In William Faulkner’s 1938 novel The Unvanquished, the implacable Colonel Sartoris takes drastic action to stop the election of a black Republican candidate to office after the Civil War, destroying the ballots of black voters and shooting two Northern carpetbaggers. While such dramatic means of voter suppression occurred often enough in the Reconstruction South, tactics of electoral exclusion refined over time, such that by the mid-twentieth century the Jim Crow South relied largely on nearly impossible-to-pass literacy tests to impede free and fair elections.
These tests, writes Rebecca Onion at Slate, were “supposedly applicable to both white and black prospective voters who couldn’t prove a certain level of education” (typically up to the fifth grade). Yet they were “in actuality disproportionately administered to black voters.”
Additionally, many of the tests were rigged so that registrars could give potential voters an easy or a difficult version, and could score them differently as well. For example, the Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement describes a test administered in Alabama that is so entirely subjective that it measures the registrar’s shrewdness and cunning more than anything else.
The test here from Louisiana consists of questions so ambiguous that no one, whatever their level of education, can divine a “right” or “wrong” answer to most of them. And yet, as the instructions state, “one wrong answer denotes failure of the test,” an impossible standard for even a legitimate exam. Even worse, voters had only ten minutes to complete the three-page, 30-question document. The Louisiana test dates from 1964, the year before the passage of the Voting Rights Act, which effectively put an end to these blatantly discriminatory practices.
In a 2013 blog post, the great Ursula K. Le Guin quotes a London Times Literary Supplement column by a “J.C.,” who satirically proposes the “Jean-Paul Sartre Prize for Prize Refusal.” “Writers all over Europe and America are turning down awards in the hope of being nominated for a Sartre,” writes J.C., “The Sartre Prize itself has never been refused.” Sartre earned the honor of his own prize for prize refusal by turning down the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964, an act Le Guin calls “characteristic of the gnarly and counter-suggestible Existentialist.” As you can see in the short clip above, Sartre fully believed the committee used the award to whitewash his Communist political views and activism.
But the refusal was not a theatrical or “impulsive gesture,” Sartre wrote in a statement to the Swedish press, which was later published in Le Monde. It was consistent with his longstanding principles. “I have always declined official honors,” he said, and referred to his rejection of the Legion of Honor in 1945 for similar reasons. Elaborating, he cited first the “personal” reason for his refusal
This attitude is based on my conception of the writer’s enterprise. A writer who adopts political, social, or literary positions must act only with the means that are his own—that is, the written word. All the honors he may receive expose his readers to a pressure I do not consider desirable. If I sign myself Jean-Paul Sartre it is not the same thing as if I sign myself Jean-Paul Sartre, Nobel Prize winner.
The writer must therefore refuse to let himself be transformed into an institution, even if this occurs under the most honorable circumstances, as in the present case.
There was another reason as well, an “objective” one, Sartre wrote. In serving the cause of socialism, he hoped to bring about “the peaceful coexistence of the two cultures, that of the East and the West.” (He refers not only to Asia as “the East,” but also to “the Eastern bloc.”)
Therefore, he felt he must remain independent of institutions on either side: “I should thus be quite as unable to accept, for example, the Lenin Prize, if someone wanted to give it to me.”
As a flattering New York Times article noted at the time, this was not the first time a writer had refused the Nobel. In 1926, George Bernard Shaw turned down the prize money, offended by the extravagant cash award, which he felt was unnecessary since he already had “sufficient money for my needs.” Shaw later relented, donating the money for English translations of Swedish literature. Boris Pasternak also refused the award, in 1958, but this was under extreme duress. “If he’d tried to go accept it,” Le Guin writes, “the Soviet Government would have promptly, enthusiastically arrested him and sent him to eternal silence in a gulag in Siberia.”
These qualifications make Sartre the only author to ever outright and voluntarily reject both the Nobel Prize in Literature and its sizable cash award. While his statement to the Swedish press is filled with polite explanations and gracious demurrals, his filmed statement above, excerpted from the 1976 documentary Sartre by Himself, minces no words.
Because I was politically involved the bourgeois establishment wanted to cover up my “past errors.” Now there’s an admission! And so they gave me the Nobel Prize. They “pardoned” me and said I deserved it. It was monstrous!
Sartre was in fact pardoned by De Gaulle four years after his Nobel rejection for his participation in the 1968 uprisings. “You don’t arrest Voltaire,” the French President supposedly said. The writer and philosopher, Le Guin points out, “was, of course, already an ‘institution’” at the time of the Nobel award. Nonetheless, she says, the gesture had real meaning. Literary awards, writes Le Guin—who herself refused a Nebula Award in 1976 (she’s won several more since)—can “honor a writer,” in which case they have “genuine value.” Yet prizes are also awarded “as a marketing ploy by corporate capitalism, and sometimes as a political gimmick by the awarders [….] And the more prestigious and valued the prize the more compromised it is.” Sartre, of course, felt the same—the greater the honor, the more likely his work would be coopted and sanitized.
Perhaps proving his point, a short, nasty 1965 Harvard Crimson letter had many, less flattering things than Le Guin to say about Sartre’s motivations, calling him “an ugly toad” and a “poor loser” envious of his former friend Camus, who won in 1957. The letter writer calls Sartre’s rejection of the prize “an act of pretension” and a “rather ineffectual and stupid gesture.” And yet it did have an effect. It seems clear at least to me that the Harvard Crimson writer could not stand the fact that, offered the “most coveted award” the West can bestow, and a heaping sum of money besides, “Sartre’s big line was, ‘Je refuse.’”
Karl Marx was a German philosopher-historian (with a few other pursuits besides) who wrote in pursuit of an understanding of industrial society as he knew it in the nineteenth century and what its future evolution held in store. There are good reasons to read his work still today, especially if you have an interest in the history of economic and sociological theory, or in the time and places he lived. But in the almost century-and-a-half since his death — and more so during the twentieth century, during which the ostensibly Marxist project of the Soviet Union rose and fell — he’s turned from a historical figure into an iconic specter, representing either penetrating insight into or catastrophic delusion about the organization of human society.
It was surely Marx’s tendency to inflame strong opinions that got him placed at the center of a debate between the psychologist/cultural commentator Jordan Peterson and the philosopher/cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek. The event took place in 2019, at Toronto’s Sony Center, billed as a clash of the titans on the subject of “Happiness: Capitalism vs. Marxism.”
In fact, it ended up covering a wide range of twenty-first-century issues, with each of the two unorthodox, highly recognizable public intellectuals giving characteristic performances on the economic and political ideologies of the day. Yet they aren’t as opposed as one might have imagined: “I cannot but notice the irony of how Peterson and I, the participants in this duel of the century, are both marginalized by the official academic community,” Žižek remarks early on.
Indeed, writes the Guardian’s Stephen Marche, “the great surprise of this debate turned out to be how much in common the old-school Marxist and the Canadian identity politics refusenik had. One hated communism. The other hated communism but thought that capitalism possessed inherent contradictions. The first one agreed that capitalism possessed inherent contradictions.” Nevertheless, as in many a debate, the surprising common ground is more interesting than the predictable points of conflict, especially on themes broader than any set of ‑isms. “My basic dogma is, happiness should be treated as a necessary by-product,” says Žižek. “If you focus on it, you are lost.” To this proposition Peterson later gives his hearty assent. As for what, exactly, to focus on instead of happiness… well, that’s a matter of debate.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
“Adolf Eichmann went to the gallows with great dignity,” wrote the political philosopher Hannah Arendt, describing the scene leading up to the prominent Holocaust-organizer’s execution. After drinking half a bottle of wine, turning down the offer of religious assistance, and even refusing the black hood offered him at the gallows, he gave a brief, strangely high-spirited speech before the hanging. “It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us — the lesson of the fearsome word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.”
These lines come from Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, originally published in 1963 as a five-part series in the New Yorker. Eichmann “was popularly described as an evil mastermind who orchestrated atrocities from a cushy German office, and many were eager to see the so-called ‘desk murderer’ tried for his crimes,” explains the narrator of the animated TED-Ed lesson above, written by University College Dublin political theory professor Joseph Lacey. “But the squeamish man who took the stand seemed more like a dull bureaucrat than a sadistic killer,” and this “disparity between Eichmann’s nature and his actions” inspired Arendt’s famous summation.
A German Jew who fled her homeland in 1933, as Hitler rose to power, Arendt “dedicated herself to understanding how the Nazi regime came to power.” Against the common notion that “the Third Reich was a historical oddity, a perfect storm of uniquely evil leaders, supported by German citizens, looking for revenge after their defeat in World War I,” she argued that “the true conditions behind this unprecedented rise of totalitarianism weren’t specific to Germany.” Rather, in modernity, “individuals mainly appear in the social world to produce and consume goods and services,” which fosters ideologies “in which individuals were seen only for their economic value, rather than their moral and political capacities.”
In such isolating conditions, she thought, “participating in the regime becomes the only way to recover a sense of identity and community. While condemning Eichmann’s “monstrous actions, Arendt saw no evidence that Eichmann himself was uniquely evil. She saw him as a distinctly ordinary man who considered obedience the highest form of civic duty — and for Arendt, it was exactly this ordinariness that was most terrifying.” According to her theory, there was nothing particularly German about all of this: any sufficiently modernized culture could produce an Eichmann, a citizen who defines himself by participation in his society regardless of that society’s larger aims. This led her to the conclusion that “thinking is our greatest weapon against the threats of modernity,” some of which have become only more threatening over the past six decades.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Among modern-day liberals and conservatives alike, George Orwell enjoys practically sainted status. And indeed, throughout his body of work, including but certainly not limited to his oft-assigned novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, one can find numerous implicitly or explicitly expressed political views that please either side of that divide — or, by definition, views that anger each side. The readers who approve of Orwell’s open advocacy for socialism, for example, are probably not the same ones who approve of his indictment of language policing. To understand what he actually believed, we can’t trust current interpreters who employ his words for their own ends; we must return to the words themselves.
Hence the structure of the video above from Youtuber Ryan Chapman, which offers “an overview of George Orwell’s political views, guided by his reflections on his own career.” Chapman begins with Orwell’s essay “Why I Write,” in which the latter declares that “in a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer.”
His awakening occurred in 1936, when he went to cover the Spanish Civil War as a journalist but ended up joining the fight against Franco, a cause that aligned neatly with his existing pro-working class and anti-authoritarian emotional tendencies.
After a bullet in the throat took Orwell out of the war, his attention shifted to the grand-scale hypocrisies he’d detected in the Soviet Union. It became “of the utmost importance to me that people in western Europe should see the Soviet regime for what it really was,” he writes in the preface to the Ukrainian edition of the allegorical satire Animal Farm. “His concerns with the Soviet Union were part of a broader concern on the nature of truth and the way truth is manipulated in politics,” Chapman explains. An important part of his larger project as a writer was to shed light on the widespread “tendency to distort reality according to their political convictions,” especially among the intellectual classes.
“This kind of thing is frightening to me,” Orwell writes in “Looking Back on the Spanish War,” “because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world”: a condition for the rise of ideology “not only forbids you to express — even to think — certain thoughts, but it dictates what you shall think, it creates an ideology for you, it tries to govern your emotional life as well as setting up a code of conduct.” Such is the reality he envisions in Nineteen Eighty-Four, a reaction to the totalitarianism he saw manifesting in the USSR, Germany, and Italy. “But he also thought it was spreading in more subtle forms back home, in England, through socially enforced, unofficial political orthodoxy.” No matter how supposedly enlightened the society we live in, there are things we’re formally or informally not allowed to acknowledge; Orwell reminds us to think about why.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
One of the many memorable details in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, placed prominently in a shot of George C. Scott in the war room, is a binder with a spine labeled “WORLD TARGETS IN MEGADEATHS.” A megadeath, writes Eric Schlosser in a New Yorker piece on the movie, “was a unit of measurement used in nuclear-war planning at the time. One megadeath equals a million fatalities.” The destructive capability of nuclear weapons having only increased since 1964, we might well wonder how many megadeaths would result from a nuclear strike on a major city today.
In collaboration with the Nobel Peace Prize, filmmaker Neil Halloran addresses that question in the video above, which visualizes a simulated nuclear explosion in a city of four million. “We’ll assume the bomb is detonated in the air to maximize the radius of impact, as was done in Japan in 1945. But here, we’ll use an 800-kiloton warhead, a relatively large bomb in today’s arsenals, and 100 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.” The immediate result would be a “fireball as hot as the sun” with a radius of 800 meters; all buildings within a two-kilometer radius would be destroyed, “and we’ll assume that virtually no one survives inside this area.”
Already in these calculations, the death toll has reached 120,000. “From as far as away as eleven kilometers, the radiant heat from the blast would be strong enough to cause third-degree burns on exposed skin.” Though most people would be indoors and thus sheltered from that at the time of the explosion, “the very structures that offered this protection would then become a cause of injury, as debris would rip through buildings and rain down on city streets.” This would, over the weeks after the attack, ultimately cause another 500,000 casualties — another half a megadeath — with another 100,000 at longer range still to occur.
These are sobering figures, to be sure, but as Halloran reminds us, the Cold War is over; unlike in Dr. Strangelove’s day, families no longer build fallout shelters, and schoolchildren no longer do nuclear-bomb drills. Nevertheless, even though nations aren’t as on edge about total annihilation as they were in the mid-twentieth-century, the technologies that potentially cause such annihilation are more advanced than ever, and indeed, “nuclear weapons remain one of the great threats to humanity.” Here in the twenty-twenties, “countries big and small face the prospect of new arms races,” a much more complicated geopolitical situation than the long standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union — and, perhaps, one beyond the reach of even Kubrickianly grim satire.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
More than thirty years after the formal dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, few around the world have a clear understanding of how life actually worked there. That holds less for the larger political and economic questions than it does for the routine mechanics of day-to-day existence. These had a way of being even more complex in the regions where the USSR came up against the rest of the world. Take the German capital of Berlin, which, as everyone knows, was formerly divided into East and West along with the country itself — but which, as not everyone knows, but as clarified in a nineteen-eighties informational video previously featured here on Open Culture, was entirely surrounded by East Germany.
You can learn much else about life on the edges of the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic from the new neo video above, “How the Berlin Wall Worked.” The first thing to clarify is that, even after the division of Germany, the Berlin Wall wasn’t always there; for a time the narrator explains, with “socialism and capitalism, two different nations, and even two different currencies, were separated only by streets.”
Many “lived in one part of the city but worked in the other: East Berliners took jobs in the West in order to benefit from the stronger currency, while West Berliners got their haircuts in the East at prices that were much cheaper to them.” Kurfürstendamm’s shop windows displayed the purchasable glories of capitalism; just a few streets away, Stalinallee swelled with proudly socialist architecture.
But on August 13th, 1961, “Berlin woke up to a divided city.” The GDR immediately began on a wall between East and West “made out of concrete and topped off with barbed wire,” though it couldn’t command the resources to build its whole length quite so solidly right away. Over time, however, the wall was “consistently upgraded with more and more increasing security features.” By 1975, it had become the structure we remember, consisting of not just one but two concrete walls, and between them a barbed-wire signal fence, tank traps, mats of steel needles known as “Stalin’s grass,” and watchtowers manned by armed guards. “Virtually impossible to cross” in its day, the formidable Berlin Wall now exists primarily as a cultural phenomenon: a memory, a series of tourist sites, a sometimes-misused cultural reference. Living in South Korea, I can’t help but ask myself if the same will ever be said of the DMZ.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
From the guy who brought you 51 Propaganda Techniques Explained in 11 Minutes comes this: Every Political Ideology Explained in 8 Minutes. You get the usual suspects–conservatism, liberalism, socialism, communism and fascism. And then some less frequently encountered ideologies: transhumanism, syndicalism, and communitarianism. By the end, he covers 23 different belief systems that organize our political and economic lives. The video is brief, necessarily superficial. But it’s a place to start. To take a deeper dive, you can explore Andrew Heywood’s book, Political Ideologies: An Introduction.
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