Weird to think that "Satan" is being replaced by Hitler. That is (again) some odd modern Christian socio-philosophical observation. Satan is part of a fictional narrative that is religion. Hitler is for Westerners (and my fellow Jews) for sure for those who aren't socio/psycho/politico insane the embodiment of human evil. Pol Pot might be a runner-up and there is a lot of competition. No single ruler has so perfectly organized and tried to carry out the extinction of an entire racial/religious other group.
So, for Christians, is he NOT the embodiment of Satan? Just asking for a friend...
I see modern society as too fractured to really have any universal figure of condemnation. Even Hitler and the Nazis will lose their power, especially as the global Left increasingly makes Palestine the central symbol of their movement. Leftists know that sympathy for Zionism is in large part due to the Holocaust, so they don’t want to bring Hitler up too much anymore. Younger Democrats and others on the global left are almost entirely anti-Zionist.
Meanwhile, you have some people on the Right like Darryl Cooper (Martyr Made) saying that Hitler wasn’t really the bad guy in World War II. So I don’t think Hitler can play the role of Satan for long.
Yeah, I wanted to say, the "Hitler as boogeyman" thing is breaking down on the right, in a way that I think is ahistorical and not good, even if the Hitler-as-Satan narrative has gone too far at times.
On the one hand, Hitler was not Satan. So I've found myself pushing back against friends that present him as Satan. For example, one friend -- who is a Gen X churchgoer and politically a centrist -- has trouble with the idea of Sola Fide because he doesn't believe there's any way Hitler could have been saved. This is a problem.
Yet let's not forget Hitler actually WAS the villain of WW2 and an enemy of the church and a pathological liar of the highest degree. Stalin was also very bad. Yet Hitler was worse than Stalin in at least some respects and worse than any old lousy democratic politician in basically all respects.
But meanwhile, besides the actual self-identified Nazis/fascists/neo-pagans out there online (whom I presume are mostly unhappy teenagers and young men without families), there seem to be a lot of less-radical men on the right, including the Christian right, that may even have families yet nonetheless seem to have adopted a revisionist "Churchill was the real villain" attitude towards WW2. Not good, and just plain factually incorrect.
I stumbled upon this post last week and think it's very unfortunate that this sort of exercise is even necessary:
I see a lot of tension coming from the fact that a lot of these Christian right guys view Christianity as good because it represents historical Western civilization and tradition, but aren’t too fond of Christ’s more egalitarian and pacifist teachings. I remember reading an article about how some conservative Christians were calling their own pastors “woke” for preaching about the Sermon on the Mount.
Also, even as people continue to argue about WWII, the entire war will slowly decline in relevance, especially as there will eventually be no one alive from that era.
>Also, even as people continue to argue about WWII, the entire war will slowly decline in relevance, especially as there will eventually be no one alive from that era.
This is true. Firsthand accounts are mostly gone, but many of us grew up hearing lots of firsthand accounts from WW2 vets, which still carry a certain visceral impact above and beyond reading a book. My kids won't ever know that.
I would like to hear any demographical opinion research that backs up some of these remarks. Younger Democrats and the "global left" are not so much "anti-Zionist" as pro-Oslo Accords. Yes, there are benighted/misled groups and individuals, but it is an extreme minority that actually wants Israel as a state dissolved. Those who know the history as well and intimately as I do and have lived in Israel and been going there since the 70s know the trajectory: There was to be a settlement giving Palestinians their own state, the Oslo Accords. Netanyahu was against giving ANYTHING to Palestinians and openly agitated for and achieved the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin because he was the signatory to the settlement.
There were other players and phenomena that participated, most of Ariel Sharon and his favorite demographer Arnon Soffer. Look all these up and you will have a clear picture of how things got to where they are now.
This doesn't sound right at all, at least among the activist class. From what I can see, they're mostly advocating for a one-state solution with an Arab right of return (which is to say, the effective dissolution of Israel as a state). Basically everyone who is calling Israel a "settler-colonialist state" is suggesting this.
Of course, not everyone on the left is an activist, but I think it's wrong to underestimate the appeal of activists among people who are disengaged from the topic. A lot of people on the left who are not themselves activists because they're too old or apathetic nonetheless sympathize with activists for their coolness and conviction.
The Oslo Accords -- which is to say, a two-state solution, is a center-left position. Here's Yglesias defending the two-state position while recognizing that it's "cringe": an uncool old man idea.
As much as "slowboring..." has a lot correct and is a good thoughtful rumination on the problem(s), it fails in the final paragraph. "Posturing radicalism" is just a response to the composition of the Israeli government. Key members: Netanyahu, Smotrich, Ben-Gvir, et al. And the rest basically don't matter in terms of Netanyahu's policies. Netanyahu will be tried and jailed almost certainly if he exits the government. This is completely improbable...except feet first. The annexations and the settlements have at this point all but annihilated the possibility of any reasonable "partition". And if you take into account what took place and is taking place in Gaza, well, forget about it. I have Christian and Muslim friends in the West Bank. I am just amazed that they hold on after now decades of having to endure their house and property being perpetually ransacked and destroyed by IDF "raids".
With the (self) enfranchisement now of the Lubavitchers and other extreme Orthodox groups joining in, this will only make any settlement impossible.
Short of a miracle, Israel is in many ways a doomed state. There will never be a real settlement. The population of Israel has exploded and the fastest growing demographic is the right wing orthodox. Short of USA, EU, Russia and China joining together to force a fair/reasonable settlement, things are only going to be worse for Palestinians. Watch what happens next with Gaza as a hint of what is coming for any Palestinians.
I'm trying to think -- in the history of media, has there EVER been a successful project like this? Create a work that subverts and perverts the original and extends a middle finger to all of its fans, yet is still a success?
It at least seems like it's almost always a bad bet. After all, if you want to tell an original story, why not just tell an original story? What's the point of using a familiar brand if its only effect will be to antagonize its existing fans? It's one thing to never produce anything besides reboots, prequels, and sequels of stories that you love -- but of stories that you hate? I get why unhappy people writing fanfic as a hobby late at night might choose to write hate-adaptations, but why does Hollywood keep giving them a budget?
The closest I can think of to a subversive project succeeding is "Wicked" (the play, which I think the movie adapts straightforwardly). But there are several important respects in which it is different from the various other subversion/perversion adaptations, which is probably why it succeeds.
Yeah, I had that thought as well. There's a lot we could say about that one, which I saw in theaters and rather enjoyed. I didn't include it alongside Wicked because, while not a total bomb, it was still considered a commercial failure. But I'll acknowledge it DOES have a lasting appeal that something like Rings of Power will never have. It was, on some level, an *artistic* success.
One funny thing about it, germane to this point, is they actually started out with an original screenplay! But the suits wouldn't buy it, which is why they started shopping it again with the "Starship Troopers" name and ended up with something that was a mix between their original screenplay and that novel.
On one hand, it seems dumb that the suits cared about the Starship Troopers brand per se, which really wasn't worth that much. But on the other hand, by tempering the original vision, they probably ended up with something better than they would have otherwise: a film that was a subtle enough satire that it could still be enjoyed as a straightforward military adventure. I think a lot of what made the old Hollywood work was this sort of interplay, which really limited the degree to which creators' contempt for their audience shone through in the final work.
Been following your substack for a long time, thanks, and completely agree on the secular Satan!
The Enlightenment and modern physics start to call the supernatural into doubt around 1700. Preachers responded by shifting to grand *secular* harms like slavery.
I did a big reading project on this, where I looked at what Harvard Divinity Schools grads were doing year by year (1810, 1811, etc). Best I can tell, the transition becomes really noticeable in Unitarianish authors around 1810 to 1860.
The upshot is God is dead, but Satan continues incognito as Hitler and slavery. Unfortunately, this creates a claustrophobically angry pseudo-religion, missing joy, peace, forgiveness, awe.
If you actually read the letter where Sean Rowe, head of the Episcopal church, gives his reasoning for the decision, it's not great.
He doesn't dispute the idea that the Afrikaners might deserve refugee status, which is something that is debatable, but simply says that he's upset with how the administration is handling other groups and that, somehow, Afrikaners leaving South Africa is so detrimental to the mission of racial reconciliation there that it is a moral imperative for the church to end its cooperation with the feds so as not to be forced into helping with their resettlement.
Imagine, for a moment, someone saying that about the ethnic minorities of Myanmar.
If he'd actually said "we think the Trump administration is politicizing the refugee program based on the fact that it's rejecting 'left-coded' refugees and taking in 'right-coded' ones whose situations are far less dire, and we refuse to be part of that," I would at least respect his reasoning, and would sympathize with his decision even though I disagree with it. As matters stand, however, the letter reeks of identity politics as much as the Trump administration's policies do.
"Hitler has replaced Satan....etc"
Weird to think that "Satan" is being replaced by Hitler. That is (again) some odd modern Christian socio-philosophical observation. Satan is part of a fictional narrative that is religion. Hitler is for Westerners (and my fellow Jews) for sure for those who aren't socio/psycho/politico insane the embodiment of human evil. Pol Pot might be a runner-up and there is a lot of competition. No single ruler has so perfectly organized and tried to carry out the extinction of an entire racial/religious other group.
So, for Christians, is he NOT the embodiment of Satan? Just asking for a friend...
I see modern society as too fractured to really have any universal figure of condemnation. Even Hitler and the Nazis will lose their power, especially as the global Left increasingly makes Palestine the central symbol of their movement. Leftists know that sympathy for Zionism is in large part due to the Holocaust, so they don’t want to bring Hitler up too much anymore. Younger Democrats and others on the global left are almost entirely anti-Zionist.
Meanwhile, you have some people on the Right like Darryl Cooper (Martyr Made) saying that Hitler wasn’t really the bad guy in World War II. So I don’t think Hitler can play the role of Satan for long.
Yeah, I wanted to say, the "Hitler as boogeyman" thing is breaking down on the right, in a way that I think is ahistorical and not good, even if the Hitler-as-Satan narrative has gone too far at times.
On the one hand, Hitler was not Satan. So I've found myself pushing back against friends that present him as Satan. For example, one friend -- who is a Gen X churchgoer and politically a centrist -- has trouble with the idea of Sola Fide because he doesn't believe there's any way Hitler could have been saved. This is a problem.
Yet let's not forget Hitler actually WAS the villain of WW2 and an enemy of the church and a pathological liar of the highest degree. Stalin was also very bad. Yet Hitler was worse than Stalin in at least some respects and worse than any old lousy democratic politician in basically all respects.
But meanwhile, besides the actual self-identified Nazis/fascists/neo-pagans out there online (whom I presume are mostly unhappy teenagers and young men without families), there seem to be a lot of less-radical men on the right, including the Christian right, that may even have families yet nonetheless seem to have adopted a revisionist "Churchill was the real villain" attitude towards WW2. Not good, and just plain factually incorrect.
I stumbled upon this post last week and think it's very unfortunate that this sort of exercise is even necessary:
https://notourguy.substack.com/p/hitler-hated-christ-superthread
I see a lot of tension coming from the fact that a lot of these Christian right guys view Christianity as good because it represents historical Western civilization and tradition, but aren’t too fond of Christ’s more egalitarian and pacifist teachings. I remember reading an article about how some conservative Christians were calling their own pastors “woke” for preaching about the Sermon on the Mount.
Also, even as people continue to argue about WWII, the entire war will slowly decline in relevance, especially as there will eventually be no one alive from that era.
>Also, even as people continue to argue about WWII, the entire war will slowly decline in relevance, especially as there will eventually be no one alive from that era.
This is true. Firsthand accounts are mostly gone, but many of us grew up hearing lots of firsthand accounts from WW2 vets, which still carry a certain visceral impact above and beyond reading a book. My kids won't ever know that.
I would like to hear any demographical opinion research that backs up some of these remarks. Younger Democrats and the "global left" are not so much "anti-Zionist" as pro-Oslo Accords. Yes, there are benighted/misled groups and individuals, but it is an extreme minority that actually wants Israel as a state dissolved. Those who know the history as well and intimately as I do and have lived in Israel and been going there since the 70s know the trajectory: There was to be a settlement giving Palestinians their own state, the Oslo Accords. Netanyahu was against giving ANYTHING to Palestinians and openly agitated for and achieved the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin because he was the signatory to the settlement.
There were other players and phenomena that participated, most of Ariel Sharon and his favorite demographer Arnon Soffer. Look all these up and you will have a clear picture of how things got to where they are now.
This doesn't sound right at all, at least among the activist class. From what I can see, they're mostly advocating for a one-state solution with an Arab right of return (which is to say, the effective dissolution of Israel as a state). Basically everyone who is calling Israel a "settler-colonialist state" is suggesting this.
Of course, not everyone on the left is an activist, but I think it's wrong to underestimate the appeal of activists among people who are disengaged from the topic. A lot of people on the left who are not themselves activists because they're too old or apathetic nonetheless sympathize with activists for their coolness and conviction.
The Oslo Accords -- which is to say, a two-state solution, is a center-left position. Here's Yglesias defending the two-state position while recognizing that it's "cringe": an uncool old man idea.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-two-state-solution-is-still-best
As much as "slowboring..." has a lot correct and is a good thoughtful rumination on the problem(s), it fails in the final paragraph. "Posturing radicalism" is just a response to the composition of the Israeli government. Key members: Netanyahu, Smotrich, Ben-Gvir, et al. And the rest basically don't matter in terms of Netanyahu's policies. Netanyahu will be tried and jailed almost certainly if he exits the government. This is completely improbable...except feet first. The annexations and the settlements have at this point all but annihilated the possibility of any reasonable "partition". And if you take into account what took place and is taking place in Gaza, well, forget about it. I have Christian and Muslim friends in the West Bank. I am just amazed that they hold on after now decades of having to endure their house and property being perpetually ransacked and destroyed by IDF "raids".
With the (self) enfranchisement now of the Lubavitchers and other extreme Orthodox groups joining in, this will only make any settlement impossible.
Short of a miracle, Israel is in many ways a doomed state. There will never be a real settlement. The population of Israel has exploded and the fastest growing demographic is the right wing orthodox. Short of USA, EU, Russia and China joining together to force a fair/reasonable settlement, things are only going to be worse for Palestinians. Watch what happens next with Gaza as a hint of what is coming for any Palestinians.
On the Gerwig/Netflix Narnia thing:
I'm trying to think -- in the history of media, has there EVER been a successful project like this? Create a work that subverts and perverts the original and extends a middle finger to all of its fans, yet is still a success?
It at least seems like it's almost always a bad bet. After all, if you want to tell an original story, why not just tell an original story? What's the point of using a familiar brand if its only effect will be to antagonize its existing fans? It's one thing to never produce anything besides reboots, prequels, and sequels of stories that you love -- but of stories that you hate? I get why unhappy people writing fanfic as a hobby late at night might choose to write hate-adaptations, but why does Hollywood keep giving them a budget?
The closest I can think of to a subversive project succeeding is "Wicked" (the play, which I think the movie adapts straightforwardly). But there are several important respects in which it is different from the various other subversion/perversion adaptations, which is probably why it succeeds.
Arguably, Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers would also count.
Yeah, I had that thought as well. There's a lot we could say about that one, which I saw in theaters and rather enjoyed. I didn't include it alongside Wicked because, while not a total bomb, it was still considered a commercial failure. But I'll acknowledge it DOES have a lasting appeal that something like Rings of Power will never have. It was, on some level, an *artistic* success.
One funny thing about it, germane to this point, is they actually started out with an original screenplay! But the suits wouldn't buy it, which is why they started shopping it again with the "Starship Troopers" name and ended up with something that was a mix between their original screenplay and that novel.
On one hand, it seems dumb that the suits cared about the Starship Troopers brand per se, which really wasn't worth that much. But on the other hand, by tempering the original vision, they probably ended up with something better than they would have otherwise: a film that was a subtle enough satire that it could still be enjoyed as a straightforward military adventure. I think a lot of what made the old Hollywood work was this sort of interplay, which really limited the degree to which creators' contempt for their audience shone through in the final work.
Been following your substack for a long time, thanks, and completely agree on the secular Satan!
The Enlightenment and modern physics start to call the supernatural into doubt around 1700. Preachers responded by shifting to grand *secular* harms like slavery.
I did a big reading project on this, where I looked at what Harvard Divinity Schools grads were doing year by year (1810, 1811, etc). Best I can tell, the transition becomes really noticeable in Unitarianish authors around 1810 to 1860.
The upshot is God is dead, but Satan continues incognito as Hitler and slavery. Unfortunately, this creates a claustrophobically angry pseudo-religion, missing joy, peace, forgiveness, awe.
For more on this if anyone is interested, see:
https://jurassiclocke.substack.com/p/mass-holiness-ocd-in-gaza-encampments https://jurassiclocke.substack.com/p/a-cognitive-model-of-modernity-part
If you actually read the letter where Sean Rowe, head of the Episcopal church, gives his reasoning for the decision, it's not great.
He doesn't dispute the idea that the Afrikaners might deserve refugee status, which is something that is debatable, but simply says that he's upset with how the administration is handling other groups and that, somehow, Afrikaners leaving South Africa is so detrimental to the mission of racial reconciliation there that it is a moral imperative for the church to end its cooperation with the feds so as not to be forced into helping with their resettlement.
Imagine, for a moment, someone saying that about the ethnic minorities of Myanmar.
If he'd actually said "we think the Trump administration is politicizing the refugee program based on the fact that it's rejecting 'left-coded' refugees and taking in 'right-coded' ones whose situations are far less dire, and we refuse to be part of that," I would at least respect his reasoning, and would sympathize with his decision even though I disagree with it. As matters stand, however, the letter reeks of identity politics as much as the Trump administration's policies do.