Christian Missionary Activity as a Prime Mover in the Boxer War.

It is first important to point-out that Christian missionaries did not invent violence in the region of Northern China, where the Boxer War originated. That area had experienced physical conflict for many years prior to the expansion of Christian cultural imperialism. Professor Henrietta Harrison sets the stage by discussing inter-village politics concerning water distribution: “The Jin River Flowed from a spring as the base of the hills west of Taiyuan County town and irrigated approximately thirty villages…These villages depended on the water to grow profitable cash crops and for industries such as paper-making and the manufacture of alum.” Irrigation was “regulated by a series of hatches controlled by village hatch keepers…The prosperity of any individual was often directly dependent on the position of his village in the irrigation hierarchy. Fights, the stealing of water, the breaking of dykes, and lawsuits between villages were common” (Bickers & Tiedemann [eds.], p. 8). But in spite of these conditions, violent methods had been limited to the above tactics. It was only with the introduction of Catholic and Protestant missionaries into the local politics, that war and mass slaughter resulted.

Missionaries pursued an opportunistic strategy that exploited and exacerbated the existing inter-village conflicts. After the Second Opium War of 1860, and the First Sino-Japanese War of 1895, the Imperial Government of China was dominated by foreign powers. Missionaries, primarily from France, Germany and Great Britain, used this new political leverage to gain converts. “Here, their effective intervention in what essentially were ongoing struggles for scarce resources were of crucial importance and brought remarkable results…foreign priests demonstrated their power by winning disputes on behalf of converts and potential converts…Thus ‘conversion’ became a part of the repertoire of collective—and to some extent individual—rural survival strategies for a significant minority in a violently competitive environment...For example, the French Jesuits had gained the reputation for being very powerful as a consequence of their successful settlement of the Big Sword (Dadaohui) affair of 1896…local officials had to offer apologies, pay indemnities, and promise to protect the church…As Rosario Renaud has noted, ‘No power—that of the Emperor excepted—has ever achieved anything like it in Xuzhou’” (Bickers & Tiedemann [eds.], p. 21). As a result, Chinese communities that had converted to Christianity gained dominion in resources and legal disputes over those who did not convert. This created resentments, that would increase the number of recruits against Christians during the Boxer War and result in more casualties on both sides.

Northern China was an ecologically fragile area prone to severe droughts and severe flooding. These were perpetual and unavoidable. It was at a juncture between natural disaster and resentment of Christian missionaries that the Boxers made their appearance. “Facing first floods and then drought, these men had placed their hopes for salvation in…martial arts and spirit possession practices that had emerged in northwest Shandong province between 1898 and 1899. As they understood it, the alien presences in the land and their Chinese compatriots who had turned their backs on their identity by converting to Christianity had knocked the world out of kilter. To restore order and to bring on the rains, the land needed to be purged. In many instances, existing local tensions and conflicts between Christian and non-Christian communities and villages—over land, over water, over participation in community life—further fed the flames. Attacks on Christians spiraled into attacks on missionaries and other foreigners” (Bickers & Tiedemann [eds.], p. xiii).

Early in the struggle, “armed response” to Boxer attacks “was usually led by foreign missionaries” who “had significant advantages over their non-Christian rivals. Their extensive higher-level networks enabled them to share information and acquire superior technology” in defensive fortification and weaponry (Bickers & Tiedemann [eds.], p. 33). This foreign leadership and technology resulted in an amount of casualties that could never have been reached with the more primitive, local weapons. But even this situation of unequal resources was dwarfed by the later military intervention of seven European powers plus Japan. In the end, “perhaps a total of up to 100,000 or more people died in the conflict.” https://www.britannica.com/event/Boxer-Rebellion  

The role of Christian missionaries in cynically exploiting an existing conflict to expand their influence, arming the convert populace, and causing what was once localized minor violence to escalate into a widespread war against Christian intrusion, is clear. History is rife with examples of that signature Christian hypocrisy where clergy, (following a savior who eschewed material gain and counseled people to love their enemies), are instead pursuing power and causing war. It is a sad confluence of belief and power. One can observe it when any religion that thinks of itself as possessing absolute truth, leaves the private realm of personal worship, and enters the political public sphere.

Bickers, Robert & Tiedemann, R.G. (editors). The Boxers, China and the World. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2007.

How the Trump Agenda Serves the Wealthy Elite.

We all know that the United States is (roughly) divided into two politico-cultural camps. So why do we have a president who worsens this divide? Who benefits from our discord?

Clearly, the people who comprise Trump’s base, white people who feel that they have been left behind by Washington, whose jobs have disappeared, who blame our first African American president for policies they feel have disenfranchised them, whose advantages are vanishing as they lose prominence to other cultures; surely they will not benefit from Trump’s policies. This president is dedicated to cutting their health care, polluting their air with coal plant emissions, depriving them of their birth control benefit, gutting the EPA that protects them, whittling away at the national parks their children will inherit and providing them with less of a tax-cut than the wealthy one percent. As a private businessman, he has sent their jobs to foreign sweat shops. But he promises to consider them; to restore their dominant past over the non-white population that is going to have superior numbers in 20 years time. He fuels the culture war through racist and anti-immigrant sentiment, through pandering to white supremacists, through attacks on football players kneeling, Confederate statues coming down and border walls going up. He soothes their fears while robbing them.

Who benefits? His class. The wealthy elite. If they do not have to pay for healthcare and birth control; if their businesses thrive because they are not regulated by the EPA and pollution laws; if their taxes are reduced; they benefit...in the short run. In 1930s Germany, wealthy industrialists backed the Nazis to unseat a socialist Weimar government. They thought that they could control the Nazis through money. They were wrong. At present, the US is not in the same situation regarding Trump and his anti-semitic & white supremacist supporters. Trump is a nationalist racist who is reacting against the Obama years; but he is not a Nazi. However, it is the goal of Steve Bannon to replace moderate Republicans with candidates who are white supremacist & anti-semitic. His thinking is longer-term than Trump's and momentum is on his side. If he is successful, it will not end well. The nationalism, hatred, violence and division we are seeing in our streets and our government will become stronger.

Presidents have the potential to be unifiers. Government has the potential to be a tool that protects all of its citizens. But that is not the United States of today.

Today, the wealthy elite buy the politicians loyalty. They fund the campaigns of those who promise to serve their desires. Most of these politicians are themselves part of this wealthy elite. And the current President of the United States is the wealthiest of these politicians. Trump, his agenda, his Republican Party, with the complicity of wealthy Democrats, will continue to skew the laws to benefit the wealthy at the expense of the non-elite citizen and the environment.

There is a way out of this quandary; a way to claim government for all of the people: The general population of common citizens would have to make an effort to involve itself in the political process in a manner that served their own interest for fair government. They would need to work on the following three tasks: 1) Education for unity over division, that exposes who benefits from culture wars where the rest of us fight over scraps. 2) Limitations on campaign contributions so money does not control the peoples’ representatives in government. 3) A permanent vigilance by the populace against injustice and privileges of the wealthy.

The reality of the present is that the populace is divided. While the rich harvest the trees, white people are fighting with people of color and immigrants over the fruit left rotting on the ground. Those who are not involved in this culture war are docile in front of TV screens and game consols, too distracted, too apathetic, too tired from work and life’s stressors to become involved. A change in our thought, our action and our direction is necessary. Unfortunately, people normally participate en masse as a last resort; when basic human needs are threatened for a significant number of their class.

Will people getting fed-up with the culture war and being robbed be enough of an impetus to fix this problem? That’s up to you. There are a couple of places to begin. A couple of organizations attempting to correct the problem of the wealthy elite’s power:

One organization is Indivisible. Their objective is to defeat the Trump agenda. You can connect with a local chapter through their website at https://www.indivisible.org/  

Another organization is Common Cause. They are a non-partisan, grassroots organization, attempting to limit campaign spending and make government responsive to all citizens. They can be reached at http://www.commoncause.org/

The battle to regain the United States for the rest of us will be long. Even after the elite have lost their stranglehold on national politics, the populace will need to remain politically active, and well-educated regarding the wealthy opposition, to prevent their resurgence. So get involved, pace yourself, be patient and be persistent.

From Civil Rights 1961 to the Women’s March for America 2017. Dissent Against Prejudiced Politicians.

In Mississippi, on September 25, 1961, an African American “farmer named Herbert Lee, the father of nine, an NAACP member who braved the terror to attend voter meetings and drive [Bob] Moses around the country, was shot dead in broad daylight, by a state legislator named E.H. Hurst” (Gitlin, p. 141). Injustices committed during the early Civil Rights Movement are suffocating, terrifying, oppressive episodes in recent US history that most people, particularly those outside of the African American community, would prefer to forget. But history presents valuable lessons that are obviated by forgetting. Humans are the same biological animals whether we are discussing humans of the 10^th Century, the 20^th Century or the 21^st Century. Though there has been significant social evolution over the past 1000 years, we still retain qualities, behavioral and biological, that can instruct us about who we are and how we will respond in a given situation.

In Mississippi of 1961, elected officials like E.H. Hurst set examples, as political leaders, concerning racism and suppression. These examples emboldened other racists to commit hate crimes as well. As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump also set an example. By now we are all familiar enough with Trump’s prejudiced comments against minorities and physical assaults against women, that a litany is unnecessary. Enough progress has been made during the ensuing 56 years between Hurst’s and Trump’s examples that our elected officials no longer shoot targeted minorities in cold blood (they leave that to the police). We have socially evolved enough that opportunists like Trump employ only racist language to obtain office. The instructive similarity between 1961 and 2017 is that the examples politicians set have material consequences in society.

The Southern Poverty Law Center documented “what has become a national outbreak of hate, as white supremacists celebrate Donald Trump’s victory. In the ten days following the election, there were almost 900 reports of harassment and intimidation from across the nation. Many harassers invoked Trump’s name during assaults, making it clear that the outbreak of hate stemmed in large part from his electoral success.” Here are some examples:

A Sudanese-American family in Iowa City, Iowa...found a note attached to their door that read, “You can all go home now. We don’t want niggers and terrorists here. #trump.”

In Tuscola County, Mich., a Latino family was shocked to find a wall of boxes scrawled with “Trump,” “Take America Back,” and “Mexicans suck.”

While a Chinese-American high school student was getting gas, a white man approached her to say, “Can’t wait for Trump to deport you or I will deport you myself, dyke yellow bitch.”

On the Las Vegas Strip, a white man punched two black men and attempted to assault a black woman. After the attack, he chanted “Donald Trump!” and “White Power!”

In Sarasota, Florida, a 75-year-old gay man was ripped from his car and beaten by an assailant who told him, “You know my new president says we can kill all you faggots now.”

In Minneapolis, middle-school boys leaned out of a school bus to yell, “Grab her by the pussy!” to a man walking with a female colleague.

In Albuquerque, New Mexico, a woman caught a stranger trying to take the “I’m With Her” bumper sticker off of her car. When confronted, the perpetrator asked her if she was a Jew because she “looked like one.” “Get ready for your next exodus lady,” they told her, “because we’re about to clean out this country.”

The report is at  https://www.splcenter.org/20161129/ten-days-after-harassment-and-intimidation-aftermath-election

History never repeats itself verbatim. It is unlikely that we will see an exact replica of Civil Rights Era reactionary injustice. But the evidence is clear that Donald Trump’s hate speech against women and minorities has emboldened a profoundly ignorant segment of the US to expand upon his language with acts of hatred. Interestingly, there is also a historical parallel among political organizations between 1961 and 2017. The anonymous racists of the 1961 Ku Klux Klan are mirrored in 2017 by the anonymous trolls of the Alt Right who perform cowardly, incognito attacks, like their predecessors.

The day that this writing was penned, there occurred the largest demonstration in US history: The Women's March for America. The Washington Post estimated that the march had more than a million attendees nation-wide.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/womens-march-on-washington-a-sea-of-pink-hatted-protesters-vow-to-resist-donald-trump/2017/01/21/ae4def62-dfdf-11e6-acdf-14da832ae861_story.html?utm_term=.8af24a6c399b  Internationally, the conservative estimate by reputable news agencies is that 2 million people in 75 nations joined the million US women’s protesters https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/21/protests-around-world-show-solidarity-with-womens-march-on-washington#top 

Demonstrations are a fine and positive expression of vision. But they are not enough. Professor Todd Gitlin, whose book is quoted at the beginning of this article, spoke to NPR a week before the event. He used the example of Tea Party demonstrators, who turned protest into permanent organizations and elected representatives to Washington. Gitlin indicated that the progressive, anti-Trump demonstrators should do the same. If we are going to turn the tide against Trump-inspired hatred, we need to follow Gitlin’s suggestions. Individual commitment to organizing, not just protesting, is the answer. The author of this article, for one, will be contacting the website of the Women’s March for America. He will chose a partner organization with whom to volunteer, as soon as this is posted. Here is the link to their national website’s list of partners:

https://www.womensmarch.com/partners/

Gitlin, Todd. The Sixties. Years of Hope, Days of Rage. New York: Bantam Books, 1987.