David Rozado has created the website Media Analytics where you can track the frequency of various words in the New York Times from 1970-2017. This would appear to be a very useful tool for tracking the Zeitgeist. You can do something similar in Google Books, but it only runs to 2000.
Anyhow, here is his keynote graph tracking the rise of various SJWisms:
You can also track Great Power dynamics and international crises using this tool. For instance, “Russia” was getting much fewer mentions by the late 1990s than “Soviet” during the late 1980s, though it spiked upwards since 2014. But China has been growing steadily and has long overtaken Russia.
Please keep off topic posts to the current Open Thread.
If you are new to my work, start here.
Why were “anti-Semitism”, “Nazi” and (especially) “Holocaust” so big in the 90s?
The contrast between the ‘KKK’ and ‘AIDS’ graphs is telling; looking only at these figures, which would you guess was affecting more people in America today?
My guess: Schindler’s List was released in late 1993 and its critical and commercial success generated renewed interest in the Holocaust. Also the National Holocaust Museum opened in DC the same year so the topic was just sort of “in the air,” I think.
Some of those (transgender, intersectionality, Islamophobia) were not even real words back in the day.
Hate wins. It’s everywhere, it has been accumulating in the steady, peaceful, good-life we have been having.
One way to remove hate is with an actual conflict, the resulting pain has a sobering effect. Too bad the tools are so overwhelming and we are densely packed, it is simply logistically hard to have a good war – or even some hate-liberating civil unrest.
We are about to find out what happens when safety valves are removed and pressure steadily increases. They could bring back Game of Thrones and burn down a few more cities with whites slaughtered in the most gruesome way – having the victims use cyrillic symbols and sneer at people of color would be helpful.
Wait, that is already in every Hollywood movie. Maybe it is time to escalate. How about a mestizo chica – with incredible math skills and partial Habsburg ancestry – who murders her way through the eastern European marches killing vote-riggers, trolls and topless white guys. The freed lebensraum is used to settle Nigerian brain surgeons and Paki enterpreneurs. The white scum are then burnt in large funeral pyres by diverse female and he-would-actually-prefer-to-be-female characters. That would buy us a year or two. (Apologies for going off-topic.)
That was my first guess too, and it is certainly responsible for an initial rise, but there is a massive peak in 1996. From further inquiry however, it seems that it was due to the Irving trial taking place in 1996.
But I still do not understand the ‘antisemitism’ graph (and I also can’t work out what term replicates the graph he shows above)
Microaggression shot up and down as quickly as the Beanie Babies craze.
It seems to be a pattern with several of the phenomena which were thought to be the most flagrant examples of ‘SJWism’ (albeit the others had a less pronounced drop); cf. ‘slut-shaming’, ‘fat-shaming’, ‘safe-space’ and even ‘intersectionalism’. Their drop also roughly parallels the drop in salience in the online right-wing (youtube) sphere of ‘anti-SJW’ commentators (although they still have quillette I suppose) relative to the alt-right. I think the controversy about all of those issues represents a stage of ‘culture wars’ which is now over as we have moved into more explicitly anti-white and tranny kids stuff.
If you want to speculated about future of movie industry due to rising wokeness and rising Russophobia…
In 1945, Joseph Goebbels predicted:
Was he right?
Let the trends continue few years more, and assume that history continues to evolve as Mr. Karlin predicted here.
http://www.unz.com/akarlin/rog-shoahed-the-jews
In this case I can see ole Joseph’s words coming true. We can see great blockbusting movie, where cast of LGBT women of color in stylish black uniforms defend United Europe against savage Russian horde.
Guaranteed worldwide box office hit.
This is a fantastic tool for amateur historians. I want to look under the hood and see if I can make a customized version for myself in Python.
They’ve been big for decades, at least since the comedy confused for tragedy Diary of Anne Frank was televised in the 50s. The only thing you hear more about than the “Holocaust” is the weather report.
That decline of “duties” in the end……
Count the Holocaust films.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Holocaust_films
Peak Holocaust was in 90’s and early 00’s. Afterwards, the holocaust fatigue sets in and interest is waning, feel free to speculate why.
That Joey Goebbels was quite a joker. Too bad he didn’t stick around for the Nurnberg trial, they could had used him there for context.
Ok, stop right there. Could those ladies (loosely defined) take a break from fighting the Russian hordes and call me?
I am casting a movie where Hitler is actually a secret Bolshevik who came to power as a result of Russian meddling. Yes, before Facebook there was the forgotten scandal with the local Nazi graffiti in German toilets that swung the 1933 election, and guess who did most of it? (Hint: there were cyrillic symbols interspersed with the anti-Semitic filth, and in any case it is highly likely that it could have happened.) I need some stylish ladies for the toilets’ scenes – German hygiene pre-Hitler in the early 1930’s was not yet fully so-to-speak Aryan, we need to liven it up…have them call me.
Was it 9/11?
“Incitement mission accomplished” and all that.
Then there was something like a real war going on, complete with conspiracy rumors, passports found in rubble, Anthrax from USAMRIID, Tora Bora, Nigerian Yellowcake, “sexed up” dossiers, dead Kellys, Patriot Acts, more conspiracy rumors, Pollack, dancing Israelis, Saddam gassing his own people and everything. Who has time for a silly Holocaust – or even going to the movies – in those circumstances? Oh yeah, the economy wasn’t so good either.
That was also when Israelis also started to get really really nasty with Palestinians, right around 2002 with the Jenin camp “battle”. Felt like they knew they could finally let rip.
Nope, it last longer. The peak is in the 00’s, and decline starts in the 10’s, slowly.
https://imgur.com/a/6Z0N2bO
Source: Wikipedia, no idea how accurate and representative is the list.
OT: what is up with the anonymous numbers? The same anon is supposed to have the same number? If so, it does not work for me. Am I supposed to keep Unz.com cookies?
they’re simply trying word by word, and keep those that catch on, don’t have that much of an opposition etc.
???
This doesn’t feel right. There is a lot more “Russia” than “China” in mainstream US media, including NYT. I’m saying it as a frequent reader of NYT. Mentions of “Russia” should be seen skyrocketing starting in 2016.
Schindler’s List is interesting as there are no gas chambers, they are shower rooms, if I remember correctly. It is actually very revisionist with just shootings, camps etc.
A world of victim wokeness.
i wonder how much of this was Trayvon Martin.
So terrors and those behind win.