Friday 29th of March 2024

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 Culture wars are not as new a phenomena as our politicians, academics and commentariat would have us believe – there have always been points in history where it appeared that two tribes were going to war.

 

 

Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s number one hit about the cold war, ‘Two Tribes’, was the fourth biggest-selling single in 1984, a year that was filled with political agitation and class war. My own family was involved in the bitter, seismic 1984 to 1985 miners strike. Although the strike was initially about jobs and the economics of our communities, culturally, the working class were demonised by Margaret Thatcher’s right-wing government as the enemy within – bad for Britain, backwards-looking and holding the country back with our outdated loyalties to family and community.

 

I believe Thatcher’s legacy of that annihilation of the working class is still as strong as it was then, if not more so. Gil Scot Heron, an American poet, performer and songwriter, in 1982 released a spoken-word piece entitled ‘B-Movie’, about America’s manipulation of its population through the Hollywood narrative of good vs evil, where a man (almost always a white one, of course) rides in on an equally-white horse to save the day. The irony was that a B-movie cowboy actor, Ronald Reagan, had ridden in to ‘save’ America in the 1980 presidential election. 

The infantile and childlike narratives of ‘black vs white’, ‘good vs evil’, ‘wrong vs right’ do nothing but keep the same sort of politicians in control so that power stays in the hands of the few forever. These childlike politics are everywhere in the 2020s and are causing irreparable damage to our society, to democracy, and to our sense of ourselves.    

Over the last ten years, I have seen these dangerous narratives grow and become ever more divisive and dangerous. Brexit, the contentious 2016 referendum in the UK on our European Union membership, began as mostly a niche debate within the British Conservative Party; very few of the overall population had thought too much about it. Sporadic, splenetic headlines from the Daily Mail and Express about bendy bananas sometimes annoyed a particular part of the population, but none of this signalled the bitter division that came by the time the UK voted to leave. 

During the past five years, there has been an intense and irrational pulling apart of our nation, not just through political debate about Europe, but in a bitter culture war framed as ‘good vs evil’ and ‘the clever vs the stupid’ – who is right, who is wrong, who is unintelligent and unable to follow a simple argument. Unfortunately, but as always, it has been towards the working class that most of this hate has been directed – I have seen academics within universities openly discuss ‘intelligent citizenship’ and whether the working class is clever enough to be able to vote and can be entrusted with making important political decisions. 

The same year, on the other side of the Atlantic, these debates of ‘good vs evil’ erupted with the election of Donald Trump. Citizens were not only criticised for their choice of voting for Trump, but for the very essence of who they were – they were labelled backward, stupid and unable to grasp modern society. All of the same things the miners and the wider British working class were accused of in the 1980s by established politicians and their colleagues and friends, the captains of industry – ordinary men and women, with their old fashioned, out-of-date communities, were supposedly everything that was wrong with the country, and it could not move into the future with them in tow. 

In the last year, I have seen these same divisive and childlike political narratives emerge over Covid – another binary narrative of good vs evil. Those who are vaccinated, wear masks, and believe in lockdowns without question, are on the right side – while those who are more suspicious, less trustful of government, anti-vax, or critical about lockdowns, have been lumped together under the heading of ‘bad’ and, once again, called stupid, irrational, and unable to know what’s best for them. My argument here is not the merit of any single person’s beliefs or thought processes, but to highlight the consequences of these deep divisions, which are being nurtured by those who always benefit from a divided system. 

In the UK, our government is embroiled in sleaze and accused of breaking lockdown rules last year by holding a Christmas party on Downing Street while the rest of us miserably spent Christmas without our loved ones. In Austria, a country imposing mandatory and forced vaccination programmes, a gala was held last week, with live music, dancing and partying. The chancellor, the president, the mainstream party leaders and media bosses were all there, in black tie and sequined evening dresses. It was the only legal party in the country. The only missing politicians from the shindig were the far-right Freedom Party.  

Small wonder that our faith in our leaders is plunging. In 1944, just one in three Britons (35 percent) saw politicians as ‘out for themselves’; by 2014, that had grown to 48 percent and, in polling released this week, 63 percent said they share this view. 

This declining trust fuels disengagement from the political system, encourages populism and creates further polarisation that blights everyday life. The culture wars, the lazy and childish and infantile ‘us vs them’, ‘good vs evil’ narratives will cause instability in societies where wealth inequality is high. Growing public frustration fuels populist anger, and far-right politics will again find a space to speak about class, elitism, and unearned privileges. Subjects that were once traditionally in the hands of the left are being given as gifts to the right by the middle class in an act of political snobbery. Only once these culture wars have worn themselves out, will we again have to address the one war worth fighting: the class war.

 

By Dr Lisa McKenzie — a working-class academic. She grew up in a coal-mining town in Nottinghamshire and became politicized through the 1984 miners’ strike with her family. At 31, she went to the University of Nottingham and did an undergraduate degree in sociology. Dr McKenzie is the author of ‘Getting By: Estates, Class and Culture in Austerity Britain.’ She’s a political activist, writer and thinker. Follow her on Twitter @redrumlisa.

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/542348-culture-wars-trusted-vote/

 

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THE APOCRYPHAL TWAIN: “IF VOTING MADE ANY DIFFERENCE, THEY WOULDN’T LET US DO IT.”

 

Posted on February 27, 2020 by Matt Seybold


There is perhaps no greater testament to Twain’s lasting reputation than the habitual misattribution of miscellaneous wit and wisdom to his name. The circulation of such apocryphal aphorisms has increased with the popularization of digital media. The most common question addressed to the Center for Mark Twain Studies is some variety of “Did he really say that?” Whenever possible, we track down the original source, as well as attempt to trace how their words came to be imagined in Twain’s mouth.

Mark Twain is a favorite source of political cynicism, and justifiably so. With alleged “irregularities” in recent Democratic primaries and renewed concern about potential foreign interference in the 2020 election cycle, the following apocryphal aphorism has again been making the rounds.

 

QuoteFancy offers nineteen variations of the above meme for users to post to their pages and accounts, all claiming Twain as the source.

The use of this quote surges during election season. Iterations of it were tweeted well over a hundred times in the week following the Iowa caucus, most often crediting Mark Twain. And while proper attribution predictably eludes the usual cast of partisan pundits, motivational speakers, and other social media influencers, it has also eluded sources one might expect to know better. The following tweet appeared on Election Day 2016:

 

Mark Twain said that if voting made a difference, they wouldn't let us do it. Cheerful, huh? Well, ignore it. IGNORE MARK TWAIN!

— Harper's Magazine (@Harpers) November 8, 2016

 

 

Twain was not cynical about elections because he believed they couldn’t make a difference, but because he believed his countrymen failed to appreciate the difference they could make. 

 

"In America we have a privilege other countries don't have.When a thing gets unbearable people can get rid of if at the ballot box"
M TWAIN

— Wink Martindale (@WinkMartindale) November 3, 2014

 

 

Troublingly, versions of Twain’s most famous defense of enfranchisement have appeared only 22 times in the history of Twitter. His apocryphal degradation of voting often gets retweeted that many times in a single day. 

Several fact-checking services have already debunked the attribution to Twain, notably Snopes and the Australian Associated Press(with impeccable sourcing, by the way). So I will move quickly to the more difficult questions. Where did this aphorism actually come from? How did it get wrongly attributed to Twain? And why is the misattribution so pervasive?

The Twain attribution, as usual, appears to be a product of the social media era. While the aphorism itself circulated widely during the late 20th century, I found no instance of it being associated with Twain prior to this relatively innocuous tweet on Election Day 2008:

 

"If voting made any difference, they wouldn't let us do it." -Mark Twain

— dougweissman (@dougweissman) November 4, 2008

 

 

The misattribution resurfaced only two dozen times over the next eleven months, rarely retweeted, until an unlikely trio of accounts started recycling it daily in October of 2009: a self-described “radical right-wing super villain,” “a mild-mannered…crossword puzzler;” and a “tenor singer.”

Commitment to this type of repetitive barrage has proven a reliable way of amplifying misinformation on Twitter. It is one way accounts with relatively small followings can have outsized influence. The aphorism spread more widely in 2010, picked up by users with increasingly large followings, though no verified user took the bait until 2012:

 

“If voting made any difference they wouldn't let us do it.” ― Mark Twain

— Rachel Held Evans (@rachelheldevans) September 6, 2012

 

 

It has since become a staple on Twitter, recycled ceaselessly, and sometimes by accounts with several million followers.

 

If Voting Made Any Difference They Wouldn't Let Us Do It – Mark Twain |||

— Jaden (@jaden) December 29, 2015

 

 

So, if Twitter was the vehicle for misattributing the quote to Mark Twain, where did it actually originate? One presumed source, not quite as popular as Twain, is Emma Goldman. 

 

This is interesting. My anarchist hero Emma Goldman once said "If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal." https://t.co/eQHOdeWY6j

— Mona Eltahawy (@monaeltahawy) October 30, 2016

 

But it turns out the attribution to Goldman is just as specious. Like Twain, she died many decades before any version of this aphorism was attributed to her and it is not present in her many published writings and recorded speeches. That said, Goldman’s anarchist politics do seem to conform with later invocations of the quote.

 

 

Charles Umney, in his Class Matters (2018), calls it “an old anarchist slogan, frequently found as lamp-post graffiti in university cities.” Umney’s claim is corroborated by several sources. Journalists Harry Goldman, Matt Ridley, and Patrick Traub all reported seeing the slogan tagged on bridges, buildings, and other graffiti sites in Boston, Indianapolis, New York, and Washington D.C. from 1988 and 1992.

The slogan seems likely to have originated in 1960s activism. Two stories in the Reno Gazette-Journal, separated by a decade, report that it was a “typical motto” of the broadcaster and gonzo journalist, Travus T. Hipp. The revised edition of And I Quote (2003) attributes it to Bob Avakian. And in a 2008 interview with The Nation, Father Daniel Berrigan gives the sources as his brother, Father Phillip Berrigan.

 

Hipp (born Chandler Laughlin III) and Avakian belonged to the same generation of Berkeley radicals, active in socialist, anti-war, and Civil Rights protests throughout the ’60s and ’70s. Hipp continued to appear on California’s KPIG station, critiquing mainstream media and politics, until his death in 2012. In 1979 Avakian became Chairman of the US Revolutionary Communist Party, and so he remains.

 

Certainly, Avakian’s published work, like Democracy: Can’t We Do Better Than That? (1984), confirms his distaste for electoral politics. But I have not be able to find either Hipp or Avakian using the disputed aphorism in their accessible writings. While there are large repositories of their work – for instance, Hipp’s broadcast back to 2005 in Internet Archive – they also produced a lot of work that evades traditional historical records. Both were active pamphleteers and spontaneous speechmakers. It’s very possible that either or both were part of the popularization and circulation of the slogan in activist communities, further explaining its popularity as a tag decades later. 

Father Berrigan was also a prominent antiwar protester in the ’60s and ’70s, associated with multiple plots to disrupt the Vietnam draft. He was, most famously, arrested alongside his brother as part of the so-called Cantonville Nine, who succeeded in stealing and publicly destroying Maryland Draft Board records in 1968. After their case was argued before the Supreme Court, the Berrigan Brothers served three years in federal prison.

 

By the mid-’80s, the sentiment was ingrained enough in the British Labour Party, than Ken Livingstone gave the book associated with his first campaign for Parliament the ironic title, If Voting Made A Difference, They’d Abolish It (1987). 

These attributions, though conflicting and inconclusive, do make a compelling connection between the aphorism and socialist sloganeering operations of the mid 20th century. Within these activist communities, messaging was often collaborative, decentralized, and privileged anonymity. It would not be surprising if a motto coined in Berkeley in the 1960s remained unverifiable.

There has clearly been a resurgence in usage over the last decade, during the same period that the attribution to Twain has become commonplace. This is yet another example of how Twain somehow remains a desirable object of political ventriloquism. This aphorism and its misattribution is as likely to be appropriated by individuals and institutions espousing libertarianism or fascism as by those supporting anarchism or communism. Yet somehow these diverse radicalisms all want to associate their politics with Mark Twain. Why?

 

Read more:

https://marktwainstudies.com/the-apocryphal-twain-if-voting-made-any-difference-they-wouldnt-let-us-do-it/

 

Gus: may be it was Samuel Langhorne Clemens who said “IF VOTING MADE ANY DIFFERENCE, THEY WOULDN’T LET US DO IT.” Just joking... 

 

But hell, don't we need to get rid of the ScoMo government in Australia, NOW!!!!!???! And only VOTING ScoMo out can do this... 

 

 

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