Jay Doubleyou: english literature
Jay Doubleyou: education levels and voting trump
Culture War in the USA:
Culture war - Wikipedia
"What's the Matter with Kansas?" movie - longer Internet trailer - YouTube
Why Do Poor White People Vote For Trump & The Republican Party? - YouTube
With the latest:
One Year After Charlottesville, President Trump Wades Into The Culture Wars
How plastic straws became the latest victim in culture wars | GulfNews.com
From last month:
Germany’s increasingly bold nationalists spark a new culture war
The far right is now training its sights on the arts — and playwrights and politicians are locked in combat
Guy Chazan in Berlin JULY 29, 2018
The party is also determined to fight what it describes as the post-1968 leftwing hegemony over German culture, a dominance it routinely describes as “versifft” — meaning filthy, grimy or scuzzy. Jongen recently provoked a storm by saying his aim was to “entsiffen” or “de-grime” the “left-green arts scene”.
With its championing of tolerance and diversity, German theatre is particularly “versifft”, in the view of Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, another of the AfD’s leading voices on cultural matters. “The refugee is portrayed as a new kind of saint while self-confident Germans are shown as poor devils and provincial morons,” he says. One of his bugbears is a recent dance production in the east German town of Dessau involving local youths and young Syrian refugees, which he dismissed as “amateurish multiculturalism”. “Its aim is to break down the difference between ourselves and the Other,” he says. “But you can only do that if you break with your national culture.”
Instead, Tillschneider advocates a cultural agenda that is unashamedly conservative. Germans must, he says, return to the canon. “We must put on new productions of our plays,” he says. “But they must be our plays and they must deal with things that matter to us: Who are we Germans? Where do we come from? Where are we going?”
It is the classics that can provide answers to these questions, Tillschneider continues, naming three of the great masterpieces of German literature as examples — Goethe’s Faust, Schiller’s Wallenstein, and Heinrich von Kleist’s Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, based on the epic encounter between the Romans and German tribes in 9AD, which was seen by Kleist’s contemporaries as a rousing call to arms against Napoleon’s France.
So far, German theatres do not appear to be flocking back to Kleist. But if one were to judge the AfD by its goal of “shifting the prevailing mood” in Germany, it has been surprisingly successful. Unsettled by the AfD’s electoral strength, the country’s mainstream conservative parties have tacked ever more to the right, particularly on immigration policy. “The bourgeois elites . . . are running after rightwing ideas to win back voters [from the AfD],” says Thomas Ostermeier, the Schaubühne’s artistic director.
The AfD is best known for its criticism of Merkel’s refugee policy and its attacks on Islam. But its long-term ambitions go much further: it wants to change the way Germans see their past. Its ideologues have long argued that Germany is too focused on the Third Reich and the crimes and atrocities of Hitler’s regime. Last year one of its leaders, Björn Höcke, called for a “180-degree revolution” in this culture of remembrance, and attacked the memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe in the centre of Berlin. “Germans are the only people in the world that have planted a monument of shame in the heart of their capital,” he said.
The speech broke one of the great taboos of German politics — before the AfD, few had ever questioned Germany’s moral obligation to atone for the sins of Nazism. Moderates in the party tried, unsuccessfully, to kick Höcke out. But others have since taken up the theme. Alexander Gauland, the AfD’s leader, said last month that Hitler and the Nazis were “just a piece of bird-shit in more than a thousand years of successful German history”. Jewish groups accused him of trivialising the Holocaust.
Others prefer direct action to petitions. One advocate of a more hands-on approach is the Centre for Political Beauty, or ZPS, a Berlin-based collective whose mixture of performance art and political protest has earned them a huge following in Germany. After Höcke’s famous speech last year, they built a replica of the Berlin Holocaust Memorial outside his home in the small east German village of Bornhagen. Höcke has gone to court to have it removed — so far without success.
“We make life hell for rightwing rabble-rousers,” says Philipp Ruch, ZPS’s head. “Nazis have no right to privacy, because they just withdraw there to rest and prepare themselves for their next attacks.”
A Tiggerish mischief-maker who routinely daubs his face with black paint — made from what he describes as the “residue of Germany’s scorched hopes” — Ruch was born in the east German city of Dresden but grew up in Switzerland. After studying political philosophy in Berlin, he founded ZPS in 2008 with a mission to “break through the complacency of my generation”.
The AfD’s reaction to the Höcke action was furious. It filed a parliamentary question asking the government whether it agreed that the ZPS had infringed on Höcke’s right to privacy and crossed the limits of artistic freedom. Ministers said it was up to the courts — not them — to decide such matters.
Ruch says German civil society has “no choice” but to fight rightwing extremism, and to fight with the gloves off. “I don’t care much for the politics of appeasement, à la Chamberlain,” he says. “We have to be much more aggressive in the way we deal with the AfD.”
Germany’s increasingly bold nationalists spark a new culture war | Financial Times
A matter of perception:
Civilization Part 1 BBC Series by Niall Ferguson - YouTube
Or:
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The danger of a single story | TED Talk
Or:
BBC Radio 4 - The Briefing Room, Why Did People Vote Leave?
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