The Civil War Will Not Be Mediated

Notes From Nina: Week of April 15th, 2024

This week, we published Ryan Zickgraf on Alex Garland’s new film Civil War. Zickgraf argued, among other things, that “Civil War remains above the fray, attempting to force us to confront the dangers posed by fierce partisan attachments, no matter whose team colors anyone is wearing.” I went to see the film on the huge Waterloo IMAX in London, which gave the fighting and explosions a somewhat over-real quality. Zickgraf is right about the deliberately depoliticized quality of the film—though the president is clearly some sort of Trump-Bannon figure, even if the alliances are all mixed up (Texas and California), and it’s unclear what anyone’s fighting for (or against).

What really struck me about the film, though, was its curious message about iconoclasm. Perhaps it was there, perhaps I projected it slightly, but what’s striking about the photographers and reporters is how little world there is for them to communicate to. There’s no internet, and it’s clear the media are moribund to dead. Who, then, are they taking photographs and reporting on behalf of? The post-civil-war country—and there are some truly amazing scenes, like the highway choked with dead cars—is a place where representation has died, or is dying. “The revolution will not be televised” as Gil Scott-Heron taught; the civil war will not be instagrammed.

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Apart from Ryan’s review of Garland’s film, this week we published my take on the final Cass report, in which I use René Girard’s analysis of eating disorders from the 1990s to look at notable feature of transgender ideology: in particular, social contagion and the implications that puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones have for our understanding of maturity and sexual difference in our own age. The desire to keep some children in a state of arrested development is a sorry indictment of our collective inability to confront and recognize genuine transition, i.e., from child to sexually mature adult. Our culture’s lack of religious ritual return with a vengeance in the form of dangerous medicalization and irreversible surgery with “true believers” setting the template for others to emulate. The brute reality of sexual difference appears as a kind of shock and indictment to an image of an unlimited freedom to be “whatever.”

Many of us hope that the Cass report will signal not just an end to state-sponsored child abuse, but to this ideology being pushed in all our major institutions. The only way to prevent societal madness is to understand, in the first place, how collectively we are prone to it, how envy and mimesis work, how deeper motivations are obscured by the use of language. Those of us who wanted to protect children and young people from irreparable harm, and to stand up for women’s reality, were smeared with the worst words imaginable, while the activists invoked the language of care. We must be wary of these patterns repeating themselves.

Indeed, the language of “care” was invoked this week as the Mayor of Brussels shut down the latest National Conservatism conference that was taking place in the city. Hamilton Craig provided timely historical background to “the conflict between national communities and a rules-based order helmed by cosmopolitan elites,” which was nowhere more on show than in Brussels itself, as police prevented speakers from leaving and entering. Eventually backing down after a legal challenge from the ADF, the treatment of conservatives this week in the heart of the European Union can’t but demonstrate the on-going tensions between national and supranational ideals.

These tensions are also at play in the relationship between national censorship and multinational social media platforms. Juan David Rojas covered Elon Musk’s recent unsuccessful feud with Brazil’s courts, arguing that “the sad lesson of the Twitter Files Brazil is that the whims of self-interested oligarchs are woefully inadequate to protect the online public square from state censorship.”

Compact co-founding editor Sohrab Ahmari covered Sen. Josh Hawley’s promising support for the Teamsters, arguing that “the Hawley-Teamster alliance demonstrates that it is possible for Republicans to win labor’s support, provided both camps are prepared to take trust-building steps.”

Valerie Stivers covered Nicolette Polek’s debut novel Bitter Water Opera, praising it for asking “exciting, original, and urgently relevant questions about the value and role of art.”

And finally, for our weekend read, we published Dr. Andrew Ross on modern medicine with reference to Ivan Illich: “The embrace of progressive nostrums marks a new phase in the medical system’s long-term tendency toward commodification. Instead of depersonalized “customers,” we now speak of depersonalized “bodies.” Instead of a monetized commodity, one becomes an immutable phenotype—merely black or white, or male or female.” Do read—what Ross describes from the inside is at the heart of many of our bureaucratic and institutional tragedies.  

Until next week — Nina