Kentucky Police Training Quoted Hitler and Urged ‘Ruthless’ Violence

On Nov 1, 2020, at 7:43 AM, John Reimann <1999wildcat@...> wrote:



I've been realizing what bothers me the most about the different socialist groups posting articles about why we shouldn't vote for Biden: It's not that this could swing the election to Trump. After all, our influence is so low it's nonexistent for all practical purposes. Why I think it's so mistaken is that it is entirely the wrong focus. In the past the danger - no, the near-certainty - that any movement would get sucked into the Democratic Party was the most important issue. But that's not true today. Today, the most important issue is how to stop Trump. (In my opinion, the best way is to build an independent movement of the working class, in part by fighting inside the unions to make them lead a working class mobilizations.) These anti-lesser evilism articles have entirely the wrong focus. It's tone deaf, completely unaware of what is really happening. It's meant to prove one's "left" credentials to others in that little left ghetto, not to try to actually build a movement. The focus should be on how to build a resistance to Trump, not on whether or not to vote for Biden. And, no, voting for Biden in and of itself does not preclude building that resistance; relying on him does, but that's a different thing.

--

“Science and socialism go hand-in-hand.” Felicity Dowling
Check out:https:http://oaklandsocialist.com also on Facebook

From: H-Net Staff via H-REVIEW <h-review@...>
Date: November 1, 2020 at 11:27:53 AM EST
To: h-review@...
Cc: H-Net Staff <revhelp@...>
Subject: H-Net Review [H-Buddhism]:  Bai on Struve, 'The Dreaming Mind and the End of the Ming World'
Reply-To: h-review@...

Lynn A. Struve.  The Dreaming Mind and the End of the Ming World.  
Honolulu  University of Hawaii Press, 2019.  Illustrations. 439 pp.  
$72.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8248-7525-1.

Reviewed by Yuzhou Bai (Princeton University)
Published on H-Buddhism (November, 2020)
Commissioned by Jessica Zu

Lynn A. Struve boldly places dreams at the center of historical
inquiry in _The Dreaming Mind and the End of the Ming World_. Basing
the book on dream-related writings produced by Chinese literati
between 1550 and 1700, Struve intricately narrates the rise of dream
sensibility that paralleled the collapse of the Ming dynasty
(1368-1644) and its aftermath. The thesis can be summarized as
follows: this era reflects a "dream arc" in Chinese history, a time
when individual struggles in official careers, personal lives, moral
cultivation, and the pursuit of salvation were collectively expressed
through various forms of oneiric writing--the psychological and
narratological practice that achieved unprecedented levels of
popularity among the Ming literati.

Methodologically, this book makes a remarkable contribution to the
history of mentalities in the context of early modern China. Struve
rejects approaches that sideline dreams in historiography. Historians
have long noticed that educated elites across various cultures and
periods like to write about their dreams, yet most historians tend to
discard dream reports as unreliable historical data or dismiss them
as fantasy or superstition. In this book, Struve shows that dream
reports merit serious scholarly attention. Based on psychoanalytical
readings of the Ming literati writings, she probes into different
types of anxieties and frustrations experienced by the writers as
they coped with crises in their lives. Moreover, by highlighting the
unique fashion in which the Ming literati tirelessly chronicled and
intensely reflected on what they dreamed about day to day, Struve
connects the emotional lives of these individuals to the central
themes that define the sociopolitical and intellectual history of
their era.

The four chapters of this book can be thematically divided into two
halves. The first half explains the buildup of the Chinese "dream
arc" in 1550-1700, while the second half offers closeups of the
individuals living in this "dream arc." Chapter 2 serves as the
cornerstone of the book and, thus, the focus of the current review.
In this chapter, Struve teases out five factors (creedal, literary,
visual, political, and emotional) that establish the "dream arc" as a
distinctive period in Chinese history.

The rise of the Chinese "dream arc" is intimately tied to the growing
attention paid to subjectivity in the Ming intellectual landscape.
Intellectuals of this period are notable for their efforts to
harmonize the "three teachings" (Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism)
into one in their pursuits of selfhood and freedom. The
inward-looking and inter-creedal trends, as Struve demonstrates,
encouraged Ming intellectuals to turn to personal dreams for
self-cultivation. Within the Neo-Confucian tradition, the followers
of Wang Yangming (1472-1529) elevated the status of dreaming as an
integral part of one's subjectivity. During the same period, Daoist
and Buddhist masters were also paying significant attention to
dreaming for its ability to illuminate religious truths and point to
cues for salvation. While these thinkers were engaged in dream-rich
intellectual discourse, literary works packed with dream references
were being consumed by the Chinese intelligentsia. In fact, zealous
digging into the human psychology behind dream episodes characterized
the literature of this era across the genres of autobiography,
_xiaopin_ (short) prose, and fiction. By the same token, Ming
literati entertained themselves with images, illustrations, and
paintings that playfully subverted the reality-dream hierarchy. For
instance, Struve's interpretation of the two illustrations of a
dreaming scene from _Story of the West Wing _(figures 8 and 9; figure
9 is also the cover art of this book) highlights how the
mid-seventeenth-century illustrator pictured the dreaming mind as
more real than the waking mind. In sum, Chinese elites in 1550-1700
collectively romanticized subjective experiences. As a result, they
embraced dreaming as a critical aspect of their lived realities.

However, the political and emotional lives of the Chinese literati,
discussed from the second half of chapter 2 on, also fundamentally
shaped the "dream arc." In the mid-sixteenth century, the Ming
literati began to develop a growing sense of frustration with their
government, which proved incapable of curbing partisanship,
suppressing rebellions, and warding off military intrusions. For
some, dream writing offered a way to engage in protests against the
corrupted organs of the Ming court; for others, it became a means of
mental escape. Once it became apparent to some literati that the Ming
would eventually fall, they leveraged dream writing to alleviate
anxiety and stress. In chapters 3 and 4, Struve taxonomizes themes
that appeared repeatedly in the dreams of the Ming literati during
and after the dynastic transition. Particularly insightful is her
analysis in chapter 4 on how dream writing fulfilled various needs of
the Ming "remnant subjects" (_yimin_) following the fall of Beijing
in 1644. Through writing about dreams, the literati who were deeply
disoriented by the dynastic change embarked on a variety of personal
and spiritual journeys of memory making, social withdrawal, pursuit
of a sense of righteousness, and confessional reflection on the self
and the world. Interestingly, as hope for a Ming revival diminished
toward the end of the seventeenth century, dream writing also faded
away. However, as Struve mentions in the epilogue, the emotional
character of dreams was transformed into an element commonly
associated with femininity. The eighteenth-century magnus opus _Dream
of the Red Chamber _is a prime example of the cultural heritage of
the "dream arc."

Carrying a substantial amount of carefully translated primary
materials, including diaries, poems, and fictional writings, this
book can be a good sourcebook for upper-level undergraduate and
graduate courses on the cultural and intellectual history of Ming
China, as well as general survey courses on early modern world
history. For scholars and graduate students studying Chinese
religions, this book will inspire new scholarship in at least three
ways. First, Struve identifies two dreaming modalities ("partite" and
"phasic") in Chinese religions. Simply put, the "partite" model views
the dream as a quasi-religious experience that temporarily draws
human consciousness from its mundane existence into a supernatural
sphere; the "phasic" model, on the other hand, considers the human
dream state as a continuation of the waking state (see figure 1).
While Struve revisits the two dreaming modalities only sporadically
after chapter 1, this framework provides a foundation for future
investigation on dream theories within both Chinese and comparative
contexts.

Second, for the study of Buddhism in the Ming dynasty, this book
offers a reexamination of the "late Ming Buddhist revival" through
several cases. On the political stage, Buddhism competed with Daoism
by assuming a legitimating role, which can be seen in the Buddhist
dreams reported by two powerful Ming empresses. In the broader
cultural context, the influence of eminent Buddhist monks and their
more positive views on dreams can be felt in a wide array of scholars
and their texts. This includes the influential commentary on the
"Inner Chapters" of _Zhuangzi _by Hanshan Deqing (1546-1623), as well
as the iconic variety plays (_zaju_) by Tang Xianzu (1550-1616), who
was greatly inspired by Zibo Zhenke (1543-1603) to reinvent the
classical Tang dynasty dream tales. These case studies will inspire
new research on the sociopolitical and cultural history of late
imperial Chinese Buddhism.

Third, as the perceptions of body, illness, and healing in Chinese
religions attract more and more attention from contemporary scholars,
Struve's discussion of dream diagnosis in the context of traditional
Chinese medicine, albeit brief, can significantly contribute to the
ongoing effort to bring the studies of Chinese religions and history
of medicine together.

Citation: Yuzhou Bai. Review of Struve, Lynn A., _The Dreaming Mind
and the End of the Ming World_. H-Buddhism, H-Net Reviews. November,
2020.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55278

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
License.

From: H-Net Staff via H-REVIEW <h-review@...>
Date: November 1, 2020 at 8:23:16 AM EST
To: h-review@...
Cc: H-Net Staff <revhelp@...>
Subject: H-Net Review [H-Africa]:  Maddox on Dlamini, 'Safari Nation: A Social History of the Kruger National Park'
Reply-To: h-review@...

Jacob S. T. Dlamini.  Safari Nation: A Social History of the Kruger
National Park.  New African Histories Series. Athens  Ohio University
Press, 2020.  Illustrations. 350 pp.  $36.95 (paper), ISBN
978-0-8214-2409-4; $80.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8214-2408-7.

Reviewed by Gregory H. Maddox (Texas Southern University)
Published on H-Africa (November, 2020)
Commissioned by David D. Hurlbut

Environmental History as Intellectual History

Jacob S. T. Dlamini bills his book as a "social history" of the
Kruger National Park in South Africa. In doing so, he shortchanges
the breadth of the work. He examines the place of Kruger National
Park and wildlife conservation in black South African thought. He
reviews the history of black communities in and around the park. He
includes an overview of black environmental thought both in South
Africa and in other parts of the continent. He explores the history
of black travel and leisure in twentieth-century South Africa. He
reviews the literature on hunting and poaching in and around the
park. The work is not a straightforward environmental history of the
park. Rather it complements the work of Jane Carruthers's _Kruger
National Park: A Social and Political History_ (1995) and others by
exploring the ways that blacks in South Africa from all the
communities under that designation negotiated their relationships in,
around, and outside the park under white rule.

Dlamini's first target is the notion that Kruger was exclusively a
white playground. He builds on Carruthers's work to show that African
communities continued to live in Kruger long after it became a
reserved area and of course provided the labor necessary to create
the space. Residents, labor migrants, hunters, and workers traversed
the park. The park was never just a white space. Whites in South
Africa sought to define the park as part of a distinctive part of
white nationalism and "modern" blacks sought to claim their place in
the park, and hence their right to be part of the nation.

Dlamini divides the book into two sections labeled "Movements" and
"Homelands." In the first, he addresses both the labor the park got
from residents within and just outside the park and the movement of
black migrants through the park. Migrant routes to the mining region
of South Africa helped pioneer the roads that would become the
infrastructure of tourism in the park. WNLA (Wenela) ran regular
migrant convoys from Portuguese East Africa to the Witwatersrand and
the park itself eventually used "clandestine" migrants as unpaid
labor with migrants working to pay off the fee charged for park entry
to both visitors and migrants under Wenela's authority.

A thread on black and white mobility through the park serves as the
bridge between the two sections. Dlamini weaves discussions of
African environmental thought from across the continent with those of
black South African leisure studies and even gun ownership into his
analysis of the place of the park in South African history. He
emphasizes that people in South Africa's black communities throughout
the twentieth century sought to claim the right to use the park.
Asians and Coloureds as well as African leaders and intellectuals,
such as Sol Plaatje, Herbert Dhlomo, and John Dube, sought engagement
with and travel to the park. Dube, for example, eventually claimed
the right to own and use hunting firearms as an "exempted native" in
South Africa (p. 99). This he connects to the literature on African
hunting and poaching both before and after the transition to majority
rule.

Dlamini also examines the historiography and literature on African
land claims within and outside the park. He links the politics of
African homelands under apartheid with conservation efforts and with
ongoing struggles over land claims in South Africa. He uses the
concept of insurgent citizenship to connect these struggles with the
park as a process in neoliberal South Africa.

He begins the book with a review of African environmental thought
that connects both African environmental history with its attempt to
deconstruct conservationists' narratives and circles back to Nelson
Mandela's use of "ecological citizenship" to create a new, non-racial
definition of South African identity. Dlamini contends that Mandela
"used nature to assert a common South  
Africanness." He plays on the irony of Mandela's use of the imported
jacaranda trees as part of his assertion of such a citizenship,
noting that "the jacaranda tree did not need to be indigenous to
serve as one of the symbols of a new South Africa" (p. 241).  

Dlamini's themes read more like a work of intellectual rather than
social history, illuminating the importance of ideas in the
construction of African nationalism in South Africa. This review
barely hints at the complexity of the book. He has constructed a
powerful and thought-provoking work.

Citation: Gregory H. Maddox. Review of Dlamini, Jacob S. T., _Safari
Nation: A Social History of the Kruger National Park_. H-Africa,
H-Net Reviews. November, 2020.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55403

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
License.

On 11/1/20 6:14 AM, Vladimiro Giacche' wrote:

No doubt that Biden will be more supportive than Trump for jihadists, as Obama and Hillary were.

So speaks our resident fan of sarin gas, starvation sieges, barrel bombing of tenement buildings, and a mafia state whose cronies hid their money in banks tied to Mosseck-Fonseca.

_._,_._,