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[post_date] => 2021-01-29 16:03:30
[post_date_gmt] => 2021-01-29 16:03:30
[post_content] => This is not a time for unity in American politics. It's a time for accountability.
With Joe Biden finally inaugurated after a rocky transition period and a dubious first for America—a non-peaceful transfer of power—elite American influencers and legacy media outlets will no doubt be tempted to take their eyes off the festering fascism that brought Donald Trump to power. One key constituent element of the toxic brew that became Trumpism is Christian nationalism. It was prominently on display in the January 6 storming of the Capitol in the form of prayers, Christian flags, “Jesus 2020” signs, crosses, and more, and it will remain a powerfully destructive force in local, state, and national politics. Will the media do the responsible thing and continue to shine a spotlight on it?
Given that Biden is now calling for national “unity”—without emphasizing accountability for those who implemented hateful policies, committed crimes, incited violence, and engaged in corruption during the Trump presidency—the belated and modest progress we’ve seen in how major media outlets report on the Christian Right could be rapidly reversed. Americans invested in the health of their civil society must maintain pressure on media platforms to keep their reporting on the right track, which may help to prevent the resurgence of Christofascism four or eight years from now.
And count on this: the Christofascists will not go gently into that good night. They will be organizing, and we must keep the public informed of their activities and plans.
Conservatives, including those affiliated with the anti-Trump Lincoln Project that unfortunately became a darling of many liberals during the 2020 election cycle, have long since revealed their obvious investment in painting Trump as the problem, rather than a symptom of a problem with much deeper roots—one for which they bear much responsibility. If these conservatives have their way, no one will face real accountability for the horrors of the Trump years and their violent culmination—no one except, maybe, Trump himself. Although even Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, one of Trump’s greatest enablers since the 2016 election, agreed not to obstruct an unprecedented second impeachment trial that will take place in the Senate even with Trump already out of office, it looks like the Republican senators will once again refuse to convict Trump. After all, that’s what “unity” means to Republicans, the ostensible “party of personal responsibility”—no consequences for the destruction they have wrought.
If “unity” wins the day, there will be no justice for the victims of those who, under the auspices of the Trump presidency, violated the human rights of asylum seekers, presided over a grossly incompetent response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the concomitant spreading of disinformation, and incited the mob that invaded the Capitol on January 6. The reputations of high-level Trump administration officials and associated enablers will be rehabilitated; their lucrative, high-profile careers will be back on track.
Meanwhile, cable news and the major media outlets will likely tread lightly at best around the structural problems in America that give the Right disproportionate power. If this happens, conditions will be ripe for the rise of a smoother, more competent fascist leader than Trump. The Republican Party remains a bastion of far-right authoritarianism, and, while many Republican leaders seemed embarrassed in the immediate aftermath of the January 6 insurrection, they are now mostly trying to simply “move on” as if it never happened.
In addition to holding GOP leadership to account, we must continue to shine a bright light on the Christian Right’s anti-democratic ideology. It would be a serious mistake to end the long overdue media scrutiny of evangelicalism precipitated by authoritarian Christians’ overwhelming support for Trump. The contrast of a brash, pussy-grabbing, impious bully with the hitherto “respectable” image of “family values” politics drew constant (if still often poorly informed) media attention throughout Trump’s term in office. But that could change with Democrats in charge of both the presidency and—tenuously—Congress. The Christian supremacism that pervades America’s elite public sphere is too little acknowledged, and it would be easy for many journalists to fall back into whitewashing and breezy bothsidesism in their coverage of authoritarian Christians.
Already, prominent evangelical Trump supporters are attempting to gaslight the public. Initially, Franklin Graham, Billy Graham’s son and the head of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, said publicly that he believed Trump’s lie about the election having been “stolen” from him. He also said that he supported the efforts of right-wing Christian senators to overturn the election. Now, with Biden installed as president and possible legal repercussions for prominent people who promoted the lies, Graham denies any responsibility for inciting the January 6 insurrection. Even worse, he now insists, against a massive trove of video evidence, that he has seen no evidence of Christian involvement in the invasion of the Capitol (though he admits Christians were present at the rally on the National Mall).
Going forward, how will journalists report on such things—if they report on them at all? And what will those few influential white evangelicals who have been surprisingly willing to reckon with evangelical involvement in January 6—especially Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson, writer David French, and head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s public policy arm Russell Moore—do? Will it be back to culture-warring as usual?
French, at least, continues to blame “both sides” for America’s polarization when the Right is demonstrably far more to blame than the Left, and is stressing national unity in a way that glosses over the rot inherent in right-wing Christian ideology. And while he writes movingly of the harassment he and his family members suffered for their opposition to Trump, this does not seem to have taught him to empathize with LGBTQ folks like me, who are disproportionately subjected to bullying but not supposed to exist according to French’s theology. I suspect that so long as we are invisible to French, so will be his theology’s role in the rise of Trumpism.
Since February 2020 and over the course of the presidential election cycle through President Biden’s Inauguration, it has been my privilege to write a monthly column for The Conversationalist about the Christian Right’s politics, focusing mostly on evangelicals and Trump. While this monthly assignment now comes to an end, I plan to remain a frequent contributor to this outlet. For now, I would like to leave my readers with the following thoughts.
White evangelicals have consistently been America’s most loyal and enthusiastic Trump-supporting demographic since 2016; to say they have not taken the results of our recent presidential election well would be classic Midwestern understatement. (I am a Hoosier; don’t hate.) Many are still in denial. Most white evangelicals live in an authoritarian world rife with conspiracy theories and “alternative facts”; and that, combined with their powerful and well-heeled institutions and lobbies, means that their anti-pluralist aims will remain a serious threat to American democracy.
My 2020 reporting and commentary will remain here, bearing witness, as the country moves on from Trump. I would ask that we all do what we can to keep America’s far Right, including the Christian Right, under media scrutiny, so that we might be better prepared for the political battles to come.
[post_title] => Christian nationalism after Trump remains a powerful and destructive force
[post_excerpt] => President Biden must hold accountable those who implemented hateful policies, committed crimes, incited violence, and engaged in corruption during the Trump presidency.
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https://conversationalist.org/2021/01/08/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-trump-presidency-explained-by-a-scholar-who-lived-through-the-siege-of-sarajevo/
[post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:11:29
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From Ariella Aïsha Azoulay's exhibition "Errata" at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona.[/caption]
Azoulay posits that the use of this violent photographic shutter stretches back to 1492, a moment of imperial Spanish colonization of the Americas, the start of the international global slave trade to make this possible and the obliteration of Judeo-Muslim culture through Inquisition decrees. This history also includes the devastation of the Caribbean’s indigenous Taíno people’s politics and culture in 1514; the ruination of the nonfeudal cocitizenship system of the Igabo people in West Africa; the 1872 Crémiuex decree that gave French citizenship to Jewish Algerians but withheld it from Muslims, a divide-and-conquer strategy with ramifications that are felt to this day; and the ongoing ravaging of Palestinian politics and culture since the early 1900s. In this connected schema of colonial destruction and erasure paired with institutionalization and documentation, the concept of history is premised on the ideas of discovery and progress. Each colonial regime “discovered” new artworks and exhibited them in new museums; they documented dispossessed people with the new label of “refugees” and imposed new cultural practices and political institutions premised on the undoing of previous indigenous norms and knowledge.
Potential history is positioned as a means of addressing these historical damages by imaginatively reactivating the memories and potentialities shut off by the imperialist photograph and its material positioning. Azoulay describes “rehearsal methods” for how we can question and begin to undo these structures. One strategy is the act of revising imperial photos through annotation, including notes, comments and modified captions that challenge the histories they describe. When these interventions are rejected by the archives that own the legal rights to the photos, Azoulay redraws the photographs herself.
Another rehearsal method is the idea of striking, found in short chapters that imagine museum workers, photographers and historians going on strike. The idea of striking until our world is repaired means saying no to the relentless new of history. It does not aim to substitute an alternative history or fill museums with new objects, but rather to reject their logic and promote its active unlearning. Azoulay underlines these and other rehearsals as modes of practicing new forms of co-citizenry and solidarity based on critical looking. “Unlearning imperialism,” she writes, “means aspiring to be there for and with others targeted by imperial violence, in such a way that nothing about the operation of the shutter can ever again appear neutral.”
“Being there” is a moment of radical solidarity in which one aspires to listen to those affected by such violence and question the flow of history that imperial institutions strive to promote as casual and natural. This includes recognizing the role of looted objects and their role in building imperial ideas, but also reclaiming them as means to enact other modes of being, such as thinking of them not as protected “art” but as part of people’s real material worlds.
Azoulay also listens to new melodies that arise from such sites of imperial documentation. She recounts the story of her own Algerian father moving to Israel as a child and trying to forget his native Arabic—because in Israel, the European elite actively condemned its use and promoted Hebrew. She first learned that her grandmother’s name was the Arabic Aïsha, the name of the Prophet Mohamed’s third wife, when she saw her father’s birth certificate after he died. Plucked from this imperial document, the name was a “treasure” in her Hebrew-speaking, Jewish-Israeli family; she sought to use it as a site of imagination by adopting it as her own—in addition to her Hebrew name, Ariella. Azoulay speaks of Aïsha as a haunting scream: Aïsha, Aïsha, Aïeeeeeeee-shaaaaaaaa.
Azoulay further demonstrates photographs and documents as dual sites of violence and resistance with images taken by the Civil War photographer Timothy O’Sullivan in 1862. One of his iconic images shows eight Black people standing stiffly near a large house persistently labeled as the “J.J. Smith Plantation.” These words make it clear that the people in the photograph are racialized property. She describes how this violence is repeated in historical archives, in which photographs of Black people taken before and after the Civil War are interchangeably captioned as depicting slaves; she proposes the imagining of a “dismissed exposure,” or ghostly negative of a forgotten image reinserted into the frame. The original image becomes blurred and surreal as it competes with sculptures from the MoMA floating in the background. Since there are no images on display in U.S. museums of Black Americans reunited with objects stolen from them, the dismissed exposure serves as an imaginative placeholder in the photographic archive. It waits for different worlds and meanings.
Potential history dwells in such creative exercises. It resists simplistic ideas of financial restitution for destroyed cultures or the mere substitution of one history for another. Instead, it advocates persistent unlearning of how the world is taught, represented and constructed; solidarity in resisting these demands; listening to those affected; and, above all, imagining. Azoulay’s book is a long (over 670 pages) and challenging read. It brings up the question of who has the resources to read it; while its ideas are currently being filtered through museum exhibitions such as the traveling , the question remains as to how this work can reach a wider and more diverse audience. If you do manage to find a copy, perhaps try following one of the more whimsical moments of the book: dip in as you please, conceiving of no beginning or end, but rather of moments that shine in “a bright, brief and sudden light” against the “dazzling” beam of imperialism.
After all of the “kings” had been “beheaded” at the intergalactic memorial carnival in Berlin, we passed around a hat, on which was written things we wanted to cherish and save. “It’s more about the spirit of hope than destruction,” laughed a person in a wooden demon mask.
[post_title] => 'Potential Histories: Unlearning Imperialism': a review of Ariella Azoulay's new book
[post_excerpt] => How the "shutter" of photography aided imperial conquest.
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