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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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I think you need to be more careful about ascribing generality to your experience in your culture in the present day, based only on that which you observe in your immediate environment and glimpses of past and foreign art that are mediated through the interpretation of those inhabiting that same immediate environment. It is not at all clear to me that for instance the medieval European bards that brought us the chansons de geste or the Song of the Nibelungs had a progressive bone in their body, and getting an interpretation of the Odyssey that is not memetically contaminated by a Western Classics department of the last 200 years seems like a lost cause. You can come up with a somewhat compelling-sounding story that efficient acting - literal theatre - necessitates a degree of mental promiscuity and openness that you can't do that and then return to the sort of loyalty to a single narrative framework intended to be shared by everyone in society that conservatism almost definitionally requires, any more than a three-digit bodycount Tinder 1%er (m/f) can happily settle down with a boring unattractive accountant; however, theatre narrowly defined does not seem like a wide enough domain of art that an ideology locked out of it would be forever barren. Narrative-weaving artists considered more generally, though, especially in other societies, seem to have no trouble sustaining right-wing attitudes. Japan had Yukio Mishima, and anime runs the gamut from Miyazaki's surface pacifism that is still bulging with a barely repressed fascination with blood and steel, via every vapid piece of romance (I only realised just how trad the delta from reality to fiction is after interacting with actual Japanese youths), to the unapologetic jingoism of something like GATE. Russia among many others had Solzhenitsyn (and perhaps our very own Ilforte), and I gather that even Limonov was so charismatic and fun in his writing that he won over a significant fraction of the intelligentsia.

I liked your whole post, but I have one tiny quibble:

Miyazaki's surface pacifism that is still bulging with a barely repressed fascination with blood and steel

Is that what you could call it? I know Miyazaki has a love of old-school aviation, I'm not terribly sure there's any real appreciation of the displays of power associated with pre-Cold-War planes. Granted, as someone who saw The Wind Rises in a theater, I will concede that there definitely seems to be a conflicted love of that subject matter there.

Have you read Miyazaki's Tigers In The Mud?

Whole thing(?) Not the best image quality I'm afraid, but enough to give you the idea. He's an absolute model tank and rifle collector who reads Nazi tank ace autobiographies. Really great stuff done in his style.

I've never heard of this before, huh.