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!
Thank you Shaina, really appreciate it! And great to find a Substack fiction writer! It's relatively rare. Appreciate your sharing your fiction.
Yeah, I was really floored reading Storm of Steel. Everything else I'd ever read about WWI was so reasonable, so much about the lessons learned from the war, war to end all wars, etc. There had been a lot of revisionism by the time people wrote in the '20s. So it was very interesting to read Storm of Steel and have the sense that, oh yeah, a lot of the people in the trenches were fighting men who were proud of what they were doing and developed a world view to accompany it. Btw if you read Junger, it's very easy to understand where Hitler and the Nazis were coming from.
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.
Thank you Josh. Totally fair point re DiAngelo. That's right, there is a whole program of purifying oneself.
I guess where I'm trying to get to with everything on wokeism is an understanding that it's not coming from a completely irrational place - even if the expression is often so irrational. Imperialism really was (and is) devastating - and there does have to be some sort of society-wide reckoning with it. Slavery was (to use religious language) the 'original sin' of America and there probably is no way to fully heal from it. And there does seem to be a crying need for the development of new national myths - the old ones about the Founding Fathers and the More Perfect Union are not aging so well.
There's a tendency in the sort of heterodox Substack space we're in to become conservative and just set up a barricade against anything that's coming out of the woke movement. The better path - and I think you're in a similar place - is to somehow reintegrate it into liberalism: to say, in so many words, you're not wrong, but this isn't going to lead anywhere productive, and that there is a political throughline that runs from Lincoln to King to Obama that emphasizes healing and atonement within functional democratic structures - and that that is probably a better approach. - Sam
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!
Thank you Shaina, really appreciate it! And great to find a Substack fiction writer! It's relatively rare. Appreciate your sharing your fiction.
Yeah, I was really floored reading Storm of Steel. Everything else I'd ever read about WWI was so reasonable, so much about the lessons learned from the war, war to end all wars, etc. There had been a lot of revisionism by the time people wrote in the '20s. So it was very interesting to read Storm of Steel and have the sense that, oh yeah, a lot of the people in the trenches were fighting men who were proud of what they were doing and developed a world view to accompany it. Btw if you read Junger, it's very easy to understand where Hitler and the Nazis were coming from.
- Sam
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.
Thank you Josh. Totally fair point re DiAngelo. That's right, there is a whole program of purifying oneself.
I guess where I'm trying to get to with everything on wokeism is an understanding that it's not coming from a completely irrational place - even if the expression is often so irrational. Imperialism really was (and is) devastating - and there does have to be some sort of society-wide reckoning with it. Slavery was (to use religious language) the 'original sin' of America and there probably is no way to fully heal from it. And there does seem to be a crying need for the development of new national myths - the old ones about the Founding Fathers and the More Perfect Union are not aging so well.
There's a tendency in the sort of heterodox Substack space we're in to become conservative and just set up a barricade against anything that's coming out of the woke movement. The better path - and I think you're in a similar place - is to somehow reintegrate it into liberalism: to say, in so many words, you're not wrong, but this isn't going to lead anywhere productive, and that there is a political throughline that runs from Lincoln to King to Obama that emphasizes healing and atonement within functional democratic structures - and that that is probably a better approach. - Sam