Welcome to CONVOLUTE Number 1.
The crux of this "convolute" seems to "roll" around "war", "pretty girls" and the "Americanisation" of the World.
The use of the term CONVOLUTE?
The point of reference for all this is the sequence Re:LODE Radio has chosen from the film by Francis Ford Coppola Apocalypse Now and included within the montage of the video titled:
. . . it's also the Capitalocene
The clip shows Playboy models performing for American servicemen in some remote location surrounded by both "jungle" and an invisible "enemy". "Jungle" and "invisible enemy" becomes a significant trope in the echoland of dying colonial empires. Hence prompting the somewhat lurid proposition that the cultural phenomenon of Playboy magazine explains the tragedy of the Vietnam War and the Americanisation of the world!
The intention within this proposition is to elicit more than an argument and a history and is as much about method when it comes to the mosaic of information links that begin with the cultural, political and material facts associated with the way capitalism has shaped prevailing environmental conditions along the LODE Zone Line.
So the mooted term "anthropocene" is substituted here by the alternative term "capitalocene".
If "transportation is civilisation", as Rudyard Kipling would have it, the globalisation of the planetary economic and information environment, driven by the needs of capitalism to make sure the conditions for making a "quick buck" are preserved, then it appears that Re:LODE Radio is required to interrogate this version of "civilisation".
The legacy in the "now" of this "civilisation" includes global heating, the genocide of Indigenous People, racism, slavery, colonial exploitation, pollution, misogyny, patriarchy, burgeoning social and economic inequalities and the degradation of the material and information environment.
If Re:LODE Radio asks the question:
Is there any scope for accountability?
That's when the issue and matter of hegemony kicks in, and that is why the video montage
. . . it's also the Capitalocene
deals with both the spatial and temporal dimensions of dominant and competing centres of global power.
The video dissolve linking the mapping of maritime trade routes and the Central American isthmus, along with the Panama Canal, with the film Follow the Fleet, links with an article for the Re:LODE blog of 2017 on methods and purposes, and another for A Cargo of Questions, on the bid for a global hemispheric hegemony by the United States, that took place along the LODE Zone Line in 1903.
CONVOLUTE Number 2.
The article for A Cargo of Questions is headed:
Colombia's borders and the Americanisation of the Western Hemisphere
The article looks at United States gunboat diplomacy and political subversion to acquire control of the Panama Canal from the sovereign territory of Colombia. A contemporary cartoon shows President Roosevelt intimidating Colombia to acquire the Panama Canal Zone.
1903 cartoon: "Go Away, Little Man, and Don't Bother Me".
The personification of this brutal power play, just as in the film Follow the Fleet, would employ the usual ideological and industrial seduction techniques of Hollywood.
There's no hiding the playful phallic symbolism in this recruiting poster that echoes the song and dance routine that Fred Astaire comes up with on the deck of a U.S. battleship.
Double entendres are frequently featured in the world of the American pin-up girl, and would shape something of the future aesthetic of the pin-up in Playboy.
"Can anyone beat my pair?"
These techniques of ideological and industrial seduction and deception have a long history in the aesthetics that revel in aspects of sexual violence, and crucially associated with power and patriarchy. Terms that inevitably intrude in some of the following CONVOLUTES relate to this aesthetic include:
"PORNOCRATIE" and "PORNOTROPIA"
Click on the link here (and above) with a warning that "clickbait" will be encountered, necessarily, in the exploration of this aesthetic universe.
CONVOLUTE Number 3.
The pretty "girl next door"?
Gillette Elvgren (March 15, 1914 – February 29, 1980) was an American painter of pin-up girls, advertising and illustration. Best known for his pin-up paintings for Brown & Bigelow, Elvgren studied at the American Academy of Art.
The Vanishing Sex "Come now - I'll match you for it"
Elvgren was strongly influenced by the early "pretty girl" illustrators, such as Charles Dana Gibson (above) and Andrew Loomis (below).
Gee!! I wish I were a man I'd join the Navy
Howard Chandler Christy was another influence on Elvgren. His WWI poster of 1917 for the Navy is an example of the crossover of advertising with propaganda, and that intriguingly includes a "take" on the gender identity agenda. Elvgren was a commercial success. His clients ranged from Brown & Bigelow and Coca-Cola to General Electric and Sealy Mattress Company. During the 1940s and 1950s he illustrated stories for a host of magazines, such as The Saturday Evening Post and Good Housekeeping.
"Take off . . . refreshed"
Although best known for his pin-ups, his work for Coca-Cola and others depicted typical Americans, ordinary people doing everyday things, yet even here in this advert there's a subtle invitation to multiple readings.
A Coca-Cola? Or a Quickie?
The women Elvgren painted are typically the girl next door rather than the femme fatale, and whose charms are innocently revealed in that fleeting instant when she is caught unaware in what might be an embarrassing situation.
All the pretty girls!
FILM FUN?
Arnold Armitage (1899–1991) was a British-born artist and illustrator, best known for his work with pin-up art. He moved to the United States around 1925 and settled in Hollywood, California, working for the Foster and Kleiser Company, which produced billboards. During the 1930s, he developed a reputation as a designer specialising in billboards, and he designed many of these for American corporations.
About 1940, Armitage began a series of "pretty girl" paintings for the calendar market. While not strictly pin-ups, these works were very reminiscent of the work of Gil Elvgren. Armitage's pretty girls were well received in both the United States and England.
A portfolio of artwork by Arnold Armitage
And all the "pretty girls" are white!
CONVOLUTE Number 4.
The next edit in the video montage links the musical comedy Follow the Fleet to the beginning of the John Ford film They Were Expendable. This film, made by John Ford following the American victory in the Pacific in WWII, celebrates the resilience of American servicemen and servicewomen as they faced the humiliating prospect of defeat while making an heroic last ditch stand to defend the Philippines.
It's perhaps necessary for Re:LODE Radio listeners and readers to have access to a brief history of why the "Americans" were in the Philippines, as this is essential contextual information when it comes to the phenomenon of globalisation and the realities of today to be found along the LODE Zone Line.
This magnificent map of the Philippine archipelago, drawn by the Jesuit Father Pedro Murillo Velarde (1696–1753) and published in Manila in 1734, is the first and most important scientific map of the Philippines. The Philippines were at that time a vital part of the Spanish Empire, and the map shows the maritime routes from Manila to Spain and to New Spain (Mexico and other Spanish territory in the New World), with captions. In the upper margin stands a great cartouche with the title of the map, crowned by the Spanish royal coat of arms flanked each side by an angel with a trumpet, from which an inscription unfurls.
The map is not only of great interest from the geographic point of view, but also as an ethnographic document. It is flanked by twelve engravings, six on each side, eight of which depict different ethnic groups living in the archipelago and four of which are cartographic descriptions of particular cities or islands. According to the labels, the engravings on the left show: Sangleyes (Chinese Philippinos) or Chinese; Kaffirs (a derogatory term for non-Muslims), a Camarin (from the Manila area), and a Lascar (from the Indian subcontinent, a British Raj term); mestizos, a Mardica (of Portuguese extraction), and a Japanese; and two local maps — one of Samboagan (a city on Mindanao), and the other of the port of Cavite. On the right side are: various people in typical dress; three men seated, an Armenian, a Mughal, and a Malabar (from an Indian textile city); an urban scene with various peoples; a rural scene with representations of domestic and wild animals; a map of the island of Guajan (meaning Guam); and a map of Manila.
CONVOLUTE Number 5.
Among the Re:LODE (2017-18) A Cargo of Questions pages there is an article that explores the historical and spatial origins of the globalisation of trade. The heading for this article runs:
The Seven Seas referred to are not the oceans but the seas of the Dutch East Indies, the colonial territories that provided Dutch merchants and financiers with a monopoly on the spice trade. In the nineteenth century the Clipper Ship Tea Route from China to England was the longest trade route in the world. This route took sailors through seven seas near the Dutch East Indies: the Banda Sea, the Celebes Sea, the Flores Sea, the Java Sea, the South China Sea, the Sulu Sea, and the Timor Sea. So, the Seven Seas, in these quarters and during these times, referred to those seas, and if someone had sailed the Seven Seas it meant he had sailed to, and returned from, the other side of the world.
Manila is also referred to as "the world's first global city" as a result of the Manila Galleons trade route, arguably the first example of the globalisation of trade. In 2017, the Philippines established the Manila-Acapulco Galleon Museum in Metro Manila, one of the necessary steps in nominating the trade route to UNESCO as a UNESCO World Heritage project.In Peter Frankopan's book The Silk Roads - A New History of the World, the chapter 'The Road of Silver' sets out the way this trading route transformed world trade. China is ever present in this narrative, as are the multiple routes and connections that have shaped the modern world. The Spanish city of Manila was founded on June 24, 1571, by Spanish conquistador Miguel López de Legazpi, and is regarded as the city's official founding date.
In 1571, the foundation of Manila by the Spanish changed the rhythm of global trade; for a start it followed a programme of colonisation whose character was markedly less destructive for the local population than had been the case after the first Atlantic crossings. Originally established as a base from which to acquire spices, the settlement quickly became a major metropolis and an important connection point between Asia and the Americas. Goods now began to move across the Pacific without passing through Europe first, as did the silver to pay for them. Manila became an emporium where a rich array of goods could be bought.
This essentially Spanish trade route, often referred to as the silver road, carried an amount of silver originating in the Americas, then through the Philippines and on into the rest of Asia, that was truly staggering: at least as much passed this way as it did through Europe in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, causing alarm in some quarters in the Spanish Empire as remittances from the New World began to fall.
The silver road was strung round the world like a belt. The precious metal ended up in one place in particular: China. It did so for two reasons. First, China's size and sophistication made it a major producer of luxury goods, including the ceramics and porcelain that were so desirable in Europe that a huge counterfeit market quickly grew up. The Chinese, wrote Matteo Ricci while visiting Nanjing, 'are greatly given to forging antique things, with great artifice and ingenuity', and generating large profits thanks to their skill. China was able to supply the export market in volume and to step up production accordingly. The second reason why so much money flowed into China was an imbalance in the relationship between precious metals. In China, silver's value hovered around an approximate ratio to gold of 6:1, significantly higher than in India, Persia or the Ottoman Empire; its value was almost double its pricing in Europe in the early sixteenth century. In practice, this meant that European money bought more in Chinese markets and from Chinese traders than it did elsewhere - which in turn provided a powerful incentive to buy Chinese. The opportunities for currency trading and taking advantage of these imbalances in what modern bankers call arbitrage were grasped immediately by new arrivals to the Far East - especially those who recognised that the unequal value of gold in China and Japan produced easy profits.Peter Frankopan's book The Silk Roads - A New History of the World (pp 239-41)
In the chapter 'Cheap Money' in A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things - A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet by Jason W. Moore and Raj Patel (see Guardian Review), they look at this particular history of exchange:"Once again we can see cheapness at work. Cheap lives turned into cheap workers dependent on cheap care and cheap food in home communities, requiring cheap fuel to collect and process cheap nature to produce cheap money - and quite a lot of it. Potosi was the single most important silver source in the New World, and New World silver constituted 74 percent of the world's sixteenth century silver production. Silver does not make trade, but global trade can be traced from the mines of Potosi. Unless it forms parts of circuits of exchange, silver is just shiny dirt. It's the fusion of commodity production and exchange that turns it into capital. That's why some commentators have suggested that the birth year of global trade was 1571, when the city of Manila was founded. Silver from the New world didn't stay in Europe but was propelled along the spice routes and later across the Pacific. Japanese silver flowed to China from 1540 to 1620 as part of a complex network of exchange and arbitrage. Without the connection of exchange of silver for Asian commodities, money couldn't flow from the New World into East Asia. Because the Portuguese and then the Dutch controlled maritime silver flows through Europe to Asia, the Spanish short-circuited them, annually sending as much silver (fifty tons) across the Pacific and through Manila as they did across the Atlantic through Seville. Similar volumes of silver found their way to the Baltic. In eastern Europe, silver combined with credit, quasi-feudal landlords, and enserfed labor to deliver cheap timber, food, and vital raw materials to the Dutch Republic. To remember this is to insist that, although Europe features in it, capitalism's story isn't a Eurocentric one. The rise of capitalism integrated life and power from Potosi to Manila, from Goa to Amsterdam."(pages 84-85)
CONVOLUTE Number 6.From an American western hemisphere to the Philippines. The spatial expansion of an American empire?
The Spanish Empire was set to disintegrate in the final decades of the nineteenth century, offering the United States an opportunity to expand its sovereign territories on a global as well a continental scale.
There had been numerous quasi-religious uprisings in the Philippines during the more than 300 years of colonial rule, but the late 19th-century writings of José Rizal and others helped stimulate a more broad-based movement for Philippine independence. Spain had been unwilling to reform its colonial government, and armed rebellion broke out in 1896. Rizal, who had advocated reform but not revolution, was shot for sedition on December 30, 1896; his martyrdom fuelled the revolution, led by the young general Emilio Aguinaldo.Thus the Philippine Revolution began in August 1896 and ended with the Pact of Biak-na-Bato, a ceasefire between the Spanish colonial Governor-General Fernando Primo de Rivera and the revolutionary leader Emilio Aguinaldo which was signed on December 15, 1897. The terms of the pact called for Aguinaldo and his militia to surrender. Other revolutionary leaders were given amnesty and a monetary indemnity by the Spanish government in return for which the rebel government agreed to go into exile in Hong Kong.However, on the pretext of the failure of Spain to engage in active social reforms in Cuba, as demanded by the United States government, would lead to the cause for the Spanish–American War. American attention was focused on the issue after the mysterious explosion that sank the American battleship Maine on February 15, 1898 in Havana harbour. As public political pressure from the Democratic Party and certain industrialists built up for war, the U.S. Congress forced the reluctant Republican President William McKinley to issue an ultimatum to Spain on April 19, 1898. Spain found it had no diplomatic support in Europe, but nevertheless declared war; the U.S. followed on April 25 with its own declaration of war.Theodore Roosevelt, who was at that time Assistant Secretary of the Navy, ordered Commodore George Dewey, commanding the Asiatic Squadron of the United States Navy: "Order the squadron ...to Hong Kong. Keep full of coal. In the event of declaration of war Spain, your duty will be to see that the Spanish squadron does not leave the Asiatic coast, and then offensive operations in Philippine Islands." Dewey's squadron departed on April 27 for the Philippines, reaching Manila Bay on the evening of April 30.
The Battle of Manila Bay took place on May 1, 1898. In a matter of hours, Commodore Dewey's Asiatic Squadron defeated the Spanish squadron under Admiral Patricio Montojo. The U.S. squadron took control of the arsenal and navy yard at Cavite. Dewey cabled Washington, stating that although he controlled Manila Bay, he needed 5,000 additional men to seize Manila itself.
On June 12, 1898, Aguinaldo proclaimed the independence of the Philippines at his house in Cavite El Viejo. Ambrosio Rianzares Bautista wrote the Philippine Declaration of Independence, and read this document in Spanish that day at Aguinaldo's house. On June 18, Aguinaldo issued a decree formally establishing his dictatorial government. On June 23, Aguinaldo issued another decree, this time replacing the dictatorial government with a revolutionary government (and naming himself as President).Within days, on the other side of the Pacific, the American Anti-Imperialist League had begun to take shape. This organisation, which opposed American involvement in the Philippines, grew into a mass movement that drew support from across the political spectrum. Its members included luminaries such as social reformer Jane Addams, industrialist Andrew Carnegie, philosopher William James, and author Mark Twain.Writing retrospectively in 1899, Aguinaldo claimed that U.S. Consul E. Spencer Pratt had verbally assured him that "the United States would at least recognize the independence of the Philippines under the protection of the United States Navy". In an April 28 message from Pratt to United States Secretary of State William R. Day, there was no mention of independence, or of any conditions on which Aguinaldo was to cooperate. In a July 28 communication, Pratt stated that no promises had been made to Aguinaldo regarding U.S. policy, with the concept aimed at facilitating the occupation and administration of the Philippines, while preventing a possible conflict of action. On June 16, Secretary Day cabled Consul Pratt with instructions to avoid unauthorised negotiations, along with a reminder that Pratt had no authority to enter into arrangements on behalf of the U.S. Government. Filipino scholar Maximo Kalaw wrote in 1927: "A few of the principal facts, however, seem quite clear. Aguinaldo was not made to understand that, in consideration of Filipino cooperation, the United States would extend its sovereignty over the Islands, and thus in place of the old Spanish master a new one would step in. The truth was that nobody at the time ever thought that the end of the war would result in the retention of the Philippines by the United States."On August 12, 1898, The New York Times reported that a peace protocol had been signed in Washington that afternoon between the U.S. and Spain, suspending hostilities between the two nations. The full text of the protocol was not made public until November 5, but Article III read: "The United States will occupy and hold the City, Bay, and Harbor of Manila, pending the conclusion of a treaty of peace, which shall determine the control, disposition, and government of the Philippines." After conclusion of this agreement, U.S. President McKinley proclaimed a suspension of hostilities with Spain.On the evening of August 12, the Americans notified Aguinaldo to forbid the insurgents under his command from entering Manila without American permission. On August 13, unaware of the peace protocol signing, U.S. forces assaulted and captured the Spanish positions in Manila. While the plan was for a mock battle and simple surrender, the insurgents made an independent attack of their own, which led to confrontations with the Spanish in which some American soldiers were killed and wounded. The Spanish formally surrendered Manila to U.S. forces.There was some looting by Insurgent forces in portions of the city they occupied. Aguinaldo demanded joint occupation of the city, however U.S. commanders pressed Aguinaldo to withdraw his forces from Manila. General Merritt received news of the August 12 peace protocol on August 16, three days after the surrender of Manila. Admiral Dewey and General Merritt were informed by a telegram dated August 17 that the President of the United States had directed that the United States should have full control over Manila, with no joint occupation permissible. After further negotiations, insurgent forces withdrew from the city on September 15.This battle marked the end of Filipino-American collaboration, as the American action of preventing Filipino forces from entering the captured city of Manila was deeply resented by the Filipinos.On August 14, 1898, two days after the capture of Manila, the U.S. established a military government in the Philippines, with General Merritt acting as military governor. During military rule (1898–1902), the U.S. military commander governed the Philippines under the authority of the U.S. president as Commander-in-Chief of the United States Armed Forces. After the appointment of a civil Governor-General, the procedure developed that as parts of the country were pacified and placed firmly under American control, responsibility for the area would be passed to the civilian.General Merritt was succeeded by General Otis as military governor, who in turn was succeeded by General MacArthur. Major General Adna Chaffee was the final military governor. The position of military governor was abolished in July 1902, after which the civil Governor-General became the sole executive authority in the Philippines.While the initial instructions of the American commission undertaking peace negotiators with Spain was to seek only Luzon and Guam, which could serve as harbours and communication links, President McKinley later wired instructions to demand the entire archipelago. The resultant Treaty of Paris, signed in December 1898, formally ended the Spanish–American War. Its provisions included the cession of the archipelago to the United States, for which $20 million would be paid as compensation. This agreement was clarified through the 1900 Treaty of Washington, which stated that Spanish territories in the archipelago which lay outside the geographical boundaries noted in the Treaty of Paris were also ceded to the U.S.On December 21, 1898, President McKinley proclaimed a policy of Benevolent assimilation with regards to the Philippines. This was announced in the Philippines on January 4, 1899. Under this policy, the Philippines was to come under the sovereignty of the United States, with American forces instructed to declare themselves as friends rather than invaders.The Treaty of Peace between the United States of America and the Kingdom of Spain, commonly known as the Treaty of Paris of 1898, was a treaty signed by Spain and the United States on December 10, 1898, that ended the Spanish–American War. Under it, Spain relinquished all claim of sovereignty over and title to Cuba and also ceded Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines to the United States. The cession of the Philippines involved a compensation of $20 million from the United States to Spain.
On the night of February 4, 1899, shooting erupted on the outskirts of Manila. Morning found the Filipinos, who had fought bravely, even recklessly, defeated at all points. While the fighting was in progress, Aguinaldo issued a proclamation of war against the United States. Anti-imperialist sentiment was strong in the United States, and on February 6 the U.S. Senate ratified the treaty that concluded the Spanish-American War by a single vote. U.S. reinforcements were immediately sent to the Philippines. Antonio Luna, the ablest commander among the Filipinos, was given charge of their military operations but seems to have been greatly hampered by the jealousy and distrust of Aguinaldo, which he fully returned. Luna was murdered, and on March 31 the rebel capital of Malolos was captured by U.S. forces.
Portion of the ruins of Manila, Philippines, after shelling by U.S. forces in 1899.
The Paris Treaty came into effect on April 11, 1899, when the documents of ratification were exchanged. It was the first treaty negotiated between the two governments since the 1819 Adams-Onís Treaty.The Treaty of Paris marked the end of the Spanish Empire, apart from some small holdings in Northern Africa and several islands and territories around the Gulf of Guinea, also in Africa. It marked the beginning of the United States as a world power. But there would be NO peace!The outbreak of hostilities in the so-called Philippine-American War, a war between the United States and Filipino revolutionaries from 1899 to 1902, led to an an insurrection that may be seen as a continuation of the Philippine Revolution against Spanish rule.
Filipino insurgents
In March 1900 U.S. Pres. William McKinley convened the Second Philippine Commission to create a civil government for the Philippines (the existence of Aguinaldo’s Philippine Republic was conveniently ignored). On April 7 McKinley instructed commission chairman William Howard Taft to “bear in mind that the government which they are establishing is designed not for our satisfaction, or for the expression of our theoretical views, but for the happiness, peace, and prosperity of the people of the Philippine Islands.” While nothing explicit was said about independence, these instructions were later often cited as supporting such a goal.Meanwhile, the Filipino government had fled northward. In November 1899 the Filipinos resorted to guerrilla warfare, with all its devastating consequences. The major operations of the insurrection were conducted in Luzon, and, throughout them, the U.S. Army was assisted materially by indigenous Macabebe scouts, who had previously served the Spanish regime and then transferred that loyalty to the United States. The organised insurrection effectively ended with the capture of Aguinaldo on March 23, 1901, by U.S. Brig. Gen. Frederick Funston. After learning of the location of Aguinaldo’s secret headquarters from a captured courier, Funston personally led an audacious mission into the mountains of northern Luzon. He and a handful of his officers posed as prisoners of war, marching under the guard of a column of Macabebe scouts who were disguised as rebels. Aguinaldo, who had been expecting reinforcements, welcomed the lead elements of the force only to be stunned by a demand to surrender. When Funston arrived, Aguinaldo remarked, “Is this not some joke?” before being led back to Manila.
U.S. troops in the Philippines during the Philippine-American War (1899–1902).
Although Aguinaldo pledged his allegiance to the United States and called for an end to hostilities, the guerrilla campaign continued with unabated ferocity. Brig. Gen. Jacob F. Smith, enraged by a massacre of U.S. troops, responded with retaliatory measures of such indiscriminate brutality that he was court-martialled and forced to retire. After the surrender of Filipino Gen. Miguel Malvar in Samar on April 16, 1902, the American civil government regarded the remaining guerrillas as mere bandits, though the fighting continued. About a thousand guerrillas under Simeón Ola were not defeated until late 1903, and in Batangas province, south of Manila, troops commanded by Macario Sakay resisted capture until as late as 1906.The last organised resistance to U.S. power took place on Samar from 1904 to 1906. There the rebels’ tactic of burning pacified villages contributed to their own defeat. Although an unconnected insurgency campaign by Moro bands on Mindanao continued sporadically until 1913, the United States had gained undisputed control of the Philippines, and it retained sovereignty over the archipelago of the islands until 1946.
Cheap lives?
Filipino casualties
The human cost of the war was significant. An estimated 20,000 Filipino combatants were killed, and more than 200,000 civilians perished as a result of combat, hunger, or disease. Of the 4,300 Americans lost, some 1,500 were killed in action, while nearly twice that number succumbed to disease.
CONVOLUTE Number 7.
The consequences of the images are the images of the consequences!
Page from Souvenir of the 8th Army Corps, Philippine Expedition. A Pictorial History of the Philippine Campaign, 1899.
Q. And babies?
A. And babies.
Photographs of casualties in the Philippines, the result of U.S. military action, resonate with different places and different times following the continued spatial expansion of American economic, political and military power. Three generations later as part of the protest movement against America's conduct in the Vietnam War, this iconic anti-Vietnam War poster was produced on the 26th December 1969. The poster uses uses a colour photograph of the My Lai Massacre taken by U.S. combat photographer Ronald L. Haeberle on March 16, 1968. It shows about a dozen dead and partly naked South Vietnamese women and babies in contorted positions stacked together on a dirt road, killed by U.S. forces. The picture is overlaid in semi-transparent blood-red lettering that asks along the top "Q. And babies?", and at the bottom answers "A. And babies." The quote is from a Mike Wallace CBS News television interview with U.S. soldier Paul Meadlo, who participated in the massacre.
Q. So you fired something like sixty-seven shots?
A. Right.Q. And you killed how many? At that time?A. Well, I fired them automatic, so you can't – You just spray the area on them and so you can’t know how many you killed ‘cause they were going fast. So I might have killed ten or fifteen of them.Q. Men, women, and children?A. Men, women, and children.Q. And babies?A. And babies.
The lettering was sourced from The New York Times, which printed a transcript of the Meadlo interview the day after.
According to cultural historian M. Paul Holsinger, And babies was "easily the most successful poster to vent the outrage that so many felt about the conflict in Southeast Asia."In 1969, the Art Workers Coalition (AWC), a group of New York City artists who opposed the war, used Haeberle's shocking photograph of the My Lai Massacre, to create this poster titled And babies. It was produced by AWC members Irving Petlin, Jon Hendricks and Frazer Dougherty along with Museum of Modern Art members Arthur Drexler and Elizabeth Shaw. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) had promised to fund and circulate the poster, but after seeing the 2 by 3 foot poster, pulled financing for the project at the last minute. MoMA's Board of Trustees included Nelson Rockefeller and William S. Paley (head of CBS), who reportedly "hit the ceiling" on seeing the proofs of the poster. Both were firm supporters of the war effort and backed the Nixon administration. It is unclear if they pulled out for political reasons (as pro-war supporters), or simply to avoid a scandal (personally and/or for MoMA), but the official reason, stated in a press release, was that the poster was outside the "function" of the museum. Nevertheless, under the sole sponsorship of the AWC, 50,000 posters were printed by New York City's lithographers union.On December 26, 1969, a grassroots network of volunteer artists, students and peace activists began circulating it worldwide. Many newspapers and television shows re-printed images of the poster, consumer poster versions soon followed, and it was carried in protest marches around the world, all further increasing its viewership. In a further protest of MoMA's decision to pull out of the project, copies of the poster were carried by members of the AWC into the MoMA and unfurled in front of Picasso's painting Guernica, on loan to MoMA at the time, a painting that depicts the tragedies of war and the suffering it inflicts upon innocent civilians.
One member of the group was Tony Shafrazi, who returned in 1974 to spray paint the Guernica with the words "KILL LIES ALL" in blood red paint, protesting about Richard Nixon's pardon of William Calley for the latter's actions during the My Lai massacre.
Although the photograph was shot almost two years prior to the production of the poster, Haeberle had not released it until late 1969. It was a colour photograph taken on his personal camera, which he did not turn over to the military, unlike the black and white photographs he took on a military camera. Haeberle sold the colour photographs to Life magazine where they were first seen nationally in the December 5, 1969, issue. When the poster came out a few weeks later, in late December 1969, the image was still quite shocking and new to most viewers but already becoming a defining image of the My Lai Massacre and U.S. war crimes in Vietnam.
CONVOLUTE Number 8.
An American Empire?The costs and the benefits?
And, after all, the Philippines are only the stepping-stone to China
Supporters of U.S. policy in the Philippines frequently reminded the American public that acquisition of a colony in Asia could open the door toward trade opportunities in China. This 1900 cartoon by Emil Flohri shows Uncle Sam bringing not only “education” and “religion” but a vast array of consumer goods to an eager Chinese population. The many signs on the Chinese shore itemise all the goods that presumably will find a market in China. The tiny Chinese figure dressed in traditional clothing follows the condescending stereotype demeaning non-Western, non-Caucasian peoples.
When it comes to this CONVOLUTE No. 8. the China-United States struggle for hegemony and the expansion of global power and influence has consequences for all, including along the LODE Zone Line.
Just as there was widespread opposition to the Vietnam War in the United States, and across the world, U.S. policy and the Spanish-American War elicited a strong anti-imperialist response from a wide section of American society. On June 2, retired Massachusetts banker Gamaliel Bradford published a letter in the Boston Evening Transcript in which he sought assistance gaining access to historic Faneuil Hall to hold a public meeting to organise opponents of American colonial expansion. An opponent of the Spanish–American War, Bradford decried what he saw as an "insane and wicked" colonial ambition among some American decision-makers which was "driving the country to moral ruin." Bradford's organiing efforts proved successful, and on June 15, 1898, his protest meeting against "the adoption of an imperial policy by the United States" was held.
The June 15 meeting gave rise to a formal four member organising committee known as the Anti-Imperialist Committee of Correspondence, headed by Bradford. This group contacted religious, business, labor, and humanitarian leaders from around the country and attempted to stir them into action to stop what they perceived as a growing menace of American colonial expansion into Hawaii and the former colonial possessions of the Spanish empire. A letter-writing campaign attempting to involve editors of newspapers and magazines was initiated. This initial pioneering effort by Bradford and his associates bore fruit on November 19, 1898, when the Anti-Imperialist Committee of Correspondence formally established itself as the Anti-Imperialist League.
The U.S. public was bitterly divided over the American conquest of the Philippines. While anti-imperialist critics denounced the invasion, supporters of the war defended it in terms of America’s destiny to spread civilization and progress to backward peoples and nations. In the rhetoric of the pro-war camp, the independence movement was commonly referred to as an “insurrection”.Even more vividly than in photographs, poems, and prose, the mystique of the white man’s burden found expression in a flood of colourful cartoons depicting the global spread of the Western world’s superior material as well as spiritual civilisation.
“If they’ll only be good. ‘You have seen what my sons can do in war — now see what my daughters can do in peace.’”
This graphic by S.D. Erhart, published in 1900 in the popular magazine Puck, depicts American colonialism as a benevolent form of uplift. As U.S. soldiers depart, Uncle Sam introduces a group of female teachers to the Filipinos, depicted in typical caricatures — here as childlike and half-naked — that suggested they were in need of education and civilisation. The U.S. government did send small numbers of teachers to the Philippines soon after acquiring the colony, but in reality, American troops outnumbered teachers throughout the military occupation.
CONVOLUTE Number 9.
The female personification of agency in the civilising mission belongs to the many propaganda efforts where the stereoptypes generating images of "pretty girls" are mobilised in these ideological wars, actual wars and culture wars.
Howard Chandler Christy "Mother of His Country" 1932
The anti-imperialists opposed expansion, believing that imperialism violated the fundamental principle that just republican government must derive from "consent of the governed." The League argued that such activity would necessitate the abandonment of American ideals of self-government and non-intervention — ideals expressed in the United States Declaration of Independence, George Washington's Farewell Address and Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.
In 1941, with war in the Pacific looming, it was these "values" that were trumpeted as the American "freedoms" in this image of Howard Chandler Christy's "pretty girl" personification of these sacred freedoms that were to be defended at all costs.
Female symbol of America holding torch in front of Bill of Rights and standing on "150 years" pedestal. Pastel drawing by Howard Chandler Christy, 1941. Library of Congress.
The Anti-Imperialist League was ultimately defeated in the battle of public opinion by a new wave of politicians who successfully advocated the virtues of American territorial expansion in the aftermath of the Spanish–American War and in the first years of the 20th century.
However important Americans may have felt it was to get to know the Philippines, they also felt it important to understand why Americans were there. As often as not, they drew on notions of civilisation and uplift that British poet Rudyard Kipling had conveyed in his famous 1899 poem “The White Man’s Burden,” in which Kipling urged Americans to “Take up the White Man’s burden” in the Philippines and “bind your sons to exile / To serve your captives’ need.”
This ca. 1900 studio photo of a baseball team in the Philippines conveyed a reassuring aura of normalcy for those worried about the well-being of American forces in the Philippines. (T. Enami Studio, Manila)
Soldiers posed for the camera with visages serious and calm. Some appeared as visual embodiments of President Theodore Roosevelt’s Kipling-esque call in an 1899 speech urging young American men to undertake “The Strenuous Life.” T.R. explained,Above all, let us shrink from no strife, moral or physical, within or without the nation, for it is only through strife, through hard and dangerous endeavor, that we shall ultimately win the goal of true national greatness.Americans in the Philippines understood colonial conquest as a burden to be carried by soldiers, missionaries, doctors, and teachers, and they frequently documented their personal sacrifices in images sent back home.
Americans who would never travel to the Philippines as soldiers, teachers, missionaries, or journalists had the opportunity to learn about the place from an explosion of books sold around the country during the Spanish-American War of 1898 and in the years that followed. The books promised an easily digestible introduction to the war’s campaigns, along with maps of the physical and cultural landscapes of America’s new island territories, all lavishly illustrated with photographs that took advantage of their status as honest guides to a far-off reality that most readers would never experience directly.
“There is truth-telling that should be prized in photography,” explained the author of one popular guide published as early as 1898 under the title The Story of the Philippines, The El Dorado of the Orient, “and our picture gallery is one of the most remarkable that has been assembled.” Another album titled Our New Possessions, put out that same year by a publisher of mass entertainments, mystery novels, and children’s books, interspersed images of war, destruction, and enemy corpses with landscapes and cozy scenes of camp life — as if to reassure Victorian Americans that their sons and brothers were upholding the standards of civilisation.
Philippine independence? A Commonwealth of the Philippines
The U.S. planned that the period 1935–1946 would be devoted to the final adjustments required for a peaceful transition to full independence, a great latitude in autonomy being granted in the meantime. Instead there was war with Japan, which postponed any plans for Philippine independence.On May 14, 1935, an election to fill the newly created office of President of the Commonwealth of the Philippines was won by Manuel L. Quezon (Nacionalista Party), and a Filipino government was formed on the basis of principles superficially similar to the U.S. Constitution. The Commonwealth as established in 1935 featured a very strong executive, a unicameral national assembly, and a supreme court composed entirely of Filipinos for the first time since 1901.
CONVOLUTE Number 10.
This group photo of U.S. Army officers depicts a sense of confidence in the American mission in the Philippines. Circa 1899-1901.
This air of studied confidence among the U.S. military was to take a severe battering following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour on December 7th 1941.
A few hours after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour on December 7, 1941, the Japanese launched air raids in several cities and US military installations in the Philippines on December 8, and on December 10, the first Japanese troops landed in Northern Luzon. As the Japanese forces advanced, Manila was declared an open city to prevent it from destruction, meanwhile, the government was moved to Corregidor. In March 1942, General MacArthur and President Quezon fled the country. Guerrilla units harassed the Japanese when they could, and on Luzon native resistance was strong enough that the Japanese never did get control of a large part of the island.
General Douglas MacArthur, commander of the United States Armed Forces in the Far East (USAFFE), was forced to retreat to Bataan. Manila was occupied by the Japanese on January 2, 1942. The fall of Bataan was on April 9, 1942 with Corregidor Island, at the mouth of Manila Bay, surrendering on May 6. This rearguard action delayed Japanese campaign in the Pacific to a significant degree but the cost to American and Filipino combatants and civilians was extreme. Atrocities and war crimes were committed by the Japanese forces throughout this conflict, including the Bataan Death March and the Manila massacre.
Depicting this terrible defeat and celebrating the heroic resilience of servicemen and women involved in this conflict, would be a challenging artistic achievement and with the film They Were Expendable the bar was set very high. This 1945 American war film directed by John Ford, starring Robert Montgomery and John Wayne, and featuring Donna Reed is based on the 1942 book by William Lindsay White, relating the story of the exploits of Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron Three, a PT boat unit defending the Philippines against Japanese invasion during the Battle of the Philippines (1941–42) in World War II. It is considered by some to be "one of the finest (and most underrated) of all WW2 films."
Following the acquisition of the film rights to William L. White's They Were Expendable MGM asked Ford to direct a film based on the book; Ford repeatedly refused due to his serving in the Navy Field Photographic Unit. During this time Ford met Lieutenant John D. Bulkeley, the Commander of the MTB Squadron, during the preparations for the Normandy Invasion and later sighted Bulkeley's former executive officer Robert Montgomery on D-Day.According to Turner Classic Movies host Ben Mankiewicz, Ford, a notoriously hard taskmaster, was especially hard on Wayne, who did not serve in the armed forces. During production, Ford fell from scaffolding and broke his leg and turned to Montgomery, who had actually commanded a PT boat, to temporarily take over for him as director. Montgomery did so well that within a few years he began directing films.Ford's onscreen directing credit reads, "Directed by John Ford, Captain U.S.N.R."; Frank Wead's onscreen credit reads: "Screenplay by Frank Wead Comdr. U.S.N., Ret"; Montgomery's onscreen credit reads: "Robert Montgomery Comdr. U.S.N.R."The final episodes of the film deal with the mounting Japanese onslaught against the doomed American defenders at Bataan and on Corregidor. The squadron is assigned to evacuate the commanding general of the Pacific Theatre Douglas MacArthur, his family, and others to Mindanao, where they will be flown to Australia.
Rusty (John Wayne) manages to make a last phone call to Sandy (Donna Reed, a "pretty girl"), now on Bataan, to explain he has been ordered out, but before they can say goodbye the connection is cut off. The small flotilla successfully carries MacArthur to his rendezvous across spans of open ocean. They then resume their attacks against the Japanese, who gradually whittle the squadron down too small to function effectively. Crews without boats are sent to fight as infantry. The final two PTs pull into a small shipyard run by crusty "Dad" Knowland for repairs.
The Japanese troops are approaching but Dad says they will have to fight to get him. He is last seen sitting on the steps of his home with a rifle across his lap and whisky jug at his feet, grimly awaiting his fate.
In a final PT-boat attack Rusty's boat is sunk, after which the surviving craft is turned over to the US Army, once again reduced to messenger duty. Brick (Robert Montgomery), Ryan and two ensigns are ordered to be airlifted out on the last plane, assigned stateside to train PT crews, the small, inexpensive wood-hulled boats having proved their worth in combat. While waiting for the plane Rusty runs into Ohio. Neither knows what happened to Sandy, trapped behind on Bataan. They speculate that she might have escaped to the hills but are not optimistic. When one of the ensigns finally arrives late Ohio is forced to give up his seat on the plane and is left behind to certain death or capture.The surviving enlisted men, led by Chief Mulcahey (Ward Bond), shoulder rifles and march off to continue the resistance with the remnants of the U.S. Army and Filipino guerrillas, as expendable in the fight as their PT boats had been before them.
The final credit sequence shows the last flight leaving and a title across the screen that quotes General MacArthur's famous promise "We Shall Return" that, for American audiences following the U.S. military victory over Japan in 1945, proved to be something of a welcome vindication for the U.S. military, industrial and capitalist establishment.
MacArthur did, indeed, return.
CONVOLUTE Number 11.
From 1942 the Japanese occupation of the Philippines was opposed by large-scale underground guerrilla activity. The Hukbalahap, a communist guerrilla movement formed by peasant farmers in Central Luzon, did most of the fighting. The Hukbalahap, also known as Huks, resisted invaders and punished the people who collaborated with the Japanese, but did not have a well-disciplined organisation, and were later seen as a threat to the Manila government. Before MacArthur returned, the effectiveness of the guerrilla movement had decimated Japanese control, limiting it to only 12 out of the 48 provinces.
In October 1944, MacArthur had gathered enough additional troops and supplies to begin the retaking of the Philippines, landing with Sergio Osmeña who had assumed the Presidency. The Philippine Constabulary went on active service under the Philippine Commonwealth Army on October 28, 1944 during liberation under the Commonwealth regime.
General Douglas MacArthur, President Osmeña, and staff land at Palo, Leyte on October 20, 1944.
The largest naval battle in history, according to gross tonnage sunk, the Battle of Leyte Gulf, occurred when Allied forces began liberating the Philippines from the Japanese Empire. Battles on the islands entailed long fierce fighting and some of the Japanese continued to fight after the official surrender of the Empire of Japan on September 2, 1945.After the landing, Filipino and American forces also undertook measures to suppress the Huk movement, which was founded to fight the Japanese Occupation. The Filipino and American forces removed local Huk governments and imprisoned many high-ranking members of the Philippine Communist Party. While this suppression was ongoing fighting carried on against the Japanese forces and, despite the American and Philippine measures against the Huk, they still continued to supported American and Filipino soldiers in the fight against the Japanese.Allied troops defeated the Japanese in 1945. By the end of the war it is estimated that over a million Filipinos (including regular and constable soldiers, recognised guerrillas and non-combatant civilians) died during the war. The 1947 final report of the High Commissioner to the Philippines documents massive damage to most coconut mills and sugar mills; inter-island shipping had all been destroyed or removed; concrete highways had been broken up for use on military airports; railways were inoperative; Manila was 80 percent destroyed, Cebu 90 percent, and Zamboanga 95 percent.
Filipino veterans in this conflict, classed as American nationals, were stripped of their rights to benefits!
During World War II, over 200,000 Filipinos fought in defence of the United States against the Japanese in the Pacific theatre of military operations, where more than half died. As a commonwealth of the United States before and during the war, Filipinos were legally American nationals. With American nationality, Filipinos were promised all the benefits afforded to those serving in the armed forces of the United States. In 1946, Congress passed the Rescission Act (38 U.S.C. § 107) which stripped Filipinos of the benefits they were promised.Since the passage of the Rescission Act, many Filipino veterans have travelled to the United States to lobby Congress for the benefits promised to them for their service and sacrifice. Over 30,000 of such veterans live in the United States today, with most being United States citizens. Sociologists introduced the phrase "Second Class Veterans" to describe the plight of these Filipino Americans. Beginning in 1993, numerous bills titled Filipino Veterans Fairness Act were introduced in Congress to return the benefits taken away from these veterans, only to fail in committee. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, signed into law on February 17, 2009, included provisions to pay benefits to the 15,000 remaining veterans.
CONVOLUTE Number 12.Battleship's on battleships?The lingering appeal of the last naval battle between battleships in history
This map shows the four main actions in the Battle of Leyte Gulf, a battle that was crucial in the U.S. military campaign to recover the Philippines from the Japanese invaders. The battle is considered to have been the largest naval battle of World War II and, by some criteria, possibly the largest naval battle in history, with over 200,000 naval personnel involved.
This sequence of naval engagements was fought in waters near the Philippine islands of Leyte, Samar, and Luzon, from 23 to 26 October 1944, between combined American and Australian forces and the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN), as part of the invasion of Leyte, which aimed to isolate Japan from the countries it had occupied in Southeast Asia which were a vital source of industrial and oil supplies.By the time of the battle, Japan had fewer capital ships (aircraft carriers and battleships) left than the Allied forces had total aircraft carriers, underscoring the disparity in force strength at this point in the war. Regardless, the IJN mobilised nearly all of its remaining major naval vessels in an attempt to defeat the Allied invasion, but it was repulsed by the U.S. Navy's Third and Seventh fleets.The battle consisted of four main separate engagements: the Battle of the Sibuyan Sea, the Battle of Surigao Strait, the Battle off Cape Engaño and the Battle off Samar, as well as lesser actions.This was the first battle in which Japanese aircraft carried out organised kamikaze attacks, and the last naval battle between battleships in history. The Japanese Navy suffered heavy losses and never sailed in comparable force thereafter, stranded for lack of fuel in their bases for the rest of the war, and were therefore unable to affect the successful Allied invasion of Leyte.
1 Battle of the Sibuyan Sea
2 Battle of Surigao Strait
3 Battle off Cape Engaño
4 Battle off Samar.
Leyte Gulf is north of 2 and west of 4. The island of Leyte is west of the gulf.
The aesthetics that frame this historical event, the largest naval battle in history, are today shaped by film and documentary styles and soundscapes alongside interactive computer based video games, such as World of Warships, with their high definition animated graphics swamped in immersive and portentous orchestral soundtracks.
This video montage begins with the documentary use of original wartime film footage of the Battle of Leyte Gulf, and the followed by historical accounts that rely as much on cgi design as original source material. The soundscapes are almost indistinguishable from the style of film score to be found in the 2012 American military science fiction action film Battleship, based on the board game of the same name. Sequences from the trailer and behind the scenes of the making of the film Battleship, are juxtaposed in the montage that prompts these CONVOLUTES, namely:
. . . it's also the Capitalocene
Virtual v factual in the depiction of the . . .
World of Warships, originally released for Microsoft Windows in 2015, is a free-to-play naval warfare-themed multiplayer online game produced and published by Wargaming and developed by its subsidiary Lesta Studio. Players can battle others at random or play cooperative battle types against bots or an advanced player versus environment (PvE) battle mode. For the most skilled players, two seasonal competitive modes are also available. The free-to-play structure is of the "freemium" type. Significant progress can be made without purchasing anything, but access to higher levels of play and additional warships becomes progressively more difficult without financial investment.
DISH IT OUT with THE NAVY!
The steely, armour-plated "sex appeal" of warships with their enormous guns (if this indeed is a viable proposition), inhabits a world where size matters, and where a retro aesthetic, glamourised to the "nth degree", dominates. And the World of Warships inhabits this world, a world where history, catastrophic actions and the consequences are virtual, visual, and "in perspective".
CONVOLUTE Number 13.
Shock and/or?
The effect of this image is intended to encourage a connection between the aesthetic support systems of capitalist and imperialist power as an ideology steeped in another kettle (that's actually the same kettle), pornography!
Bringing out the big guns . . .
. . . in this sequence of World of Warships YouTube posts, is what it is all about, and concluding with a "retro" escapist fantasy, a Hollywood pin-up inspired dance and music number taking place on the deck of a carrier.
There was some controversy over the virtual presence of the Japanese Rising Sun Flag flying on the virtual Japanese warships when in 2013 a petition was lodged by 40,000 South Korean players. Wargaming removed the Rising Sun Flag from Imperial Japanese warships. An opposite view followed when 12,000 signatures were gathered requesting reimplementation of the Rising Sun Flag, but the previous decision was not overturned.
World of Warships stand at the Tokyo Gaming Show in 2014.
USS Missouri (BB-63) is an Iowa-class battleship and was the third ship of the United States Navy to be named after the U.S. state of Missouri. Missouri was the last battleship commissioned by the United States and is best remembered as the site of the surrender of the Empire of Japan, which ended World War II.
Missouri received a total of 11 battle stars for service in World War II, Korea, and the Persian Gulf, and was finally decommissioned in 1992 after serving a total of 17 years of active service, but remained on the Naval Vessel Register until her name was struck in 1995. In 1998, she was donated to the USS Missouri Memorial Association and became a museum ship at Pearl Harbour.
USS Missouri underway in August 1944.
The fetishising of "big guns" merges with history and ideology when it comes to the World of Warships story of the USS Missouri, and extends into science fiction fantasy with the film Battleship.
From surrender to Cher . . .
This video montage begins with newsreel documentation film footage of General MacArthur on his way to receive the surrender of the Japanese aboard the USS Missouri anchored in Tokyo Bay. There is a whiff of triumphalism peppered with a pinch of revenge, and that casts a veil over the substantial fact that the war with Japan resulted in U.S. hegemony in the Pacific being put in question. Any doubts as to the future of U.S. hegemony in the Asia Pacific region would have to be countered by all available means. The expected result would be a re-established "Pax Americana".
CONVOLUTE Number 14.
The use of this term "Pax Americana", latin for an "American Peace", originates in the 1890's, and echoes the use of the term "Pax Britannica", a term that recast the "Pax Romana", the 200-year-long timespan of Roman history which is identified as a golden age of Roman imperialism, order, prosperity stability, hegemonial power and expansion.
The use of this term is, in chronological order first:
The use of the term Pax Romana to pretend that peace is a benefit of empire.
That the late nineteenth century use of the terms Pax Britannica and Pax Americana are bound together in the shifting geopolitical patterns of global power, with a British Empire finding itself as a European colonial and imperialist power contending with an increasingly imperialist United States.
HANDS OFF!
"This in reality entails no new obligation upon us, for the Monroe Doctrine means precisely such a guarantee on our part" - President Roosevelt
A 1906 political cartoon depicting Theodore Roosevelt using the Monroe Doctrine to keep European powers out of the Dominican Republic.
The Goddess Pax appears as a "Calendar Girl" by pin-up artist Ted Withers in 1960.
The goddess Pax under Augustus Caesar was utilised as an ideological image, a demonstration that peace brought wealth, a contradiction, given that the traditional Roman understanding was that only war and conquest afforded wealth in the form of loot and plunder. Fruits and grains were incorporated into Pax’s image and this was maybe done to show the return and abundance of agriculture at the time, as many veterans during the empire where often settled onto farms - particularly after the civil wars. Pax was also shown with twins, maybe representing domestic harmony achieved through the Pax Romana. This was because fertility at home was spurred when the father of the household was around and not fighting in the legions. Cows, pigs and sheep imagery on the Ara Pacis showed the abundance of food and animal husbandry during the Pax Romana and these animals were also regularly scarified to Pax. Pax is also shown with a cornucopia to further emphasise the opulence and wealth during this Roman golden era. During the latter years of her worship she was very rarely shown holding the caduceus and she was increasingly shown sharing many more features common with Augustus - hinting at the Pax Augusta.
The Goddess Pax - Ara Pacis, Rome
Peace and war! OR War and peace! Which comes first!
The Pax Romana is said to have been a "miracle" because prior to it there had never been peace for so many years in a given period of history. However, Walter Goffart wrote:
"The volume of the Cambridge Ancient History for the years AD 70–192 is called 'The Imperial Peace', but peace is not what one finds in its pages".
Walter Goffart (1989). Rome's Fall and After. Hambledon Press. p. 111.
Arthur M. Eckstein writes that the period must be seen in contrast to the much more frequent warfare in the Roman Republic in the 4th and 3rd centuries BC. (Arthur M. Eckstein (2011). "Conceptualizing Roman Imperial Expansion under the Republic: An Introduction". In Nathan Rosenstein; Robert Morstein-Marx (eds.). A Companion to the Roman Republic. John Wiley & Sons. p. 574.)
The Pax Romana began when Octavian (Augustus) defeated Mark Antony and Cleopatra in the Battle of Actium on 2 September 31 BC and became Roman emperor. He became princeps, or first citizen. Lacking a good precedent of successful one-man rule, Augustus created a junta of the greatest military magnates and stood as the front man. By binding together these leading magnates in a coalition, he eliminated the prospect of civil war. The Pax Romana was not immediate, despite the end of the civil wars, because fighting continued in Hispania and in the Alps. Nevertheless, Augustus closed the Gates of Janus (a ceremony indicating that Rome was at peace) three times, first in 29 BC and again in 25 BC. The third closure is undocumented, but Inez Scott Ryberg (1949) and Gaius Stern (2006) have persuasively dated the third closure to 13 BC with the commissioning of the Ara Pacis. At the time of the Ludi Saeculares in 17 BC the Concept of Peace was publicised, and in 13 BC was proclaimed when Augustus and Agrippa jointly returned from pacifying the provinces. The order to construct the Ara Pacis was no doubt part of this announcement.
The Ara Pacis Augustae (Latin, "Altar of Augustan Peace"; commonly shortened to Ara Pacis) is an altar in Rome dedicated to Pax, the Roman goddess of Peace.
The monument was commissioned by the Roman Senate on July 4, 13 BC to honour the return of Augustus to Rome after three years in Hispania and Gaul and consecrated on January 30, 9 BC.
Originally located on the northern outskirts of Rome, a Roman mile from the boundary of the pomerium on the west side of the Via Flaminia, the Ara Pacis stood in the northeastern corner of the Campus Martius, close to the the Solarium Augusti.
The monument was erected by the emperor Augustus, along with the 30-meter Egyptian red granite Obelisk of Montecitorio, that he had brought from Heliopolis in ancient Egypt. The obelisk was employed as a gnomon that cast its shadow on a marble pavement inlaid with a gilded bronze network of lines, by which it was possible to read the time of day according to the season of the year. The solarium was dedicated to the Sun in 10 BCE, 35 years after Julius Caesar's calendar reform.
The nearby original location of the Ara Pacis on the former flood plain of the Tiber River resulted in the monument becoming gradually buried under 4 metres of silt deposits.
It was reassembled in its current location, now the Museum of the Ara Pacis, in 1938, turned 90° counterclockwise from its original orientation so that the original western side now faces south.
The historic Fascist style building around the Altar, locally known as "teca del Morpurgo", was pulled down in 2006, and replaced by a glass and steel structure in modern style, designed by architect Richard Meier.
The new cover building, which has been named "Ara Pacis museum", now stands on the same site as Mussolini's structure.
It was in 1938 that Italy’s dictator Benito Mussolini decided that the recomposed altar remains should be moved from their original location and prominently displayed in a dedicated building, intending to emphasise the glorious past of the then recently established Italian Empire. He commissioned the Italian architect Vittorio Balio Morpurgo to design a new home for the Ara Pacis near the Mausoleum of Augustus, to create a monumental ensemble of Roman antiquities on the Tiber river bank.
The pavilion was inaugurated by Mussolini himself on September 23, 1938.
Mussolini had been instrumental in preserving monuments from ancient Rome’s Golden Age. An avid admirer of Roman history, he sought to represent modern Italy as the heir to the Roman Empire. The ideology of Mussolini’s political party touted nationalist and anti-individualistic ideals, wishing to reform what they saw as an ineffectual governing body and outdated monarchy with a fondness for excess and class division. Roman Imperialism was to be mirrored in early twentieth-century Italy, with military expansion and colonisation of certain Roman provinces from antiquity, such as Greece and North Africa.Mussolini’s own writings advanced a link between Augustus, the founder of Imperial Rome, and himself, the self-styled founder of modern Imperial Italy. Mussolini wrote:
“In five years from now, Rome will appear wonderful to all the world: vast, orderly, powerful as she was at the times of her first empire under Augustus.”CONVOLUTE Number 15.
Given Mussolini's bellicose political stance, and character, the appropriation of an altar of peace seems somewhat perverse until we understand as Michel Foucault proposes:
Peace is a form of war!
A War By Other Means?
This question appears in the banner image for Jack Bowers article (November 18, 2019). the article is headed with this quote from Michel Foucault (Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, edited by Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, translated by David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 47.
“How, when, and why was it noticed or imagined that what is going on beneath and in power relations is a war? When, how and why did someone come up with the idea that it is a sort of uninterrupted battle that shapes peace, and that the civil order...is basically an order of battle?...Who saw war just beneath the surface of peace; who sought in the noise and confusion of war, in the mud of battles, the principle that allows us to understand order, the State, its institutions, and its history?”
Jack Bowers then begins his article with a question and proposal concerning Von Clausewitz's famous maxim:
"War is the continuation of politics by other means."
He writes:
What if, just for the sake of argument, we were to reverse Clausewitz’s famous maxim? What if, say, we considered that war is not the continuation of politics by other means, but instead that politics is really the continuation of war? What would this say about war? Or politics? One of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, Michel Foucault, speculated in just this way, simultaneously turning Clausewitz on his head and questioning the very nature of the relationship between war and peace. What does it mean, then, for war to be the default strategy?
In setting out Foucault's radical re-setting of the terms for an historical question Bower asks the question:
What, then, are the implications of Foucault’s discourse of politics as war?
Bower answers his question identifying three such implications that Re:LODE Radio summarises selectively with these quotations from the article:
"First, one of the ways in which states exercise power is to legitimise behaviours, including war. International conventions, the notion of recognised belligerents, the treatment of prisoners, and the separation of legitimate targets from civilians are all bound up in assumptions, conventions, and understandings of war and, therefore, peace. However, such assumptions, conventions, and understandings were created over time, evolving out of, according to Foucault, a shift in the power structures of nation states following the Middle Ages. While all conflicts—indeed, all human interaction—always involve conventions, they only work if everyone follows them. At its premise, the notion that war is politics by other means requires an implicit agreement that we will all play along according to the rules and assumptions inherent in our notions of war and peace.""Second, Foucault’s reversal gives primacy to a state of war. This turns on its head our accepted assumption that peace is the status quo and war a means to return to that status quo. Foucault’s speculation, however, is not meant to suggest the ongoing use of the military in a conventional conflict ad infinitum. Rather, it is to see the military and conventional conflict as simply one of the ways in which the state enacts power for its interests. That is, Foucault is alert to the discursive strategies of a professional, institutionalised military force at the behest of the state, and also alert to what we might nowadays refer to as political warfare or the grey zone.Understanding war as a complex system is not new. Propaganda, consciousness-raising, psychological operations, economic leverage, espionage, surveillance, assassination, sabotage, threats, and much more, can all be found in Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War. Students of guerrilla warfare recognise Mao’s three phases of war, which combined consciousness-raising with civil and military techniques for undermining the state, followed by consolidating power and minimising casualties, before escalating into conventional war. In the Vietnam War, the strategy of dau tranh also blurred lines between civilian and military personnel, war and peace, and insurgency and conventional war. Clearly, dau tranh’s exploitation of many of the assumptions of western understandings of war and politics was significant in the defeat of the United States. George Kennan, a master of political warfare, appreciated the importance of the Soviet Union’s perception of being engaged in a perpetual war, and developed counter-strategies for the United States during the Cold War. In practice, each of these examples exercised power in ways reflecting the primacy of war in all its guises. Each embraced non-binary understandings of war and politics, conflict and peace, and external and domestic interests.This brings us to the third implication of Foucault’s reversal, and perhaps its most troubling: the role of military, paramilitary, and state apparatuses in controlling the domestic population. Foucault argues the evolution of states enabled them to banish war to outside the state. The state’s normal condition is to be at peace; the state sets the parameters of peace within its borders, and any notion of civil unrest is always particularly fraught for states because it entails the potential for the military to exercise its force within the territory the state’s power should control. The benevolence of the state towards its people is paid for by the acquiescence of the people to the state. That is the fundamental contract between the citizen and the state, and the foundation of Western civilian-military affairs is based upon an understanding that the military is exclusively for external matters. Foucault has one eye on the past—in particular the French Revolution—but his blurring is significant because it alerts us to the discursive power inherent in expressions like (counter)insurgency, terrorism, asymmetric warfare, and nonstate actors. The distinction between war and civil war is used to delegitimise nonstate actors—their political and military objectives, their ethics, their rights as combatants (e.g., the Mujahedeen, the Vietcong, the Taliban, the PKK, the IRA, to mention only a few). Such antagonists are frequently involved in struggles that are part civil war, part interstate conflict.""To be clear, Foucault is not arguing for or against the rights of particular states or nonstate actors. What he is showing in his reversal of Clausewitz’s dictum is that our discourses around peace, war, sovereignty, and rights frame our assumptions and behaviours when it comes to conflict. These discourses operate both domestically and internationally, legitimising or delegitimising certain practices. Immigration controls, which keep the enemy out, have been used extensively to frame the exercise of states to differentiate between us and them. The so-called war on terror has become a vehicle for exceptional laws allowing surveillance and detention. Offshore, the use of rendition and indefinite detention is rationalised by the binary between an enemy (and a war) out there and a domestic population (and peace) at home."
American Peace?
In 1945, following the defeat of Germany and Japan, returning America's geopolitical "sphere of influence" to a default "stable state", a "state of peace", uses the normalised notion of "peace" in the ideological ways that Foucault identifies.
This image, used in the Wikipedia article on the Pax Americana, shows the wingtips of the American Bald Eagle stretching across the western hemisphere and the Pacific Ocean, the peaceful sea. Ten thousand miles from Puerto Rico to the Philippines.
CONVOLUTE Number 16.
Manifest destiny
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American Progress (1872) by John Gast is an allegorical representation of the modernisation of the new west. Columbia, another "pretty girl", a personification of the United States, is shown leading civilisation westward with the American settlers.
The date of 1898, so prominently displayed in this image from the Philadelphia Press, emphasises the de facto imperialist outcome of the Spanish American War, as a natural consequence of continental westward expansion and American exceptionalism.While the term Pax Britannica as referred to Britain's "imperial century", from 1815 and the defeat of Napoleon to the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, the term itself had no currency in its formative years. By contrast, the notion of Pax Americana emerged in the last decades of the nineteenth century, during the period when Pax Britannica was weakened by the breakdown of the continental order which had been established by the Congress of Vienna. Relations between the Great Powers of Europe were strained to breaking point by issues such as the decline of the Ottoman Empire, which led to the Crimean War, and later the emergence of new nation states in the form of Italy and Germany after the Franco-Prussian War. Both of these wars involved Europe's largest states and armies.
The industrialisation of Germany, the Empire of Japan, and the United States contributed to the relative decline of British industrial supremacy in the late 19th century. The start of World War I in 1914 marked the end of the Pax Britannica. However, the British Empire remained the biggest colonial empire until the start of decolonisation after World War II ended in 1945. Britain remained one of the leading powers until the Suez Canal crisis in 1956, when British and French troops were forced to withdraw from Egypt under pressure from the United States and (to a lesser extent) the Soviet Union.
Wars! Hot and Cold!
By 1945 the wingtips of the American Bald Eagle had stretched even further to include the islands of the Japanese archipelago during the Allied Occupation of 1945-1952. This essentially "American" occupation resulted in a dramatic political and social transformation of Japanese society and its political economy.US General Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander of Allied Powers, served as Japan's de facto leader and played a central role in implementing reforms, many inspired by the New Deal of the 1930s, that Franklin D. Roosevelt implemented to mitigate some of the catastrophic consequences of the Great Depression. With the re-establishment of a semblance of geo-political hegemony across the Pacific there was nevertheless a potential threat from the appeal of communism, especially for those experiencing the yoke of colonial exploitation, poverty and inequality. In this context, of what became known as the "Cold War", it was essential that re-construction of the Japanese political economy would mitigate the effects of the capitalist, colonial and imperialist system.
Coincidently (or perhaps NOT coincidentally) what is known as the Japanese economic miracle took place in the period between the surrender of the Japanese aboard USS Missouri and the end of the "Cold War", and the break up of the Soviet Union.
Although the Japanese economy was in bad shape in the immediate postwar years, an austerity program implemented in 1949 by finance expert Joseph Dodge ended inflation, but it was the Cold War hot war, The Korean War (1950–1953) that proved to be a major boon to Japanese business. In 1949 the Yoshida cabinet created the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) with a mission to promote economic growth through close cooperation between the government and big business. MITI sought successfully to promote manufacturing and heavy industry, and encourage exports. The factors behind Japan's postwar economic growth included technology and quality control techniques imported from the West, close economic and defence cooperation with the United States, non-tariff barriers to imports, restrictions on labor unionisation, long work hours, and a generally favourable global economic environment.Japan's postwar growth spurt would not have been possible without Japan's alliance with the United States, since the United States absorbed Japanese exports, tolerated controversial Japanese trade practices, subsidised the Japanese economy, and transferred technology to Japanese firms; thereby magnifying the effectiveness of Japanese trade policy. Japanese corporations successfully retained a loyal and experienced workforce through the system of lifetime employment, which assured their employees a safe job.By 1955, the Japanese economy had grown beyond prewar levels, and by 1968 it had become the second largest capitalist economy in the world. The GNP expanded at an annual rate of nearly 10% from 1956 until the 1973 oil crisis slowed growth to a still-rapid average annual rate of just over 4% until 1991.
CONVOLUTE Number 17.A museum piece with big guns?
USS Missouri is the star in the American 2012 film Battleship. Filming for this escapist and nostalgic piece of entertainment took place in Hawaii and on USS Missouri. In the film, the crews of a small group of warships are forced to battle against a naval fleet of extraterrestrial origin in order to thwart their destructive goals.
The main plot device is that the anachronistic value of a museum piece, a battleship, is that it has an advantage in tackling a technologically superior adversary by virtue of its being "old fashioned", so the "Mighty Mo" overcomes an extraterrestrial foe's complex technological weapons system. Rotten Tomatoes site's critics consensus reads:
"It may offer energetic escapism for less demanding filmgoers, but Battleship is too loud, poorly written, and formulaic to justify its expense – and a lot less fun than its source material."
Due to his success with the Transformers franchise, composer Steve Jablonsky was chosen to score the official soundtrack. So, when it comes to being "too loud", the film music score is typical of this genre, "big and awesome", "scary and driving", and yes, "immersive", but nevertheless a rather stale formula.
CONVOLUTE Number 18.
"They that make them shall be like unto them!" Shock and/or (awe)?
Q. Is this image uploaded below a pornographic image?
A. YES and NO!
YES, as in a dictionary definition of printed or visual material containing the explicit description or display of sexual organs or activity, but NOT as intended to stimulate sexual excitement.
The Guardian's Jonathan Jones article on Penises of the ancient world, references an article in Vice's Garage on the archaeological discovery of a mosaic found in a Roman toilet in Turkey depicting a young man holding his erect penis. Jonathan Jones writes:
When excavations began at the ancient Roman city of Pompeii in the 18th century, the place turned out to be full of penises. The ancient art preserved under ash from the 79 AD eruption of Vesuvius was so rich in willies that the English antiquarian Richard Payne Knight argued for the existence of an ancient fertility cult there. After all, there was one still alive in southern Italy at the time. His 1786 book An Account of the Remains of the Worship of Priapus has an engraved frontispiece showing an array of contemporary wax phalluses made as votive offerings.
More than 200 years later, the priapism of the ancient world can still astound us. Archaeologists have uncovered a Roman public toilet in southern Turkey with some filthy and funny floor decorations. As they hitched up their togas or reached for sponge on a stick, users of this men’s loo could look down at a mosaic of a young man holding his cock. He is labelled in the mosaic as Narcissus, who in Greek myth fell in love with his own reflection and wasted away gazing at it. Here, his attention is more focused: he’s obsessed with his own erection. As he plays with it, he looks sideways to reveal a ludicrous phallic nose.
Reports on this intimate uncovering show that for all our modern sophistication we can still be as amazed as 18th-century dilettanti were by ancient erotic art. One article even asks:
“Is this the first historical dick pic?
Re:LODE Radio seeks to offer a different account of the myth of Narcissus and Echo from the usual and common interpretation given by Jonathan Jones in his article, i.e. that:
"Narcissus, who in Greek myth fell in love with his own reflection and wasted away gazing at it."
Echo and Narcissus, 1630, by Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665)
Marshall McLuhan in his 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, has a chapter, Chapter 4, titled:
THE GADGET LOVERThe subheading for this chapter is:
Narcissus as NarcosisMcLuhan writes:
The Greek myth of Narcissus is directly concerned with a fact of human experience, as the word Narcissus indicates. It is from the Greek word narcosis, or numbness. The youth Narcissus mistook his own reflection in the water for another person. This extension of himself by mirror numbed his perceptions until he became the servomechanism of his own extended or repeated image. The nymph Echo tried to win his love with fragments of his own speech, but in vain. He was numb. He had adapted to his extension of himself and had become a closed system. Now the point of this myth is the fact that men at once become fascinated by any extension of themselves in any material other than themselves. There have been cynics who insisted that men fall deepest in love with women who give them back their own image. Be that as it may, the wisdom of the Narcissus myth does not convey any idea that Narcissus fell in love with anything he regarded as himself. Obviously he would have had very different feelings about the image had he known it was an extension or repetition of himself. It is, perhaps, indicative of the bias of our intensely technological and, therefore, narcotic culture that we have long interpreted the Narcissus story to mean that he fell in love with himself, that he imagined the reflection to be Narcissus!Is the battleship's 16 inch gun an archetype of the Narcissus as narcosis effect, and a substitute version of the phallus, a tool of power, an extension of man?
When it comes to a dictionary definition of pornography, and the particular intention to stimulate sexual excitement, the "big dick" here is simply another example of "clickbait" on the internet, in this case pointing to the serious cultural, psychological and perceptual fallout that stems from the use of mechanical technological forms as powerful extensions of man. But everything has changed. As McLuhan said in the opening paragraphs of Understanding Media, back in 1964:After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western world is imploding. During the mechanical ages we had extended our bodies in space. Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man - the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society.
The intention here in CONVOLUTE No. 18. is, as with previous representations of a "big dick", to explore just how far a discussion like this can explore the extent to which a battleship is capable of becoming a fetishised "power and/or sex" thing in the service of ideology. Re:LODE Radio proposes for the sake of making a point; substitute the erect penis for a 16 in (406 mm) /50 caliber Mark 7 gun, and Julius Zimmerman's "pretty girl" for Cher!
CONVOLUTE Number 19.
Cher's performance of the pop rock song "If I could turn back time" among the big guns of USS Missouri for a video shoot that took place at the end of June, 1989, coincides with a period when the power politics underpinning the Cold War, and the accompanying contestation of spheres of influence, began to unravel. The lyrics of the song are about feelings of remorse following a reflection on past actions and a willingness to reverse time to make things right. If only!
Well . . . Hello Sailor!
The music video for Cher's "If I Could Turn Back Time", directed by American television director Marty Callner, shows Cher and her band performing a concert for the ship's crew. The video footage was shot on June 30, 1989.
Earlier that month tanks and troops had rolled into Tiananmen Square to crush the protests that were taking place there on 4 June 1989. Although they were not effectively organised and their goals varied, the students called for greater accountability, constitutional due process, democracy, freedom of the press, and freedom of speech. At the height of the protests, about one million people assembled in the Square. The Chinese Communist Party continues to forbid discussions about the Tiananmen Square protests and has taken measures to block or censor related information, in an attempt to suppress the public's memory of the Tiananmen Square protests. Textbooks contain little, if any, information about the protests. After the protests, officials banned controversial films and books and shut down many newspapers. Within a year, 12% of all newspapers, 8% of all publishing companies, 13% of all social science periodicals, and more than 150 films were either banned or shut down. The government also announced that it had seized 32 million contraband books and 2.4 million video and audio cassettes.[ Access to media and Internet resources about the subject are either restricted or blocked by censors. Banned literature and films include Summer Palace, Forbidden City, Collection of June Fourth Poems, The Critical Moment: Li Peng diaries and any writings of Zhao Ziyang or his aide Bao Tong, including Zhao's memoirs. However, contraband and Internet copies of these publications can still be found.
On the day following the massacre of protesters in Tiananmen Square a lone protester stepped in front of a column of tanks rolling down the northeast edge of Tiananmen Square, along Chang'an Avenue, shortly after noon . . .
Amazingly, the tank stopped. The protester then engages with the tank crew, then the CNN film footage ends. The incident was shared to a worldwide audience. Internationally, it is considered one of the most iconic images of all time, but inside China, the image and the accompanying events are subject to censorship.There is no reliable information about the identity or fate of the man; the story of what happened to the tank crew is also unknown. At least one witness has stated that Tank Man was not the only person to have blocked the tanks during the protest, but Tank Man is unique in that he is the only one who was photographed and recorded on video.
On the same day as the Tiananmen Square protests were being crushed by the Chinese Communist party, an election victory for Solidarity in the first partially free parliamentary elections in post-war Poland sparks off a succession of anti-communist Revolutions during 1989 across Central Europe, and later in South-East and Eastern Europe.
A "pretty girl" turning back time?
Cher's outfit for the original video, a fishnet body stocking under a black one-piece bathing suit that left most of her buttocks (and a tattoo of a butterfly) exposed, proved very controversial, and many television networks refused to show the video. MTV first banned the video, and later played it only after 9 PM. A second version of the video was made, including new scenes and less overtly sexual content than the original.
The outfit and risque nature of the video were a complete surprise to the Navy, who expected Cher to wear a jumpsuit for the concert, as presented on storyboards during original discussions with producers. The sailors were already in place and the band had begun playing when Cher emerged in her outfit. Lieutenant Commander Steve Honda from the Navy's Hollywood Liaison office requested Callner briefly suspend shooting and convince Cher to change into more conservative attire, but Callner, refused.The Navy received criticism for allowing the video shoot, especially from World War II veterans who saw it as a desecration of a national historic site that should be treated with reverence.
As the concerns over an "historic site" were being expressed by World War II veterans, the consequences of the Revolutions of 1989 and the adoption of a foreign policy based on non-interference by the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact was dissolved on 1 June 1991 and Soviet troops began withdrawing back to the Soviet Union, completing their withdrawal by the mid-1990s.In 2020 the United States military, industrial and capitalist complex would probably dearly love to "turn back time" to 1945 or even 1898.
The concept of time travel by mechanical means was popularised in H. G. Wells' 1895 story, The Time Machine.
The plot of the 1960 American film version of H. G. Wells' 1895 novella is set in London on the eve of 1900, but has been adjusted to fit the contemporary Cold War ideological narrative of the late 1950's. At a dinner on New Year's Eve, George says that time is "the fourth dimension". He shows David Filby, Dr. Philip Hillyer, Anthony Bridewell, and Walter Kemp a small model time machine and has one of them press a tiny lever on it. The device disappears, but his friends remain doubtful. A few days later, on January 5, the four friends arrive for a dinner at their inventor friend George, but he is absent. He arrives suddenly, bedraggled and exhausted, and tells them what has happened to him.
George has a full-size time machine which he uses to travel forward to September 13, 1917. He meets Filby's son, James, who tells him of Filby's death in a war. He then stops on June 19, 1940, during the Blitz, finding himself in the midst of "a new war". George resumes his journey and stops on August 18, 1966. People hurry into a fallout shelter amid the blare of air raid sirens. An elderly James Filby urges George to take cover. Moments later, a nuclear satellite detonates, causing a volcanic eruption. George narrowly makes it back to his machine ahead of the approaching lava, which rises, cools, and hardens, trapping him inside, as he travels far into the future. Eventually the lava wears away, revealing a lush, unspoiled landscape.
The 2002 film version is set in 1899, with the protagonist Dr. Alexander Hartdegen, an inventor teaching at Columbia University in New York City. After a mugger kills his fiancée Emma, he devotes himself to building a time machine that will allow him to travel back in time to save her. When he completes the machine four years later, he travels back to 1899 and prevents her murder, only to see her killed again when a horseless carriage frightens the horses of a horse-drawn vehicle.
Alexander realises that any attempt to save Emma will result in her death through other circumstances. He travels to 2030, where an advertising campaign proclaims that:
He tries to discover whether science has been able to solve his question of how to change the past. At the New York Public Library, a holographic librarian called Vox 114 insists time travel to the past is impossible.
In general, time travel stories focus on the consequences of traveling into the past or the future. The central premise for these stories often involves changing history, either intentionally or by accident, and the ways by which altering the past changes the future and creates an altered present or future for the time traveler upon their return home. In other instances, the premise is that the past cannot be changed or that the future is predetermined, and the protagonist's actions turn out to be either inconsequential or intrinsic to events as they originally unfolded. Some stories focus solely on the paradoxes and alternate timelines that come with time travel, rather than time traveling itself. They often provide some sort of social commentary, as time travel provides a "necessary distancing effect" that allows science fiction to address contemporary issues in metaphorical ways.
Come and See! Science Fiction and/or Historical Fiction?
Time travel has been part of the storylines in Marvel's the X-Men, a fictional team of superheroes appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. Created by artist/co-plotter Jack Kirby and writer/editor Stan Lee, the characters first appeared in The X-Men #1 back in September 1963, and formed one of the most recognisable and successful franchises of Marvel Comics, appearing in numerous books, television shows, films, and video games.
Many of the X-Men's stories delve into time travel either in the sense of the team travelling through time on a mission, villains traveling through time to alter history, or certain characters traveling from the past or future in order to join the present team. Story arcs and spin-offs that are notable for using this plot device include Days of Future Past, Messiah Complex, All-New X-Men, Messiah War, and Battle of the Atom. Characters who are related to time travel include: Apocalypse, Bishop, Cable, Old Man Logan, Prestige, Hope Summers, Tempus, and Stryfe.
Cher's song "If I Could Turn Back Time" is featured in a post-credit scene in the 2018 film Deadpool 2,an American superhero film based upon the Marvel Comics character Deadpool. It is a spin-off in the X-Men film series, a sequel to 2016's Deadpool, and the eleventh instalment overall. As the closing credits roll, Cable, one of the main characters of the film, and a time traveller from the far future, the character Deadpool uses Cable's time machine to go back in time and correct various timelines as Cher's song plays. This includes time travel back to a find a baby Hitler, and potentially correcting the history of the twentieth century and accordingly removing the Holocaust and World War II from human history by killing a baby.
Q. Killing a baby?
A. Yes, killing a baby!
A similar scenario, but emerging from an historical and existential context, occurs in the 1985 Soviet anti-war film directed by Elem Klimov titled Come and See.
The original Belarusian title of the film derives from Chapter 6 of the Book of Revelation, where in the first, third, fifth, and seventh verse is written "ідзі і глядзі" (English: "Come and see", Greek: Ἐρχου καὶ ἴδε, Erchou kai ide) as an invitation to look upon the destruction caused by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
The fourth woodcut of the Apocalypse series by Albrecht Dürer, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1498)
Chapter 6, verses 7–8 have been cited as being particularly relevant to the film:And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, "Come and see!" And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.
In 1943, two Belarusian boys dig in a sand-filled trench looking for abandoned rifles in order to join the Soviet partisan forces. Their village elder warns them not to dig up the weapons as it would arouse the suspicions of the occupying Germans. One of the boys, Flyora, finds an SVT-40 rifle, though both of them are seen by an Fw 189 flying overhead.The next day two partisans arrive at Flyora's house, to conscript him. Flyora becomes a low-rank militiaman and is ordered to perform menial tasks. When the partisans are ready to move on, the partisan commander, Kosach, says that Flyora is to remain behind at the camp. Bitterly disappointed, Flyora walks into the forest weeping and meets Glasha, a young girl working as a nurse in the camp, and the two bond before the camp is suddenly attacked by German paratroopers and dive bombers.Flyora is partially deafened from the explosions before the two hide in the forest to avoid the German soldiers. Flyora and Glasha travel to his village, only to find his home deserted and covered in flies. Denying that his family is dead, Flyora believes that they are hiding on a nearby island across a bog. As they run from the village in the direction of the bogland, Glasha glances across her shoulder, seeing a pile of executed villagers' bodies stacked behind a house, but does not alert Flyora.The two become hysterical after wading through the bog, where Glasha then screams at Flyora that his family is actually dead in the village; resulting in the latter attempting to drown her. They are soon met by Rubezh, a partisan fighter, who takes them to a large group of villagers who have fled the Germans. Flyora sees the village elder, badly burnt by the Germans, who tells him that he witnessed his family's execution and that he should not have dug up the rifles. Flyora, hearing this, then attempts suicide out of guilt, but Glasha and the villagers save and comfort him.Rubezh takes Flyora and two other men to find food at a nearby warehouse, only to find it being guarded by German troops. During their retreat, the group unknowingly wanders through a minefield resulting in the deaths of the two companions. That evening Rubezh and Flyora sneak up to an occupied village and manage to steal a cow from a collaborating farmer. As they escape across an open field, Rubezh and the cow are shot and killed by a German machine gun. The next morning, Flyora attempts to steal a horse and cart but the owner catches him and instead of doing him harm, he helps hide Flyora's identity when SS troops approach.Flyora is taken to the village of Perekhody, where they hurriedly discuss a fake identity for him, while the SS unit, accompanied by Soviet collaborators surround and occupy the village. Flyora tries to warn the townsfolk as they are being herded to their deaths, but is forced to join them inside a wooden church. Flyora and a young girl are allowed to escape the church, but the latter is dragged by her hair across the ground and into a truck to be gang raped. Flyora is forced to watch as several Molotov cocktails and grenades are thrown onto and within the church before it is further set ablaze with a flamethrower as other soldiers shoot into the building. A German officer points a gun to Flyora's head to pose for a picture before leaving him to slump to the ground as the soldiers leave.Flyora later wanders out of the scorched village in the direction of the Germans, where he discovers they had been ambushed by the partisans. After recovering his jacket and rifle, Flyora comes across the young girl in a fugue state, her legs and face covered in blood after having been gang-raped and brutalised by German forces. Flyora returns to the village and finds that his fellow partisans have captured eleven of the Germans and their collaborators, including the commander, an SS-Sturmbannführer. While some of the captured men including the commander and main collaborator plead for their lives and deflect blame, a young fanatical officer, an Obersturmführer, is unapologetic and vows they will carry out their genocidal mission.Kosach makes the collaborator douse the Germans with a can of petrol brought there by Flyora, but the disgusted crowd shoots them all before they can be set on fire. As the partisans leave, Flyora notices a framed portrait of Adolf Hitler in a puddle and proceeds to shoot it numerous times.
As he does so, a montage of clips from Hitler's life play in reverse, but when Hitler is shown as a baby on his mother's lap, Flyora stops shooting and cries.
A title card appears:
"628 Belorussian villages were destroyed, along with all their inhabitants"
(alternate translations: "628 Belarusian villages were burnt to the ground with all their inhabitants"; "The Nazis burned down 628 Byelorussian villages together with all the people in them").
Flyora rushes to rejoin his comrades, and they march through the birch woods as snow blankets the ground.
Rita Kempley, of The Washington Post, wrote that;
"directing with an angry eloquence, [Klimov] taps into that hallucinatory nether world of blood and mud and escalating madness that Francis Ford Coppola found in Apocalypse Now. And though he draws a surprisingly vivid performance from his inexperienced teen lead, Klimov's prowess is his visual poetry, muscular and animistic, like compatriot Andrei Konchalovsky's in his epic Siberiade."
According to Klimov, the film was so shocking for audiences that ambulances were sometimes called in to take care of particularly impressionable viewers, both in the Soviet Union and abroad. During one of the after-the-film discussions, an elderly German man stood up and said:
"I was a soldier of the Wehrmacht; moreover, an officer of the Wehrmacht. I traveled through all of Poland and Belarus, finally reaching Ukraine. I will testify: everything that is told in this film is the truth. And the most frightening and shameful thing for me is that this film will be seen by my children and grandchildren."
The historical events of 1989 that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall were to some extent accompanied by the evolving ideological notion of;
the End of History!
The "end of history" is a political and philosophical concept that supposes that a particular political, economic, or social system may develop that would constitute the end-point of humanity's sociocultural evolution and the final form of human government.
A name that is commonly linked to the concept of the end of history in contemporary discourse is Francis Fukuyama. Fukuyama brought the term back to the forefront with his essay The End of History? that was published months before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In this essay, which he later expanded upon in his book The End of History and the Last Man in 1992, Fukuyama builds on the knowledge of Hegel, Marx and Kojève. The essay centres around the idea that now that its two most important competitors, fascism and communism, have been defeated, there should no longer be any serious competition for liberal democracy and the market economy.In his theory, Fukuyama distinguishes between the material or real world and the world of ideas or consciousness. He believes that in the realm of ideas liberalism has proven to be triumphant, meaning that even though a successful liberal democracy and market economy have not yet been established everywhere, there are no longer any ideological competitors for these systems. This would mean that any fundamental contradiction in human life can be worked out within the context of modern liberalism and would not need an alternative political-economic structure to be resolved. Now that the end of history is reached, Fukuyama believes that international relations would be primarily concerned with economic matters and no longer with politics or strategy, thus reducing the chances of a large scale international violent conflict.Fukuyama concludes that the end of history will be a sad time, because the potential of ideological struggles that people were prepared to risk their lives for has now been replaced with the prospect of "economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands." This does not mean that Fukuyama believes that a modern liberal democracy is the perfect political system, but rather that he does not think another political structure can provide citizens with the levels of wealth and personal liberties that a liberal democracy can.The problem with this concept is that it is . . .
. . . complete bollocks!
This is a close-up of Michelangelo's sculpture of David, showing the subject's genitalia. A plaster cast version of this work stands in the Cast Courts of the V&A Museum in London.
For Victorian Londoners without the means of travelling abroad, these casts provided a fascinating glimpse into the marvels of European sculpture. One of the earliest major casts of Italian figure sculpture – Michelangelo's David – sets the tone for the scale and breadth of the objects to be found in the courts. David, which was constructed by the Florentine cast-maker Clemente Papi in the 1850s, is more than five metres tall and was created from hundreds of pieces of a plaster mould taken directly from the original. Acquired by chance, it was sent to Queen Victoria by Leopold II, Grand Duke of Tuscany, supposedly in an attempt to placate the British following his refusal to allow the National Gallery to export from Florence a painting by Domenico Ghirlandaio. The Queen, shocked by the nudity of the cast, requested that a suitably proportioned fig leaf be made (by the London firm D. Brucciani & Co), and hung on the cast using a pair of hooks when dignitaries visited. Today the plaster fig leaf is a popular exhibit on its own.
The trouble with Fukuyama's notion that the failure of communism and fascism leaves humanity with the opportunity to concentrate on how life can be worked out within the context of modern liberalism means that there's no need to consider an alternative political-economic structure. This is problematic.
In 2020 it is clear to a few that development of some form of post-capitalist structure is necessary. Why? Because the only way to alter the trajectory of climate change, the result of global heating, is to replace currently existing global capitalism with something else.
Fukuyama's ideas were used, very effectively, by many neoconservatives and neoliberals, to conceal this "cock and balls" awful truth with an ideological fig leaf. Facing the future in this way during the early 1990's allowed for a degree of complacency as regards the continuing survival of the ancien regime. As Margaret Thatcher used to say:
"There is no alternative!" aka TINA
This is MISS MAY, the Playboy centrefold spread showing Tina Bockrath, Playboy's Playmate of the Month for May 1990.
In the May 1990 issue of Playboy there's an interview with the American author and columnist Dave Barry. Barry has defined a sense of humour as "a measurement of the extent to which we realise that we are trapped in a world almost totally devoid of reason. Laughter is how we express the anxiety we feel at this knowledge."
During 1990, and by the time Tina appeared in the centrefold as MISS MAY, the political unravelling and disintegration of the Soviet Union was under way. The year had begun with Black January when Soviet troops occupied Baku, Azerbaijan SSR, under the state of emergency decree issued by Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev, and kill over 130 protesters who were demonstrating for independence, and the Nakhichevan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic declared its independence from the USSR.
In February 1990, when Pamela Anderson featured as Playboy's Playmate of the month, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union voted to end its monopoly of power, clearing the way for multiparty elections. And later that month the USSR agrees to withdraw all 73,500 troops from Czechoslovakia by July, 1991.
In March 1990, when Donald Trump was interviewed and featured on the cover of Playboy, the Lithuanian SSR declares independence from the Soviet Union with the Act of the Re-Establishment of the State of Lithuania, following the so-called Singing Revolution.
The New York Times would revisit this 1990 interview with Playboy in 2016 while Trump was campaigning for his election to the American presidency.
Lisa Matthews was the centrefold model for the April 1990 issue of Playboy, and the interview subject was the theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union apologises for the Katyn massacre, while West Germany and East Germany agree to merge currency and economies on July 1.
In the November 1990 issue of Playboy, the centrefold model was the African American Lorraine Olivia.
The first African American Playboy model was Darine Stern who appeared by herself on the cover of Playboy magazine in the October 1971 issue. Her appearance followed Jean Bell who was featured on the magazine's January 1970 cover, though with four other models.
The subject of the Playboy interview for the November 1990 issue was the American businesswoman Leona Helmsley. Helmsley's flamboyant personality and reputation for tyrannical behaviour earned her the nickname Queen of Mean. After allegations of non-payment were made by contractors hired to improve Helmsley's Connecticut home, she was investigated and convicted of federal income tax evasion and other crimes in 1989. Although having initially received a sentence of sixteen years, she was required to serve only nineteen months in prison and two months under house arrest. During the trial, a former housekeeper testified that she had heard Helmsley say:
"We don't pay taxes; only the little people pay taxes".
From Britannia's "pin-up girl" to "pretty" unpopular!
The pin-up girl for neoliberalism, from the 1980's until the present, was Margaret Thatcher.
However, in November 1990 the UK's "Queen of neoliberal mean" was on the way out. During her premiership Thatcher had the second-lowest average approval rating (40%) of any post-war prime minister. Opinion polls in September 1990 reported that Labour had established a 14% lead over the Conservatives, and by November, the Conservatives had been trailing Labour for 18 months. These ratings, together with Thatcher's combative personality and tendency to override collegiate opinion, contributed to further discontent within her party.
On 14 November, Michael Heseltine mounted a challenge for the leadership of the Conservative Party. Opinion polls had indicated that he would give the Conservatives a national lead over Labour. Although Thatcher led on the first ballot with the votes of 204 Conservative MPs (54.8%) to 152 votes (40.9%) for Heseltine, with 16 abstentions, she was four votes short of the required 15% majority. A second ballot was therefore necessary. Thatcher initially declared her intention to "fight on and fight to win" the second ballot, but consultation with her cabinet persuaded her to withdraw. After holding an audience with the Queen, calling other world leaders, and making one final Commons speech, on 28 November she left Downing Street in tears. She reportedly regarded her ousting as a betrayal.
In 2013 TINA was back in the UK!
Nick Robinson, Political editor at the BBC reported on 7 March 2013 under the headline:
Economy: There is no alternative (TINA) is back
Nick Robinson reports:
She's back. She's not been heard of since the 1980s. She's been brought out of retirement by David Cameron. She is TINA - "There Is No Alternative" - the phrase forever associated with Mrs Thatcher in the 1980s.
Today her successor has revived it in a speech which, whilst revealing no new policies, reveals a great deal of the government's thinking and is clearly designed as a script for its supporters.
"If there was another way I would take it. But there is no alternative"
The key message of the speech is summed up in this sentence :
"The very moment when we're just getting some signs that we can turn our economy round and make our country a success is the very moment to hold firm to the path we have set"
At some length Cameron takes on the Labour argument that he has been cutting too fast and too deep insisting that there is no "magic money tree":
"There are some people who think we don't have to take all these tough decisions to deal with our debts. They say that our focus on deficit reduction is damaging growth. And what we need to do is to spend more and borrow more. It's as if they think there's some magic money tree. Well let me tell you a plain truth: there isn't. Last month's downgrade was the starkest possible reminder of the debt problem we face. If we don't deal with it interest rates will rise, homes will be repossessed and businesses will go bust…And more and more taxpayer's money will be spent just paying off the interest on our debts"
The question in 2013, just as it was in 2008, when the global taxpayer bailed out a collapsed capitalist global banking system, is whose debt was it? It wasn't the taxpayer's debt, it was the banks, the actors and servants of capital. Steve Bell depicts these bad actors in his cartoon as the "fat cats"! Cameron, and the neoliberals tried hard, and succeeded to a large extent, to convince the electorate that it this debt was "our debt", and that to protect the taxpayer what was required was an "austerity programme" designed dismantle the state's role in social security and protection through a "safety net" system of benefits. So Cameron and Osborne looked after their capitalist masters in an ideological project that would hurt the poorest (many of whom paid tax) the most. But, hey:
There Is No Alternative!
This video captured image is of Claire Berlinski promoting her book There Is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters (2008). The presentation was framed by the a backdrop that was emblazoned with the logo for The Heritage Foundation.
The title of Berlinski's book is a slogan which the author uses to mobilise the belief that despite capitalism's problems, "there is no alternative" to it as an economic system, and that neoliberalism must push back against socialism. There are a lot more "hacks" at work on this project up to the present day, thanks to some extent to the way Fukuyama's work has been co-opted to the neoliberals regressive political agenda, which is above all to protect the status quo, globalised capitalism. And what about The Heritage Foundation? Heritage is an American conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C., primarily geared towards public policy. The foundation took a leading role in the conservative movement during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, whose policies were taken from Heritage's policy study Mandate for Leadership. Historically, the Heritage Foundation has had significant influence in U.S. public policy making. It is among the most influential conservative public policy organisations in the United States.
The organisation is, and has been, a false friend to democracy. The Heritage Foundation has promoted false claims of voter fraud. Hans von Spakovsky who heads the Election Law Reform Initiative at the Heritage Foundation has played an influential role in making alarmism about voter fraud mainstream in the Republican Party, despite no evidence of widespread voter fraud. His work, which claims voting fraud is rampant, has been discredited.
Following the 2020 presidential election—in which President Donald Trump made baseless claims of fraud after he was defeated for reelection—the Heritage Foundation launched a campaign in support of Republican efforts to make state voting laws more restrictive. Heritage, through its political arm, Heritage Action for America, planned to spend $24 million over two years across eight key states to support efforts to restrict voting, in coordination with the Republican Party and allied conservative outside groups, such as Susan B. Anthony List, American Legislative Exchange Council and State Policy Network.
The Heritage Foundation rejects the scientific consensus on climate change. The Heritage Foundation is one of many climate change denial organisations that have been funded by ExxonMobil.
The Heritage Foundation strongly criticised the Kyoto Agreement to curb climate change, saying American participation in the treaty would "result in lower economic growth in every state and nearly every sector of the economy." The Heritage Foundation projected that the 2009 cap-and-trade bill, the American Clean Energy and Security Act, would result in a cost of $1,870 per family in 2025 and $6,800 by 2035; on the other hand, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office projected that it would only cost the average family $175 in 2020.
In the Re:LODE Radio's 2020 THE YEAR OF TRUTH weekly posts, the urgency of the global heating crisis, and requirement for everyone to make the most of the time we have right now, to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions, is an abiding theme. As time runs out to achieve the goal of a limit to the global atmospheric temperature rise to a 1.5 degree maximum, people cannot afford to entertain the wish "to turn back time" because time is catching up with the totality of the environmental impact of capitalist industrial output. this has been an ongoing scenario since the industrial revolution in England in the late eighteenth century!
Greenhouse gas emissions need to be reduced NOW!
CONVOLUTE Number 20.
When it comes to turning back time for the United States, and considering the conditions of global geopolitics and global hegemonic power, the spatial dimension would fluctuate in the dimension of time, to a point in time when the power relations between America and China were as depicted in the political cartoon that appeared in Puck magazine in 1900. In this cartoon a diminutive and demeaning stereotypical representation of "China" is shown as subservient, the potential recipient of a cornucopia of the goods and chattels of modernity being carried across the Pacific from the U.S.A. Today this power, trade and technology relationship has seen a complete reversal.
The relationship between the People's Republic of China and the United States of America has been a complex one since the beginning of the Chinese Communist State in 1949.
Cold War and/or Trade War?
The volume of trade in goods between the US and China has grown rapidly since the beginning of China's economic reforms in the late 1970s. After 1980 the economic ties grew rapidly. At the beginning of this century President Clinton signed the U.S. China Relations Act in October 2000, granting Beijing permanent normal trade relations with the United States and paving the way for China to join the World Trade Organisation in 2001.
The relationship is one of close economic ties, as well as hegemonic rivalry in the Asia-Pacific. It has been described by world leaders and academics as the world's most important bilateral relationship of the 21st century. As of today, the United States has the world's largest economy and China has the second largest although China has a larger GDP when measured by PPP.
Historically, relations between the two countries have generally been stable with some periods of open conflict, most notably during the Korean War and the Vietnam War. Currently, the United States and China have mutual political, economic, and security interests, such as the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons, but there are unresolved concerns relating to the role of democracy in government in China and human rights in China. China is the second largest foreign creditor of the United States, after Japan. The two countries remain in dispute over territorial issues in the South China Sea; China claims sovereignty over virtually the entire South China Sea, while the United States sees it as international waters and claims the right for its warships and aircraft to conduct operations in the area.
Relations with China began slowly until the 1845 Treaty of Wangxia. The US was allied to the Republic of China during the Pacific War against Japan (1941–1945) but, after the victory of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Mainland China during the Chinese Civil War, fought a major armed conflict with the People's Republic of China in the Korean War and did not establish relations for 25 years, until President Richard Nixon's 1972 visit to China. Since Nixon's visit, every US president, with the exception of Jimmy Carter, has toured China.
The US has consistently imported more from China than it has exported to China, with the bilateral US trade deficit in goods with China rising to $375.6 billion in 2017. The US government has at times criticised various aspects of the US-China trade relationship, including large bilateral trade deficits, and China's relatively inflexible exchange rates. The administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama imposed quotas and tariffs on Chinese textiles in order to shield US domestic producers, accusing China of exporting these products at dumping prices. During the Obama administration, the US additionally accused China of subsidizing aluminium and steel production, and initiated a range of anti-dumping investigations against China.
During these two US administrations, US-Chinese trade continued to grow. During this time, China's economy grew to be the second largest in the world (using nominal exchange rates), second only to that of the US. Large-scale Chinese economic initiatives, such as the Belt and Road Initiative, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and "Made in China 2025" alarmed some US policymakers. More broadly, China's economic growth has been viewed by the US government as a challenge to American economic and geopolitical dominance.
The Belt and Road Initiative is especially relevant to the LODE Zone Line, as it involves spatially oriented pathways of trade, transport and communication of goods, cargo and financial services, stretching westward across the continent of Asia and to the heart of Europe.
This expansion of hegemonic influence along trade routes, trade routes that echo the so-called Silk Roads going back to antiquity, has a spooky resonance with the American ideologically driven narratives of Manifest Destiny and American Exceptionalism, with first a continental expansion across the, so-called, "wild west", of North America, followed by the expansion of U.S. territories across the Pacific.
Relations with China strained under President Barack Obama's Asia pivot strategy. Despite tensions during his term, the Chinese population's favourability of the US stood at 51% in Obama's last year of 2016, only to fall during the Trump administration.Since the 1980s, Trump had advocated tariffs to eliminate the U.S. trade deficit and promote domestic manufacturing, saying the country was being "ripped off" by its trading partners; imposing tariffs became a major plank of his presidential campaign. Most economists do not believe trade deficits pose a significant problem for the American economy. Nearly all economists who responded to surveys conducted by the Associated Press and Reuters said Trump's tariffs would do more harm than good to the American economy, and some economists advocated alternate means to address trade deficits with China.
This trade war has negatively impacted the economies of both countries. In the United States, it has led to higher costs for manufacturers, higher prices for consumers and financial difficulties for farmers. In China, the trade war contributed to a slowdown in the rate of economic and industrial output growth, which had already been declining. Many American companies have shifted supply chains to elsewhere in Asia, bringing fears that the trade war would lead to a US-China economic 'decoupling'. The trade war has also caused economic damage in other countries, though some benefited from increased manufacturing as production was shifted to them. It also led to stock market instability. Governments around the world have taken steps to address some of the damage caused by the economic conflict.
While there has been broad support for the Trump administration's objective of making China change its trade policies, the use of tariffs and the trade war's negative economic impact have been widely criticised. Among American industries, U.S. businesses and agricultural industries have opposed the trade war, though most farmers continued to support Trump, who provided them with substantial financial support. A study estimates that U.S. exports to China provide support to 1.2 million American jobs and that Chinese multinational companies directly employ 197,000 Americans, while U.S. companies invested $105 billion in China in 2019. Economists have studied the impact of trade with China and increasing labor productivity on employment in the American manufacturing sector, with mixed results. Most economists believe that American trade deficit is the result of macroeconomic factors, rather than trade policy. While increased tariffs on Chinese goods are expected to decrease US imports from China, they are expected to lead to increased imports from other countries, leaving the United States' overall trade deficit largely unchanged - a phenomenon known as trade diversion.
Generally the U.S. relationship with China has deteriorated sharply under U.S. president Donald Trump and CCP general secretary Xi Jinping, with issues such as China's militarisation of the South China Sea and Chinese espionage in the United States arising. The Trump administration labelled China a "strategic competitor" starting with the 2017 National Security Strategy. It subsequently launched a trade war against China, banned US companies from selling equipment to Huawei and other companies linked to human rights abuses in Xinjiang, increased visa restrictions on Chinese nationality students and scholars and designated China as a currency manipulator. During the Trump administration, and especially since the US-China trade war began, political observers have started to warn that a new cold war is emerging. By May 2020 the relationship had deteriorated to the lowest point as both sides were recruiting allies to attack the other regarding guilt for the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic.
CONVOLUTE Number 21.
Eurocentrism versus Han-centrism?
An article in THE DIPLOMAT by Bradley A. Thayer and John M. Friend (October 03, 2018), authors of the 2018 publication by the University of Nebraska Press, How China Sees the World: Han-Centrism and the Balance of Power in International Politics, and was headlined:
The web based on-line news magazine THE DIPLOMAT (Read THE DIPLOMAT know the Asia-Pacific) is based in Washington, D.C., the capital city of the United States, so that's where the article is coming from, and this what Bradley A. Thayer and John M. Friend say:
Inevitably as China becomes more powerful and influential in international relations, Beijing will fundamentally change the international system created by the United States and the Cold War. The key question for international politics is what kind of world does China seek to create by 2049 — the centenary of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Will China sustain the present liberal system or forge another anchored on its ambitions, culture, and desires? Millennia of Chinese history strongly suggests the latter. In this essay, we illuminate China’s model of global governance and touch upon its derivative economic and political features.Conceiving of what type of world China will create is significant for three reasons. First, it is critical for the United States to understand so that the full scope of China’s strategic ambitions and direction may be understood. Second, as China grows in power and influence, it is essential to comprehend what China will sustain of the present global order versus what it will replace. U.S. decision-makers should expect that the world China would like to create by 2049 will be fundamentally different. The economic order will be a curious mix of hyper-capitalism and neomercantilism. The political order will be authoritarian. Third, understanding China’s ambition and grand strategic objectives allows the United States to develop policies and undertake measures to thwart them. Whether the United States can maintain its position as the pre-eminent force for free and open societies in the face of a rising challenge from China is likely to be a defining element of international politics in the 21st century and is of immediate U.S. national security policy interest.The world by 2049 will be defined by the realization of Chinese power. China will be the world’s greatest economic and political force, including alliances and global presence. While its power will make it the dominant state in international politics, the central issue is how China will use its power. Will China join the liberal world order or will it transform Western rules, norms, and institutions?China’s grand strategic vision is primacy — China will and should be the dominant force in international politics. China’s vision is defined by Xi Jinping’s phrase “One World, One Dream,” which is a modern form of tianxia, or “all under heaven.” This concept serves as the foundation of China’s imperial ideology — the Chinese conception of how the world should be ordered.The concept of “all under heaven” is the genesis of the Chinese worldview with respect to how China ought to be ruled, its position in international politics, and the subordinate role required of other states. It implies, first, an ethnic Han polity, which is inherently authoritarian. Second, it requires that a single powerful monarch, the Chinese emperor (“Son of Heaven”) should rule the entire civilized world — which by definition should be unified under the emperor’s control so that disorder and chaos may be avoided, and reason and just rule may triumph.The fundamental ideas and values that forged China’s political culture remain today. What China will want in 2049 dovetails with what China wants today or wanted in its imperial past. There is a profound continuity in the Chinese worldview, its imperial ideology, including why its political leaders sincerely believe its domination provides the best outcome for its denizens and for all states in international politics. For most of its history, China was the epitome of power and held a dominant position in East Asia. Its relationship with neighboring countries was based on a hierarchical tribute system that provided China will vast amounts of power, influence, and prestige. Thus, we can appreciate why a resurgent China with an emboldened leadership desires to recapture a modern form of this position.Q. Is this analysis shaped by an "orientalist" and "eurocentric" world view?
A. Probably!The idea that a Chinese contemporary imperial ideology is at work and driving a particular developing global identity for the People's Republic of China today, one that is continuous with the cultural and political history of China going back millennia, is itself a typical example of an ideological narrative about an "oriental other". This critique requires some explanation.
Re:LODE Radio's reference to the "orientalist" character of this ideological narrative points to, in particular, to the work of Edward Said, rather than the "orientalism" of an imitation or depiction of the Eastern world by writers, designers, and artists from the Western world. In particular, Orientalist painting, depicting more specifically "the Middle East", was one of the many specialisms of 19th-century academic art, and the literature of Western countries took a similar interest in Oriental themes. In his book Orientalism (1978), Edward Said redefines the term Orientalism to describe a pervasive Western tradition — academic and artistic — of prejudiced outsider-interpretations of the Eastern world, which was shaped by the cultural attitudes of European imperialism in the 18th and 19th centuries. The thesis of Orientalism develops Antonio Gramsci's theory of cultural hegemony, and Michel Foucault's theorisation of discourse (the knowledge-power relation) to criticise the scholarly tradition of Oriental studies.It is the assumption that the authors of How China Sees the World hold, or suggest, of an historical continuity with the Chinese empires of the past and present, that Re:LODE Radio questions.
Re:LODE Radio recognises that the present Chinese leadership has mobilised the idea of China's imperial past as an ideological narrative, and that, although officially still communist and Maoist, in practice China's rulers are claiming that their current policies are restoring China's historical glory.
The point Re:LODE Radio seeks to establish is that the world view of the Chinese leadership, and the account of U.S. based "the world according to China", are narratives that share a significant omission, that is the identification of the significant "ruptures" to the continuity of political power relations, and social structures that have occurred, in Europe and the Americas as much as in China, as a result of the hidden technological forces immanent in the condition that is generally termed "modernity". This includes the emergence in Europe of capitalism, colonial exploitation on a global scale, and imperialism. The moment of this emergence in the period of the so-called "Renaissance" was no kind of "re-birth" of the values and energy of classical antiquity. It was something completely new, but clothed, disguised (or camouflaged) as a "postmodern" "return" to the classical in the faking of an art, architecture and "appearance" of a new and invented classical world.
One of the "glosses" in Marshall McLuhan's Gutenberg Galaxy (page 119) runs:
Renaissance Italy became a kind of Hollywood collection of sets of antiquity.
According to Samir Amin this occurrence was a significant "rupture", a break with the previous two millennia of what Amin terms a "tributary" cultural, political and economic system, as distinct and transparent as the systems of capitalism have remained opaque.
The sheer visibility of the acts of "paying", or "making", tribute makes clear and unambiguous the nature of power relations, as depicted in this painting of the reception of foreign dignitaries and tribute bearers by the Qing Emperor by a European baroque painter at the Qing court. Detail from Giuseppe Castiglione, Qazak Paying Tribute of Horses to Qianlong Emperor, 1757.
For Amin the pre-capitalist forms of production are "tributary", defining the tributary mode as “juxtaposing the persistence of the village community and that of a social and political apparatus exploiting the latter in the form of exacting tribute”. Considering Chinese political economy in the pre-capitalist era of the Qing dynasty and before, this is essentially "the Asiatic mode of production", which is characterised by the existence of village communes, supporting a powerful state apparatus by their surplus product, usually appropriated as tax. However, Amin goes further: “this tribute-paying mode of production is the most common and most general form characterising pre-capitalist class formations; we propose to distinguish between the early forms, and the advanced forms such as the feudal mode of production in which the village community loses the eminent domain of the land to the benefit of the feudal lords, the community persisting as a community of families.”
Significantly for Amin, European feudalism was not a more advanced form of the tributary mode of production, but rather an “uncompleted [sic]”, “primitive” and undeveloped form of it, “marked by feudal fragmentation and a dispersal of power” and an “unfinished degree” of ideological expression in the form of a state religion. Amin explains, “The primitive feudal form evolves gradually towards the advanced tributary form”. Therefore, for Amin, any further categorisation of pre-capitalist societies is only a comparison between more or less “developed” tributary forms, with the level of development determined by the concentration of “power”, expressed ideologically in the form of a state religion.
It was precisely the "uncompleted" state of the tributary mode of production in western Europe that contributed to the necessary conditions that allowed for the emergence of capitalism as a significant "rupture" with the past. Ideological constructions were deployed to obscure this rupture, and state religion was as good a way as any to achieve the fundamental break in the continuity of culture, tradition, values and belief systems, and obscuring this as the source of catastrophic social consequences.
Re:LODE Radio suggests that those narratives that gloss over this kind of "rupture" are ideologically motivated and therefore liable to conveniently distort versions of actual history.
CONVOLUTE Number 21.
The Qing dynasty, the last dynasty in China, ended with the abdication of Puyi, the last emperor, on 12 February 1912. The twentieth century in China had begun with anti-foreign "Boxers" killing many Chinese Christians and foreign missionaries. In retaliation, the foreign powers invaded China and imposed a punitive Boxer Indemnity.
In response, the Chinese government initiated unprecedented fiscal and administrative reforms, including elections, a new legal code, and abolition of the examination system. Sun Yat-sen and other revolutionaries debated over how to transform the Manchu Empire into a modern Han Chinese nation. After the deaths of the Guangxu Emperor and Empress Dowager Cixi in 1908, Manchu conservatives at court blocked reforms and alienated reformers and local elites alike. The Wuchang Uprising on 10 October 1911 led to the Xinhai Revolution. The abdication of Puyi, the last emperor, on 12 February 1912, brought the dynasty to an end.
Contemporaneously with the emergence of the new Republic of China in 1912, writers, historians and scholars in China and abroad generally deprecated the failures of the late imperial system. However, more recently in the 21st century, a favourable view has emerged in popular culture. Re:LODE Radio considers that it an account of the twentieth origins of this "popular culture" will help explain how present positive but contested notions of the Qing empire, have emerged. These contemporary favourable views stand in contrast to the views of many literate Chinese over a century ago.
"Expel Tatar barbarians, revive Zhonghua, and establish a unified government."驅除韃虜，恢復中華，創立合眾政府。
The Hsing Chung Hui, translated as the Revive China Society (興中會), was founded by Sun Yat-sen on 24 November 1894 to forward the goal of establishing prosperity for China and as a platform for future revolutionary activities. It was formed during the First Sino-Japanese War, after a string of Chinese military defeats exposed corruption and incompetence within the imperial government of the Qing dynasty.
Because Sun was in exile from China at the time, the Revive China Society was founded in Honolulu, then in the independent nation of the Republic of Hawaii. The United States would soon add Hawaii to its list of "possessions". The Republic of Hawaiʻi was a short-lived one-party state in Hawaiʻi between July 4, 1894, when the Provisional Government of Hawaii had ended, and August 12, 1898, when it became annexed by the United States as an organised incorporated territory of the United States. In 1893 the Committee of Public Safety overthrew Kingdom of Hawaii Queen Liliʻuokalani after she rejected the 1887 Bayonet Constitution. This was a legal document prepared by anti-monarchists to strip the Hawaiian monarchy of much of its authority, initiating a transfer of power to American, European and native Hawaiian elites. It became known as the Bayonet Constitution for the use of intimidation by the armed militia which forced King Kalākaua to sign it or be deposed. The Committee of Public Safety intended for Hawaii to be annexed by the United States but President Grover Cleveland, a Democrat opposed to imperialism, refused. A new constitution was subsequently written while Hawaii was being prepared for annexation. Hawaii was annexed under Republican President William McKinley on 12 August 1898, during the Spanish–American War. The Territory of Hawaii was formally established as part of the U.S. on June 14, 1900.
Ethnocentrism and the rise of nationalism in China?
On the founding of the Revive China Society those admitted to the society swore the following oath:
Expel Tatar barbarians, revive Zhonghua, and establish a unified government.
The term "Tatar barbarians" was used by this "Society" to ethnographically identify the Qing dynasty with for the Manchu ethnic minority in China. The use of the description "barbarian", an obvious ethnocentric slur, was designed to appeal to a majority Han population in China.
Today the Han make up 92% of the population of the People's Republic of China, with a name and original ethnic roots and identity deriving from the Han dynasty.
The Han Chinese trace their cultural ancestry to the Huaxia, the initial confederation of agricultural tribes living along the Yellow River. These tribes were the ancestors of the modern Han Chinese people who gave birth to Chinese civilisation. During the course of the Warring States period led to the emergence of the early discernible consciousness of the Zhou-era Chinese referring to themselves as being Huaxia (literally, "the beautiful grandeur"), which was distinctively used to denote a "civilised" culture in contrast to what seen as "barbaric" peoples beyond the borders of the Zhou Kingdoms, inhabited by a variety non-Han Chinese peoples.
Map of the Zhou kingdoms circa 260 BCE
By 196 BC, the Han court had replaced all but one of these kings (the exception being in Changsha) with royal Liu family members, since the loyalty of non-relatives to the throne was questioned. After several insurrections by Han king, the largest being the Rebellion of the Seven States in 154 BC, the imperial court enacted a series of reforms beginning in 145 BC limiting the size and power of these kingdoms and dividing their former territories into new centrally controlled commanderies. Kings were no longer able to appoint their own staff; this duty was assumed by the imperial court. Kings became nominal heads of their fiefs and collected a portion of tax revenues as their personal incomes. The kingdoms were never entirely abolished and existed throughout the remainder of Western and Eastern Han.
Even before Han's expansion into Central Asia, diplomat Zhang Qian's travels from 139 to 125 BC had established Chinese contacts with many surrounding civilisations. Zhang encountered Dayuan (Fergana), Kangju (Sogdiana), and Daxia (Bactria, formerly the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom); he also gathered information on the Shendu, the Chinese name for the river that gives its name to the Indus Valley Civilisation of North India. He also developed contacts with the Anxi (the Parthian Empire). All of these countries eventually received Han embassies.
The ruins of a Han-dynasty watchtower made of rammed earth at Dunhuang, Gansu province, the eastern edge of the Silk Road.
These connections marked the beginning of the Silk Road trade network that extended to the Roman Empire, bringing Han items like silk to Rome and Roman goods such as glasswares to China.
From roughly 115 to 60 BC, Han forces fought the Xiongnu over control of the oasis city-states in the Tarim Basin. Han was eventually victorious and established the Protectorate of the Western Regions in 60 BC, which dealt with the region's defence and foreign affairsHan society was hierarchical, reflecting the Asiatic mode of production in an advanced tributary form, the very model of Samir Amin's pre-capitalist system of a tributary mode of production. In the hierarchical social order, the emperor was at the apex of Han society and government. However the emperor was often a minor, ruled over by a regent such as the empress dowager or one of her male relatives. Ranked immediately below the emperor were the kings who were of the same Liu family clan. The rest of society, including nobles lower than kings and all commoners excluding slaves belonged to one of twenty ranks (ershi gongcheng 二十公乘).
One of the "classic features" of Chinese social and political ideology and belief system is th importance of "filial piety", family relationships, and ancestry.
Painting with scenes from The Twenty-four Cases of Filial Piety. Kano Motonobu, 1550.
The author of the most influential texts on the core "philosophy" of social harmony in China was Confucius. If filial piety is considered a key virtue in Chinese culture it is Confucius who laid down the concepts and social theory for this social and political practice, and it is the main concern of a large number of stories. One of the most famous collections of such stories is "The Twenty-four Filial Exemplars", a classic text of Confucian filial piety written by Guo Jujing (郭居敬) during the Yuan dynasty (1260–1368).
Social harmony, according to Confucianism, results in part from every individual knowing his or her place in the natural order, and playing his or her part well. Reciprocity or responsibility extends beyond filial piety and involves the entire network of social relations, even the respect for rulers. This is shown in the story where Duke Jing of Qi asks Confucius about government, by which he meant proper administration so as to bring social harmony.
齊景公問政於孔子。孔子對曰：君君，臣臣，父父，子子。The duke Jing, of Qi, asked Confucius about government. Confucius replied, "There is government, when the prince is prince, and the minister is minister; when the father is father, and the son is son."
Analects 12.11 (Legge translation).Confucius (c. 551–479 BCE) was a Chinese philosopher, poet and politician of the Spring and Autumn period and traditionally considered the paragon of Chinese wisdom. Confucius's teachings and philosophy have been used to underpin the ideology of East Asian culture and society, and remaining influential across China and East Asia to this day.His philosophical teachings, called Confucianism, emphasized personal and governmental morality, correctness of social relationships, justice, kindness, and sincerity. Confucianism was part of the Chinese social fabric and way of life; to Confucians, everyday life was the arena of religion. His followers competed successfully with many other schools during the Hundred Schools of Thought era, only to be suppressed in favour of the Legalists during the Qin dynasty, the first dynasty of imperial China.
The Legalists or Fajia were, and are, one of the six classical schools of thought in Chinese philosophy. Literally meaning "house of (administrative) methods / standards (法, Fa)". The Fa "school" represents several branches of "men of methods", in the west often termed "realist" statesmen, who played foundational roles in the construction of the bureaucratic Chinese empire.
Map of Chu-Han Contention between Qin and Han dynasties.
Following the victory of Han over Chu after the collapse of Qin, Confucius's thoughts received official sanction in the new government. During the Tang and Song dynasties, Confucianism developed into a system known in the West as Neo-Confucianism, and later as New Confucianism.
A page from the Analects of Confucius.
Confucius is traditionally credited with having authored or edited many of the Chinese classic texts, including all of the Five Classics, but modern scholars are cautious of attributing specific assertions to Confucius himself. Aphorisms concerning his teachings were compiled in the Analects, but only many years after his death.CONVOLUTE Number 22.
The standing of Confucius in the European Enlightenment's pantheon of global knowledge is clearly identified in a European pictorial representation by the early nineteenth century French artist Jean-Baptiste Mauzaisse, in his painting that hangs in the Louvre, Paris, La Sagesse divine donnant des lois aux rois et aux législateurs, (Divine Wisdom giving laws to kings and legislators) 1827.
A pathway to the production of this image had been prepared for, two generations earlier, in the frontispiece of the Encyclopédie (1772). It was drawn by Charles-Nicolas Cochin and engraved by Bonaventure-Louis Prévost.
The work is laden with symbolism: The figure in the centre represents truth — surrounded by bright light (the central symbol of the Enlightenment).
Two other figures on the right, . . .
. . . reason and philosophy, are tearing the veil from truth!
Any veil covering the truth and the body of the goddess of Divine Wisdom in the painting by Jean-Baptiste Mauzaisse, has already been torn away. Divine Wisdom is an early nineteenth century beaux-arts version of the "pretty girl".
The ancient Greek goddess Athena, associated with wisdom, handicraft, and warfare, and who was later syncretised with the Roman goddess Minerva, has provided a fruitful model for versions of this "pretty girl" throughout the modern period. The cultural crossovers in this picture resemble the fluidity of narrative connections in the contemporary genre of the super hero and heroine.
From Greek goddess, via "pretty girl", to Wonder Woman?
This painting by Jacques-Louis David, The Combat of Ares and Athena, 1771, Louvre, Paris, has a contemporary version of the conflict between Ares and Athena in the 2017 film Wonder Woman, with Wonder Woman redirecting Ares own lightning to rebound upon him and thereby killing the God of War for good.
The aesthetics that frame the modern "pretty girl" versions of the goddess of wisdom and war are those very same aesthetics that drive the "metaverse" of "clickbait".
The Wonder Woman title has been published by DC Comics almost continuously ever since 1942.
The Wonder Woman comic book character first appeared in All Star Comics #8 published October 21, 1941 with her first feature in Sensation Comics #1 in January 1942.
Wonder Woman appeared in the very moment that the United States entered the Second World War, as an Amazon champion who wins the right to return Steve Trevor – a United States intelligence officer whose plane had crashed on the Amazons' isolated island homeland – to "Man's World" and to fight crime and the evil of the Nazis.
During the so-called Silver Age of comics, under writer Robert Kanigher, Wonder Woman's origin was revamped, along with other characters'. The new origin story increased the character's Hellenic and mythological roots: receiving the blessing of each deity in her crib, Diana is destined to become as "beautiful as Aphrodite, wise as Athena, strong as Hercules, and swift as Hermes."At the end of the 1960s, under the guidance of Mike Sekowsky, Wonder Woman surrendered her powers in order to remain in Man's World rather than accompany her fellow Amazons to another dimension. Wonder Woman begins using the alias Diana Prince and opens a mod boutique. She acquires a Chinese mentor named I Ching, who teaches Diana martial arts and weapons skills. Using her fighting skill instead of her powers, Diana engaged in adventures that encompassed a variety of genres, from espionage to mythology.
The Wonder Woman aesthetic now shapes the representation of her Hellenic and mythological roots, and has incorporated the soft-core eroticism of the pin-up "pretty girl" "next door" as, for example, in this representation of Athena, the goddess of wisdom and of war.
But it is also the case that this aesthetic envelope includes the pornographic and the sign systems of pornotropia.
“It’s been said that you’re too skinny,” an interviewer told Gadot on Israeli television. “Wonder Woman is large-breasted.”
“Wonder Woman is Amazonian,” Gadot said, smiling coyly. “And historically accurate Amazonian women actually had only one breast.” (They cut off the other one, the better to wield a bow.)
From "pretty girl" pin-up to pornography via a feminist icon?
This fluid territory in the aesthetic treatment of Wonder Woman seems especially ironic when the origins of this comic book hero are so expertly excavated by Jill Lepore in her article for The New Yorker magazine (September 15, 2014):The Last Amazon
In this article Jill Lepore connects the epiphany of Wonder Woman to the mobilisation of women in the United States as it entered World War II.
She writes:
In 1940, M. C. Gaines, who published Superman, read an article in Family Circle by Olive Byrne. She’d been worried by reading in the papers that comic books were dangerous, and that Superman was a Fascist. “With terrible visions of Hitlerian justice in mind,” she wrote in Family Circle, “I went to Dr. Marston.”“Do you think these fantastic comics are good reading for children?” she asked.Mostly, yes, Marston said. They are pure wish fulfillment:“And the two wishes behind Superman are certainly the soundest of all; they are, in fact, our national aspirations of the moment—to develop unbeatable national might, and to use this great power, when we get it, to protect innocent, peace-loving people from destructive, ruthless evil.”Gaines decided to hire Marston as a consultant. Marston convinced Gaines that what he needed, to counter the critics, was a female superhero. The idea was for her to become a member of the Justice Society of America, a league of superheroes that held its first meeting in All-Star Comics No. 3, in the winter of 1940: “Each of them is a hero in his own right, but when the Justice Society calls, they are only members, sworn to uphold honor and justice!”
Wonder Woman’s début appeared in December, 1941, in All-Star Comics No. 8. On the eve of the Second World War, she flew her invisible plane to the United States to fight for peace, justice, and women’s rights. To hide her identity, she disguised herself as a secretary named Diana Prince and took a job working for U.S. Military Intelligence. Her gods are female, and so are her curses. “Great Hera!” she cries. “Suffering Sappho!” she swears. Her “undermeaning,” Marston explained, concerned “a great movement now under way—the growth in power of women.” Drawn by an artist named Harry G. Peter, who, in the nineteen-tens, had drawn suffrage cartoons, she looked like a pinup girl. She’s Eleanor Roosevelt; she’s Betty Grable. Mostly, she’s Margaret Sanger.In the spring of 1942, Gaines included a one-page questionnaire in All-Star Comics. “Should wonder woman be allowed, even though a woman, to become a member of the Justice Society?” Of the first eighteen hundred and one questionnaires returned, twelve hundred and sixty-five boys and three hundred and thirty-three girls said yes; a hundred and ninety-seven boys, and just six girls, said no. Wonder Woman joined the Justice Society. She was the only woman. Gardner Fox, who wrote the Justice Society stories, made her the society’s secretary. In the summer of 1942, when all the male superheroes head off to war, Wonder Woman stays behind to answer the mail. “Good luck boys,” she calls out to them. “I wish I could be going with you!” Marston was furious.In May, 1942, F.D.R. created the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. A hundred and fifty thousand women joined the Army, filling jobs that freed more men for combat. The corps “appears to be the final realization of woman’s dream of complete equality with men,” Sanger wrote in the New York Herald-Tribune. But she was dismayed that the government didn’t provide contraceptives for waacs and adopted a policy of dismissing any woman who got pregnant. “This new women’s Army is a great thing, a real test of the woman’s movement,” she said. “Never before has the fight for woman’s equality narrowed down to the real issue, sex.”In 1943, Marston wrote a Wonder Woman story called “Battle for Womanhood.” It opens with Mars, the god of war, angry that so many American women are helping with the war effort.“There are eight million American women in war activities—by 1944 there will be eighteen million!” one of Mars’ female slaves reports, dragging a ball and chain.“If women gain power in war they’ll escape man’s domination completely!” Mars thunders. “They will achieve a horrible independence! . . . If women become warriors like the Amazons, they’ll grow stronger than men and put an end to war!”He commands the Duke of Deception to put a stop to it. The Duke enlists the aid of Doctor Psycho, who, by means of tools he’s developed in his psychological laboratory, conjures a trick in which George Washington rises from the dead and addresses a spellbound audience.“I have a message for you—a warning!” Washington says.“Women will lose the war for America! Women should not be permitted to have the responsibilities they now have! Women must not make shells, torpedoes, airplane parts—they must not be trusted with war secrets or serve in the armed forces. Women will betray their country through weakness if not treachery!”Wonder Woman, watching from the side, cries out, “He’s working for the Axis!” To defeat Doctor Psycho, she breaks into his laboratory, dropping in through a skylight. Captured, she’s trapped. Doctor Psycho locks her in a cage. Eventually, she’s rescued by her best friend, Etta Candy, after which she frees Psycho’s wife, Marva, whom he has blindfolded and chained to a bed.“Submitting to a cruel husband’s domination has ruined my life!” an emancipated Marva cries. “But what can a weak girl do?”“Get strong!” Wonder Woman urges. “Earn your own living—join the waacs or waves and fight for your country!”At the end of 1943, Wonder Woman reports to Hippolyte, “Women are gaining power in the man’s world!” Hippolyte shows Wonder Woman what lies ahead: Etta Candy will be awarded an honorary degree and become Professor of Public Health at Wonder Woman College, and Diana Prince will be President of the United States.In 1944, Wonder Woman became the only superhero, aside from Superman and Batman, to make the jump from the pages of a comic book to daily newspaper syndication as a comic strip. Marston had so much work to do, writing Wonder Woman stories, that he hired an assistant, nineteen-year-old Joye Hummel. She’d been a student in a psychology class he taught at the Katharine Gibbs School. (Hummel, now ninety, still has the exam that Marston gave in class. It reads as though it were written by Sheryl Sandberg. Question No. 6: “Advise Miss F. how to overcome her fear of talking with the company Vice President who is in charge of her Division and whom she has plenty of opportunities to contact if she chooses; also tell Miss F. why these contacts are to her advantage.”) To help Hummel write Wonder Woman, the family gave her copies of Marston’s “Emotions of Normal People” and Sanger’s “Woman and the New Race.”By the end of the Second World War, the number of American women working outside the home had grown by sixty per cent; three-quarters of these women were married, and a third were mothers of young children. Three-quarters of the working women hoped to keep their jobs, but they were told to make room for men returning from military service. If they didn’t quit, they were forced out: their pay was cut, and factories stopped providing child care.
So why is Wonder Woman being fucked by Superman?
Wonder Woman and "clickbait"?
CONVOLUTE Number 23.
It was the European Enlightenment that provided the artist Jean-Baptiste Mauzaisse with this humanist version of the goddess figure as a "pretty girl" handing down "wisdom" to humanity.
The biblical god has been replaced by a bare breasted "pretty girl", but the European ideological construct of "wisdom" remains inscribed in the biblical version, a tablet of stone. A 1789 painting by Jean-Jacques-François Le Barbier of The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen de 1789), sets in two stone tablets the human civil rights document from the French Revolution.
Drawn up by France's National Constituent Assembly in 1789, and inspired by Enlightenment philosophers, the Declaration was a core statement of the values of the French Revolution and had a major impact on the development of popular conceptions of individual liberty and democracy in Europe and worldwide.
Significantly, given the aesthetic, symbolic structures relating to capitalism, power relations and patriarchy, explored in this "CONVOLUTE", women were excluded. The Declaration recognised many rights, that correspond to human rights, but bestowed upon citizens who could only be male. And this was despite the fact that after The March on Versailles on 5 October 1789, women presented the Women's Petition to the National Assembly in which they proposed a decree giving women equal rights. In 1790, Nicolas de Condorcet and Etta Palm d'Aelders unsuccessfully called on the National Assembly to extend civil and political rights to women. Condorcet declared that "he who votes against the right of another, whatever the religion, colour, or sex of that other, has henceforth abjured his own". The fact that the French Revolution did not lead to a recognition of women's rights and this prompted Olympe de Gouges to publish the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen in September 1791.
This Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen is modelled on the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and is ironic in formulation and exposes the failure of the French Revolution, which had been devoted to equality. It states that:
This revolution will only take effect when all women become fully aware of their deplorable condition, and of the rights, they have lost in society.
The declaration did not revoke the institution of slavery, as lobbied for by Jacques-Pierre Brissot's Les Amis des Noirs but argued in favour of and defended by the group of colonial planters called the Club Massiac because they met at the Hôtel Massiac. Despite the lack of explicit mention of slavery in the Declaration, slave uprisings in Saint-Domingue in the Haitian Revolution were inspired by it, as discussed in C. L. R. James' history of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins.
Deplorable conditions for the thousands of slaves in Saint-Domingue, the most profitable slave colony in the world, led to the uprisings which would be known as the first successful slave revolt in the New World. Free persons of colour were part of the first wave of revolt, but later former slaves took control. In 1794 the Convention dominated by the Jacobins abolished slavery, including in the colonies of Saint-Domingue and Guadeloupe. However, Napoleon reinstated it in 1802 and attempted to regain control of Saint-Domingue by sending in thousands of troops. After suffering the losses of two-thirds of the men, many to yellow fever, the French withdrew from Saint-Domingue in 1803. Napoleon gave up on North America and agreed to the Louisiana Purchase by the United States. In 1804, the leaders of Saint-Domingue declared it as an independent state, the Republic of Haiti, the second republic of the New World. Napoleon abolished the slave trade in 1815.
Keep taking the tablets!
History of the World, Part I is a 1981 American comedy film written, produced, and directed by Mel Brooks. Brooks also stars in this parody of the historical spectacular film genre. In the section titled The Old Testament Moses (Mel Brooks) comes down from Mount Sinai carrying 3 stone tablets, having received the Law from God (the voice of an uncredited Carl Reiner). When announcing the giving of the reception of the law to the people, Moses proclaims, "The Lord Jehovah has given unto you these fifteen..." (whereupon he drops one of the tablets, which promptly shatters) . . .
"Oy... ten! TEN Commandments! For all to obey!" And . . .
Scholars disagree about when the Ten Commandments were written and by whom, with some modern scholars suggesting that they were likely modelled on Hittite and Mesopotamian laws and treaties.
According to the book of Exodus in the Torah, the Ten Commandments were revealed to Moses at Mount Sinai and inscribed by the finger of God on two tablets of stone kept in the Ark of the Covenant.
The hierarchy of values evident in this painting includes a central position for Moses and the Mosaic Law, indicating the centrality of what was later termed the Judeo-Christian religious tradition, in a global scheme of things. The ideological dimension in the use of this term is worth interrogating. The term "Judæo Christian" first appeared in the 19th century as a word for Jewish converts to Christianity. The German term "Judenchristlich" ("Jewish-Christian") was used by Friedrich Nietzsche to describe continuity between the Jewish and Christian world views.
However, the term became widely used in the United States during the Cold War to suggest a unified American identity opposed to communism. Theologian and author Arthur A. Cohen, in The Myth of the Judeo-Christian Tradition, questioned the theological validity of the Judeo-Christian concept, suggesting that it was instead essentially an invention of American politics. Historian K. Healan Gaston has stated that the term emerged as a descriptor of the United States in the 1930s, when the US sought to forge a unified cultural identity to distinguish itself from the face-off between fascism and communism in Europe.
Face-off between Fascism and Communism at the Paris Exposition of 1937
The German Pavilion designed by Albert Speer can be seen on the left with its tower topped by an effigy of the German Eagle and Nazi Swastika. It faces the Soviet Pavilion designed by Boris Iofan, topped with the large figurative sculpture, titled Worker and Kolkhoz Woman, on the pavilion designed by Vera Mukhina of a male worker and a female peasant, their hands together, thrusting a hammer and a sickle. The statue was meant to symbolise the union of workers and peasants.
The Spanish pavilion attracted extra attention because the exposition took place during the Spanish Civil War. The pavilion included Pablo Picasso's Guernica, the now-famous depiction of the horrors of war.
While at work on the mural progressed, Picasso explained:
"The Spanish struggle is the fight of reaction against the people, against freedom. My whole life as an artist has been nothing more than a continuous struggle against reaction and the death of art. How could anybody think for a moment that I could be in agreement with reaction and death? ... In the panel on which I am working, which I shall call Guernica, and in all my recent works of art, I clearly express my abhorrence of the military caste which has sunk Spain in an ocean of pain and death."
Later, in the midst of war in occupied Paris, a Gestapo officer who had barged his way into Picasso’s apartment pointed at a photo of the mural, Guernica, asking: “Did you do that?” “No,” Picasso replied, “you did”!
The Cold War and the American Christian right
The Judeo-Christian term rose to greater prominence during the Cold War to express opposition to communist atheism. In the 1970s, the term became particularly associated with the American Christian right, and is often employed in political attempts to restrict immigration and LGBT+ rights.
Centre and periphery?
Drawing attention to the spatial relationship between centre and periphery is referenced throughout Samir Amin's political analyses of power relations, eurocentrism, capitalism and everything. So there's no surprise in the compositional "placing" of the figure of Confucius in this early nineteenth century painting. This "placing", below the "platform" where Moses, Mohammed and various classical "others" stand, is "by design". Confucius is depicted, not grovelling, it is true, at the feet of Moses.
CONVOLUTE Number 24.
Trivial pursuits?
The manifest influence of Confucian thought and philosophy, when it comes to the ethical dimensions of governance in an historical and cultural continuum of Chinese political economy, culture and society, was finally fractured in the twentieth century.
See CONVOLUTE Number
The longevity of this manifest influence was due to the transparency of power relations that existed before the onset of capitalist confusion. So, if Re:LODE Radio takes Samir Amin's notion of the continuity of the pre-capitalist tributary form of production as a point of reference, the question arises:
Q. Was there a corollary to Confucianism, a continuum in the patterns of thought and governance during the European pre-capitalist experience?
A. Yes there was!
The foundation of the liberal arts and education in medieval Europe is to be found in the classical world, and thereby supporting Samir Amin's view that the pre-capitalist, pre-Renaissance European cultural matrix was classically classical from Greek antiquity until the quattrocento.
The life and work of Cassiodorus (c. 485 – c. 585), the Roman statesman, renowned scholar of antiquity, and writer serving in the administration of Theodoric the Great, king of the Ostrogoths, and who founded the monastery, of Vivarium, where he spent the last years of his life and created the foundations of medieval thought and learning during Europe's so called "dark" and "middle" ages. It turns out that the dark ages were spectacularly illuminated, and the middle ages weren't in the middle of anything, and turned out to come at the end the classic age and the beginning of the capitalocene.
The trivium and quadrivium!The meaning and origins of the word "trivial" are a collision of opposites.A dictionary definition for "trivial" is "of little value or importance", with similar meaning to; unimportant; insignificant; inconsequential; minor; of no/little account; of no/little consequence; of no/little importance; not worth bothering about; not worth mentioning; incidental; inessential;non-essential; petty; trifling; fiddling; pettifogging; footling; small; slight; little; inconsiderable; negligible; paltry; nugatory; meaningless; pointless; worthless; idle; flimsy; insubstantial; piddling; piffling; penny-ante; twopenny-halfpenny; nickel-and-dime; small-bore; chickenshit
"Trivial" (of a person) concerned only with petty things; frivolous; superficial; shallow; unthinking; empty-headed.
Trivial originates from the Latin - "trivium", Medieval Latin "trivialise" to the English "trivial" which means "belonging to the trivium" (late medieval English).
Q. So, what is the trivium?A. The trivium is the lower division of the seven liberal arts.
Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator was NOT frivolous, but he was responsible for institutionalising the framework for what the European medieval communities of knowledge and learning referred to as the seven liberal arts, the trivium and the quadrivium.Etymologically, the Latin word trivium means "the place where three roads meet" (tri + via); hence, the subjects of the trivium are the foundation for the quadrivium, the upper division of the medieval education in the liberal arts, which consists of arithmetic (numbers as abstract concepts), geometry (numbers in space), music (numbers in time), and astronomy (numbers in space and time). Educationally, the trivium and the quadrivium imparted to the student the seven liberal arts of classical antiquity.
Cassiodorus had spent much of his career trying to bridge the 6th-century cultural divides: between East and West, Greek culture and Latin, Roman and Goth, and between an orthodox people and their Arian rulers. His studies of these different worlds were to guide him to reflect upon the very nature of the activities of study itself, its methodologies as well as the outcomes of these studies.
Cassiodorus was born at Scylletium, near Catanzaro in Calabria, Italy. Some modern historians speculate that his family was of Syrian origin based on his Greek name. His ancestry included some of the most prominent ministers of the state extending back several generations. His great-grandfather held a command in the defence of the coasts of southern Italy from Vandal sea-raiders in the middle of the fifth century; his grandfather appears in a Roman embassy to Attila the Hun, and his father served as Count of the sacred largesses and count of the private estates to Odovacer.
Flavius Odoacer (c. 431 – 493 AD), or Odovacer, was a soldier and statesman of barbarian background, who deposed the child emperor Romulus Augustulus and became King of Italy (476–493). Odoacer's overthrow of Romulus Augustulus is traditionally seen as marking the end of the Western Roman Empire as well as Ancient Rome, with Romulus Augustulus ending up as the last Western Roman emperor. The earliest known writer to consider him as such was Marcellinus Comes (died c. 534), who wrote the following passage concerning Romulus:
The western Empire of the Roman people, which first began in the seven hundred and ninth year after the founding of the City with Octavian Augustus, the first of the emperors, perished with this Augustulus, in the five-hundred and twenty-second year of the reign of Augustus' successor emperors. From this point on Gothic kings held power in Rome.
Cassiodorus' father then transferred his allegiance to Theodoric, under whom he rose to an even higher position, that of Praetorian Prefect, which held, under the Gothic kings, the same influence that it had previously in the court of Rome.
Cassiodorus began his career under the auspices of his father, when he made him his consiliarius on his appointment to the Praetorian Prefecture. In the judicial capacity of the prefect, he held absolute right of appeal over any magistrate in the empire (or, later, the Gothic kingdom) and the consiliarius served as a sort of legal advisor in cases of complexity, so evidently Cassiodorus had received some education in the law. During his working life he worked as quaestor sacri palatii c. 507–511, as a consul in 514, then as magister officiorum under Theoderic, and later under the regency for Theoderic's young successor, Athalaric. Cassiodorus kept copious records and letterbooks concerning public affairs.
In this Byzantine mosaic of "The Three Magi" (c.565, Basilica of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna, Italy), we find an example of persons of importance paying homage, in a political economy where the explicit paying of tribute makes visible, though action, the actual power relationships at work. Here, as in general, Byzantine art usually depicts the Magi in Persian clothing which includes breeches, capes, and Phrygian caps.
At the Gothic court Cassiodorus' literary skill, which seems mannered and rhetorical to modern readers, was so esteemed that while at court in Ravenna he was often entrusted with drafting significant public documents. His culminating appointment was as praetorian prefect for Italy, effectively the prime ministership of the Ostrogothic civil government and a high honour to finish any career. Cassiodorus also collaborated with Pope Agapetus I in establishing a library of Greek and Latin texts which were intended to support a Christian school in Rome.
James O'Donnell notes:
It is almost indisputable that he accepted advancement in 523 as the immediate successor of Boethius, who was then falling from grace after less than a year as magister officiorum, and who was sent to prison and later executed. In addition, Boethius' father-in-law (and step-father) Symmachus, by this time a distinguished elder statesman, followed Boethius to the block within a year. All this was a result of the worsening split between the ancient senatorial aristocracy centred in Rome and the adherents of Gothic rule at Ravenna. But to read Cassiodorus' Variae one would never suspect such goings-on.
There is no mention in Cassiodorus' selection of official correspondence of the death of Boethius. This is a page from a 1385 Italian manuscript of Boethius' most notable work The Consolation of Philosophy.
The miniatures in this fourteenth century Italian manuscript depict Boethius teaching (above) and (below) in prison.
While imprisoned in Pavia Boethius began composing The Consolation of Philosophy (De consolatione philosophiae), a philosophical work by the Roman statesman, written in 523 AD. It has been described as the single most important and influential work in the West on Medieval and early Renaissance Christianity, as well as the last great Western work of the Classical Period. Boethius writes the book as a conversation between himself and a female personification of philosophy. In the The Consolation of Philosophy there's also the female personification of Lady Fortune, the goddess Fortuna, the personification of luck in Roman religion who, largely thanks to this Late Antique author, remained popular through the Middle Ages until at least the Renaissance. The blindfolded depiction of her is still an important figure in many aspects of today's Italian culture, where the dichotomy fortuna/sfortuna (luck/unluck) plays a prominent role in everyday social life, also represented by the very common refrain "La [dea] fortuna è cieca" (latin Fortuna caeca est; "Luck [goddess] is blind"). In The Consolation of Philosophy Lady Luck is associated with the Wheel of Fortune.
In medieval and ancient philosophy the Wheel of Fortune, or Rota Fortunae, is a symbol of the capricious nature of Fate. The wheel belongs to the goddess Fortuna (Greek equivalent Tyche) who spins it at random, changing the positions of those on the wheel: some suffer great misfortune, others gain windfalls.
Tyche was the presiding tutelary deity who governed the fortune and prosperity of a city, its destiny. In Classical Greek mythology, she is the daughter of Aphrodite and Zeus or Hermes, and at this time served to bring positive messages to people, relating to external events outside their control.During the Hellenistic period, with dramatic socio-political changes starting with Alexander the Great, Tyche increasingly embodied the whims of fate (both negative and positive), eclipsing the role of the Olympic gods. The Greek historian Polybius believed that when no cause can be discovered to events such as floods, droughts, frosts, or even in politics, then the cause of these events may be fairly attributed to Tyche. Other ancient Greek sources corroborate Polybius, such as Pindar who claims Tyche could hand victory to a lesser athlete. This "Hellenistic Tyche" came to represent not only personal fate, but the fate of communities. Cities venerated their own Tychai, specific iconic versions of the original Tyche.
One goddess, then three!
There are many shifting and fluid contexts when it comes to the symbolic use of a female goddess as a personification of a significant aspect of human social and political experience that's abstracted into an "idea". This includes the multiplication of qualities from one quality to three. So one goddess can become three, allowing for increasingly precise identifications of qualities, as required, in order to help make sense of any changes taking place in the shared social and political environment.
The White Goddess?
This image can be found in apposition to another image of a "goddess", a Black Goddess.
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The kitsch of pornotropia catches up with this pattern of cultural response with Robert Graves' The White Goddess: a Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth.
This a book-length essay on the nature of poetic myth-making by author and poet Robert Graves. First published in 1948, the book is based on earlier articles published in Wales magazine; corrected, revised and enlarged editions appeared in 1948, 1952 and 1961. The White Goddess represents an approach to the study of mythology from a decidedly creative and idiosyncratic perspective. Graves proposes the existence of a European deity, the "White Goddess of Birth, Love and Death", much similar to the Mother Goddess, inspired and represented by the phases of the Moon, who lies behind the faces of the diverse goddesses of various European and pagan mythologies.
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The Fortuna/Tyche metaphor was already a cliché in ancient times, complained about by Tacitus, but was greatly popularised for the Middle Ages by its extended treatment in the Consolation of Philosophy. It became a common image in manuscripts of the book, and then other media, where Fortuna, often blindfolded, turns a large wheel of the sort used in watermills, to which kings and other powerful figures are attached.
Fortuna has a long and complicated story, as do most myths and their consequent mythological personifications. Efforts by literary figures, such as Robert Graves, to tidy up the multiple versions, loose ends and inconsistencies so characteristic of these narratives, prioritise an embedded ABCEDmindedness over emotional intelligence, and an open understanding through association, feeling and sensibility. Myths are, after all, better understood as . . .
. . . the "many" speaking (through telling stories), to the "many".
In the stories, or hero myths of antiquity, Tyche the precursor of Fortuna, was depicted
Luck be a lady?
PornhubCasino aka Playhub Casino!
What is it about gambling and sex that makes them pair so well together? Throw in some drugs and alcohol, and you’ve got yourself a party. I think it has something to do with the fact that upstanding, responsible citizens aren’t supposed to let loose and just enjoy these things. You’ve always had to visit the same kind of places to get them.
PlayHubCasino is operated by a company out of Las Vegas, so they could probably tell you a thing or two about that.
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The female personification of Philosophy
The precedent of the "pretty girl" as a female personification of ideas and abstractions takes this CONVOLUTE back to "the cliché behind the myth" of the many representations of various goddess figures standing for various "qualities" across the histories of all cultures, and now, in our GRAPHIC AGE, in advertising, and the monetisation of celebrity, influencers etc.
The female personification of philosophy in the The Consolation of Philosophy is an example of how the classical tropes of gods and Christian saints merge and overlap in ways that are potentially fluid, confounding some of the differences between pagan and Christian knowledge and belief.
The female personification of capitalism?
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More trivia and Vivarium
It was in his retirement that Cassiodorus founded the monastery of Vivarium on his family estates on the shores of the Ionian Sea.The Vivarium appears not to have been governed by a strict monastic rule, such as that of the Benedictine Order, and Cassiodorus' great work, the Institutiones was written to guide the monks' studies, a guide for both introductory learning of "divine" and "secular" writingsTo this end, the Institutiones focus largely on texts assumed to have been available in Vivarium's library. The Institutiones seem to have been composed over a lengthy period of time, from the 530s into the 550s, with redactions up to the time of Cassiodorus' death. Cassiodorus explains how and why he composed the Institutiones:I was moved by divine love to devise for you, with God's help, these introductory books to take the place of a teacher. Through them I believe that both the textual sequence of Holy Scripture and also a compact account of secular letters may, with God's grace, be revealed.The first section of the Institutiones deals with Christian texts, and was intended to be used in combination with the Expositio Psalmorum. The order of subjects in the second book of the Institutiones reflected what would become the Trivium and Quadrivium of medieval liberal arts: grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy. While he encouraged study of secular subjects, Cassiodorus clearly considered them useful primarily as aids to the study of divinity, much in the same manner as St. Augustine. Cassiodorus' Institutiones thus attempted to provide what Cassiodorus saw as a well-rounded education necessary for a learned Christian, all in uno corpore (in one body), as Cassiodorus put it.The library at Vivarium was still active c. 630, when the monks brought the relics of Saint Agathius from Constantinople, dedicating to him a spring-fed fountain shrine that still exists. However, its books were later dispersed, the Codex Grandior of the Bible being purchased by the Anglo-Saxon Ceolfrith when he was in Italy in 679–80, and taken by him to Wearmouth Jarrow, where it served as the source for the copying of the Codex Amiatinus, which was then brought back to Italy by the now aged Ceolfrith.
Despite the demise of the monastery of Vivarium, Cassiodorus' work in compiling classical sources and presenting a sort of bibliography of resources would prove extremely influential in Late Antique Western Europe.
Cassiodorus is rivalled only by Boethius in his drive to preserve and explore classical literature during the 6th century AD. He found the writings of the Greeks and Romans valuable for their expression of higher truths where other arts failed. Though he saw these texts as vastly inferior to the perfect word of Scripture, the truths presented in them played to Cassiodorus' educational principles. Thus he is unafraid to cite Cicero alongside sacred text, and acknowledge the classical ideal of good being part of the practice of rhetoric.
His love for classical thought also influenced his administration of Vivarium. Cassiodorus connected deeply with Christian neoplatonism, which saw beauty as concomitant with the Good. This inspired him to adjust his educational program to support the aesthetic enhancement of manuscripts within the monastery, something which had been practiced before, but not in the universality that he suggests.Classical learning would not replace the role of Scripture within the monastery, instead it performed a crucial role in augmenting the education already under way. It is also worth noting that all Greek and Roman texts in the curriculum were constantly reviewed to ensure that only those texts that supported the rest of the structured learning would be studied.Cassiodorus' legacy is quietly profound. Before the founding of Vivarium, the copying of manuscripts had been a task reserved for either inexperienced or physically infirm devotees, and was performed at the whim of literate monks. Through the influence of Cassiodorus, the monastic system adopted a more vigorous, widespread, and regular approach to reproducing documents within the monastery. This approach to the development of the monastic lifestyle was perpetuated especially through German religious institutions.This change in daily life also became associated with a higher purpose: the process was not merely associated with disciplinary habit, but also with the preservation of history. During Cassiodorus' lifetime, theological study was on the decline and classical writings were disappearing. Even as the victorious Ostrogoth armies remained in the countryside, they continued to pillage and destroy Christian relics in Italy. Cassiodorus' programme helped ensure that both classical and Christian literature were preserved through the Middle Ages.
A garden of delights?
Philosophia et septem artes liberales, the seven liberal arts. From the Hortus deliciarum of Herrad of Landsberg (12th century)
The Hortus deliciarum of Herrad of Landsberg (Latin for Garden of Delights) was a medieval manuscript compiled by Herrad of Landsberg at the Hohenburg Abbey in Alsace, better known today as Mont Sainte-Odile.
This illuminated manuscript is an example of the formal programmes of learning instigated seven centuries before by Cassiodorus. More than a CONVOLUTE of pages rolled together this was an illuminated encyclopaedia. It was begun in 1167 as a pedagogical tool for young novices at the convent and the first encyclopaedia evidently written by a woman. It was finished in 1185, and was one of the most celebrated illuminated manuscripts of the period. The majority of the work is in Latin, with glosses in German.Most of the manuscript was not original, but a compendium of 12th-century knowledge. The manuscript contained poems, illustrations, and music, and drew from texts by classical and Arab writers. Interspersed with writings from other sources were poems by Herrad, addressed to the nuns, almost all of which were set to music.
Hell, as illustrated in the Hortus deliciarum.
The most famous portion of the manuscript were its 336 illustrations, which symbolised various themes, including the theological, the philosophical, and the literary. These works were widely admired but doomed to destruction as a result of the bombing of the library housing the manuscript during the German Siege of Strasbourg.
This photo shows the ruins of Strasbourg from the Stone Gate, September 28, 1870, a result of the German siege of the city during the Franco-Prussian War. Mention is made in several other CONVOLUTES of this European conflict, and the consequent Siege of Paris and the Paris Commune, but the Siege of Strasbourg is notable for the military method chosen by the German commander General August von Werder in the initial phase of the siege. Desiring a quick surrender, the Germans began a terror bombardment to destroy the morale of the civilian population on 23 August. Explosive and incendiary shells were rained down on the city for four days and entire quarters were reduced to ash. Panic developed among the civilians but there was no capitulation. The deliberate German targeting of civilian morale presaged the total wars of the twentieth century, a significant feature of European modernity.
The twelfth century Hell depicted in Herrad of Landsberg's Garden of Delights shows an ordered hierarchy of the punishment of sinners. As the medieval world order crumbled with the rise of the new proto-capitalist order a vision of dislocation and of a world turned topsy turvy can be found in another image of a Garden of Earthly Delights.
Re:LODE Radio considers that a more appropriate title for this altarpiece, a triptych by the Early Netherlandish master Hieronymus Bosch, painted between 1490 and 1510, when Bosch was between 40 and 60 years old, would be "The Millennium".
Nearly a millennium before this painting was begun, Cassiodorus had establishing the monastery school of Vivarium in 544, thus preserving two thousand years in the continuity of European classical philosophy, from the time of Socrates and Plato, until the "renaissance" of the fifteenth century. This renaissance, dressed in the classical, in both art and architecture, and that professed to represent a re-birth of the classical, was in fact a post-modern, that is "post-Gothic" phenomenon ("Gothic" was used as a pejorative term), a cultural envelope about to bring forth the capitalocene.
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CONVOLUTE Number 25.
The philosopher, poet and politician we know as Confucius has his own name that in Chinese is signified by these Chinese ideographic characters:
孔夫子
The pinyin version is: Kǒng Fūzǐ, "Master Kǒng"; or commonly:
孔子; Kǒngzǐ
So what's in a name?
A map of the 200 or so Jesuit churches and missions established across China c. 1687
It was the Jesuits who popularised the latinised version of Master Kǒng's Chinese name as a result of their studies of Chinese philosophy and culture whilst on their evangelising mission in China.
The Jesuits first entered China through the Portuguese settlement on Macau, where they settled on Green Island and founded St. Paul's College.The Jesuit China missions of the 16th and 17th centuries introduced Western science and astronomy, then undergoing its own revolution, to China.
Matteo Ricci (left) and Xu Guangqi in the 1607 Chinese publication of Euclid's Elements.
The scientific revolution brought by the Jesuits coincided with a time when scientific innovation had declined in China. According to Udías, Agustín (2003) in Searching the Heavens and the Earth: The History of Jesuit Observatories:[The Jesuits] made efforts to translate western mathematical and astronomical works into Chinese and aroused the interest of Chinese scholars in these sciences. They made very extensive astronomical observation and carried out the first modern cartographic work in China. They also learned to appreciate the scientific achievements of this ancient culture and made them known in Europe. Through their correspondence, European scientists first learned about the Chinese science and culture.The Jesuits introduced to China Western science and mathematics which was undergoing its own revolution. "Jesuits were accepted in late Ming court circles as foreign literati, regarded as impressive especially for their knowledge of astronomy, calendar-making, mathematics, hydraulics, and geography." In 1627, the Jesuit Johann Schreck produced the first book to present Western mechanical knowledge to a Chinese audience, Diagrams and explanations of the wonderful machines of the Far West.
The steam engine manufactured by Ferdinand Verbiest at the Qing Court in 1672.
For over a century, Jesuits like Michele Ruggieri, Matteo Ricci, Diego de Pantoja, Philippe Couplet, Michal Boym, and François Noël refined translations and disseminated Chinese knowledge, culture, history, and philosophy to Europe.
The frontispiece of Athanasius Kircher's 1667 China Illustrata, depicting the Jesuit founders Francis Xavier and Ignatius of Loyola adoring the monogram of Christ in Heaven, back-lit by a divine light, while Johann Adam Schall von Bell and Matteo Ricci labour on the China mission.
The 1734 map compiled by d'Anville based on the Jesuits' geographic research during the early 1700's.
The Portuguese Jesuit João Rodrigues and other Jesuits also began compiling geographical information about the Chinese Empire. In the early years of the 18th century, Jesuit cartographers travelled throughout the country, performing astronomical observations to verify or determine the latitude and longitude relative to Beijing of various locations, then drew maps based on their findings.
Their work was summarised in a four-volume Description géographique, historique, chronologique, politique et physique de l'empire de la Chine et de la Tartarie chinoise published by Jean-Baptiste Du Halde in Paris in 1735, and on a map compiled by Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d'Anville (published 1734). It was these Jesuist's Latin works that popularised the name "Confucius" and had considerable influence on the Deists and other Enlightenment thinkers, some of whom were intrigued by the Jesuits' attempts to reconcile Confucian morality with Catholicism.
CONVOLUTE Number 26.
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The late nineteenth and early twentieth century idea of a Chinese nation, ethnocentrically identifiable with the Han peoples, is an ideological construction forged in the names of modernity and nationalism, while driven by the hidden forces of capitalism.
The Han Chinese share a history of origins in these ancient ancestral territories for over four thousand years, with many different cultural traditions and customs.
The Huaxia tribes of Northern China have gradually and continuously migrated into Southern China over the past two millennia, spreading south from its heartland in the Yellow River Basin, and acculturating and absorbing various non-Chinese ethnic groups that became sinicised over the centuries.
For many the Han dynasty is considered to be one of the first great eras in Chinese history, a unified and cohesive empire. Han China became East Asia's geopolitical power broker, projecting its influence on its neighbours, comparable with its European contemporary, the Roman Empire, both in its population size, geographical and cultural reach.
Thus the Han dynasty's prestige and prominence was to influenced many people of the ancient Huaxia to begin identifying themselves as "The People of Han".
In 1898, just as the United States was occupying the Philippines archipelago, as "a stepping stone to China" in the wake of the Spanish Empire's demise, the Qing Emperor Guangxu turned to reformers like Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao who offered a programme inspired in large part by the reforms in Japan. They proposed basic reform in education, military, and economy in the so-called Hundred Days' Reform.The court established the New Army under Yuan Shikai and many concluded that Chinese society also needed to be modernised if technological and commercial advancements were to succeed.However, the reform was abruptly aborted by a conservative coup led by Empress Dowager Cixi.
The Emperor was put under house arrest in June 1898, where he remained until his death in 1908. Reformers Kang and Liang exiled themselves to avoid being executed. The Empress Dowager controlled policy until her own death in 1908, with support from officials such as Yuan, but her attempts at resisting foreign aggression were not helped by surreptitiously supporting the attacks on foreigners and Chinese Christians in the Boxer Rebellion, prompting another foreign invasion of Beijing in 1900.
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Building pride in Chinese history, present day nationalists have portrayed Imperial China as benevolent, strong and more advanced than the West. They blame ugly wars and diplomatic controversies on imperialist exploitation by Western nations and Japan.
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This is the magazine cover for the December/January 2020 issue of Cosmopolitan. The covers for this woman's magazine have, in recent years, prompted concerns in particular about its cover stories, which have become increasingly sexually explicit in tone, and using images on these covers with models wearing revealing clothes.
This cover includes items about "Here's when stuff will go back to normal-ish!!!", and "Never thought we'd print this but: dating lessons from pandemics past. The 14th century called and it wants its sex spree back".
The question of what is normal in 2020 has an added resonance in a time during a global pandemic and impending environmental catastrophe. So what has SEX got to do with it?
Just LOOK!
The New York Times featured this image in a story in 2015 about how retailers in the United States were shielding the covers of Cosmopolitan from view. This story was picked up later by Lydia Wheeler (08/07/15) in The Hill:
Retailers to shield customers from Cosmopolitan magazine
Cosmopolitan magazine has proven to be too risqué for some retailers.
Late last month, Rite Aid and Food Lion announced they were working to shield customers from the content on the magazine’s cover. In a statement, Rite Aid said it is still going to carry the publication, but future issues will be behind pocket shields. Food Lion, meanwhile, said it’s asking the publisher of the magazine to provide a screened holder.
"We encourage those with concerns about the content of this or other magazines to contact the publishers directly, as we believe this is the most effective way to address these matters,” the company said in a statement.
Now Wal-Mart is taking similar steps to protect customers. Wal-Mart spokesman Kory Lundberg said the company has provided stores with blockers for more than 10 years but has recently decided to send out a communication to remind stores about their use.
“We’re making sure the right people know this is available,” he said.
The National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCSE), which has been behind the push for the magazine cover-up, said Wal-Mart had become increasingly lax in enforcing the use of company-provided blinders in recent years.
The NCSE, which links pornography to sex trafficking, violence against women and child abuse, said the magazine targets children, yet continues to print adult content. Past Cosmo covers have donned headlines that include, “10 Things Guys Crave in Bed,” “His #1 Sex Fantasy” and “25 Sex Moves.”
“In its current issue, Cosmopolitan features a drawing by a sixth grade girl scout reader in the same issue that gives detailed descriptions of sexual acts for the purpose of pleasing a man,” NCSE Executive Director Dawn Hawkins said in a news release.
What's in a name?
The Cambridge Dictionary says that "cosmopolitan" means "containing or having experience of people and things from many different parts of the world", as in: New York is a highly cosmopolitan city. And Cosmopolitan as a magazine was first published and based in New York City in March 1886 as a family magazine; it was later transformed into a literary magazine and, since 1965, has become a women's magazine. It was formerly titled The Cosmopolitan.
What is now generally known as "Cosmo" was widely known as a "bland" and boring magazine by critics. Cosmopolitan's circulation continued to decline for another decade until Helen Gurley Brown became chief editor in 1965. She changed the entire trajectory of the magazine during her time as editor. Brown remodelled and re-invented it as a magazine for modern single career women completely transforming the old bland Cosmopolitan magazine into a racy, contentious and well known, successful magazine. As the editor for 32 years, Brown spent this time using the magazine as an outlet to erase stigma around unmarried women not only having sex, but also enjoying it.
In How Cosmo Changed the World, an article by Jennifer Benjamin for Cosmopolitan (May 3 2007), Helen Gurley Brown is quoted as saying:
"I knew that women were having sex and loving it," she says. "I wanted my magazine to be their best friend, a platform from which I could tell them what I'd learned and talk about all the things that hadn't been discussed before. I wanted to tell the truth: that sex is one of the three best things out there, and I don't even know what the other two are."
Known as a "devout feminist", Brown was often attacked by critics due to her progressive views on women and sex. She believed that women were allowed to enjoy sex without shame in all cases. She died in 2012 at the age of 90. Her vision is still evident in the current design of Cosmopolitan Magazine. The magazine eventually adopted a cover format consisting of a usually young female model (in recent years, an actress, singer, or another prominent female celebrity), typically in a low cut dress, bikini, or some other revealing outfit.
The magazine set itself apart by frankly discussing sexuality from the point of view that women could and should enjoy sex without guilt. The first issue under Helen Gurley Brown, July 1965, featured an article on the birth control pill, which had gone on the market exactly five years earlier.
This was not Brown's first publication dealing with sexually liberated women. Her 1962 advice book, Sex and the Single Girl, had been a bestseller. Fan mail begging for Brown's advice on many subjects concerning women's behavior, sexual encounters, health, and beauty flooded her after the book was released. Brown sent the message that a woman should have men complement her life, not take it over. Enjoying sex without shame was also a message she incorporated in both publications.
In Brown's early years as editor, the magazine received heavy criticism. In 1968 at the feminist Miss America protest, protestors symbolically threw a number of feminine products into a "Freedom Trash Can." These included copies of Cosmopolitan and Playboy magazines.
The dramatic, symbolic use of a trash can to dispose of feminine objects caught the media's attention. Protest organiser Carol Hanisch said about the Freedom Trash Can afterward, "We had intended to burn it, but the police department, since we were on the boardwalk, wouldn't let us do the burning."A story by Lindsy Van Gelder in the New York Post carried a headline "Bra Burners and Miss America". Her story drew an analogy between the feminist protest and Vietnam War protesters who burned their draft cards. Individuals who were present said that no one burned a bra nor did anyone take off her bra.The parallel between protesters burning their draft cards and women burning their bras were encouraged by organizers including Robin Morgan. The phrase became headline material.
So, what's normal?
Women reading Cosmo? Men reading Playboy?
The photograph above shows Dan Mouer in Vietnam in 1966. The magazine was sent by his wife, along with a batch of chocolate chip cookies.
The image was used in an Opinion piece by Amber Batura for The New York Times, with the headline:
How Playboy Explains Vietnam
There’s a famous scene about halfway through “Apocalypse Now” in which Martin Sheen’s river boat pulls into a supply base, deep in the jungle. While the crew members are buying diesel fuel, the supply clerk gives them free tickets to a show — “You know,” he says, “the bunnies.” Soon they’re sitting in an improvised amphitheater around a landing pad, watching as three Playboy models hop out of a helicopter and dance to “Suzie Q.”
The scene is entirely fictional; Playboy models almost never toured Vietnam, and certainly not in groups. But if the women were never there themselves in force, the magazine itself certainly was. In fact, it’s hard to overstate how profound a role Playboy played among the millions of American soldiers and civilians stationed in Vietnam throughout the war: as entertainment, yes, but more important as news and, through its extensive letters section, as a sounding board and confessional.Playboy’s value extended beyond the individual soldier to the military at large; the publication became a coveted and useful morale booster, at times rivaling even the longed-for letter from home. Playboy branded the war because of its unique combination of women, gadgets, and social and political commentary, making it a surprising legacy of our involvement in Vietnam. By 1967, Ward Just of The Washington Post claimed, “If World War II was a war of Stars and Stripes and Betty Grable, the war in Vietnam is Playboy magazine’s war.”The most famous feature of the magazine was the centerfold Playmate. The magazine’s creator and editor, Hugh Hefner, had a specific image in mind for the women he portrayed. The Playmate, originally introduced as the Sweetheart of the Month, represented the ultimate companion to the Playboy. She enjoyed art, politics and music. She was sophisticated, fun and intelligent. Even more important, this ideal woman enjoyed sex as much as the ideal man described in the publication. She wasn’t after men for marriage, but for mutual pleasure and companionship.
She enjoys art . . .
The sexualized, yet familiar, "girl next door" . . .
Though following in their legacy, the Playmate models differed from the pinups of World War II. Hefner wanted images of real women their readers might see in their everyday life — a classmate, secretary or neighbor — instead of the highly stylized and often famous women of an older generation. The sexualized, yet familiar, “girl next door” was the perfect accompaniment for soldiers stationed in Vietnam. This conception of wholesome, all-American beauty and sexuality acted out by largely unknown models reminded young soldiers of the women they left behind, and for whom they were fighting — and could, if they survived, imagine returning to.
The centerfold and other visual features in the magazine served another, unintentional purpose for American troops in Vietnam.
Playboy’s pictures and often-ribald cartoons conveyed changing social and sexual norms back home.
"Don't call me 'boy'!"
The introduction of women of color in 1964 with China Lee and in 1965 with Jennifer Jackson reflected shifting attitudes regarding race. Many soldiers wrote to both the magazine and the Playmates thanking them for their inclusion in Playboy. Black soldiers, in particular, felt that the inclusion of Ms. Jackson extended the promise of Mr. Hefner’s good life to them. Viewing these images forced all Americans to rethink their definitions of beauty.Over time, the centerfolds pushed the boundaries of social norms and legal definitions as they featured more nudity, with the inclusion of pubic hair in 1969 and full-frontal nudity in 1972. The Washington Post reported that American prisoners of war were “taken aback” by the nudity in a smuggled Playboy found on their flight home in 1973.
The nudity, sexuality and diversity portrayed in the pictorials represented more permissive attitudes about sex and beauty that the soldiers had missed during their years in captivity.
Playboy’s appeal to the G.I. in Vietnam extended beyond the centerfold. The men really did read it for the articles. The magazine provided regular features, editorials, columns and ads that focused on men’s lifestyle and entertainment, including high fashion, foreign travel, modern architecture, the latest technology and luxury cars. The publication set itself up as a how-to guide for those men hoping to achieve Mr. Hefner’s vision of the good life, regardless of whether they were in San Diego or Saigon.For young men serving in Southeast Asia, whose average age was 19, military service often provided them their first access to disposable income. Soldiers turned to the magazine for advice on what gadgets to buy, the best vehicles and the latest fashions — products they could often then buy at one of Vietnam’s enormous on-base exchanges, sprawling shopping centers to rival anything back home.The magazine’s advice feature, “The Playboy Advisor,” encouraged men to ask questions on all manner of topics, from the best liquor to stock at home to bedroom advice to adjusting to civilian life. Troops found Playboy a useful tool in figuring out their roles in the consumer-oriented landscape they were now able to join because of the mobility and income their military service provided them.The content moved beyond lifestyle and entertainment as the editorial mission of the magazine evolved. By the 1960s, Playboy included hard-hitting features on important social, cultural and political issues confronting the United States, often written by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists, government and military leaders and top literary figures. The magazine took on topics like feminism, abortion, gay rights, race, economic issues, the counterculture movement and mass incarceration — something soldiers couldn’t get from Stars and Stripes. It offered exhaustive interviews with everyone from Malcolm X to the American Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell, exposing young G.I.s to arguments and ideas about race and African-American equality they might not have been introduced to in their hometowns. Service in Vietnam put many soldiers in direct contact with diverse races and cultures, and Playboy presented them new ideas and arguments regarding those social and cultural issues.As early as 1965, Playboy began running articles about the Vietnam War, with an editorial position that expressed reservations about the escalating conflict. The editors were smart about it, of course: Their stance may have been critical of the president, the administration, the military leaders and the strategy, but they made sure the contributors made every effort to stay supportive of the soldiers. In 1967, troops read the liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith arguing that “no part of the original justification” for the war “remains intact,” as he dismantled the idea of monolithic Communism and other Cold War justifications for war. But that was different from attacking the troops themselves. In 1971, the journalist David Halberstam wrote in an article for Playboy that “we admired their bravery and their idealism, their courage and dedication in the face of endless problems. We believed that they represented the best of American society.” Troops in Vietnam could turn to Playboy for coverage of their own war without fearing criticism of themselves.Playboy was also useful as a forum for the men engaged in the fighting. The publication was unique in its number of interactive features. Soldiers wrote into sections like “Dear Playboy” for advice and with reactions to articles. But those correspondents also freely described their wartime experiences and concerns. They often described what they saw as unfair treatment by the military, discussed their difficulty in transitioning back to civilian society or thanked the magazine for helping them through their time in-country. In 1973, one soldier, R. K. Redini of Chicago, wrote to Playboy about his return home. “One of the things that made my Vietnam tour endurable was seeing Playboy every month,” he said. “It sure helped all of us forget our problems — for a little while, anyway. I thank you not only for myself but also for the thousands of other guys who find a lot of pleasure in your magazine.”In “The Playboy Forum,” another reader-response section, many wrote in addressing specific aspects of Hefner’s lengthy editorial series “The Playboy Philosophy,” including drugs, race and homosexuality in the military. The forum format allowed those who served in Vietnam to reach out not just to other soldiers, but also to the public, providing them a safe space to voice their opinions and criticisms of their service. “Traditionally, a soldier with a gripe is advised by friends to tell it to the chaplain, take it to the inspector general or write to his congressman,” a soldier wrote. “Now, probably because of letters about military injustice in The Playboy Forum, another court of last resort has been added to the list.”Playboy magazine’s significance to the soldiers in Vietnam spread far beyond the foldout Playmate. Troops appropriated the magazine’s bunny mascot and the company’s logo, painting it on planes, helicopters and tanks. They incorporated the logo into patches and “playboy” into call signs and unit nicknames. Adopting the symbol of Playboy was a small rebellion to the conformity of military life and a testament to the impact of the magazine on soldiers’ lives and morale.
And the magazine returned the favor. Long after the war ended, it funded documentaries on the war, Agent Orange research and post-traumatic stress disorder studies. It is a commitment that testifies to this enduring relationship between the publication and the soldier, and reveals how the magazine is a surprising legacy of one of America’s longest wars.
Continued in CONVOLUTES Volume No. 2.
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