This was a fantastic read. Where to start really...I’m particularly struck by Junger. I haven’t read much about WWI. WWII took that place of wartime fascination. But I haven’t read a memoir that wasn’t, as you put it, of a liberal bent. Pacifist to the core. Which is a blind spot to the spectrum of human experience on my part.
His mention of birds singing as the battle rages on reminded me of a paragraph from a Holocaust survivor’s memoir (whether Gerda Weissmann Klein or Elie Wiesel, I can’t remember). They are on a march, leaving the death camp as the Allies close in. And when they look up they see trees. Notice the sky. That the natural world is as it was before and will be after, even in the midst of hell on earth.
Such a stark contrast...I will have to read his work to get the full scope of it. Thank you for writing!
Appreciate your clear-eyed take on wokeness, wokeism, whatever it is. As you say, that view typically yields everything, intellectually. There is no conversation -- simply a rehearsed consensus. This is what leads AA-style exercises, such as going around a circle and saying, "I'm so-and-so, and I'm a racist."
Where I disagree slightly is the notion that it doesn't require anyone to do anything. "Doing the work" is very much part of Robin DiAngelo's regimen. There are books to read, workbooks to complete. What I find paralyzing about the movement, however, is how risky engagement is. See this recent blog post, for instance: https://tzedeksocialjusticefund.org/white-women-doing-white-supremacy-in-nonprofit-culture/. Doing too much work too publicly, yielding the argument too unreservedly leads to charges of white saviorism. I found this paradox quite distressing as a professor and really wrestled with it as a department chair when there are calls for public statements committing to anti-racism.
To the Stokey Carmichael example of radicalism being emboldened by a more accepting climate I might add Jamaica Kincaid's "A Letter to Robinson Crusoe," which somehow made it into the Best American Essays 2020: https://books.substack.com/p/diary-a-letter-to-robinson-crusoe. The critique of colonialism, as you say, has a point. It's the turn toward dismissing the entire Enlightenment and glorifying a pre-industrial paradise that is jaw-dropping. I realize I can get off in the weeds about Ibram Kendi, but it's just this kind of logic that often baffles me in his writing.
This was a fantastic read. Where to start really...I’m particularly struck by Junger. I haven’t read much about WWI. WWII took that place of wartime fascination. But I haven’t read a memoir that wasn’t, as you put it, of a liberal bent. Pacifist to the core. Which is a blind spot to the spectrum of human experience on my part.
His mention of birds singing as the battle rages on reminded me of a paragraph from a Holocaust survivor’s memoir (whether Gerda Weissmann Klein or Elie Wiesel, I can’t remember). They are on a march, leaving the death camp as the Allies close in. And when they look up they see trees. Notice the sky. That the natural world is as it was before and will be after, even in the midst of hell on earth.
Such a stark contrast...I will have to read his work to get the full scope of it. Thank you for writing!
Appreciate your clear-eyed take on wokeness, wokeism, whatever it is. As you say, that view typically yields everything, intellectually. There is no conversation -- simply a rehearsed consensus. This is what leads AA-style exercises, such as going around a circle and saying, "I'm so-and-so, and I'm a racist."
Where I disagree slightly is the notion that it doesn't require anyone to do anything. "Doing the work" is very much part of Robin DiAngelo's regimen. There are books to read, workbooks to complete. What I find paralyzing about the movement, however, is how risky engagement is. See this recent blog post, for instance: https://tzedeksocialjusticefund.org/white-women-doing-white-supremacy-in-nonprofit-culture/. Doing too much work too publicly, yielding the argument too unreservedly leads to charges of white saviorism. I found this paradox quite distressing as a professor and really wrestled with it as a department chair when there are calls for public statements committing to anti-racism.
To the Stokey Carmichael example of radicalism being emboldened by a more accepting climate I might add Jamaica Kincaid's "A Letter to Robinson Crusoe," which somehow made it into the Best American Essays 2020: https://books.substack.com/p/diary-a-letter-to-robinson-crusoe. The critique of colonialism, as you say, has a point. It's the turn toward dismissing the entire Enlightenment and glorifying a pre-industrial paradise that is jaw-dropping. I realize I can get off in the weeds about Ibram Kendi, but it's just this kind of logic that often baffles me in his writing.