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A white civil rights activist was brutally murdered in Selma, AL in 1965. The leading white men of Selma immediately began raising money to defend those accused of the crime. The fate of "western civilization" hinged, they said, on the trial's outcome. npr.org/podcasts/51034…
In the eyes of the leading white men of Selma, the business owners & professionals & elected officials, defending "western civilization" meant defending white rule against the "outside agitators and pressure groups" who advocated for black voting rights and school integration.
The term "western civilization" has many connotations & is used in a wide range of ways; but we should always be mindful of the long history of American conservatives who have used that term to define racial and religious others as "outsiders" to "our" political tradition.
"Western Civilization" includes Islam and Karl Marx and Emma Goldman and James Baldwin and Dolores Huerta and Frederick Douglass and Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft...as well as Edmund Burke and Friedrich Hayek and Billy Graham and Ronald Reagan and Phyllis Schlafly...
Selling some apocalyptic story about the "threat posed to Western Civilization" like this one is the oldest trick in the conservative rhetorical playbook. It was BS back in the days of Selma, and it's BS now.
Here's a thread from a few weeks ago where I unpacked another important line of interpretation from the White Lies podcast.
