- Dale Partridge wants the white race to again subdue and enslave the Africans;
- Red Joseph thinks gays are impossible;
- Recalling Howard Zinn, who told the history conservatives would deny;
- Will conservative historians 50 years from now erase MAGA, as an embarrassing episode from the 2020s?
Right Wing Watch, Kyle Mantyla, yesterday: Dale Partridge Calls For The Return Of ‘European Christian Colonization Of African Nations’
For the last several weeks, far-right Christian nationalist pastor Dale Partridge has been preaching on the Curse of Ham, a controversial theological theory long used to justify slavery and racism.
Originating in Genesis 9, the theory posits that black people were perpetually cursed by God to serve and be ruled by white people because Ham, one of the sons of Noah, looked upon his father when he was passed out drunk and naked in his tent.
Partridge claimed that “the African peoples … and some of the people from India” are the modern-day descendants of Ham and that they have been assigned by God to be ruled over and dependent upon whites, Europeans, Asians, Jews, and Arabs, who are allegedly the descendants of Ham’s brothers, Shem and Japheth.
This is why religion poisons everything, in Hitchens’ words. Here Partridge is using it to justify the presumptions of white Europeans to subdue the black and brown races around the world. Don’t they have anything to say about it? Also, the curse of Ham is seeing his father naked? That’s it?
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The main problem with faith is that it teaches you to believe things that are not true. It teaches you a simplified version of reality.
Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta, today: Evangelical GOP candidate Rod Joseph: “You cannot be born gay. That’s impossible”, subtitled “The Republican said being gay is a choice, despite campaigning in one of South Florida’s most LGBTQ-friendly districts”
“You cannot be born gay. That’s impossible biologically,” he said.
Joseph said sexuality is a preference, not an inherent orientation. “Sexual preference from the Roman Empire to date, it’s always a preference.”
Joseph, in an interview Tuesday, also said he is concerned that people are somehow indoctrinated or influenced to become LGBTQ. “Most of the people, they’re victims of sexual abuse at the very young age.”
Nonsense, especially the last comment. He’s ignorant. Homosexuality is perfectly possible and happens among hundreds of animal species, as has been well-documented. He’s blinded by faith.
(Of course, there is always this response: if being gay is just a choice, so what? Why do they care? Isn’t being American about freedom, to do whatever one wants without government or religious coercion?)
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A running theme here is that conservatives retell the past to suit their current priorities and values. Perhaps all nations and religions do this. More broadly: even human memory is subject to selective editing, to place the self in better circumstances. (Don’t trust your memories, especially your older ones, especially those that placed you in a good or bad light.)
LA Times, Dave Zirin, yesterday: Howard Zinn spoke to this moment, even decades ago
Howard Zinn, who died in 2010, was the author of A People’s History of the United States, which might be defined as a record of all the history of the US that conservatives want to deny and erase. I have a copy, but have only read a portion. It’s relevant now because of Trump’s ambitions to whitewash history in the Smithsonian Museums. (See Inside Trump’s Ideological Fight With the Smithsonian.)
Not many historians have seen their work referenced on “The Simpsons” and “The Sopranos.” Not many historians have been condemned by name by a president on the White House lawn for the “crime” of researching and writing about this nation’s history. And not many historians have taught countless people that this country’s past looks quite different depending upon the perspective of those doing the telling. This is Howard Zinn, who shaped Americans’ understanding of themselves through seven decades of activism and whose insights should continue to color how we understand the news of the day.
Those doing the telling, precisely. This is both political and psychological.
Zinn is both perhaps the most banned historian in U.S. history and the author of arguably the most enduring U.S. history text, the 46-year-old and still best-selling “A People’s History of the United States.” He had died a decade earlier when President Trump — amid the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic — held Zinn responsible for “left-wing rioting and mayhem” and “propaganda tracts … that try to make students ashamed of their own history.”
At the barest-bones level, detractors attack Zinn for the same reason teachers, students and readers celebrate him: because his work inspires people to think critically, fight back and make their own history. For the authoritarian, the thought of people being inspired in such a manner is chilling. It also contradicts their politically useful belief that history only happens at the behest of “great men.” Those who’ve read Zinn — and some of the generations of historians inspired by him — recognize this to be the greatest lie of all. As he wrote: “The good things that have been done, the reforms … all of that was not done by government edict. … It was all done by citizens’ movements. … What really matters is what are people doing, and what are people saying, what are people demanding.”
The biggest lie is that history is the result of “great men.” That’s a simplistic view of history, and so of course beloved by conservatives. Reality is more complex, as always.
The balance of the article is about how Zinn’s influence is waning. This, I think, is the inescapable cycle of history. Yet which manages to progress. The article ends:
History proves that when there are green shoots pushing out of the concrete, then — to paraphrase Tupac Shakur — those of us who want change need to tend to them, not ignore or even stomp these glints of hope because they aren’t yet what we want them to be.
We need hope and truth-tellers more than ever because this country at 250 is being smothered: suffocating under an avalanche of disinformation and “alternative facts.” Fighting for the truth — however inconvenient — means telling the stories of the deliberately unheard. That was the life’s work of Howard Zinn. And we need it more than ever.
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Thought. Conservatives would prefer that history not teach the worst of conservative (racist) thinking; better edit it away, pretend it didn’t happen. It was all about states’ rights, and so on. I wonder if the same will happen about the 2020s, and MAGA. An embarrassment, best forgotten, 50 years from now.
