Moral Crusade Research Articles

The Virtualization of Elián González

The Virtualization of Elián González

Saints, Sinners, and Soldiers: Canada's Second World War (review)

Reviewed by: Saints, Sinners, and Soldiers: Canada’s Second World War P. Whitney Lackenbauer Saints, Sinners, and Soldiers: Canada’s Second World War. By Jeffrey A. Keshen. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004. ISBN 0-7748-0923-X. Photographs. Tables. Figures. Notes. Index. Pp. x, 389. Can. $45.00. If Canadian military historians still tend to depict the Second World War as "the good war," a selfless moral crusade against tyranny, Jeffrey Keshen's social history of the war years exposes the more sordid side of wartime life. The author charts an able course through the realities, perceptions, and exaggerations of the country at war. Using a national lens he is able to discern and contextualize broad social and cultural trends in a revealing and compelling fashion. "In many ways, the war was a social accelerator," Keshen explains, "quickly thrusting people into situations that boldly challenged their moral and social conventions" (p. 11). In these pages we see a country recoiling in the face of rapidly changing social values, and the range of topics is impressive: from voluntary services like the Red Cross and Air Raid Protection program, to economic strains and labour disputes, to rationing, a flourishing black market, and the selling of bodily pleasures. These challenges precipitated the increasing regulation of Canadian life and concomitant reforms to recreation, education, and justice systems. His important chapters on women and youth, with their rigorous attention to context and demographic realities, critically re-evaluate assumptions in the historiography and challenge misconceptions. His chapter on Canadians serving overseas, although probably the weakest, still reveals some interesting statistics on venereal disease and Canadians' proclivities for carnal pleasures. Veterans who returned to "civvie street" benefited from a comprehensive re-establishment program, carefully designed to ensure social stability. Many women, pushed back into the domestic sphere at war's end, shared concerns about traditional values and structures. Their wartime experiences, however, had "expanded horizons and ambitions" and "contributed to greater self-reliance and confidence and helped to build a legacy of broadened opportunities" (p. 145). [End Page 1281] More broadly, the author reveals fundamental changes in Canadian society and culture that had far-reaching repercussions. The title bears striking resemblance to Lieut.(S) William Pugsley's Saints, Devils, and Ordinary Seamen (1945)—suggesting that perhaps not all the literature is as monolithic in its depiction of the "good war" as the author suggests—but Keshen's book is a wonderful and refreshing contribution to our knowledge of war and society in Canada. It is that rare gem that is as rich in detail as it is broad in its historiographical implications. Impressive in its critical use of the available secondary literature, archival holdings, newspapers, and oral interviews, the book's assertions are generally supported with solid evidence, and particularly rich aggregate statistics. The ample endnotes hold a wealth of interesting and useful information, although a bibliography would still have been helpful. Keshen's clear, accessible style and vigorous prose, unencumbered by jargon, make this an important source for students, scholars, and an interested general readership. Saints, Sinners, and Soldiers bridges the artificial divide which all too often stifles meaningful dialogue between social and military historians, and deserves a wide audience. P. Whitney Lackenbauer St. Jerome’s University Waterloo, Ontario, Canada Copyright © 2004 Society for Military History

Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History. By James A. Morone. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. xiv, 575 pp. Cloth, $35.00, ISBN 0-300-09484-1.)

Liberalism, according to the standard account of U.S. political history, has fostered free markets, limited government, and the sovereign rights of the individual. The resulting momentum toward a purely liberal society is held in check, however, the story goes, by a strain of communitarianism in the American character— a robust commitment to the collective life, which is given expression in social movements, labor unions, churches and synagogues, and other voluntary associations of civil society. James A. Morone, a political scientist at Brown University, believes that this familiar interpretive framework is inadequate. “Liberal political history,” he argues, “underestimates the roaring moral fervor at the soul of American politics” (p. 7). Not infrequently, the liberal state, hijacked by this or that moral crusade, has faltered: particular minority communities have been targeted, their constitutional safeguards skirted, and their rights, properties, and even lives taken away. The Puritans and their cultural-political heirs are to blame. To demonstrate the point, Morone has written a persuasively detailed and insightful history of the perennial dynamics of “sin” and sociomoral reform that have shaped public policy debates, laws, and the size and purposes of government in the United States since John Winthrop and crew set out in 1629 to carve “‘a shining city on a hill’” (p. 9) out of the New England wilderness. Within a generation, shamefaced Puritan preachers, confronted by their society's failure to honor the covenant, were perfecting the American jeremiad—a rhetorical mode that combines stylized laments over the fall from grace, exhortations to reform, and dire warnings of the divine wrath in store for the morally complacent. (See, for a recent example, the remarks of Reverend Jerry Falwell, who blamed the 9/11 terrorist attacks on “‘the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians,’” whose gross immorality had compelled God to withdraw His divine protection from the United States, p. 494).

George W. Bush & the missionary position

broadly appealing justifications for the project of global nation building as a moral crusade. He spoke with an uncan ny prescience and with intimations of the preemptive use of American force to promote human progress. The date was January 29, 2002. The oc casion was Mr. Bush's first State of the Union address to Congress and the na tion after the terrorist attacks of Septem ber 11. Listen carefully to his augury: America will lead by defending liberty and justice because they are right and true and unchanging for all people everywhere. No nation owns these aspirations and no na tion is exempt from them. We have no in tention of imposing our culture, but America will always stand firm for the non-negotiable demands of human digni ty, the rule of law, limits on the power of the state, respect for women, private prop erty, free speech, equal justice and reli gious tolerance.

Pirates, sharks and moral crusaders: Social control in peer–to–peer networks

File sharing in peer–to–peer (p2p) networks is a popular pastime for millions of Internet users and a source of concern for copyright holders and for many others who fear the worldwide spread of offensive and illegal content. As file sharing proliferates, the question is what can and should be done to regulate this practice. Can and should governments cooperate to develop stricter laws and regulations and invest in wide–scale international cooperation in order to arrest Internet villains? Can and should copyright holders in the music, film and software industries extend their tactics of inciting fear, by randomly threatening customers with lawsuits in which they claim millions of dollars in damages? This article explores a possible alternative, namely that of user self–regulation, and uses an empirical investigation of two different peer–to–peer networks to examine social norms in these networks and the informal social sanctions that are used to enforce these norms. The results of this investigation indicate that some self–regulation already exists and suggest that it may be possible to strengthen this self–regulation to reduce the occurrence of some types of offences. However, there is a limit to the effectiveness of peer control of illegal and antisocial activities on the Internet.

Scandals, Media, and Citizenship in Contemporary Argentina

This article examines several scandals in 1990s Argentina to discuss the linkages between scandals, media, and citizenship. Suggesting that media publicity is central for scandals to unfold, the article examines a particular arms scandal. An institutional approach that considers the role of different political actors in different scandals shows how and why the media and other institutions contributed to the making and unmaking of scandals. Although scandals offer opportunities for “doing politics by other means,” not all actors are similarly involved. Scandals that dealt with official corruption mainly featured political elites, whereas scandals that followed revelations about human rights violations showed a different pattern: public outrage and citizens’mobilization. In a political context of “scandal fatigue,” scandals do not necessarily trigger public action or moral crusades. Only those scandals that directly affected groups of citizens and were not simply causes d’état were followed by public demonstrations and intense audience attention.

Spreading Peace, Democracy, and Coca-ColaR

Modern sport is today the single most important form of leisure across the globe.1 In participation and in spectatorship, sports excite the passions of billions of people, with profound effects on everyday lives, on moral ideas, on views of the body, race, and gender, on the individual and society, and on conceptions of time and space. International competitions like the Olympic Games and soccer's World Cup are behemoths in global affairs, generating capital flows in the billions of dollars and producing powerful cultural and political reverberations. Sport is not just play, separate from “real life”; it is intertwined with matters of serious import at the local, national, and international levels.2 In the aftermath of the First World War, modern Western sport spread with great rapidity across the globe, stifling or co-opting other forms of physical culture, becoming more deeply entwined with notions of nationhood and national power, and developing powerful international institutions.3 As the world's leader in many amateur sports and as a strongly sport-minded nation that served as a model to others, the United States both directly and indirectly hastened the spread of modern sport and helped to shape the form and character of the growing number of international sports competitions. Despite the Depression, the Los Angeles organizers of the 1932 Olympic Games staged a highly successful event that gave a huge boost to the global mass popularity of the Olympics and stamped the Games as a commercialized entertainment extravaganza that went well beyond mere sporting feats. Throughout the rest of the decade, ever-greater numbers of international sport tours facilitated exchanges of ideas and techniques between Americans and foreign athletes as other countries sought to replicate American success. Although the Americans who led these exchanges opposed foreign political entanglements, they were eager internationalists in the realm of sport—indeed, for these Americans, political isolationism went hand in hand with an aggressive, idealistic internationalism in the cultural sphere.4 They were convinced that the popularization of sport was an effective means of spreading their own values and ideas, and they framed their participation in international sport as a moral crusade to spread peace and democracy.

“Us” and “Them”:

Abstract: In the Aristotelian tradition, politics is a matter of public deliberation over questions of justice and injustice. The Bush administration's response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, has been uniformly hostile to this notion, and it has instead promoted a jingoistic politics of self‐assertion by an America largely identified with the executive branch of its government. This is doubly disturbing, as the executive branch has sought to free itself from international law, multinational commitments, and domestic judicial regulation, even as it has sought to validate itself by demonizing its enemies. This essay draws out the disturbing echoes here of Carl Schmitt's work of the 1920s, in particular of Schmitt's conception of the sovereign as the ungrounded ground of the law and the political as the site of mortal conflict between friend and enemy. The essay argues that Schmitt's position in the twenties, for all of its evident problems, is superior to that of Bush, Wolfowitz, and Ashcroft in at least two senses: Schmitt condemns the idea of waging war for profit and recognizes that such wars will often be disguised as moral crusades waged against the “inhuman”; and he acknowledges that claiming to fight a war for humanity denies one's enemies their humanity, leaving them open to torture and even extermination.

The re-casualisation of the nursing labour force at the end of the 20th century: A comparison with the end of the 19th century

The development and definition of the profession of nursing required, inter alia,the extinction of a casual nursing workforce that, in the main, provided the nursing staff of the hospitals in England up to the 1860s. That process was a 'moral crusade' as well as an attempt at organizational efficiency. As the end of the 20th century approached, the picture appeared to have turned full circle, and many more nursing staff are employed on anything but full-time contracts. There are major implications for the way the profession defines itself and for the future of nursing work.

Introduction

Over the past 20 years the entrepreneur as an economic agent has moved centre stage in the public policy arena of most countries, being identified as the key to maintaining or achieving competitive advantage. This is representative of a significant shift in attitudes towards business and entrepreneurship. Individuals such as Jeff Bezos, Julie Meyer, Charles Dunstone, Reuben Singh and Kanya King are highly valued as entrepreneurs who represent an enterprising frame of mind. In addition, the term ‘entrepreneur’ has been applied to a multiplicity of actors such as vice chancellors of universities, local authority officers, social workers, general practitioners, small business owners, head teachers, accountants, middle managers in large businesses, etc, providing a further demonstration of the privileged position of this ethical personality. The high value attached to the entrepreneur is directly connected to the emphasis placed by government on the need to promote enterprising and entrepreneurial activities. This is described by Scott (1996, p 106) as ‘wild capitalism’, which attempts to reproduce ‘..in a controlled and regulated fashion something like the conditions of early capitalism without losing the state’s ability to regulate these processes. . .’ In understanding this phenomenon it is important that it is not simply viewed as an attempt at economic renewal. It is also a moral crusade in recognition of the fact that economic success based on enterprise is heavily dependent on individuals possessing a positive attitude and constructive orientation to the market order. In other words, institutional and organizational change cannot successfully take place independently of the people involved, with a connection being made between the self-fulfilling desires and activities of individuals and the achievement of social and political objectives (du Gay, 1996). The association between enterprise culture and the entrepreneur has been made by a number of management writers including popularist authors such as Peters and Waterman (1982) and Osborne and Gaebler (1992), and more serious academic authors such as Burchell (1996) and du Gay (1996). The connection between these two complex concepts forms the background to the papers contained in this special issue.

Designer Deviance: Enterprise and Deviance in Culture Change Programmes

This article explores the value of investigating cultural change programmes as exercises in engineering deviance. It does so through a case study of an organizational development cultural change programme at Sprogwheels, a large Australian corporation. Drawing on and extending the classic work of Becker (1966), the article details how the programme combined a moral crusade against what it sought to have labelled as the ‘deviant conservatism’ of the existing organizational culture with social support for ‘deviant radicalism’, in the form of a counter-cultural, self-enterprising set of middle managers promoting corporate change. The article explores the complex and contradictory ideas of deviance that are deployed in such programmes, and examines the implications of a deviance analysis for an improved understanding of the dynamics of cultural change.

Hellfire nation: the politics of sin in American history

This insightful new conceptualization of American political history demonstrates that-despite the clear separation of church and state-religion lies at the heart of American politics. From the Puritan founding to the present day, the American story is a moral epic, James Morone says, and while moral fervor has inspired the dream of social justice it has also ignited our fiercest social conflicts. From the colonial era to the present day, Americans embraced a Providential mission, tangled with devils, and aspired to save the world. Moral fervor ignited our fiercest social conflicts-but it also moved dreamers to remake the nation in the name of social justice. Moral crusades inspired abolition, woman suffrage, and civil rights, even as they led Americans to hang witches, enslave Africans, and ban liquor. Today these moral arguments continue, influencing the debate over everything from abortion to foreign policy. Written with passion and deep insight, Hellfire Nation tells the story of a brawling, raucous, religious people. Morone shows how fears of sin and dreams of virtue defined the shape of the nation.

Erratum

This article illustrates the dangers of mixing religious certitudes and political activities with the study of the remote prehistoric past by critically reviewing the works of one of the 20th century's most prolific and (once) influential prehistorians, Oswald Menghin. Menghin's reconstructions of the past were inspired by a moral crusade against the perceived evils of materialist evolutionism, an agenda that during the 1930s assumed an explicitly political dimension consistent with Nazi ideology. His subsequent exile to Argentina was not a simple retreat to a safe haven but an opportunity for him to confirm a universal world history extending back into the Palaeolithic that purported to link major cultural developments in the New World with earlier developments in the Old. Menghin's theories, which today appear dated and mistaken, were once widely accepted and developed by scholars of the Vienna culture-historical school of ethnography, one of the main theoretical sources for culture historical archaeology. The latter approach, the dominant archaeological practice in many European and Latin American countries, is here reevaluated in the light of this mistaken legacy, and it is argued that peoples without prehistory deserve to have theirs rediscovered and reconstructed through archaeological research. The paper concludes by discussing the constraints of archaeological evidence for identifying correct readings of the past and by calling attention to the difference between religious and political convictions and scientific theories that are openly subjected to testing and empirical refutation.

Religion, Politics, and Prehistory

This article illustrates the dangers of mixing religious certitudes and political activities with the study of the remote prehistoric past by critically reviewing the works of one of the 20th century’s most prolific and (once) influential prehistorians, Oswald Menghin. Menghin’s reconstructions of the past were inspired by a moral crusade against the perceived evils of materialist evolutionism, an agenda that during the 1930s assumed an explicitly political dimension consistent with Nazi ideology. His subsequent exile to Argentina was not a simple retreat to a safe haven but an opportunity for him to confirm a universal world history extending back into the Palaeolithic that purported to link major cultural developments in the New World with earlier developments in the Old. Menghin’s theories, which today appear dated and mistaken, were once widely accepted and developed by scholars of the Vienna culture‐historical school of ethnography, one of the main theoretical sources for culture‐historical archaeolo...

The “Iron Law” of Business Responsibility Revisited: Lessons from South Africa

The campaign to end apartheid in South Africa is one of the inspiring stories of social conscience in the twentieth century. This campaign took place over a quarter century, from the early 1970s to the mid-1990s. Dismantling the apartheid regime that subjugated millions of blacks to institutionalized discrimi? nation ranks with the end colonial rule in India and the civil rights movement in the United States as one of the twentieth century's great crusades. But as each of these experiences reveals, moral ends cannot be achieved without economic and political means. Moral crusaders need a keen understanding of how eco? nomic power operates. Knowledge of how the modern corporation functions, for example, is vital to understanding whether, or how, it can be moved to do the right thing. Current campaigns to secure labor rights, a living wage, pro? tection of child labor, safeguard the global environment, and assure personal freedoms of speech, privacy, association, and safety all require that advocates interact with corporations and executives who wield enormous institutional and economic power. In the fifty years following World War II, a generation of moral champions has perfected the art of political influence. Now, their successors must perfect the art of economic influence as well if today's moral and ethical crusades are to be won.

Why we fought: Holocaust memory in Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan

–Steven Spielberg's film Saving Private Ryan has been criticized for its failure to frame narrative action in terms of national, moral purpose. This criticism can be understood in terms of the constraints that the “Vietnam syndrome” places upon contemporary cinematic narratives of war; Vietnam memory subverts earnest declaration of high national principle. This essay examines how Saving Private Ryan “reillusions” American national identity in the wake of Vietnam by giving presence to an even more distant past. Supported by close textual analysis of key scenes centering upon the sole Jewish character in the film, this reading argues that the specific moral justification for waging war and accepting its horrors and sacrifices is found in a moral crusade against the Nazi program of Holocaust. By suturing the Holocaust into the film as its moral foundation, the film participates in the “Americanization” of Holocaust memory, circumvents Vietnam as a source of traumatic memory, manufactures a redemptive national identity, and constructs an ethically usable past in the present.

Satanism: Psychiatric and Legal Views

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Book Forum: Religion and EthicsFull AccessSatanism: Psychiatric and Legal ViewsMARVIN W. ACKLIN, PH.D., MARVIN W. ACKLINSearch for more papers by this author, PH.D., Honolulu, HawaiiPublished Online:1 Jun 2001https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.158.6.981AboutSectionsView EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail In an age of irremediable secularization (1), the mythical roots of the religious and psychopathological imagination are nowhere more obvious than in the phenomenon of satanism. Despite widespread skepticism about the continuing truth value of Christian mythology, the role and influence of the devil continues to be felt throughout contemporary society. A substantial psychopathological literature focused on satanism exists. The 1980s saw the proliferation of beliefs about satanic practices, including satanic ritual abuse. The reality of satanism and satanic ritual abuse has been vigorously debated. Some have described a moral crusade (or panic) against satanism. The attraction of Satan, in association with Gothic and other nihilistic beliefs, exercises a peculiarly powerful influence on alienated and rebellious adolescent males (2).Reflecting the pervasive influence of the occult and associated New Age philosophies, the general public continues to be mesmerized by satanism, ritual abuse (including satanic day-care centers, sexual debauchery, sacrificial murder, cannibalism, and infanticide), satanic influences in rock and roll music, and alien abduction. Some fully accept the authenticity of cult abuse. For example, one psychiatrist (3) noted that the methods employed by “pedophiles and sexual abusers” in ritual occult abuse produce “people with programmable multiple personalities.” Others point to the role of Fundamentalist religion, mass hysteria, use of hypnotically based memory recovery techniques, the role of the mass media (4), and repressed collective rage and fear in the social construction of satanic cult crime (5, 6). An extremely interesting document published by a special agent at the Federal Bureau of Investigation Behavioral Science Unit (7) reported that in more than 12,000 investigated cases involving allegations of satanic ritual abuse, no evidence to support the accusations has ever been found.Satanism: Psychiatric and Legal Views, written by a psychiatrist and a legal scholar, provides a concise overview of myths, cults, and beliefs about the devil, placing the issues into cultural, historical, and psychopathological contexts. Chapter titles include: “Myths, Cults, and Culture,” “The Birth of the Devil,” “God Versus Satan,” “Children in Satanic Rituals,” “Juvenile Satanism,” “Satanism and Criminal Law,” “The Satanist as Criminal,” and “Psychiatric Views of Satanism.” The book is fascinating reading for those interested in the twisted recesses of the pathological and religious imagination. The authors maintain a middle-of-the-road, balanced perspective, elucidating the phenomena and their power but commenting on the psychiatric and legal aspects. The religious and psychopathological literature on satanism is reasonably well covered. The book should be of interest to those mental health professionals who remain interested in the sources and contents of deviant thought and belief. For those truly interested, however, the book is no substitute for, and should be supplemented by, works by academic researchers, ethnographers, and religious historians (8–12).By George B. Palermo, M.D., and Michele C. Del Re, J.D. Springfield, Ill., Charles C Thomas, 1999, 205 pp., $42.95; $29.95 (paper).

A Catholic-Realist Approach to International Political Life: Application to Selected Current Questions

My previous article on the subject of international politics in the pages of this journal argued that there was a basic compatibility between Catholic teachings regarding international politics and the theory of political realism as advanced most prominently by the great international affairs scholar Hans J. Morgenthau, even though it pointed out arears of disagreement. This article attempts to apply the basic principles comprising a Catholic-realist theory to a few current international questions. First, we review these basic principles. The basic perspective of political realism—which holds that society is governed by objective laws, the ubiquitous reality in international life is that nations seek to gain power to further their interests, that political realities must always be accepted and moral results are less than satisfying, and that morality cannot be identified with any one nation’s views—is accepted in a Catholic-realist position. While carefully avoiding moral crusades, efforts must be made by nations and actors to address moral questions nonetheless, taking heed of the Church’s teaching on such matters as development, human rights, and the rights of nations. When confronted by an especially great moral evil or evil ideology, such as communism or Nazism, a foreign policy may rightfully be oriented to opposing it, but must always proceed prudently. Finally, the central role of the papacy as an international moral arbiter and conciliator should be recognized. We seek here to determine how a Catholic-realist theory would be applied to the following crucial current questions: globalization, and more broadly the role of international organizations; military interventions, peacekeeping, and more basically war and peace in the contemporary world; foreign aid; international law, international juridical structures, and the protection of human rights; nationality groups and nation-building; and immigration. Globalization and International Organizations. The previous article made clear the popes’ support for international organizations, but we must note

Stars in whose eyes?

Politicians and moral crusaders want sports stars as role models for youth in an age of ‘moral decline’. But the media's more interested in scandal and laddishnesss than in sober folk heroes

'A Great Cause': The Origins of the Anti-Apartheid Movement, June 1959-March 1960

The Boycott Movement was initiated in June 1959 by exiled South African supporters of the Congress Movement with the aim of internationalizing the boycott campaign which the African and Indian Congresses had launched in South Africa. In South Africa the 1959 boycott campaign came at the end of a decade of intensifying repression which had closed off almost all peaceful means of protest against apartheid. In Britain, the late 1950s was a period of disillusion with mainstream politics. A network of organizations and individuals campaigned on three interlinked issues- peace and nuclear disarmament, racism and freedom for Britain's colonies, particularly in Africa. Working with organizations like the Movement for Colonial Freedom, Committee of African Organizations, Christian Action, the Africa Bureau and the Communist Party, a group of committed Congress Movement supporters joined by Patrick van Rensburg of the South African Liberal Party, worked within this network to launch a campaign for the boycott of South African goods. This culminated in a month of action in March 1960. It was taken up by the Labour Party, which had lost the October 1959 General Election and was split over nationalization and nuclear disarmament and by the Trades Union Council. To keep its broad base of support, the campaign stressed that it was a moral crusade of individual protest. The aim was to influence rather than overthrow the South African government. The situation was transformed by the shootings at Sharpeville, which led to the banning of the African National Congress and Pan-Africanist Congress. The Boycott Movement became the Anti-Apartheid Movement which in April 1960 called for international economic sanctions against South Africa.