[Xmca-l] Re: AERA Session: Being/Becoming an Activist Scholar: Lessons From Cultural-Historical Activity Research

HENRY SHONERD hshonerd@gmail.com
Sun Apr 1 12:00:56 PDT 2018 

Francine,
I was wannabe Weatherman in Cuba cutting sugar cane in the fall of 1969 wiIth the Venceremos Brigade at a small encampment called Aguacate. The brigade was a group of young Americans, I was the next-to oldest at 26. The oldest one was Vic, who had fought in the Spanish Civil War in the Venceremos Brigade (yes, us sugar cane cutters named ourselves in their honor) that started in 1936 and ended three years latter with the utter defeat of democracy, thanks in part to the betrayal by Stalin, who thought Russia had a better chance of survival if communism didn’t attract too much attention internationally. (Remember this was before his short-lived pact with Hitler.) Vic was still at his internationalist ways 30 years latter, when he cut sugar can alongside us young people. Things were very tense in the camp, largely due to the efforts of a group of Weathermen looking for more recruits to their cause back in the U.S. I didn’t make the cut, in fact was suspected of being an infiltrator of some kind from the right. I wasn’t really, though I was naive about the politics that was going on. I confess that naivite has been a a problem my whole life, though thanks to good luck I have survived to wince about very often. I think that most of the Weathermen were really good people, but at least one, named Tom, I believe was no better than Trump is now. I won’t say evil, but a prisoner to evil ideas. A potential in all of us. Tom said, as he attached me (verbally), “Stalin was right.” I am guessing now that other Weathermen were also prisoners to this kind of thinking. I believe that their thinking may have appealed in a factual way to other white kids, mostly male, but it lacked the grounding of a Black Lives Matter#, MeToo#, and the Civil Rights movement led by Martin. That grounding makes a movement not only well grounded in fact, but also grounded in real-life experience. There’s a Russian word for this, a term used all the time on the chat…I am having a senior moment. In English I would say true, based on fact and authenticity. I would cut Black Lives Matter# and ME Too# a lot of slack as being true, precisely because they seem authentic, not just factual. If you get my drift. I suppose Stalin, back from the grave, would call the Weathermen adventurist. But I don’t think either Stalin, nor the Weathermen, were authentic. They were phonies. Stalin was just a more efficient phony. The Weathermen only ended up killing themselves. It’s probably a good time to stop. I am thinking of the song by Justin Timberlake and Chris Stapleton “Say Something”, which is really a song about keeping your mouth shut. Oh well. Remember what I said about naivite. I guess I’m just wincesome guy. 
Henry



 
> On Apr 1, 2018, at 7:08 AM, Larry Smolucha <lsmolucha@hotmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Message from Francine:
> 
> 
> Let's speak in metaphors - as in Henry's recurring dream - in order to see the magnificent panorama the bus must reach the very edge of the cliff but going off the cliff means disaster (which is averted by changing drivers at the last minute). Wouldn't it be ironic if the March for Lives movement resorts to violence (Weatherman style)? This is exactly what ruined the Black Lives Matters movement - the call for killing policemen (Blue Lives don't Matter).  If the desired outcome is just to bring down the establishment, motives don't matter, ethics are irrelevant, the anarchist is just as useful (maybe more useful) than the idealist. Who ends up in the driver's seat is what matters - the anarchist will drive the bus off the cliff.
> 
> 
> There is a Tarot card-  the Fool - who is distracted by some beautiful vision and about to step off the edge of a cliff. This is the beginning of the Major Arcana cycle of Tarot cards. It is about the Leap of Faith. In the third Indiana Jones movie, he has to walk out over the edge of the cliff and finds he is walking on invisible stones.
> 
> 
> The morale of the story: What matters is "Whose useful idiot are you?"
> 
> 
> ________________________________
> From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu> on behalf of HENRY SHONERD <hshonerd@gmail.com>
> Sent: Sunday, April 1, 2018 6:28 AM
> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: AERA Session: Being/Becoming an Activist Scholar: Lessons From Cultural-Historical Activity Research
> 
> Greg, David, and All,
> Let’s keep on eerie for a moment: I just had a recurrent dream, I awoke at 4 in the morning and, as is often the case, I won’t be getting back to sleep for another half hour. The dream is that I am on a public mode of transportation, this time a bus, and I am feverishly headed somewhere, not knowing exactly where, but in this case it’s west (I’m pretty sure) on Central, yes Central, the name of the main east/west thoroughfare here in Albuquerque, but not Albuquerque in my dream. I have just made a mad scramble to get on this bus. Suddenly it turns south, which is not the direction I want to go. I scoot forward and ask the driver if this is where we will stay headed and he assures me we’ll be back going west in a minute. Suddenly the bus gets an unobstructed view from a cliff that overlooks a beautiful panaorama. Then just as suddenly we are edging over the edge of the cliff. Drivers change, the danger is averted, we’re on our way again, and I wake up. This is a recurrent dream, though it takes place in various places. This one reminds me (now that I am awake) of a small city in Spain I visited with my wife and son in 2009 famous for bullfighting, on the way west from Seville to Lisbon, In my waking life we had a destination, in my dream I did not.
> 
> This gets us back to the subject line with Berzemenov. David juxtaposes motives and outcomes. Is life, either individually or collectively, about the journey or the destination? Do we have to know AND agree, either individually or collectively, with the destination?
> 
> I’m headed back to bed. I’m debating whether to send this post. If I do, I will probably regret it. But I promise, either way, that I am not making up the dream. It really happened. And it is a recurrent dream: headed somewhere, don’t know where and never find out before I wake up (in this case) or go to another dream or back into a different stage of sleep. What’s different about this version of the dream is how beautiful a moment I had at that overlook. The same sort of the beautiful moment at our march in Albuquerque last weekend, a waking moment we were sharing as young people, motivated by the recurrent, senseless slaughter in schools here in the U.S., were trying to wake up the adults. When will we wake up?
> 
> Henry
> 
> 
>> On Mar 31, 2018, at 10:31 PM, Greg Thompson <greg.a.thompson@gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> I'm still not quite sure I understand what the pointer to Bezmenov was all
>> about, but I do notice some eerie connections between Bezmenov's little
>> speech and Ted Nugent's recent rant about the March for our Lives kids (and
>> esp. the Parkland students):
>> http://13wham.com/news/nation-world/ted-nugent-parkland-survivors-mushy-brained-children-who-have-no-soul
> [http://static-39.sinclairstoryline.com/resources/media/8895a5f1-a703-4add-9270-cce4a70e390b-large16x9_20419E00BVONW.jpg?1522512134449]<http://13wham.com/news/nation-world/ted-nugent-parkland-survivors-mushy-brained-children-who-have-no-soul>
> 
> Ted Nugent: Parkland survivors ‘mushy-brained children’ who ‘have no soul’<http://13wham.com/news/nation-world/ted-nugent-parkland-survivors-mushy-brained-children-who-have-no-soul>
> 13wham.com
> (CIRCA) – Rock star Ted Nugent says the students who survived a recent school shooting in Parkland, Florida are “mushy-brained children.”Nugent adds that Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students who have become gun control advocates after last month’s
> 
> 
>> Just noticing.
>> -greg
>> 
>> 
>> On Sat, Mar 31, 2018 at 9:51 PM, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> Francine:
>>> 
>>> First of all, we are all useful idiots. Just for example, Bezemenov was a
>>> "useful idiot" for the John Birchers. And John Birch himself was a "useful
>>> idiot".
>>> 
>>> Secondly, the Larry Kohlberg studies were rightly criticized at book length
>>> by Carol Gilligan (and at somewhat shorter length by Yongho Kim and myself
>>> in "Rocks and a Hard Place", in Language and Education in 2015.
>>> 
>>> Thirdly, one of the things that makes people activists, as opposed to
>>> amateur news therapists, is that we focus on the desirability of outcomes
>>> and not just motives. If the study of morality over history tells us
>>> anything, it is that only bad outcomes ever come from pure
>>> motives. Progress, like development, is always complexly motivated.
>>> 
>>> David Kellogg
>>> Sangmyung University
>>> 
>>> Recent Article in *Early Years*
>>> 
>>> The question of questions: Hasan’s critiques, Vygotsky’s crises, and the
>>> child’s first interrogatives
>>> <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09575146.2018.1431874>
>>> 
>>> Free e-print available at:
>>> https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/6EeWMigjFARavQjDJjcW/full
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On Sun, Apr 1, 2018 at 12:29 PM, Larry Smolucha <lsmolucha@hotmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> message from Francine:
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> Here are some points for activist/scholars to consider regarding the 1984
>>>> interview with Soviet KGB defector Yuri Berzmenov.
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> Here's the link (again):
>>>> 
>>>> https://youtu.be/K4kHiUAjTvQ
>>>> 
>>>> [https://i.ytimg.com/vi/K4kHiUAjTvQ/hqdefault.jpg]<htt
>>>> ps://youtu.be/K4kHiUAjTvQ>
>>>> 
>>>> Yuri Bezmenov - KGB Defector on "Useful Idiots" and the True Face of
>>>> Communism<https://youtu.be/K4kHiUAjTvQ>
>>>> youtu.be
>>>> The USA is at this moment a destabilized nation on the way to crisis. In
>>>> this interview from 1984, Yuri Bezmenov articulates the method.
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> Just for starters,
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 1.  Yuir Bezmenov provides a working model for destabilizing a nation
>>>> involving processes such as demoralization, abandonment of rational
>>>> discourse, instigating crises, and normalization under the new social
>>> order.
>>>> 2.   This interview is from 1984 so it is also old news of Russian
>>>> "interference."
>>>> 3.   Apparently, there is no actual citation from Lenin of his having
>>>> used the term "useful idiots' to describe the manipulation of unwitting
>>>> traumatized people by someone with ulterior motives. The recently
>>>> traumatized high school student March for Life activists are vulnerable
>>> to
>>>> such manipulation.  No one knows whether the movement will fizzle out out
>>>> or even produce voters on election day. Certainly a few student activists
>>>> might have found their calling.
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> The nerve of me posting something like this that interrupts what could
>>>> have been a seamless narrative on XMCA.  But as scholars, this is an
>>>> interesting opportunity to study this (and learn) from this social
>>>> phenomenon (March for Lives). I remember (years ago) Dr. Jack Getzels at
>>>> the University of Chicago talking about a study of student activists in
>>> the
>>>> 1960's that found some of the most committed student leaders scored at
>>> the
>>>> highest level of Kohlberg's stages of moral development but just as many
>>>> were anarchists at the lowest level. Are activist/ scholars or
>>>> activist/teachers all of one type?
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> ________________________________
>>>> From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu>
>>>> on behalf of mike cole <mcole@ucsd.edu>
>>>> Sent: Friday, March 30, 2018 6:45 PM
>>>> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
>>>> Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: AERA Session: Being/Becoming an Activist Scholar:
>>>> Lessons From Cultural-Historical Activity Research
>>>> 
>>>> Hi Francine-
>>>> 
>>>> What sort of lesson would you like us to take from Mr. Bezmenov's
>>>> interviews?
>>>> 
>>>> mike
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> On Fri, Mar 30, 2018 at 10:21 AM, Larry Smolucha <lsmolucha@hotmail.com>
>>>> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>>> Message from Francine Smolucha:
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> This link has an interview that would be of interest to
>>>> activist./scholars
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> https://youtu.be/K4kHiUAjTvQ
>>>> [https://i.ytimg.com/vi/K4kHiUAjTvQ/hqdefault.jpg]<htt
>>>> ps://youtu.be/K4kHiUAjTvQ>
>>>> 
>>>> Yuri Bezmenov - KGB Defector on "Useful Idiots" and the True Face of
>>>> Communism<https://youtu.be/K4kHiUAjTvQ>
>>>> youtu.be
>>>> The USA is at this moment a destabilized nation on the way to crisis. In
>>>> this interview from 1984, Yuri Bezmenov articulates the method.
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> [https://i.ytimg.com/vi/K4kHiUAjTvQ/hqdefault.jpg]<htt
>>>>> ps://youtu.be/K4kHiUAjTvQ>
>>>>> 
>>>>> Yuri Bezmenov - KGB Defector on "Useful Idiots" and the True Face of
>>>>> Communism<https://youtu.be/K4kHiUAjTvQ>
>>>>> youtu.be
>>>>> The USA is at this moment a destabilized nation on the way to crisis.
>>> In
>>>>> this interview from 1984, Yuri Bezmenov articulates the method.
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> ________________________________
>>>>> From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu
>>>> 
>>>>> on behalf of Carrie Lobman <carrie.lobman@gse.rutgers.edu>
>>>>> Sent: Friday, March 30, 2018 9:33 AM
>>>>> To: xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu
>>>>> Subject: [Xmca-l] AERA Session: Being/Becoming an Activist Scholar:
>>>>> Lessons From Cultural-Historical Activity Research
>>>>> 
>>>>> Hello XMCAers,
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> I am very pleased to be chairing this timely and important session at
>>>> AERA
>>>>> in a few weeks (Monday April 16). The idea for Being/Becoming an
>>>>> Activist-Scholar <http://tinyurl.com/ybdkh6kw> was born at last years
>>>>> conference in San Antonio where I felt a shift as more and more people,
>>>>> particularly graduate students, were identifying as activist scholars
>>> or
>>>>> were seeking to engage in activism. I believe as socio-cultural and
>>>>> activitists we have much to offer this conversation and a
>>> responsibility
>>>> to
>>>>> lead and teach.
>>>>> What Is a 21st-Century Activist Scholar to Do?<http://tinyurl.com/
>>>> ybdkh6kw
>>>>>> 
>>>>> tinyurl.com
>>>>> To the naïve mind revolution and history seem incompatible. It believes
>>>>> that historical development continues as long as it follows a straight
>>>>> line. When a change comes, a break in the historical fabric, a
>>> leap—then
>>>>> this naïve mind sees only catastrophe, a fall, a rupture; for the naïve
>>>>> mind history ends until back again straight and narrow. The scientific
>>>> mind
>>>>> on the contrary, views revolution as the locomotive of history, forging
>>>>> ahead at full speed; it regards the revolutionary epoch as the
>>> tangible,
>>>>> living embodiment of history. A revolution solves only those tasks
>>> which
>>>>> have been raised by history; this proposition holds equally true for
>>>>> revolution in general and for aspects of social and cultural life.
>>>>> (Vygotsky as quoted in Leviathan, 1982). Socio-cultural theory was born
>>>> of
>>>>> activism. It emerged in the early, most improvisational moments of the
>>>>> Russian Revolution, and one of its continuing provocations is that it
>>>> does
>>>>> not claim to be objective or apolitical. Vygotsky and his followers
>>>> located
>>>>> thei
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> I was thrilled that Kris Guitierrez, Lois Holzman, and Anna Stetsenko
>>>>> agreed to be our featured speakers as they each bring a long history of
>>>>> rigorous scholarship and activism but from with different frameworks,
>>>>> activities and communities. These three presentations will jumpstart a
>>>>> conversation with an invited panel of emerging and established scholar
>>>>> activists who will collectively interview and respond to the
>>>> presentations
>>>>> and lead a discussion with the audience.
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> Please get the word out as widely as possible.
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> http://tinyurl.com/y7zguva7
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> Carrie
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> Carrie Lobman, Ed.D.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Chair, Department of Learning and Teaching
>>>>> 
>>>>> Graduate School of Education
>>>>> 
>>>>> Rutgers University
>>>>> 
>>>>> www.gse.rutgers.edu<http://www.gse.rutgers.edu>
>>>>> 
>>>>> www.eastsideinstitute.org<http://www.eastsideinstitute.org<h<<http://www.eastsideinstitute.org<http://www.eastsideinstitute.org<h<>
>>> http://www.
>>>> eastsideinstitute.org<http://www.eastsideinstitute.org<h>
>>>>> ttp://www.eastsideinstitute.org<http://www.eastsideinstitute.org>>
>>>>> 
>>>>> www.performingtheworld.org<http://www.performingtheworld.org<<http://www.performingtheworld.org<http://www.performingtheworld.org<>
>>> http://www<
>>>> http://www.performingtheworld.org<http://www.performingtheworld.org<htt
>>>> p://www>.
>>>>> performingtheworld.org<http://www.performingtheworld.org>>
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>> 
>>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> --
>> Gregory A. Thompson, Ph.D.
>> Assistant Professor
>> Department of Anthropology
>> 880 Spencer W. Kimball Tower
>> Brigham Young University
>> Provo, UT 84602
>> WEBSITE: greg.a.thompson.byu.edu
>> http://byu.academia.edu/GregoryThompson
> 
>

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