The GMC plant in Janesville, Wisconsin (along with countless other car factories across North America) is closed for good.

What do you think? Is this an improvement? What ought towns like Janesville do?

[photo credit: Flickr member cliff1066 on a creative commons licence]

InterVarsity and other outfits working among International students frequently highlight the strategic value of hospitality and ministry to international students, frequently noting the impressive list of world leaders who studied in North America (25% of them).

But here, from GlobalHigherEd, is an analysis of international students' monetary value to the US economy: a net of $US15.58 billion. That is more than an insignificant impact.

Here’s a really interesting assessment of the difference between Paris’ and Prague’s 1968 upheavals, by French historian Jacques Rupnik.

The first half of 1968 was a remarkable season of youth rebellion around the world, from Mexico to the US, to Europe on both sides of the Iron Curtain. But it was in France and Czechoslovakia that protesters came closest to overthrowing a government.

In France, the Paris movement was a leftist one, led by Daniel Cohn-Bendit, opposed to various cultural and political (the two are inseparable in the minds of the Paris movement) developments post-WWII, most importantly the material culture, or the culture of commercialism.

The Czech movement was more political in nature and was focused on restoring various liberties (such as the press) that the Soviets had been suppressing.

Jacques Rupnik suggests that we have remembered the events falsely: the only quality they had in common was their simultaneity. More importantly, both movements were out to achieve what the other was trying to shake off: the Czechs trying to rid themselves of the very Marxism the French wanted; the French rejecting the democracy (“an illusion”) the Czechs wanted.

The Prague Spring was brutally put down by communist troops and tanks, while the Paris Spring simply ran out of gas. But the Soviet occupation of Prague, Rupnik argues, had a significant long-term impact on the French Left: it disburdened them of their delusions about the workers’ paradise USSR.

By making human rights, civil society, and European culture central to its activity, [Czech] dissent had an impact that was by no means negligible on the anti-totalitarian Left in France in a new political and intellectual context post-1968.

[…] The post-68 "new philosophers", when they asked themselves questions about the origins of twentieth-century totalitarian regimes, of the Gulags and of "barbarism with a human face" (Bernard-Henri Lévy), traced the intellectual and political ancestry of Soviet Russian Bolshevism back to the German "master thinkers" (A. Glucksmann) and further back to the Enlightenment, discovering along the way some of the concerns of Czech dissenters including Jan Patocka and Vaclav Havel.

The Czechs were trying to turn (quoting a protester from the time) “From Asia and toward Europe;” to French ears “Europe” carried more than a whiff of imperialism. Thus is was significant for both movements that the Czech return to Europe after 1989 was marked by adsorption into the European Union (by which Rupnik means the common market).

Ralph Winter has died. The missionary leader, strategist and thinker has left a wide-ranging impact.

One of his most important ideas is that of “Unreached People Groups,” which he publicly discussed thirty-five years ago, and which is now part of the everyday missionary lexicon. He explains the term here, from a month ago:

Heroin overdose rates are going way up in Wisconsin, and probably elsewhere in the United States, because of prices on the market.

A new report by the (local) Dane County Narcotics and Gang Task Force notes that cocaine, the biggest killer for many years, has gotten a lot more expensive, due to the escalating narco-wars in Mexico.

Meanwhile, Heroin, a derivative of Poppies (the flowers that put Dorothy to sleep in the Wizard of Oz), is Afghanistan’s largest export, and funds much of the Taliban’s budget in its ongoing wars in South and Central Asia. That itself is fairly significant of a moral objection: when you shoot up the Taliban make money.

Heroin may get more expensive for a short while, as US and Afghan forces seized a hundred tons of heroin and poppy products the other day. But competing poppy production is also present in Colombia and Southeast Asia, so heroin is not going away any time soon.

In the spring of 2001, when their biggest threat was international outrage over the demolition of ancient Buddhist statues, the Taliban decreed heroin production un-Islamic, according to this report from June 2001 in the Telegraph of London. Today, that principled stance is on hold, as the Taliban need more money.

[photo credit: Bayer brand Heroin, from Wikipedia]

What are you doing this summer?

I’ve been watching PBS’ new documentary on the 1973 armed standoff at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

It’s really fun, and the filmmakers do a good job giving the viewer a sense of the seriousness of the situation. In a classic bit of symbolic protest, dozens of AIMers took over the town of Wounded Knee, including hostages, and brandished weapons and a list of demands.

They shot at the FBI agents surrounding the town for two months, killing one. With the world’s media on hand, they were basically daring the Federal Government to repeat the 1890 massacre in the same town.

In the same way that most of today’s terror movements are primarily local in intention, even as they target Western countries, the Wounded Knee protesters were focused on corruption within the Bureau of Indian Affairs (subject of a long-running class-action lawsuit, still underway), and the corrupt chair of the Oglala Lakota tribe.

I’ve had many great experiences on the Pine Ridge Reservation, mostly at the town of Pine Ridge itself, and I loved learning the living history of the area. In part because people are still mad at each other over the affair, now forty years old.

Muslims in Europe are less happy, more likely to support their government, and more likely to have significant relations with people of other faiths—than their non-Muslim countrymen and –women.

This according to a new study released by Gallup, drawing on research previously done during their global survey of Muslims.

What’s really interesting to me, navel-gazing American that I am, is that when respondents from the United States and Canada were included for comparison, North Americans came off as far more likely than their European counterparts to agree that they’ve learned something from people of another faith in the last year.

That part made me proud, I must say. Over the 20-plus years I’ve been watching Europe, this may be the first time I’ve seen pollsters add a challenging question (that of learning from someone in the last year) to the usual, bland, tolerance questions, which always strike me as condescending.

I had a truly interesting conversation with some students at Ohio State the other day, on the topic of standing for justice on campus.

It’s fairly non-controversial to advocate for victims, especially anonymous ones, especially ones far, far away—Uganda, for example.

It’s a lot less popular to judge against perpetrators, especially if they are wrapped in the shimmering robes of enlightened, avant-garde wisdom.

The case in point: one student talked of an art class, in which one (male) student repeatedly showed works depicting women in sexually submissive and degraded positions. He was never challenged, even by the self-proclaimed feminists in class, who were working on awareness issues for domestic violence.

The (female) student telling this story was the only one, and when she brought it up toward the end of the semester, she got no support from her fellow students.

As we discussed the situation, we came to the sense that Christians are in a peculiar situation on campus: the dominant campus narratives of Christian Puritanism militate against an effective Christian stance against gendered violence, as long as there’s even a whiff of eroticism in the latter. This is because there are no ears to hear a case for gendered justice when voiced by parties already known as anti-sex.

Can this possibly be true? Are our campuses so locked into a logic of license, that we cannot hear critiques from some who may be in a position to bring courageous action to bear on a destructive environment?

Singalongs can terrify me on occasion. I grew up in cold-war Europe, you see, where the memory of Nazi fascism and the presence of Soviet conformity developed in me and in my friends a bit of paranoia whenever mobs appeared.

Never mind that at raucous hockey games we readily participated in singing down our opponents. Because fascism is thrilling if you’re on the inside.

That being said, I’ve been listening to a live CD by David Crowder, and have been deeply moved by the lusty singing-along on behalf of the crowd: they’re having a great time; they’re really praising God.

And more: I’ve been reading about Why Men Hate Going to Church and have been feeling gloomy about the male presence in the church. Part of it’s the music: a lot of our praise and worship is, well, feminine: we sing about our feelings about Jesus, and how he’s a knight in shining armor.

But listening to Crowder here was a breath of fresh air, with a male-dominated crowd singing their hearts out, including a particularly cheery Hank Williams cover. They were unified, and they didn’t seem at all about to goose-step down to the town square. Good stuff.