion of decline is an extremely difficult one. A political unit may indeed “fall” because of complex political, social, and economic reasons. The real problem comes when we, like the Romans, do not understand these reasons and, like the Romans, equate decline with moral decline."
"In the end, “Rome” did not decline; it changed, as all cultures must. "
THE ILLUSION OF MORAL DECLINE by Adam M. Mastroianni and Daniel T. Gilbert (Nature, 2023).
"In a series of studies using both archival and original data (n = 12,492,983), we show that people in at least 60 nations around the world believe that morality is declining, that they have believed this for at least 70 years and that they attribute this decline both to the decreasing morality of individuals as they age and to the decreasing morality of successive generations. Next, we show that people’s reports of the morality of their contemporaries have not declined over time, suggesting that the perception of moral decline is an illusion. Finally, we show how a simple mechanism based on two well-established psychological phenomena (biased exposure to information and biased memory for information) can produce an illusion of moral decline."
I understand that. But I think that framing the problem in these terms indicates rather that we hardly realise that human beings are capable of believing in all sorts of extreme fantasies. Very extreme.
@MHowell@academicchatter@histodons@psychology
I can agree to a certain extent, but I believe that assessing this political situation from a moral perspective is not the most appropriate way to understand or deal with it.