Anti Protestant Quotes

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Westboro Baptist Church: STOP. Stop protesting the funerals of our soldiers who died in action because you are anti-gay. When one of you dies, I’m going to show up with a couple of gay veterans and we’re going to do a musical at your funeral.
Billy Crystal (Still Foolin' 'Em: Where I've Been, Where I'm Going, and Where the Hell Are My Keys)
The basic distortions in the media are not innocent errors, for they are not random; rather they move in the same overall direction again and again, favoring management over labor, corporatism over anti-corporatism, the affluent over the poor, private enterprise over socialism, Whites over Blacks, males over females, officialdom over protesters, conventional politics over dissidence, anticommunism and arms-race militarism over disarmament, national chauvinism over internationalism, US dominance of the Third World over revolutionary or populist nationalist change. The press does many things and serves many functions but its major role, its irreducible responsibility, is to continually recreate a view of reality supportive of existing social and economic class power.
Michael Parenti (Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media)
This place does not feel like my country. It feels like countries I have read about where things are very bad. It feels, in fact, like exactly the kind of thing we were protesting against, but we thought it was elsewhere. It is not heartening to find that it has come to us.
Nick Harkaway (The Gone-Away World)
Individual members of certain churches in black communities should protest when worship services become a platform for teaching anti-gay sentiments. Often individuals sit and listen to preachers raging against gay people and think the views expressed are amusing and outmoded, and dismiss them without challenge. But if homophobia is to be eradicated in black communities, such attitudes must be challenged.
bell hooks (Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black)
For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew--or a Quaker--or a Unitarian--or a Baptist. It was Virginia's harassment of Baptist preachers, for example, that helped lead to Jefferson's statute of religious freedom. Today I may be the victim- -but tomorrow it may be you--until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped at a time of great national peril. Finally, I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end--where all men and all churches are treated as equal--where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice--where there is no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc voting of any kind--and where Catholics, Protestants and Jews, at both the lay and pastoral level, will refrain from those attitudes of disdain and division which have so often marred their works in the past, and promote instead the American ideal of brotherhood. That is the kind of America in which I believe. And it represents the kind of Presidency in which I believe--a great office that must neither be humbled by making it the instrument of any one religious group nor tarnished by arbitrarily withholding its occupancy from the members of any one religious group. I believe in a President whose religious views are his own private affair, neither imposed by him upon the nation or imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office. ... This is the kind of America I believe in--and this is the kind I fought for in the South Pacific, and the kind my brother died for in Europe. No one suggested then that we may have a "divided loyalty," that we did "not believe in liberty," or that we belonged to a disloyal group that threatened the "freedoms for which our forefathers died.
John F. Kennedy
non-violence is not to be treated as a holy covenant or rite, then one must adopt the explicitly anti-Gandhian position of Mandela: ‘I called for non-violent protest for as long as it was effective’, as ‘a tactic that should be abandoned when it no longer worked.
Andreas Malm (How to Blow Up a Pipeline)
It is difficult to understand the behavior of most German Protestants in the first Nazi years unless one is aware of two things: their history and the influence of Martin Luther.* The great founder of Protestantism was both a passionate anti-Semite and a ferocious believer in absolute obedience to political authority. He wanted Germany rid of the Jews and when they were sent away he advised that they be deprived of “all their cash and jewels and silver and gold” and, furthermore, “that their synagogues or schools be set on fire, that their houses be broken up and destroyed… and they be put under a roof or stable, like the gypsies… in misery and captivity as they incessantly lament and complain to God about us”—advice that was literally followed four centuries later by Hitler, Goering and Himmler.
William L. Shirer (The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany)
1. Bangladesh.... In 1971 ... Kissinger overrode all advice in order to support the Pakistani generals in both their civilian massacre policy in East Bengal and their armed attack on India from West Pakistan.... This led to a moral and political catastrophe the effects of which are still sorely felt. Kissinger’s undisclosed reason for the ‘tilt’ was the supposed but never materialised ‘brokerage’ offered by the dictator Yahya Khan in the course of secret diplomacy between Nixon and China.... Of the new state of Bangladesh, Kissinger remarked coldly that it was ‘a basket case’ before turning his unsolicited expertise elsewhere. 2. Chile.... Kissinger had direct personal knowledge of the CIA’s plan to kidnap and murder General René Schneider, the head of the Chilean Armed Forces ... who refused to countenance military intervention in politics. In his hatred for the Allende Government, Kissinger even outdid Richard Helms ... who warned him that a coup in such a stable democracy would be hard to procure. The murder of Schneider nonetheless went ahead, at Kissinger’s urging and with American financing, just between Allende’s election and his confirmation.... This was one of the relatively few times that Mr Kissinger (his success in getting people to call him ‘Doctor’ is greater than that of most PhDs) involved himself in the assassination of a single named individual rather than the slaughter of anonymous thousands. His jocular remark on this occasion—‘I don’t see why we have to let a country go Marxist just because its people are irresponsible’—suggests he may have been having the best of times.... 3. Cyprus.... Kissinger approved of the preparations by Greek Cypriot fascists for the murder of President Makarios, and sanctioned the coup which tried to extend the rule of the Athens junta (a favoured client of his) to the island. When despite great waste of life this coup failed in its objective, which was also Kissinger’s, of enforced partition, Kissinger promiscuously switched sides to support an even bloodier intervention by Turkey. Thomas Boyatt ... went to Kissinger in advance of the anti-Makarios putsch and warned him that it could lead to a civil war. ‘Spare me the civics lecture,’ replied Kissinger, who as you can readily see had an aphorism for all occasions. 4. Kurdistan. Having endorsed the covert policy of supporting a Kurdish revolt in northern Iraq between 1974 and 1975, with ‘deniable’ assistance also provided by Israel and the Shah of Iran, Kissinger made it plain to his subordinates that the Kurds were not to be allowed to win, but were to be employed for their nuisance value alone. They were not to be told that this was the case, but soon found out when the Shah and Saddam Hussein composed their differences, and American aid to Kurdistan was cut off. Hardened CIA hands went to Kissinger ... for an aid programme for the many thousands of Kurdish refugees who were thus abruptly created.... The apercu of the day was: ‘foreign policy should not he confused with missionary work.’ Saddam Hussein heartily concurred. 5. East Timor. The day after Kissinger left Djakarta in 1975, the Armed Forces of Indonesia employed American weapons to invade and subjugate the independent former Portuguese colony of East Timor. Isaacson gives a figure of 100,000 deaths resulting from the occupation, or one-seventh of the population, and there are good judges who put this estimate on the low side. Kissinger was furious when news of his own collusion was leaked, because as well as breaking international law the Indonesians were also violating an agreement with the United States.... Monroe Leigh ... pointed out this awkward latter fact. Kissinger snapped: ‘The Israelis when they go into Lebanon—when was the last time we protested that?’ A good question, even if it did not and does not lie especially well in his mouth. It goes on and on and on until one cannot eat enough to vomit enough.
Christopher Hitchens
If life is a movie most people would consider themselves the star of their own feature. Guys might imagine they're living some action adventure epic. Chicks maybe are in a rose-colored fantasy romance. And homosexuals are living la vida loca in a fabulous musical. Still others may take the indie approach and think of themselves as an anti-hero in a coming of age flick. Or a retro badass in an exploitation B movie. Or the cable man in a very steamy adult picture. Some people's lives are experimental student art films that don't make any sense. Some are screwball comedies. Others resemble a documentary, all serious and educational. A few lives achieve blockbuster status and are hailed as a tribute to the human spirit. Some gain a small following and enjoy cult status. And some never got off the ground due to insufficient funding. I don't know what my life is but I do know that I'm constantly squabbling with the director over creative control, throwing prima donna tantrums and pouting in my personal trailor when things don't go my way. Much of our lives is spent on marketing. Make-up, exercise, dieting, clothes, hair, money, charm, attitude, the strut, the pose, the Blue Steel look. We're like walking billboards advertising ourselves. A sneak peek of upcoming attractions. Meanwhile our actual production is in disarray--we're over budget, doing poorly at private test screenings and focus groups, creatively stagnant, morale low. So we're endlessly tinkering, touching up, editing, rewriting, tailoring ourselves to best suit a mass audience. There's like this studio executive in our heads telling us to cut certain things out, make it "lighter," give it a happy ending, and put some explosions in there too. Kids love explosions. And the uncompromising artist within protests: "But that's not life!" Thus the inner conflict of our movie life: To be a palatable crowd-pleaser catering to the mainstream... or something true to life no matter what they say?
Tatsuya Ishida
My mama told me to be careful and not get into trouble. I got in trouble, but it was good trouble. John Lewis Dedication in Anarchist, Republican... Assassin
Jeffrey Rasley (Anarchist, Republican... Assassin: a political novel)
So, regardless of the outcome, Bialy will be pissing off some segment of his voters. If a grand jury fails to indict or indicts Jones and Bialy fails to secure his conviction; civil rights protests are likely in an already divided Wayne County. If Bialy secures a conviction, he becomes anti-cop or anti-law and order. It’s a classic lose-lose situation.
Mark M. Bello (Betrayal In Black (Zachary Blake Legal Thriller, #4))
I once heard of a class teacher who’d punish every student wearing a blue shirt whenever a student wearing blue shirt had committed a mistake. I thought that was pretty bad. I then heard of a class teacher who’d punish every student wearing a blue shirt whenever someone in blue shirt committed a mistake somewhere else. Clearly, the worst is not a reality.
Pawan Mishra
To begin with, we have to be more clear about what we mean by patriotic feelings. For a time when I was in high school, I cheered for the school athletic teams. That's a form of patriotism — group loyalty. It can take pernicious forms, but in itself it can be quite harmless, maybe even positive. At the national level, what "patriotism" means depends on how we view the society. Those with deep totalitarian commitments identify the state with the society, its people, and its culture. Therefore those who criticized the policies of the Kremlin under Stalin were condemned as "anti-Soviet" or "hating Russia". For their counterparts in the West, those who criticize the policies of the US government are "anti-American" and "hate America"; those are the standard terms used by intellectual opinion, including left-liberal segments, so deeply committed to their totalitarian instincts that they cannot even recognize them, let alone understand their disgraceful history, tracing to the origins of recorded history in interesting ways. For the totalitarian, "patriotism" means support for the state and its policies, perhaps with twitters of protest on grounds that they might fail or cost us too much. For those whose instincts are democratic rather than totalitarian, "patriotism" means commitment to the welfare and improvement of the society, its people, its culture. That's a natural sentiment and one that can be quite positive. It's one all serious activists share, I presume; otherwise why take the trouble to do what we do? But the kind of "patriotism" fostered by totalitarian societies and military dictatorships, and internalized as second nature by much of intellectual opinion in more free societies, is one of the worst maladies of human history, and will probably do us all in before too long. With regard to the US, I think we find a mix. Every effort is made by power and doctrinal systems to stir up the more dangerous and destructive forms of "patriotism"; every effort is made by people committed to peace and justice to organize and encourage the beneficial kinds. It's a constant struggle. When people are frightened, the more dangerous kinds tend to emerge, and people huddle under the wings of power. Whatever the reasons may be, by comparative standards the US has been a very frightened country for a long time, on many dimensions. Quite commonly in history, such fears have been fanned by unscrupulous leaders, seeking to implement their own agendas. These are commonly harmful to the general population, which has to be disciplined in some manner: the classic device is to stimulate fear of awesome enemies concocted for the purpose, usually with some shreds of realism, required even for the most vulgar forms of propaganda. Germany was the pride of Western civilization 70 years ago, but most Germans were whipped to presumably genuine fear of the Czech dagger pointed at the heart of Germany (is that crazier than the Nicaraguan or Grenadan dagger pointed at the heart of the US, conjured up by the people now playing the same game today?), the Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy aimed at destroying the Aryan race and the civilization that Germany had inherited from Greece, etc. That's only the beginning. A lot is at stake.
Noam Chomsky
From time to time our national history has been marred by forgetfulness of the Jeffersonian principle that restraint is at the heart of liberty. In 1789 the Federalists adopted Alien and Sedition Acts in a shabby political effort to isolate the Republic from the world and to punish political criticism as seditious libel. In 1865 the Radical Republicans sought to snare private conscience in a web of oaths and affirmations of loyalty. Spokesmen for the South did service for the Nation in resisting the petty tyranny of distrustful vengeance. In the 1920's the Attorney General of the United States degraded his office by hunting political radicals as if they were Salem witches. The Nation's only gain from his efforts were the classic dissents of Holmes and Brandeis. In our own times, the old blunt instruments have again been put to work. The States have followed in the footsteps of the Federalists and have put Alien and Sedition Acts upon their statute books. An epidemic of loyalty oaths has spread across the Nation until no town or village seems to feel secure until its servants have purged themselves of all suspicion of non-conformity by swearing to their political cleanliness. Those who love the twilight speak as if public education must be training in conformity, and government support of science be public aid of caution. We have also seen a sharpening and refinement of abusive power. The legislative investigation, designed and often exercised for the achievement of high ends, has too frequently been used by the Nation and the States as a means for effecting the disgrace and degradation of private persons. Unscrupulous demagogues have used the power to investigate as tyrants of an earlier day used the bill of attainder. The architects of fear have converted a wholesome law against conspiracy into an instrument for making association a crime. Pretending to fear government they have asked government to outlaw private protest. They glorify "togetherness" when it is theirs, and call it conspiracy when it is that of others. In listing these abuses I do not mean to condemn our central effort to protect the Nation's security. The dangers that surround us have been very great, and many of our measures of vigilance have ample justification. Yet there are few among us who do not share a portion of the blame for not recognizing soon enough the dark tendency towards excess of caution.
John F. Kennedy
It was V-day and I was stuck at home while the guy I was dating was at an Anti-Valentine’s Day party. How wrong was that? It was one thing to be totally alone on V-day, but another to want to be with someone who would rather spend the evening protesting love instead of making it.
Kate Madison (Spilled Perfume: A Memoir (Spilled Perfume #1))
Christians best thrive as a minority, a counterculture. Historically, when they reach a majority they too have yielded to the temptations of power in ways that are clearly anti-gospel. Charlemagne ordered a death penalty for all Saxons who would not convert, and in 1492 Spain decreed that all Jews convert to Christianity or be expelled. British Protestants in Ireland once imposed a stiff fine on anyone who did not attend church and deputies forcibly dragged Catholics into Protestant churches. Priests in the American West sometimes chained Indians to church pews to enforce church attendance. After many such episodes in Christendom it became clear that religion allied too closely to the state leads to the abuse of power. Much of the current hostility against Christians evokes the memory of such examples. The blending of church and state may work for a time but it inevitably provokes a backlash, such as that seen in secular Europe today.
Philip Yancey (Vanishing Grace: What Ever Happened to the Good News?)
In the name of Christ, Protestant pastors belong to fascist groups. In the name of Christ, Catholic bishops sympathise with the aims of neo-Nazis. As a Christian, it is possible to be either a loyal communist, or a fanatical anti-communist. As a Christian, it is possible to preach pacifism or to give one's blessing to the production and the use of the atomic bomb.
Joachim Kahl (The misery of Christianity: or, A plea for a humanity without God; (Pelican books))
As the Protestants celebrate a goal, they're egged on by the team captain, a long-haired Italian called Lorenzo Amoruso, who has the look of a 1980s male model. Flailing his arms, he urges them to sing their anti-Catholic songs louder. The irony is obvious: Amoruso is a Catholic. For that matter, so are most of the Rangers players. Since the late nineties, Rangers routinely field nearly as many Catholics as Celtic. Their players come from Georgia, Argentina, Germany, Sweden, Portugal and Holland, because money can buy no better ones. Championships mean more than religious purity.
Franklin Foer (How Soccer Explains the World)
Through Jimi Hendrix's music you can almost see the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and of Martin Luther King Junior, the beginnings of the Berlin Wall, Yuri Gagarin in space, Fidel Castro and Cuba, the debut of Spiderman, Martin Luther King Junior’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, Ford Mustang cars, anti-Vietnam protests, Mary Quant designing the mini-skirt, Indira Gandhi becoming the Prime Minister of India, four black students sitting down at a whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro North Carolina, President Johnson pushing the Civil Rights Act, flower children growing their hair long and practicing free love, USA-funded IRA blowing up innocent civilians on the streets and in the pubs of Great Britain, Napalm bombs being dropped on the lush and carpeted fields of Vietnam, a youth-driven cultural revolution in Swinging London, police using tear gas and billy-clubs to break up protests in Chicago, Mods and Rockers battling on Brighton Beach, Native Americans given the right to vote in their own country, the United Kingdom abolishing the death penalty, and the charismatic Argentinean Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara. It’s all in Jimi’s absurd and delirious guitar riffs.
Karl Wiggins (Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe)
The older America, until the 1890s and in some respects until 1914, was wrapped in the security of continental isolation, village society, the Protestant denominations, and a flourishing industrial capitalism. But reluctantly, year by year, over several decades, it has been drawn into the twentieth century and forced to cope with its unpleasant realities: first the incursions of cosmopolitanism and skepticism, then the disappearance of American isolation and easy military security, the collapse of traditional capitalism and its supplementation by a centralized welfare state, finally the unrelenting costs and stringencies of the Second World War, the Korean War, and the cold war. As a consequence, the heartland of America, filled with people who are often fundamentalist in religion, nativist in prejudice, isolationist in foreign policy, and conservative in economics, has constantly rumbled with an underground revolt against all these tormenting manifestations of our modern predicament.
Richard Hofstadter
If a determined, disciplined gang of statists were to make an assault on the crumbling remnants of a mixed economy, boldly and explicitly proclaiming the collectivist tenets which the country had accepted by tacit default—what resistance would they encounter? The dispirited, demoralized, embittered majority would remain lethargically indifferent to any public event. And many would support the gang, at first, moved by a desperate, incoherent frustration, by a need to protest, not knowing fully against what, by a blind desire to strike out somehow at the suffocating hopelessness of the status quo.
Ayn Rand (The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution)
The end of toleration in 1685 left a legacy of bitterness and instability in France, for it failed to destroy the Huguenots, while encouraging an arrogance and exclusiveness within the established Catholic Church. In the great French. Revolution after 1789 this divide was one of the forces encouraging the extraordinary degree of revulsion against Catholic Church institutions, clergy and religious that produced the atrocities of the 1790s; beyond that it created the anticlericalism which has been so characteristic of the left in the politics of modern southern Europe. In the history of modern France, it is striking how the areas in the south that after 1572 formed the Protestant heartlands continued to form the backbone of anti-clerical, anti-monarchical voters for successive Republics, and even in the late twentieth century they were still delivering a reliable vote for French Socialism.
Diarmaid MacCulloch (The Reformation)
Some books about the Holocaust are more difficult to read than others. Some books about the Holocaust are nearly impossible to read. Not because one does not understand the language and concepts in the books, not because they are gory or graphic, but because such books are confrontational. They compel us to “think again,” or to think for the first time, about issues and questions we might rather avoid. Gabriel Wilensky’s book, Six Million Crucifixions: How Christian Antisemitism Paved the Road to the Holocaust is one book I found difficult, almost impossible to read. Why? Because I had to confront the terrible underside of Christian theology, an underside that contributed in no small part to the beliefs and attitudes too many Christians – Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox – had imbibed throughout centuries of anti-Jewish preaching and teaching that “paved the road to the Holocaust.” I cannot say that I “liked” Gabriel Wilensky’s book, Six Million Crucifixions: How Christian Antisemitism Paved the Road to the Holocaust. I didn’t, but I can say it was instructive and forced me to think again about that Jew from Nazareth, Jesus, and about his message of universal love and service – “What you do for the least of my brothers [and sisters], you do for me” (Matthew 25: 40). As Abraham Joshua Heschel once said, the Holocaust did not begin with Auschwitz. The Holocaust began with words. And too many of those hate-filled words had their origin in the Christian Scriptures and were uttered by Christian preachers and teachers, by Christians generally, for nearly two millennia. Is it any wonder so many Christians stood by, even participated in, the destruction of the European Jews during the Nazi era and World War II? I recommend Six Million Crucifixions: How Christian Antisemitism Paved the Road to the Holocaust because all of us Christians – Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox – must think again, or think for the first time, about how to teach and preach the Christian Scriptures – the “New Testament” writings – in such a way that the words we utter, the attitudes we encourage, do not demean, disrespect, or disregard our Jewish brothers and sisters, that our words do not demean, disrespect, or disregard Judaism. I hope the challenge is not an impossible one.
Carol Rittner
But this anti-war protest, is far from a success; it is just a placebo for the people. These peacemakers feel so satisfied, gratified; gay-gallant-and-gleeful. But they do not achieve anything acceptable, perceptible; or peaceful.
Joss Sheldon ('Involution & Evolution': A rhyming anti-war novel)
Isn't [Caffe Nero] a bit 'commercial' for an anti-establishment rock star like yourself?" He dropped my hand and dug into his pocket. "But I've got a loyalty card," he protested. "And I've got enough stamps to get you a free coffee.
Holly Bourne (Soulmates)
As but one example, the title of this book comes from a 1968 article that appeared in the prestigious Archives of General Psychiatry, in which psychiatrists Walter Bromberg and Frank Simon described schizophrenia as a “protest psychosis” whereby black men developed “hostile and aggressive feelings” and “delusional anti-whiteness” after listening to the words of Malcolm X, joining the Black Muslims, or aligning with groups that preached militant resistance to white society. According to the authors, the men required psychiatric treatment because their symptoms threatened not only their own sanity, but the social order of white America. Bromberg and Simon argued that black men who “espoused African or Islamic” ideologies, adopted “Islamic names” that were changed in such a way so as to deny “the previous Anglicization of their names” in fact demonstrated a “delusional anti-whiteness” that manifest as “paranoid projections of the Negroes to the Caucasian group.”10
Jonathan M. Metzl (The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease)
Individual abortion providers have been picketed at home and have received harassing mail and phone calls. Their family members have been followed where they work, their children have been protested at school, and their neighbors’ privacy has been invaded.
David S. Cohen (Living in the Crosshairs: The Untold Stories of Anti-Abortion Terrorism)
You know what? Who cares what normal is, Simone. Let's protest. From now on we're the anti-normal, anti-average, anti-standard. You can eat when you want to, I'll wear what I want, and we'll die with a packet of chips in our hand and a tablecloth on our head.
Randa Abdel-Fattah (Does My Head Look Big In This?)
...The coarse rhetoric and reduction of women to violently empty reproductive organs isn't a great way to argue against Trump's vulgarity. The unhinged rhetoric, violent anti-speech street protests,and hysteria currently on display don't make Trump look like he's a unique threat.
Mollie Hemingway
To submit to the authority of Scripture is to submit to its king and the gospel word of its king. It is to repent, believe, and be saved. As such, “the church” can be alive and well on planet earth even though no ecclesial authority recognizes it as such. People hear the Word of God, repent, trust, and so become “the church” (see Rom 10:17). The Word precedes the church. Theologian Christoph Schwöbel observes, “As the creature of the divine Word the Church is constituted by divine action.”689 God’s Word creates God’s people.690 This is a bedrock principle of Protestant ecclesiology.
Mark Dever (Baptist Foundations: Church Government for an Anti-Institutional Age)
I have, personally, the greatest respect for sincere religionists, but none whatsoever for professional racketeers in religion, nor for those who use religion as an anti-labor, anti-Semitic, anti-Negro, anti-democratic weapon for thwarting the progress of the common man or minorities among them.
Langston Hughes (Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings)
Believers are supposed to hold that the pope is the vicar of Christ on earth, and the keeper of the keys of Saint Peter. They are of course free to believe this, and to believe that god decides when to end the tenure of one pope or (more important) to inaugurate the tenure of another. This would involve believing in the death of an anti-Nazi pope, and the accession of a pro-Nazi one, as a matter of divine will, a few months before Hitler’s invasion of Poland and the opening of the Second World War. Studying that war, one can perhaps accept that 25 percent of the SS were practicing Catholics and that no Catholic was ever even threatened with excommunication for participating in war crimes. (Joseph Goebbels was excommunicated, but that was earlier on, and he had after all brought it on himself for the offense of marrying a Protestant.) Human beings and institutions are imperfect, to be sure. But there could be no clearer or more vivid proof that holy institutions are man-made.
Christopher Hitchens (God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything)
The result was a double disaster. The Chinese delegates refused to sign the final treaty, and left Paris in high dudgeon. When the news reached China, anti-Western and anti-Japanese riots exploded across the country. On May 4, some five thousand Chinese students stormed into Tiananmen Square in Peking to protest the Treaty of Versailles.
Arthur Herman (1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder)
We would gladly have listened to her (they said) if only she had spoken like a lady. But they are liars and the truth is not in them. Shrill… vituperative… no concern for the future of society… maunderings of antiquated feminism… selfish femlib… needs a good lay… this shapeless book… of course a calm and objective discussion is beyond… twisted, neurotic… some truth buried in a largely hysterical… of very limited interest, I should… another tract for the trash-can… burned her bra and thought that… no characterization, no plot… really important issues are neglected while… hermetically sealed… women's limited experience… another of the screaming sisterhood… a not very appealing aggressiveness… could have been done with wit if the author had… deflowering the pretentious male… a man would have given his right arm to… hardly girlish… a woman's book… another shrill polemic which the… a mere male like myself can hardly… a brilliant but basically confused study of feminine hysteria which… feminine lack of objectivity… this pretense at a novel… trying to shock… the tired tricks of the anti-novelists… how often must a poor critic have to… the usual boring obligatory references to Lesbianism… denial of the profound sexual polarity which… an all too womanly refusal to face facts… pseudo-masculine brusqueness… the ladies'-magazine level… trivial topics like housework and the predictable screams of… those who cuddled up to ball-breaker Kate will… unfortunately sexless in its outlook… drivel… a warped clinical protest against… violently waspish attack… formidable self-pity which erodes any chance of… formless… the inability to accept the female role which… the predictable fury at anatomy displaced to… without the grace and compassion which we have the right to expect… anatomy is destiny… destiny is anatomy… sharp and funny but without real weight or anything beyond a topical… just plain bad… we "dear ladies," whom Russ would do away with, unfortunately just don't feel… ephemeral trash, missiles of the sex war… a female lack of experience which… Q. E. D. Quod erat demonstrandum. It has been proved.
Joanna Russ (The Female Man)
All of anarchism, libertarianism, and anti-Statism can be traced back to the rise of Protestantism. The USA - founded by Protestants (often extremist Protestants expelled from their own countries) is where the love of the individual and hatred of the collective is practically written into its Constitution, which is extremely Protestant in its character.
Steve Madison (The Quality Agenda: The Search for Excellence)
That evening there were police outside the building in which I spoke, and in the air the rising tension of race that is peculiar to the South. It had been rumored that some of the local citizenry were saying that I should be run out of town, and that one of the sheriffs agreed, saying, "Sure, he ought to be run out! It's bad enough to call Christ a bastard. But when he calls him a nigger, he's gone too far!"... ...Nevertheless, I remember with pleasure the courtesy and kindness of many of the students and faculty at Chapel Hill and their lack of agreement with the anti-Negro elements of the town. There I began to learn at the University of North Carolina how hard it is to be a white liberal in the South.
Langston Hughes (Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings)
This desperate act was inevitable. This act is a direct result of the oppression, both political and economic, imposed by our government. You crush hope. Yes, you! You destroy opportunity. You eradicate dignity. You do all that so you may maintain your filthy bigoted anti-democratic society. You leave the rest of us no choice. We are not allowed to protest.
Peter F. Hamilton (The Abyss Beyond Dreams (Commonwealth: Chronicle of the Fallers, #1))
It could only have been strange for Arthur—an American Jew who had experienced anti-Semitism firsthand, who, as a student, had protested against the rise of Hitler, whose family loathed the Germans just as ardently, and probably more so, than other Americans did—to listen to Marietta’s story. But then, until recently, Arthur himself had worked for a German-owned company, Schering.
Patrick Radden Keefe (Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty)
One of the most catastrophic wars of European history was the notorious Thirty Years’ War. It was fought between Catholics and Protestants over an incredible thirty years of organized butchery, violence, and destruction to decide one outcome: Who will monopolize control of all religious and political institutions in Europe, the anti-Catholic Protestants or the anti-Protestant Catholics? Prof.
Jay Snelson (Taming the Violence of Faith: Win-Win Solutions for Our World in Crisis)
Before Mags became a household name across Scotland, it was during the mid Nineties when she became an avid anti-paedophile campaigner against paedophiles on the Raploch Estate, attracting media attention, even appearing on Robert Kilroy-Silk’s morning TV show. At the height of her anti-paedophilic crusade, she led a howling mob of protesters to a hostel near her home where a known paedophile was staying.
Stephen Richards (Scottish Hard Bastards)
It is never lost on me that the women in the waiting room have had to walk past these protesters, too. Even if they were escorted to the door by a cheerful young pro-choice activist with bright pink hair who carries a protective rainbow umbrella, they’ve heard the vitriol—different from the insults hurled at me, but no less offensive. “Think twice!” “Don’t murder your baby!” The antis shout these things, as if these women had not minds of their own. As if their decision fails to merit respect. As if they were not, as most of them are, adults exercising a legal right to make a private health-care decision for themselves. (Imagine, if you will, these verbal assaults being hurled at any other person for having made any other consequential health-care choice: the decision to pursue a potentially fatal course of chemotherapy, for example. “Don’t risk your life! Suicide!”)
Willie Parker (Life's Work: A Moral Argument for Choice)
We have to renounce the dream or hope that, at some point, feminism, anti-racism, LGBT+ struggles, protection of minorities, worker’s struggles, freedom of expression struggles, hate-speech opponents, freedom of information efforts, etc., will join into one big Movement in which trans-feminists will march together with Muslim women, in which students who feel their intellectual freedom is constrained protest with workers whose wages don’t allow them to survive.
Slavoj Žižek (Heaven in Disorder)
Syria, the March 2011 arrest and torture of fifteen schoolboys who had sprayed anti-government graffiti on city walls set off major protests against the Alawite Shiite–dominated regime of President Bashar al-Assad in many of the country’s predominantly Sunni communities. After tear gas, water cannons, beatings, and mass arrests failed to quell the demonstrations, Assad’s security forces went on to launch full-scale military operations across several cities, complete with live fire, tanks, and house-to-house searches.
Barack Obama (A Promised Land)
A staff member tells me that one of the female picketers has come in when the men were not around, had an abortion, and gone back to picket the next day. This sounds surrealistic to me—but not to the staff member. She explains that women in such anti-abortion groups are more likely to be deprived of birth control and so to need an abortion. They then feel guilty—and picket even more. This restriction on birth control may also explain why studies have long shown that Catholic women in general are more likely to have an abortion than are their Protestant counterparts.
Gloria Steinem (My Life on the Road)
Scholars have protested that the engraver was merely incompetent. “Droeshout’s deficiencies are, alas, only too gross,” sighed Professor Samuel Schoenbaum. But it is hard to believe that a professionally commissioned artist would be so inept as to accidentally make two left arms, two right eyes, a huge head, and all of the other alleged deformities. The First Folio was an expensive undertaking, several years in the making. The anti-theatrical puritan William Prynne complained that “Shakespeare’s plays are printed in the best crown paper, far better than most bibles.
Elizabeth Winkler (Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature)
Funny that the people who aren’t doing the fighting are the most tired of it,” Evan said. “We never knew anything about people being sick of it, or protests, or people thinking we were the bad guys. All our news was censored. We thought everyone would be proud of us, like they are of our dads. We were out there, putting everything on the line every day because that’s what our country told us to do, under conditions that would make a saint afraid to look God in the face, and we were doing our best. I knew there were a few anti-war protests before I left, but I never expected it to be like this…
Sabrina Fedel (Leaving Kent State)
Pašić dealt intelligently with this delicate situation. He made personal overtures to individual conspirators with a view to disrupting the formation of an anti-government coalition. Despite protests from Radical Party colleagues, he backed a generous funding package for the army that made up some of the ground lost since the departure of King Father Milan; he publicly acknowledged the legitimacy of the coup of 1903 (a matter of great symbolic importance to the conspirators) and opposed efforts to bring the regicides to trial. At the same time, however, he worked steadily towards curtailing their presence in public life.
Christopher Clark (The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914)
The Irish recruits who poured into the army in 1846 were already accustomed to the realities of antebellum American nativism. The country had been rocked by anti-Catholic riots even before the famine produced new waves of Irish immigrants; in Boston, Protestant mobs had burned a convent in 1834, and Philadelphia had seen mob attacks on Irishmen ten years later. So the recent immigrants who enlisted for war with Mexico weren’t surprised to encounter nativists in the army. They were very much surprised, though, by the intensity of the anti-Irish sentiment they faced from their officers—a social sentiment that was expressed through official discipline.
Chris Bray (Court-Martial: How Military Justice Has Shaped America from the Revolution to 9/11 and Beyond)
Having eviscerated the legitimate practice of pedestrian stops, the anti-cop brigades set their sights on Broken Windows policing. Leading the charge is Alex Vitale, a Brooklyn College sociologist. Members of the New York City Council and a preposterously named protest group called “New Yorkers Against Bratton” are close on his heels. Naturally, Vitale plays the race card, following other anti–Broken Windows academics (such as Bernard Harcourt, now at Columbia Law School). According to Vitale, the NYPD disproportionately and unjustifiably targets minority neighborhoods for misdemeanor enforcement, resulting in the “over-policing” of “communities of color.
Heather Mac Donald (The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe)
Consider the Holocaust: the anti-Semitism that built the Nazi death camps was a direct inheritance from medieval Christianity. For centuries, Christian Europeans had viewed the Jews as the worst species of heretics and attributed every societal ill to their continued presence among the faithful. While the hatred of Jews in Germany expressed itself in a predominately secular way, its roots were religious, and the explicitly religious demonization of the Jews of Europe continued throughout the period. The Vatican itself perpetuated the blood libel in its newspapers as late as 1914.*3 And both Catholic and Protestant churches have a shameful record of complicity with the Nazi genocide. Auschwitz,
Sam Harris (Letter to a Christian Nation)
If you are at a protest and you choose to take pictures or record video of people doing illegal things, you may end up putting that person in jail. That is, because you disapproved of someone's behavior, because you thought it was "violent" toward inanimate objects, or because you thought it might hurt the movement, you are choosing to assist the state in sending that living, breathing person to one fo the most violence places in the world, for the *express purpose* of destroying the movement. Even if you're right about the ethics or efficacy of property destruction--and I don't think you are--that is totally, utterly unconscionable, and it is far more violent and counter to the cause of justice than smashing a window ever could be.
Shareef Ali
When police arrested a New York bus driver for running down a schoolgirl in a crosswalk… the New York Daily News decried what it saw as mistreatment of one of the city’s bus drivers. The head of the transit union protested this enforcement of the city’s new Right of Way Law as “outrageous, illogical and anti-worker” while branding the head of a city street safety advocacy group “a progressive intellectual jackass.” The same union previously launched a work slowdown when another bus driver faced sanctions for killing a seventy-eight-year-old woman in a crosswalk in December 2014. All this occurred because police sought to enforce _misdemeanor_ charges in cases of pedestrians who were run over in crosswalks where they had the clear right of way.
Edward Humes (Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation)
More politically, Medusa has become shorthand for a particular brand of strong female agency perceived as aggressive or ‘unladylike’. Marie Antoinette was depicted with snake-like hair in French seventeenth-century cartoons, while in the early twentieth century, anti-suffragette postcards likened the protesters to the monster. During the 2016 American election campaign, the image of Hillary Clinton’s snake-bedecked, raging head being cut off by her Republican rival Donald Trump – compared to Perseus – appeared on unofficial merchandise. Similarly, another strong female leader, German chancellor Angela Merkel, has found herself depicted as a Gorgon. These portrayals reinforce a millennia-old message from men to women: keep your mouth shut or we’ll shut it for you.
Kate Hodges (Warriors, Witches, Women: Mythology's Fiercest Females)
What happens to a highbrow literary culture when its fault lines-along caste, class and gender-are brutally exposed? What happens to the young iconoclasts who dare to speak and write about these issues openly? Is there such a thing as a happy ending for revolutionaries? Or are they doomed to be forever relegated to the footnotes of history? This is the never-before-told true story of the Hungry Generation (or 'the Hungryalists')-a group of barnstorming, anti-establishment poets, writers and artists in Bengal in the 1960s. Braving social boycott, ridicule and arrests, the Hungryalists changed the literary landscape of Bengal (and many South Asian countries) forever. Along the way, they also influenced iconic poets, such as Allen Ginsberg, who struck up a lifelong friendship with the Hungryalists.
Maitreyee Bhattacharjee Chowdhury (The Hungryalists)
When Richmond’s Tredegar Iron Works placed enslaved Blacks in skilled positions to cut labor costs, White workers protested. In the only protracted urban industrial strike in the pre–Civil War South, they demanded pay raises and the removal of “the negroes” from skilled work. If the striking ironworkers thought enslavers really cared more about racism than profit, or that they would not abandon, out of self-interest, their promotions of a unified White masculinity, then they were in for a long and tortured lesson about power and profit and propaganda. Richmond elites banded together. They viewed the anti-Black strikers as being equivalent to abolitionists because they were trying to prevent them “from making use of slave labor,” as the local newspaper cried. In the end, the White strikers were fired.22
Ibram X. Kendi (Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America)
The English took their anti-Catholicism seriously. Catholics kept sneaking back onto the throne, so they passed laws that the monarch could not “professe the Popish religion” or “marry a Papist”. In Ireland, Catholics were barred from holding public office and fined for not attending Anglican services. Irish Catholics could not own firearms or horses worth more than £5 and were forbidden from taking custody of orphans, to protect vulnerable youth from the taint of Papism. When a Protestant landowner died, his land passed to his eldest son: when a Catholic died, the Popery Act required his land to be split among his sons, breaking up the great Catholic estates. The law also required that Catholic churches be made from wood, so that they could be burned down more easily when the local Catholics misbehaved.
David Hunt (Girt (The Unauthorised History of Australia #1))
Moshe Dayan’s closing remarks to the students in Haifa in 1969 echo what Ehud Barak told his audience in 2010. Forty years ago, Dayan – the man who, I was told as a teenager, was “the one-eyed Dajaal,” or Antichrist – uttered words of wisdom that have gone unheeded. “We have to supply the people [Palestinians] with employment and services, give them civil rights, and not treat them as enemies. The question is: What are we aiming for? Shall we be an occupying power, keeping the Arabs as an oppressed population of second- and third-class citizens and tell them: ‘You won’t do this, you won’t do that, you won’t study at the university, and if you protest, we shall impose curfew?’ Or should we aim at a common life, with Jews learning to live together with Arabs? If so, we have to be neighbours, and not conquerors.”16
Tarek Fatah (The Jew is Not My Enemy: Unveiling the Myths that Fuel Muslim Anti-Semitism)
With effort, he concentrated on an editorial. It told of widespread industrial unrest in the Midlands and asserted that it was imperative to pay a fair wage for a fair day’s work. Another article lamented that the huge industrial machine of England was operating at only half capacity and cried that greater new markets must be found for the productive wealth it could spew forth; more production meant cheaper goods, increased employment, higher wages. There were news articles that told of tension and war clouds over France and Spain because of the succession to the Spanish throne; Prussia was spreading its tentacles into all the German states to dominate them and a Franco-Prussian confrontation was imminent; there were war clouds over Russia and the Hapsburg Holy Roman Empire; war clouds over the Italian States that wished to throw out the upstart French King of Naples and join together or not to join together, and the Pope, French-supported, was involved in the political arena; there were war clouds over South Africa because the Boers – who had over the last four years trekked out of the Cape Colony to established the Transvaal and the Orange Free State – were now threatening the English colony of Natal and war was expected by the next mail; there were anti-Semitic riots and pogroms throughout Europe; Catholic were fighting against Protestants, Mohammedans against Hindus, against Catholics, against Protestants, and they fighting among themselves; there were Red Indian wars in America, animosity between the Northern and Southern states, animosity between America and Britain over Canada, trouble in Ireland, Sweden, Finland, India, Egypt, the Balkans  . . . ‘Does na matter what you read!’ Struan exploded to no one in particular. ‘The whole world’s mad, by God!
James Clavell (Tai-Pan (Asian Saga, #2))
Doggerel by a Senior Citizen (for Robert Lederer) Our earth in 1969 Is not the planet I call mine, The world, I mean, that gives me strength To hold off chaos at arm’s length. My Eden landscapes and their climes Are constructs from Edwardian times, When bath-rooms took up lots of space, And, before eating, one said Grace. The automobile, the aeroplane, Are useful gadgets, but profane: The enginry of which I dream Is moved by water or by steam. Reason requires that I approve The light-bulb which I cannot love: To me more reverence-commanding A fish-tail burner on the landing. My family ghosts I fought and routed, Their values, though, I never doubted: I thought the Protestant Work-Ethic Both practical and sympathetic. When couples played or sang duets, It was immoral to have debts: I shall continue till I die To pay in cash for what I buy. The Book of Common Prayer we knew Was that of 1662: Though with-it sermons may be well, Liturgical reforms are hell. Sex was of course —it always is— The most enticing of mysteries, But news-stands did not then supply Manichean pornography. Then Speech was mannerly, an Art, Like learning not to belch or fart: I cannot settle which is worse, The Anti-Novel or Free Verse. Nor are those Ph.D’s my kith, Who dig the symbol and the myth: I count myself a man of letters Who writes, or hopes to, for his betters. Dare any call Permissiveness An educational success? Saner those class-rooms which I sat in, Compelled to study Greek and Latin. Though I suspect the term is crap, There is a Generation Gap, Who is to blame? Those, old or young, Who will not learn their Mother-Tongue. But Love, at least, is not a state Either en vogue or out-of-date, And I’ve true friends, I will allow, To talk and eat with here and now. Me alienated? Bosh! It’s just As a sworn citizen who must Skirmish with it that I feel Most at home with what is Real.
W.H. Auden
Europe’s war against debtor countries was turning into class war, which always ends up being waged on the political battlefield. One financial analyst noted that the money raised for putting up islands and public buildings, ports and the water system for sale “will barely put a dint in Greece’s now-unpayable public debt.” Creditors simply hoped to take as much as they could, in the absence of public protests to stop the selloffs. That is why bankers resort to anti-democratic methods in opposing any political power independent of creditor interests. The aim is to centralize financial policy in the hands of “technocrats” drawn from the banking sector – not only Lucas Papademos in Greece, but also Mario Monti in Italy almost simultaneously (as described in the next chapter). The fear is that democratically elected officials will act “irresponsibly,” that is, in the interests of the economy at large rather than catering to the demands of banks and bondholders. The
Michael Hudson (Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy)
Christians like yourself invariably declare that monsters like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, and Kim Il Sung spring from the womb of atheism. ... The problem with such tyrants is not that they reject the dogma of religion, but that they embrace other life-destroying myths. Most become the center of a quasi-religious personality cult, requiring the continual use of propaganda for its maintenance. There is a difference between propaganda and the honest dissemination of information that we (generally) expect from a liberal democracy. ... Consider the Holocaust: the anti-Semitism that built the Nazi death camps was a direct inheritance from medieval Christianity. For centuries, Christian Europeans had viewed the Jews as the worst species of heretics and attributed every societal ill to their continued presence among the faithful. While the hatred of Jews in Germany expressed itself in a predominately secular way, its roots were religious, and the explicitly religious demonization of the Jews of Europe continued throughout the period. The Vatican itself perpetuated the blood libel in its newspapers as late as 1914. And both Catholic and Protestant churches have a shameful record of complicity with the Nazi genocide. Auschwitz, the Soviet gulags, and the killing fields of Cambodia are not examples of what happens to people when they become too reasonable. To the contrary, these horrors testify to the dangers of political and racial dogmatism. It is time that Christians like yourself stop pretending that a rational rejection of your faith entails the blind embrace of atheism as a dogma. One need not accept anything on insufficient evidence to find the virgin birth of Jesus to be a preposterous idea. The problem with religion—as with Nazism, Stalinism, or any other totalitarian mythology—is the problem of dogma itself. I know of no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too desirous of evidence in support of their core beliefs.
Sam Harris (Letter to a Christian Nation)
In under two weeks, and with no budget, thousands of college students protested the movie on their campuses nationwide, angry citizens vandalized our billboards in multiple neighborhoods, FoxNews.com ran a front-page story about the backlash, Page Six of the New York Post made their first of many mentions of Tucker, and the Chicago Transit Authority banned and stripped the movie’s advertisements from their buses. To cap it all off, two different editorials railing against the film ran in the Washington Post and Chicago Tribune the week it was released. The outrage about Tucker was great enough that a few years later, it was written into the popular television show Portlandia on IFC. I guess it is safe to admit now that the entire firestorm was, essentially, fake. I designed the advertisements, which I bought and placed around the country, and then promptly called and left anonymous complaints about them (and leaked copies of my complaints to blogs for support). I alerted college LGBT and women’s rights groups to screenings in their area and baited them to protest our offensive movie at the theater, knowing that the nightly news would cover it. I started a boycott group on Facebook. I orchestrated fake tweets and posted fake comments to articles online. I even won a contest for being the first one to send in a picture of a defaced ad in Chicago (thanks for the free T-shirt, Chicago RedEye. Oh, also, that photo was from New York). I manufactured preposterous stories about Tucker’s behavior on and off the movie set and reported them to gossip websites, which gleefully repeated them. I paid for anti-woman ads on feminist websites and anti-religion ads on Christian websites, knowing each would write about it. Sometimes I just Photoshopped ads onto screenshots of websites and got coverage for controversial ads that never actually ran. The loop became final when, for the first time in history, I put out a press release to answer my own manufactured criticism: TUCKER MAX RESPONDS TO CTA DECISION: “BLOW ME,” the headline read.
Ryan Holiday (Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator)
Through the fall, the president’s anger seemed difficult to contain. He threatened North Korea with “fire and fury,” then followed up with a threat to “totally destroy” the country. When neo-Nazis and white supremacists held a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and one of them killed a protester and injured a score of others, he made a brutally offensive statement condemning violence “on many sides … on many sides”—as if there was moral equivalence between those who were fomenting racial hatred and violence and those who were opposing it. He retweeted anti-Muslim propaganda that had been posted by a convicted criminal leader of a British far-right organization. Then as now, the president’s heedless bullying and intolerance of variance—intolerance of any perception not his own—has been nurturing a strain of insanity in public dialogue that has been long in development, a pathology that became only more virulent when it migrated to the internet. A person such as the president can on impulse and with minimal effort inject any sort of falsehood into public conversation through digital media and call his own lie a correction of “fake news.” There are so many news outlets now, and the competition for clicks is so intense, that any sufficiently outrageous statement made online by anyone with even the faintest patina of authority, and sometimes even without it, will be talked about, shared, and reported on, regardless of whether it has a basis in fact. How do you progress as a culture if you set out to destroy any common agreement as to what constitutes a fact? You can’t have conversations. You can’t have debates. You can’t come to conclusions. At the same time, calling out the transgressor has a way of giving more oxygen to the lie. Now it’s a news story, and the lie is being mentioned not just in some website that publishes unattributable gossip but in every reputable newspaper in the country. I have not been looking to start a personal fight with the president. When somebody insults your wife, your instinctive reaction is to want to lash out in response. When you are the acting director, or deputy director, of the FBI, and the person doing the insulting is the chief executive of the United States, your options have guardrails. I read the president’s tweets, but I had an organization to run. A country to help protect. I had to remain independent, neutral, professional, positive, on target. I had to compartmentalize my emotions. Crises taught me how to compartmentalize. Example: the Boston Marathon bombing—watching the video evidence, reviewing videos again and again of people dying, people being mutilated and maimed. I had the primal human response that anyone would have. But I know how to build walls around that response and had to build them then in order to stay focused on finding the bombers. Compared to experiences like that one, getting tweeted about by Donald Trump does not count as a crisis. I do not even know how to think about the fact that the person with time on his hands to tweet about me and my wife is the president of the United States.
Andrew G. McCabe (The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump)
Historian Robert Merton, in his study of the growth of science in 17C England, says yes, arguing for a direct link between Protestant characteristics of methodical, persistent action, empirical utilitarianism, and anti-traditionalism and the development of the scientific method in England.30 An indirect link is also possible. As a matter of theology, Aquinas’s Catholicism is more enthusiastic about the human exercise of autonomy and intellect than Lutheranism or Calvinism. As a matter of psychology, however, Protestantism pervasively affected the day-to-day practice of Christianity in ways that cut its adherents loose from a powerful institution and its attendant rituals. While good Catholics confessed to the priest, did penance under the priest’s instruction, and turned to the Church to tell them what the Bible meant, good Protestants read the Bible for themselves, confessed directly to God, received absolution directly from God, and didn’t do penance at all. In this practical sense, Protestants were more on their own than Catholics were, and it is plausible to see this as an extension of individualism and of a sense of autonomy.
Charles Murray (Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950)
While the Rumanian Radio was serializing (without my permission) How to be an Alien as an anti-British tract, the Central Office of Information rang me up here in London and asked me to allow the book to be translated into Polish for the benefit of those many Polish refugees who were then settling in this country. ‘We want our friends to see us in this light,’ the man said on the telephone. This was hard to bear for my militant and defiant spirit. ‘But it’s not such a favourable light,’ I protested feebly. ‘It’s a very human light and that is the most favourable,’ retorted the official. I was crushed. A few weeks later my drooping spirit was revived when I heard of a suburban bank manager whose wife had brought this book home to him remarking that she had found it fairly amusing. The gentleman in question sat down in front of his open fire, put his feet up and read the book right through with a continually darkening face. When he had finished, he stood up and said: ‘Downright impertinence.’ And threw the book into the fire. He was a noble and patriotic spirit and he did me a great deal of good. I wished there had been more like him in England. But I could never find another.
George Mikes (How to Be a Brit)
In any event, should you doubt that your knowledge of Western history is distorted by the work of these distinguished bigots, consider whether you believe any of the following statements: The Catholic Church motivated and actively participated in nearly two millennia of anti-Semitic violence, justifying it on grounds that the Jews were responsible for the Crucifixion, until the Vatican II Council was shamed into retracting that doctrine in 1965. But, the Church still has not made amends for the fact that Pope Pius XII is rightfully known as “Hitler’s Pope.” Only recently have we become aware of remarkably enlightened Christian gospels, long ago suppressed by narrow-minded Catholic prelates. Once in power as the official church of Rome, Christians quickly and brutally persecuted paganism out of existence. The fall of Rome and the ascendancy of the Church precipitated Europe’s decline into a millennium of ignorance and backwardness. These Dark Ages lasted until the Renaissance/Enlightenment, when secular scholars burst through the centuries of Catholic barriers against reason. Initiated by the pope, the Crusades were but the first bloody chapter in the history of unprovoked and brutal European colonialism. The Spanish Inquisition tortured and murdered huge numbers of innocent people for “imaginary” crimes, such as witchcraft and blasphemy. The Catholic Church feared and persecuted scientists, as the case of Galileo makes clear. Therefore, the Scientific “Revolution” occurred mainly in Protestant societies because only there could the Catholic Church not suppress independent thought. ► Being entirely comfortable with slavery, the Catholic Church did nothing to oppose its introduction in the New World nor to make it more humane. Until very recently, the Catholic view of the ideal state was summed up in the phrase, “The divine right of kings.” Consequently, the Church has bitterly resisted all efforts to establish more liberal governments, eagerly supporting dictators. It was the Protestant Reformation that broke the repressive Catholic grip on progress and ushered in capitalism, religious freedom, and the modern world. Each of these statements is part of the common culture, widely accepted and frequently repeated. But, each is false and many are the exact opposite of the truth! A chapter will be devoted to summarizing recent repetitions of each of these statements and to demonstrating that each is most certainly false.
Rodney Stark (Bearing False Witness: Debunking Centuries of Anti-Catholic History)
I admit that all humanists — as humanists — have been individualists. As humanists, they have had nothing to offer to the mob. But they have usually left a place, not only for the mob, but (what is more important) for the mob part of the mind in themselves. Mr. Babbitt is too rigorous and conscientious a Protestant to do that: hence there seems to be a gap between his own individualism (and indeed intellectualism, beyond a certain point, must be individualistic) and his genuine desire to offer something which will be useful to the American nation primarily and to civilization itself. But the historical humanist, as I understand him, halts at a certain point and admits that the reason will go no farther, and that it cannot feed on honey and locusts. Humanism is either an alternative to religion, or is ancillary to it. To my mind, it always flourishes most when religion has been strong; and if you find examples of humanism which are anti-religious, or at least in opposition to the religious faith of the place and time, then such humanism is purely destructive, for it has never found anything to replace what it destroyed. Any religion, of course, is for ever in danger of petrifaction into mere ritual and habit, though ritual and habit be essential to religion. It is only renewed and refreshed by an awakening of feeling and fresh devotion, or by the critical reason. The latter may be the part of the humanist. But if so, then the function of humanism, though necessary, is secondary. You cannot make humanism itself into a religion.
T.S. Eliot (For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays Ancient & Modern)
Nietzsche, one of the main thinkers being channeled by rightist chan culture knowingly or otherwise, argued for transgression of the pacifying moral order and instead for a celebration of life as the will to power. As a result, his ideas had appeal to everyone from the Nazis to feminists like Lily Braun. Today, the appeal of his anti-moralism is strong on the alt-right because their goals necessitate the repudiation of Christian codes that Nietzsche characterized as slave morality. Freud, on the other hand, characterized transgression as an anti-civilizational impulse, as part of the antagonism between the freedom of instinctual will and the necessary repressions of civilization. Perhaps the most significant theorist of transgression Georges Bataille inherited his idea of sovereignty from de Sade, stressing self-determination over obedience. Although rightist chan culture was undoubtedly not what Bataille had in mind, the politically fungible ideas and styles of these aesthetic transgressives are echoed in the porn-fuelled shocking content of early /b/ and in the later anti-liberal transgressions of the later /pol/. Bataille revered transgression in and of itself, and like de Sade viewed non-procreative sex as an expression of the sovereign against instrumentalism, what he called ‘expenditure without reserve’. For him excessive behavior without purpose, which also characterizes the sensibility of contemporary meme culture in which enormous human effort is exerted with no obvious personal benefit, was paradigmatically transgressive in an age of Protestant instrumental rationality.
Angela Nagle (Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right)
Unfortunately, we live in an era where once a person learns a bit of the Arabic language and memorizes the translation of the Qur’an, he thinks he has the right to make his own opinions regarding the Qur’an. The Blessed Prophet s said, “Whosoever explains the Qur’an from his own opinion is wrong even if he is right.” Modernists generally ignore the opinions and exegesis of the pious predecessors [al-salaf al-salihun] issuing fatwas that are based on their own whims. In our time, the modernist desires to embody all the greatest attributes in every field. If he can write simple Arabic, articulate himself in his native language, or deliver impromptu speeches, he sees himself the teacher of Junaid and Shiblõ in Taüawwuf and also a mujtahid in fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence). He introduces new ideas in the exegesis of the Qur’an without concern for the opinions of the pious predecessors or that his opinions contradict the aúódõth of the Blessed Prophet (PBUH).He is whimsical in matters of Dõn. He states his heart’s desire no matter how much it contradicts the Qur’an and the Sunna. Despite this, no one discredits him, protests his incompetence, or shows him his deviation. If one gathers the courage to say, “This is against the teachings of the pious predecessors,” he is immediately branded a sycophant of the pious predecessors. He is condemned as ultra-orthodox, anti-intellectual, and someone not attuned to the modern world. Conversely, if a person rejects the explanations of the pious predecessors and lays out his own views on matters of Din he is looked upon as an authority [muúaqqiq] in the Din.
Shaykh Muhammad Zakariyya Kandhlawi
YouTube: Dr. Samuel T. Francis — “Equality Unmasked" (American Renaissance Conference, 1996) 19:40 Egalitarianism has become an ideology that that protects, serves and rationalizes the interests of the elites that hold power in Western society, just as doctrines like the divine right of kings served the interests of monarchies and aristocracies before the French Revolution. ... I think that understanding egalitarianism as the ideology of an elite is important for several reasons. In the first place it puts the Marxists and radicals of the Left in an entirely different light from the one in which they like to present themselves--that of rebels against the system. Invariably, when Marxist groups protest against racism, they argue that racism is the tool of capitalism, that a capitalist ruling class promotes racism in order to justify the exploitation of non-whites and to keep white and non-white proletariats divided. But in reality, there is no truth whatsoever in this theory. If it were true, we would expect academics like Rushton and Levin, Arthur Jensen and Richard Herrnstein to have received millions in grants from large corporations and foundations. In fact, they receive little or nothing. The truth is that when Marxists and self-described radicals denounce what they call "racism," they are in fact performing as the ideological vanguard of the real elites that hold power and possess enormous vested interests in egalitarianism and environmentalism. It is the radical egalitarians and anti-hereditarians who are the real running dogs of the system, and not those who challenge egalitarianism and environmentalism. And it is the hereditarians like Rushton and Levin who are the real radicals, or even revolutionaries who challenge the lies and mythologies with which entrenched powers always mask themselves.
Samuel T. Francis
The appeasers had been powerful; they had controlled The Times and The BBC; they had been largely drawn from the upper classes, and their betrayal of England's greatness would be neither forgotten nor forgiven by those who, gulled by the mystique of England's class system, had believed as Englishmen had believed for generations that public school boys governed best. The appeasers destroyed oligarchic rule which, though levelers may protest, had long governed well. If ever men betrayed their class, these were they. Because their possessions were great, the appeasers had much to lose should the Red flag fly over Westminster. That was why they had felt threatened by the hunger riots of 1932. It was also the driving force behind their exorbitant fear and distrust of the new Russia. They had seen a strong Germany as a buffer against bolshevism, had thought their security would be strengthened if they sidled up to the fierce, virile Third Reich. Nazi coarseness, Anti-Semitism, the Reich's darker underside, were rationalized; time, they assured one another, would blur the jagged edges of Nazi Germany. So, with their eyes open, they sought accommodation with a criminal regime, turned a blind eye to its iniquities, ignored its frequent resort to murder and torture, submitted to extortion, humiliation, and abuse until, having sold out all who had sought to stand shoulder to shoulder with Britain and keep the bridge against the new barbarism, they led England herself into the cold damp shadow of the gallows, friendless save for the demoralized republic across the Channel. Their end came when the House of Commons, in a revolt of conscience, wrenched power from them and summoned to the colors the one man who had foretold all that had passed, who had tried, year after year, alone and mocked, to prevent the war by urging the only policy which would have done the job. And now, in the desperate spring of 1940, he resolved to lead Britain and her fading empire in one last great struggle worthy of all they had been and meant, to arm the nation, not only with weapons but also with the mace of honor, creating in every English breast a soul beneath the ribs of death.
William Manchester (The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Alone, 1932-40)
But it is also true that a society of equal opportunity, without a top 1 percent hoarding the wealth and power, would actually benefit the vast majority of White people much more than racism does. It is not coincidental that slavery kept the vast majority of southern Whites poor. It is not coincidental that more White Americans thrived during the antiracist movements from the 1930s to the early 1970s than ever before or since. It is not coincidental that the racist movements that followed in the late twentieth century paralleled the stagnation or reduction of middle-and low-income Whites’ salaries and their skyrocketing costs of living. Antiracists should stop connecting selfishness to racism, and unselfishness to antiracism. Altruism is wanted, not required. Antiracists do not have to be altruistic. Antiracists do not have to be selfless. Antiracists merely have to have intelligent self-interest, and to stop consuming those racist ideas that have engendered so much unintelligent self-interest over the years. It is in the intelligent self-interest of middle-and upper-income Blacks to challenge the racism affecting the Black poor, knowing they will not be free of the racism that is slowing their socioeconomic rise until poor Blacks are free of racism. It is in the intelligent self-interest of Asians, Native Americans, and Latina/ os to challenge anti-Black racism, knowing they will not be free of racism until Black people are free of racism. It is in the intelligent self-interest of White Americans to challenge racism, knowing they will not be free of sexism, class bias, homophobia, and ethnocentrism until Black people are free of racism. The histories of anti-Asian, anti-Native, and anti-Latina/ o racist ideas; the histories of sexist, elitist, homophobic, and ethnocentric ideas: all sound eerily similar to this history of racist ideas, and feature some of the same defenders of bigotry in America. Supporting these prevailing bigotries is only in the intelligent self-interest of a tiny group of super rich, Protestant, heterosexual, non-immigrant, White, Anglo-Saxon males. Those are the only people who need to be altruistic in order to be antiracist. The rest of us merely need to do the intelligent thing for ourselves.
Ibram X. Kendi (Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America)
One mode of anti-frontier and anti-self-reliance propaganda is contemporary hysteria about gun control – a part of the materialistic determinism of the hour. To the superficial minds of “Liberals,” collectivists, Marxians, et al., instruments are supposed to act upon man, and men (no longer self-reliant) merely to be acted upon: to them, murder lies in the gun and not in the soul of man. So they think that to deprive men of guns would prevent man from murder! “What the Power Boys – the insiders – behind the gun controls really want, of course, is not to control guns but to control us. They want registration so that they can confiscate; they want to confiscate so that they will have power and we shall be powerless – even as we live today upon a wild frontier demanding ever more self-reliance. “On the old frontier, men had to rely upon themselves and had to be armed until there were sound laws and until law-enforcement officers could enforce the laws. Today laws against thieves, muggers, thugs, rapist, arsonists, looters, murderers (thanks largely to the “Liberal” majority on the Supreme Court) are diluted almost to the point of abolition; the Marshal Dillons of the world, thanks to the same Court, are disarmed or emasculated, they are told to respect the “rights” of thieves, muggers, thugs, rapists, arsonists, looters, muggers, above the right of good citizens to be secure from such felons. “Good citizens, deprived of the processes of the law or the protection of the police, are supposed to accept their lot as the passive happy victims of “the unfortunate,” sheep to be sheared of feed to the wolves bleating about the loveliness of it all. It is “violence” if good citizens defend themselves; it is not “violent” but “protest” if they or their property are assaulted. So gun controls are the order of the day – gun controls that will disarm me of good will, but will not disarm the Mafia, the mobs out on a spree, the wolves on the prowl, the men of ill will. “This is a part of the “Liberal” sentimentality that does not see sin, evil, violence, as realities in the soul of man. To the “Liberal,” all we need is dialogue, discussion, compromise, co-existence, understanding – always in favor of the vicious and never in defense of the victim. The sentimental “Liberal,” fearful of self-reliant man, believes this to be a good thing; the cynical Power Boys pretend to believe it, and use it for their own ends. “Gun control is the new Prohibition. It will not work, as Prohibition did not work. But meanwhile, it will be tried, as a sentimental cure-all, a new usurpation of the rights of a once thoroughly self-reliant people, another step on the march to 1984. It is only a symptom of our modern disease, but it is well worth examining at a little more length. And, as I recently made a trip to the land of Sentimentalia, and brought back a published account of gun control there, I hope you will permit me to offer it as evidence speaking to our condition: “A few hundred of the several hundred million citizens of Sentimentalia have in recent years been shot by criminals. The Congress of that land, led by Senators Tom Prodd and Jokey Hidings, and egged on by the President, responded with a law to first register, and eventually confiscate, all the wicked instruments known as ‘guns.’ The law was passed amid tears of joy. “But, alas, when guns continued to be used by the happy thugs thus freed from the fear of being shot by self-reliant citizens, the Prohibitionists claimed that this meant that knives need to be forbidden… and then violence and murders would end.
Edward Merrill Root
FACT 4 – There is more to the creation of the Manson Family and their direction than has yet been exposed. There is more to the making of the movie Gimme Shelter than has been explained. This saga has interlocking links to all the beautiful people Robert Hall knew. The Manson Family and the Hell’s Angels were instruments to turn on enemy forces. They attacked and discredited politically active American youth who had dropped out of the establishment. The violence came down from neo-Nazis, adorned with Swastikas both in L.A. and in the Bay Area at Altamont. The blame was placed on persons not even associated with the violence. When it was all over, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were the icing on this cake, famed musicians associated with a racist, neo-Nazi murder. By rearranging the facts, cutting here and there, distorting evidence, neighbors and family feared their own youth. Charles Manson made the cover of Life with those wide eyes, like Rasputin. Charles Watson didn’t make the cover. Why not? He participated in all the killings. Manson wasn’t inside the house. Manson played a guitar and made records. Watson didn’t. He was too busy taking care of matters at the lawyer’s office prior to the killings, or with officials of Young Republicans. Who were Watson’s sponsors in Texas, where he remained until his trial, separate from the Manson Family’s to psychologically distance him from the linking of Watson to the murders he actually committed. “Pigs” was scrawled in Sharon Tate’s house in blood. Was this to make blacks the suspects? Credit cards of the La Bianca family were dropped intentionally in the ghetto after the massacre. The purpose was to stir racial fears and hatred. Who wrote the article, “Did Hate Kill Tate?”—blaming Black Panthers for the murders? Lee Harvey Oswald was passed off as a Marxist. Another deception. A pair of glasses was left on the floor of Sharon Tate’s home the day of the murder. They were never identified. Who moved the bodies after the killers left, before the police arrived? The Spahn ranch wasn’t a hippie commune. It bordered the Krupp ranch, and has been incorporated into a German Bavarian beer garden. Howard Hughes knew George Spahn. He visited this ranch daily while filming The Outlaw. Howard Hughes bought the 516 acres of Krupp property in Nevada after he moved into that territory. What about Altamont? What distortions and untruths are displayed in that movie? Why did Mick Jagger insist, “the concert must go on?” There was a demand that filmmakers be allowed to catch this concert. It couldn’t have happened the same in any other state. The Hell’s Angels had a long working relationship with law enforcement, particularly in the Oakland area. They were considered heroes by the San Francisco Chronicle and other newspapers when they physically assaulted the dirty anti-war hippies protesting the shipment of arms to Vietnam. The laboratory for choice LSD, the kind sent to England for the Stones, came from the Bay Area and would be consumed readily by this crowd. Attendees of the concert said there was “a compulsiveness to the event.” It had to take place. Melvin Belli, Jack Ruby’s lawyer, made the legal arrangements. Ruby had complained that Belli prohibited him from telling the full story of Lee Harvey Oswald’s murder (another media event). There were many layers of cover-up, and many names have reappeared in subsequent scripts. Sen. Philip Hart, a member of the committee investigating illegal intelligence operations inside the US, confessed that his own children told him these things were happening. He had refused to believe them. On November 18, 1975, Sen. Hart realized matters were not only out of hand, but crimes of the past had to be exposed to prevent future outrages. How shall we ensure that it will never happen again? It will happen repeatedly unless we can bring ourselves to understand and accept that it did go on.
Mae Brussell (The Essential Mae Brussell: Investigations of Fascism in America)
As to the differences, textual differences occur in all of the five acts but the preponderance of additions lie in Act III. In the B text, Act III is far longer and becomes a rather concentrated anti-Catholic, anti-Papist tract – which in and of itself isn’t terribly surprising in the Protestant hotbed that England had become under Elizabeth. Faustus and Mephistopheles travel to Rome and observe the Pope, his cardinals, bishops and friars acting like scandalously greedy buffoons. It must have been a real crowd-pleaser in its day.
Glenn Cooper (The Devil Will Come)
Because legitimacy comes from fighting for what’s right, politicians who compromise for the sake of interest or power have sold their souls and lost their legitimacy. For amateurs, justice means not a transactional outcome but fidelity to an abstract ideal, like the public interest. They are suspicious of compromise, loyalty, insiders, inducements, deals. Being amateurs, they typically have jobs outside of politics or enter the political fray only temporarily, a fact which they will trumpet as a source of disinterest and political chastity. (In New York, Wilson notes, anti-Tammany reformers in the 1950s were heavily drawn from Protestant and Jewish middle-class young professionals.) Not being repeat players, they can afford to play single hands for high stakes, and they cannot easily be held accountable for losing.
Jonathan Rauch (Political Realism: How Hacks, Machines, Big Money, and Back-Room Deals Can Strengthen American Democracy)
The Protestant view is problematic because it ignores the fact that certain prophetic oracles are very interested in punctilious performance of particular ritual laws (see esp. Jer 17.19–27). Furthermore, a close reading of prophets such as Isaiah or Amos suggests that they are not anti-law or anti-Temple, but are rhetorically emphasizing that ritual behavior alone, without proper moral behavior, is insufficient to assure divine blessing.
Adele Berlin (The Jewish Study Bible)
One American political figure saw Russia for the growing menace that it was and was willing to call Putin out for his transgressions. During President Obama’s reelection campaign, Mitt Romney warned of a growing Russian strategic threat, highlighting their role as “our number one geopolitical foe.”[208] The response from President Obama, Secretary Clinton, and other Democrats was not to echo his sentiment, but actually to ridicule Romney and support the Russian government. President Obama hurled insults, saying Romney was “stuck in a Cold War mind warp” [209] and in a nationally televised debate mocked the former governor, saying “the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back…” [210] When asked to respond to Romney’s comment, Secretary Clinton refused to rebuke the over-the-top and false Obama campaign attacks. Instead, she delivered a message that echoed campaign talking points arguing that skepticism of Russia was outdated: “I think it’s somewhat dated to be looking backwards,” she said, adding, “In many of the areas where we are working to solve problems, Russia has been an ally.”[211] A month after Secretary Clinton’s statement on Romney, Putin rejected Obama’s calls for a landmark summit.[212] He didn’t seem to share the secretary’s view that the two countries were working together. It was ironic that while Obama and Clinton were saying Romney was in a “Cold War mind warp,”[213] the Russian leader was waging a virulent, anti-America “election campaign” (that’s if you can call what they did in Russia an “election”). In fact, if anyone was in a Cold War mind warp, it was Putin, and his behavior demonstrated just how right Romney was about Russia’s intentions. “Putin has helped stoke anti-Americanism as part of his campaign emphasizing a strong Russia,” Reuters reported. “He has warned the West not to interfere in Syria or Iran, and accused the United States of ‘political engineering’ around the world.”[214] And his invective was aimed not just at the United States. He singled out Secretary Clinton for verbal assault. Putin unleashed the assault Nov. 27 [2011] in a nationally televised address as he accepted the presidential nomination, suggesting that the independent election monitor Golos, which gets financing from the United States and Europe, was a U.S. vehicle for influencing the elections here. Since then, Golos has been turned out of its Moscow office and its Samara branch has come under tax investigation. Duma deputies are considering banning all foreign grants to Russian organizations. Then Putin accused U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton of sending a signal to demonstrators to begin protesting the fairness of the Dec. 4 parliamentary elections.[215] [Emphasis added.] Despite all the evidence that the Russians had no interest in working with the U.S., President Obama and Secretary Clinton seemed to believe that we were just a Putin and Obama election victory away from making progress. In March 2012, President Obama was caught on a live microphone making a private pledge of flexibility on missile defense “after my election” to Dmitry Medvedev.[216] The episode lent credence to the notion that while the administration’s public unilateral concessions were bad enough, it might have been giving away even more in private. So it shouldn’t have been a surprise that Putin didn’t abandon his anti-American attitudes after he won the presidential “election.” In the last few weeks of Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State, Putin signed a law banning American adoption of Russian children,[217] in a move that could be seen as nothing less than a slap in the face to the United States. Russia had been one of the leading sources of children for U.S. adoptions.[218] This disservice to Russian orphans in need of a home was the final offensive act in a long trail of human rights abuses for which Secretary Clinton failed to hold Russia accountable.
Stephen Thompson (Failed Choices: A Critique Of The Hillary Clinton State Department)
We spent the morning discussing Michael’s role at Tribune, guiding the journal’s policy toward endorsing the creation of NATO and establishing an anti-Communist stance earlier than most other leftwing publications. George Orwell had become a welcome figure to the staff at Tribune, even though readers protested: “Why do you take after the Russians all the time? We’re still allies with them.” Part of Michael’s friendship with Ernest Bevin was founded on their staunchly anti-Communist views, strengthened by their dismay at what happened to Poland, Czechoslovakia and other Central European countries that became Soviet satellites shortly after the Yalta agreement.
Carl Rollyson (A Private Life of Michael Foot)
Ellis had a history of creating fake movements in support of unpopular corporations and causes. In the 1990s, he had headed a company called Ramhurst, which documents revealed to be a covert public relations arm of R. J. Reynolds, the giant tobacco company. Under his guidance, Ramhurst organized deceptively homegrown-looking “smokers’ rights” protests against proposed regulations and taxes on tobacco. In 1994 alone, R. J. Reynolds funneled $2.6 million to Ramhurst to deploy operatives who mobilized what they called “partisans” to stage protests against the Clinton health-care proposal, which would have imposed a stiff tax on cigarette sales. Anti-health-care rallies that year echoed with cries of “Go back to Russia!” If the outbursts bore a striking resemblance to those against Obama’s health-care proposal fifteen years later, it may be because the same political operatives were involved in both. Two of Ellis’s former top aides at Ramhurst, Doug Goodyear and Tom Synhorst, went on in 1996 to form DCI Group, the public relations firm that was helping Noble foment Tea Party protests against the Affordable Care Act.
Jane Mayer (Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right)
The official positions of the national Catholic churches throughout the Continent and those of the Vatican were not essentially different regarding the increasingly harsh anti-Jewish measures. In France, as we saw, in August 1940 the assembly of cardinals and bishops welcomed the limitations imposed on the country’s Jews, and no members of the Catholic hierarchy expressed any protest regarding the statutes of October 1940 and June 1941. In
Saul Friedländer (The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945)
Yet, some things do not change. Overall, designers have stayed with techniques that work—in different countries and historical periods. Flagg’s 'I Want You for U.S. Army' design in World War I, with 'Uncle Sam' looking directly at the viewer and pointing a finger at him, was derived from a British poster produced three years earlier; in the British poster, Secretary of State for War Lord Kitchener is pointing a finger at British males, with the words 'Wants You, Join Your Country’s Army! God Save The King.' Other countries—Italy, Hungary, Germany, Great Britain, Canada, France, the Irish Parliamentary Party, the Red Army in Russia, and later, the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War—designed similar posters. The British applied the same design idea in World War II, featuring Prime Minister Winston Churchill, instead of Kitchener, in the same pose; the U.S. Democratic Party resurrected Flagg’s Uncle Sam image, including it in an election poster for Franklin D. Roosevelt. In the decades that followed, however, anti-war protest groups issued satires of Flagg’s 'I Want You' poster, with 'Uncle Sam' in a variety of poses: pointing a gun at the audience; making the 'peace sign,' bandaged and accompanied by the slogan 'I Want Out'; as a skeleton, with a target superimposed on him; and with the 'bad breath' of airplanes dropping bombs on houses in his mouth.
Steven A. Seidman (Posters, Propaganda, and Persuasion in Election Campaigns Around the World and Through History)
For much of the first 100 years of the public school system, religious conflicts centred on intense anti-Catholic sentiments with tensions occasionally reaching violent levels. The Philadelphia Bible riots in 1844 ignited over the use of anti-Catholic books in public schools and the requirement that children read from the Protestant King James version of the Bible rather than the Catholic Douay version. Protestants, fearing that Catholics wanted to remove their Bible from schools and convert their children to Catholicism, rallied in the streets and violently rioted in Catholic neighbourhoods. The devastation resulted in the death of eighteen people and destroyed fifty homes, a church, and a convent.
Sylvia Broeckx (Evil Little Things: A Study of the Women Who Shaped Secular Humanist and Atheist Activism in post World War II America)
But the fact that Judah’s deputy, Zadok, was a Pharisee indicates that the lines could not be drawn sharply, and, as the first century AD progressed, more and more pious Jews, such as the Pharisees, seem to have accepted that violence was inevitable in certain circumstances.77 However, this is an obscure area, for Josephus, who is our main authority, was an interested party. He regarded the term Zealot as an honourable title, and he withdrew it when he deemed their activities to be terroristic or anti-social. The legitimacy of terrorism when other forms of protest fail was as hotly debated then as it is today, and the precise part played by Zealots and Sicarii, who were active in every violent uprising of the century, is a subject of scholarly speculation.77
Paul Johnson (History of the Jews)
Carlton Church Warning - Nuclear Fraud Scheme North Korea has been producing different nuclear weapons since last year. They have sent warning on the neighboring countries about their plan for a nuclear test. Not just South Korea, but other countries like China, U.S., and Japan have stated their complaints. Even the United Nations has been alarmed by North Korea’s move. During the last period of World War, a bomb has been used to attack Japan. Happened on 6th of August 1945, Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb just 10 kilometers away from Tokyo. This is why people and organizations like Carlton Church who’s against the use of nuclear power for production of armory in war. Many protested that it is a threat to mankind and environment. Groups who are in favor of the nuclear use explained its advantage. They say it can be helpful in generating electricity that can be used for residential and commercial purposes. They also expound how it is better to use than coal mining as it is “less harmful to the environment.” Nuclear Use: Good or Bad? Groups who are against the use of nuclear reactor and weapons try to persuade people about its catastrophic result to the environment and humankind. If such facility will be used to create weapons, there is a possibility for another world war. But the pro-nuclear groups discuss the good effects that can be gained from it. They give details on how greenhouse gas effect of coal-burning can emit huge amounts of greenhouse gases and other pollutants such as sulfur dioxide nitrogen oxide, and toxic compounds of mercury to the atmosphere every year. Burning coal can produce a kilowatt-hour of electricity but it also amounts to over two pounds of carbon dioxide emissions. They also added that the amount of carbon dioxide it produces contributes to climate change. Sulfur dioxide may cause the formation of acid rain and nitrogen oxide, if combined with VOCs, will form smog. Nuclear power plants do not emit harmful pollutants or other toxic gases. Generating energy from nuclear involves intricate process, but as a result, it produces heat. These plants have cooling towers that release water vapor. If the facility has been properly managed it may not contribute disturbance in the atmosphere. It may sound better to use compared to coal. But studies have shown that the vapor that came from nuclear plants have an effect to some coastal plants. The heated water that was released goes back to lakes and seas, and then the heat will eventually diffuse into surface warming. As a result of the increased water temperature on the ocean bodies, it changes the way carbon dioxide is transferred within the air. In effect, major shifts in weather patterns such as hurricanes may occur. It does not stop there. The nuclear power plant produces radioactive waste, which amounts to 20 metric tons yearly. Exposure to high-level radiation is extremely harmful and fatal to human and animals. The waste material must be stored carefully in remote locations for many years. Carlton Church and other anti-nuclear groups persuade the public to initiate banning of the manufacturing of nuclear products and give warnings about its health hazards and environmental effects.
Glory
This violence was not condemned by religious officials. To the contrary, Catholic priests applauded the killing of heretics (that is, Protestants) while Protestant clergy endorsed the killing of agents of the anti-Christ (that is, Catholics). After about 13,000 French Protestants were slaughtered in Paris and other cities during the notorious St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre of August 1572, Pope Gregory XIII ordered a special celebratory mass and had a medal struck to commemorate the event.
Ronald A. Lindsay (The Necessity of Secularism: Why God Can't Tell Us What to Do)
In political contests in most parts of America, the candidate who captures this refusal of deference is, more often than not, the candidate who wins. This is a crude and sweeping simplification, but nevertheless it is usually true. Understood the way I have defined it, populist protest against the economic elite is what made the Democrats the majority party for so many decades. Another reason we know that anti-elitism works is because we have seen it working against us for fifty years. The Republican Party owes its successful hold on power to adopting—you might say “stealing”—the anti-elitist themes I have described. From the days of Nixon to those of Trump, the conservative revolution happened not because Americans love polluters and disease but because Republicans sold themselves as a party of protest against the elite. Most of the time it was the cultural elite that was the target: the prideful people who make movies and write newspapers; who love blasphemy but hate the flag. The point is so easy and so obvious that it’s hard to understand why it’s been so difficult for Democratic politicians to get it: Populism is the supreme rhetorical weapon in the arsenal of American politics. On the other hand, the impulse to identify your goals with the elite—with any elite, even a moral one—is a kind of political death wish. In a democracy, a faction that chooses to go about its business by admiring its own moral goodness and scolding average voters as insensitive clods is a faction that is not interested in winning.
Thomas Frank (The People, No: The War on Populism and the Fight for Democracy)
The forty-fifth president of the United States is the son of a man, Fred C. Trump, who was arrested in New York one Memorial Day during the 1920s at a rally staged by the Ku Klux Klan. On May 31, 1927, in Queens, New York, about one thousand Klan marchers made their way through the borough's dense streets. They wore robes and hoods. The parade turned into a riot when the Klansmen attached a smaller Memorial Day march of Italian Americans. Whites beat up other whites because the second Klan, led by Protestants was anti-Catholic as well as anti-color. Fred C. Trump, age twenty-five, resident of the Jamaica section of Queens, was among seven arrested. The forty-fifth president, in his retirement, if he possessed the means of reading and writing, might himself produce a family history entitled "Life of a Klansman." The public awaits.
Edward Ball (Life of a Klansman: A Family History in White Supremacy)
After the death of the infant, in a video that emerged, small kids were seen holding posters of four-month-old kid Mohammed Jahan. Shockingly, one of the protests of the event can be heard in the background claiming that the death of the four-month-old kid was nothing but a ‘Qurbani’ or sacrifice for the anti-CAA movement.
Nupur J. Sharma (Delhi Anti-Hindu Riots 2020, The Macabre Dance of Violence Since December 2019: An OpIndia Report)
Merely two days ahead of Delhi polls, the Enforcement Directorate made an explosive revelation exposing the close nexus between PFI and the Aam Aadmi Party, Congress, Bhim Army and other groups. According to documents accessed by OpIndia, the Shaheen Bagh anti-CAA protests were funded by Popular Front of India (PFI) and leaders of the Aam Aadmi Party and Congress were in constant touch with the PFI chief.
Nupur J. Sharma (Delhi Anti-Hindu Riots 2020, The Macabre Dance of Violence Since December 2019: An OpIndia Report)
The loss of white ethno-cultural confidence manifests itself in other ways. Among the most important is a growing unwillingness to indulge the anti-white ideology of the cultural left. When whites were an overwhelming majority, empirically unsupported generalizations about whites could be brushed off as amusing and mischievous but ultimately harmless. As whites decline, fewer are willing to abide such attacks. At the same time, white decline emboldens the cultural left, with its dream of radical social transformation. ... From a modern perspective, the most important figure to emerge from this milieu is Randolph Bourne. Viewed as a spokesman for the new youth culture in upper-middle-class New York, Bourne burst onto the intellectual scene with an influential essay in the respected Atlantic Monthly in July 1916 entitled ‘Trans-National America’. Here Bourne was influenced by Jewish-American philosopher Horace Kallen. Kallen was both a Zionist and a multiculturalist. Yet he criticized the Liberal Progressive worldview whose cosmopolitan zeal sought to consign ethnicity to the dustbin of history. Instead, Kallen argued that ‘men cannot change their grandfathers’. Rather than all groups giving and receiving cultural influence, as in Dewey’s vision, or fusing together, as mooted by fellow Zionist Israel Zangwill in his play The Melting Pot (1910), Kallen spoke of America as a ‘federation for international colonies’ in which each group, including the Anglo-Saxons, could maintain their corporate existence. There are many problems with Kallen’s model, but there can be no doubt that he treated all groups consistently. Bourne, on the other hand, infused Kallen’s structure with WASP self-loathing. As a rebel against his own group, Bourne combined the Liberal Progressives’ desire to transcend ‘New Englandism’ and Protestantism with Kallen’s call for minority groups to maintain their ethnic boundaries. The end product was what I term asymmetrical multiculturalism, whereby minorities identify with their groups while Anglo-Protestants morph into cosmopolites. Thus Bourne at once congratulates the Jew ‘who sticks proudly to the faith of his fathers and boasts of that venerable culture of his’, while encouraging his fellow Anglo-Saxons to: "Breathe a larger air . . . [for] in his [young Anglo-Saxon’s] new enthusiasms for continental literature, for unplumbed Russian depths, for French clarity of thought, for Teuton philosophies of power, he feels himself a citizen of a larger world. He may be absurdly superficial, his outward-reaching wonder may ignore all the stiller and homelier virtues of his Anglo-Saxon home, but he has at least found the clue to that international mind which will be essential to all men and women of good-will if they are ever to save this Western world of ours from suicide." Bourne, not Kallen, is the founding father of today’s multiculturalist left because he combines rebellion against his own culture and Liberal Progressive cosmopolitanism with an endorsement – for minorities only – of Kallen’s ethnic conservatism. In other words, ethnic minorities should preserve themselves while the majority should dissolve itself.
Eric Kaufmann (Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities)
Like their male counterparts, Hitler's Furies came from several backgrounds: working class and well-to-do, educated and uneducated, Catholic and Protestant, urban and provincial. They were all ambitious and patriotic; to varying degrees they also shared the qualities of greed, anti-Semitism, racism, and imperialistic arrogance. And they were all young.
Wendy Lower (Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields)
A great deal. Christian clergy sometimes participated in lynchings or even gave them their blessings. And the racial terrorists of the KKK were not just anti-Black racists. They purported to defend the supremacy of white Protestants against Catholics and Jews as well.
Philip S. Gorski (The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy)
Once experience is admitted within the theological edifice, the latter begins to crumble – such portion of it, of course, as stands within the experimental domain, for the other wings are safe from any attack by experience. So years, centuries, go by; peoples, governments, manners and systems of living, pass away; and all along new theologies, new systems of metaphysics, keep replacing the old, and each new one is reputed more “true” or much “better” that its predecessors. And in certain cases they may really be better, if by “better” we means more helpful to society; but more “true”, no, if by the term we mean accord with experimental reality. One faith cannot be more scientific than another, and experimental reality is equally overreached by polytheism, Islamism, and Christianity (whether Catholic, Protestant, Liberal, Modernist, or of any other variety); by the innumerable metaphysical sects, including the Kantian, the Hegelian, the Bergsonian, and not excluding the positivistic sects of Comte, Spencer, and other eminent writers too numerous to mention; by the faiths of solidaristes, humanitarians, anti-clericals, and worshippers of Progress; and by as many other faiths as have existed, exist, or can be imagined.
Vilfredo Pareto (The mind and society)
To determine the true rulers of any society, all you must do is ask yourself this question: Who is it that I am not permitted to criticize? We all know who it is that we are not permitted to criticize. We all know who it is that it is a sin to criticize. Sodomy is no longer a sin in America. Treason, and burning and spitting and urinating on the American flag is no longer a sin in America. Gross desecration of Catholic or Protestant religious symbols is no longer a sin in America. Cop-killing is no longer a sin in America - it is celebrated in rap "music." The degradation of beautiful young girls in disgusting pornography is no longer a sin in America. The killing by the multiple millions of the next generation in the womb is no longer a sin in America. But anti-semitism is the ultimate sin in America. But as things get worse and worse, we are losing our fear of this silly word. We all know who it is that controls the wealth of our nation through their exchanges and counting-houses in New York. We all know who it is that has deformed the minds of two generations of Americans with their television programs.
Kevin Alfred Strom
Antifa is not an organized group. It is an ideology and a set of tactics, namely, violently confronting the right wing. Antifa is short for “anti-fascist.” The name is borrowed from World War II–era German anti-Nazi activism. Here in America, the antifa movement became an increasingly large feature of the political scene after Trump’s election. Alt-right groups like the Proud Boys also saw a surge in membership during this time. The two factions brawled in the streets at protests. They fed off each other. Trump and other Republicans spent the second half of 2020 criticizing violence and vandalism from antifa and Black Lives Matter activists during the civil rights demonstrations that erupted around the country after the police killing of George Floyd. Then January 6th took place.
Denver Riggleman (The Breach: The Untold Story of the Investigation into January 6th)
Black America has watched this pattern of outrage management about Black suffering for years. We’ve seen police plant weapons on their victims, as they did in the case of Walter Scott (cover up). Media outlets tell us drugs were in someone’s system when the police murdered them, as they did with George Floyd (devalue). White people constantly try to reframe police brutality as a problem of “a few bad apples” instead of a systemic problem (reinterpret). When the grand jury refused to indict Darren Wilson for the killing of Michael Brown, that became the end of the story for eager racism deniers, though the report also showed racial bias in the conduct of the Ferguson police department (use official channels). And there isn’t room for a full list of the times protesters of these injustices were met in the streets with flash-bang grenades and tanks (intimidate). Oppressors have perfected these tactics so well, they stop revolutions before they start, on a daily basis, without us ever noticing. Rank-and-file white people also try to stamp out Black rage wherever it emerges. They tell us Black anger is destructive and can’t be trusted. The truth is just the opposite. Black rage is trustworthy because it carries an analysis of present injustices. On a physiological level, anger is the body’s way of telling us that a boundary has been violated. It’s the natural emotional response humans have to being wronged, especially if that wrong is recurring and denied by the harmdoers. Therefore, Black rage is a healthy sign that we as a people recognize the crimes that have been, and continue to be, committed against us. Our anger is based in our personal experiences of anti-Black hostility in the white world and backed by our knowledge of our history.
Andre Henry (All the White Friends I Couldn't Keep: Hope—and Hard Pills to Swallow—About Fighting for Black Lives)
white Christian nationalism has animated the oppression, exclusion, and even extermination of minority groups while securing privilege for white Protestants. It permits white Christian Americans to demand "sacrifice" from others in the name of religion and country, while protecting their "rights" in the names of "liberty" and "property." White Christian nationalism inspires the anti-democratic, authoritarian, and violent instincts on display in our contemporary political situation.
George G. Porter (Summary of The Flag and the Cross: : White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy by Philip S. Gorski, Samuel L. Perry, & Jemar Tisby)
Many Protestant churches have adopted translations of the Old Testament, which are based on both the Septuagint, i.e., the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, as well as the Masoretic tradition, and other textual sources. Historically, however, Christian texts were based primarily on the Septuagint or the Vulgate rather than the Masoretic tradition.
Juan Marcos Bejarano Gutierrez (Killing the Torah: The Roots of Christian Anti-Judaism and Anti-Semitism)
The leader – the initiator – of the ferocious protests against this mild relaxation of the Anti-Catholic laws was a curious individual even to his contemporaries. Lord George Gordon’s unusual appearance – long red hair to his shoulders, and slightly protuberant blue eyes – added to the startling impression which he left upon observers, and inspired Horace Walpole to call him ‘the lunatic apostle’.
Antonia Fraser (The King and the Catholics: England, Ireland, and the Fight for Religious Freedom, 1780-1829)