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imomusPeople insist on fighting the wrong dragons, the Old Dragons, the second world war dragons, the slayed dragons, when they should be fighting the New Dragons, the dragons now roaming the globe, trying to run it, breathing fire and killing people.
Don't flog dead horses, and don't waste your time fighting pre-slayed dragons! Please be vigilant, because today's dragon wears sheep's clothing!
Today's dragon is cunning. His fire breath is manufactured by BAE Systems -- stop the corruption investigation, cynics! -- and his rhetoric has been gently hammered out in the white forge of 1960s and 1970s left liberal identity politics. That's why he's such a hard fascist to slay; he sounds like your old sociology prof! The only difference is that your old sociology prof didn't invade Iraq to "bring democracy and human rights"!
Here's a f'rinstance. Over on Neomarxisme there's a debate going on about blood types. Today's Japanese are very interested in blood type. It's one of the first things Japanese people ask you, after your birthday. It's taken to be an indicator of your personality, and to be a good predictor of relationship compatibility. You'd think that linking this to Nazism would be something even Marxy wouldn't stoop to, but that's exactly what he does, quoting Eiji Oguma's book "A Genealogy of 'Japanese' Self-Images".
Oguma has examined editions of magazines called Racial Hygiene and Eugenics published in Japan in the first half of the 1930s (the era of the Original Dragons!) and has found that "a great deal of research was carried out on the connection between intelligence and physical abilities on the one hand, and blood type on the other". He concludes (somewhat illogically) that "the origin of the contemporary theory of blood types which is so popular in Japan today can be seen here". (This is illogical because we're not told definitively that this is the first appearance of these ideas in Japan.) He then makes the link with fascism (the Dead Dragons, but not, remember, today's Living Dragons!) by saying that "within the eugenic school, some argued that each race and nation had a specific distribution ratio of blood types, which was an index of the nation's temperament and of its superiority or inferiority" and that this in turn connects to the belief that "the Japanese nation is a superior, great family nation created in the Japanese islands and presided over by the unbroken line of Emperors, and the only homeland of the Japanese nation is the Japanese islands."
The comments below the piece are full of condemnation of this "pseudoscience". "I can't tell you how much I loathe the blood type personality bullshit and all the other annoying superstitious nonsense in Japan," writes one American. Another is keen to distinguish this superstition from another closer to home: in her family, "our personalities are *nothing* like our blood types... I don't believe in astrology, but for what it's worth, my sign under either zodiac is accurate enough that I can tell people my sign without worrying that they will get the wrong idea about me, were they into that sort of thing."
A British person who fights living rather than dead dragons, and thinks that one of the identifying marks of a dragon is that it attacks other races and other ways of living, at this point smells smoke. "All Japanese people I have known have been very interested in blood type," he writes -- okay, I write. "All Japanese people I have known have believed in ghosts. Hisae tells me that speaking to rice kindly will make it resist decay longer. I accept these things -- not as dogma I must believe myself, but as part of the make-up of the average Japanese person."
Apparently this acceptance makes me a conservative. "I understand your conservative (defining conservatism as support for the status quo) perspective," says someone called Brown, who's often on my side in these debates, "and appreciate it. But do you also disapprove of such social tinkering as say, various civil rights movements, or increased political intervention in the economy? Pretty strange version of Leftism you're working with there."
Brown's view of liberalism, apparently, is that we should get upset and intervene when we disapprove of other people's way of doing things, including running their own countries a certain way, or entertaining their own superstitions. It's actually that discredited interventionist dragon, that saurian in sheep's clothing, Neo-Liberalism.
Other people's customs are not beyond criticism, snarls the New Dragon (not the Old One, the Nazi one)! Look, in some parts of Africa they cut off a woman's clitoris! That's totally against the identity politics we pioneered in our own societies as long ago as the 1970s! (The Old Dragon would just have said "They're inferior!") Human rights, although we made them up, are universal! So let's invade! (The Old Dragon would just have said "We're more powerful! So let's invade!")
Tony Blair uses concepts like democracy, humanitarianism, women's rights and global interdependence as justifications for pre-emptive war in this interview, given to John Humphries yesterday at 10 Downing Street. Globalization is making us all depend on each other more, he says, so we need to nip problems in the bud. Strip out the New Dragonspeak, though, and that means making an inversion of strength and weakness, using the future as a space for creative accountancy. Again and again we see the New Dragons doing this. Sure, NOW we are powerful, say the New Dragons, and they are weak. But SOMETIME IN THE FUTURE (as short a period as twenty minutes, according to the Dodgy Dossier's assessment of Saddam's ability to threaten the UK) the weak will rise up against us, and become the strong. We will, for instance, see Europe become Eurabia, and the white race become dhimmis. We will see Arabs becoming the majority in Israel, and enslaving the Jews behind a wall. To nip these things in the bud, the New Dragons must kill, maim, invade, disable, paralyse the weak NOW. They must breathe pre-emptive fire on a merely potential threat. A threat portrayed as illiberalism, and yet "forestalled" (actually, fire-fanned) by a far, far worse illiberalism.
Hitler is the model of the Old Dragons, and the New Dragons (including those who run Israel) have every interest in keeping our definition of "dragon" pinned to Hitler, who is eternally synonymous with evil. Who, though, is the model of the New Dragons? I'd pick Pim Fortuyn. He's as dead as Hitler, having been assassinated by an animal rights campaigner. But his project lives on. He's the most extreme and sincere example of New Dragonism. Not only did he attack Muslims in Holland using liberal-sounding arguments (they can't understand our tolerance, he said, citing Muslims' condemnation of his own homosexuality -- therefore they must go), he actually was a sociology professor. His lieutenant -- the man who took over his party when Pim was shot dead -- was a black man.
If the ideology of universal, transcendental liberalism and human rights is to the New Dragons what eugenics and racial purity was to the Old Dragons, their mythical locus (replacing concentration camps and Hitler's bunker) must be Baghdad's Green Zone. Bloomsbury has just published Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran. The Guardian has been running extracts. In the first, Chandrasekaran describes just how out of touch with Iraqi culture the Green Zone is. This is what happens when "transcendental" neo-liberalism touches down in a real place -- total surreal disconnection, pure imposition.
"The Green Zone was Baghdad's Little America... Americans drove around in new GMC Suburbans, dutifully obeying the 35mph speed limit signs posted by the CPA on the flat, wide streets. When they cruised around, they kept the air-conditioning on high and the radio tuned to 107.7 FM - Freedom Radio, an American-run station that played classic rock and rah-rah messages. Every two weeks, the vehicles were cleaned at a Halliburton car wash.
"...Most of the CPA's staff had never worked outside the United States. More than half, according to one estimate, had got their first passport in order to travel to Iraq. If they were going to survive in Baghdad, they needed the same sort of bubble that American oil companies had built for their workers in Saudi Arabia, Nigeria and Indonesia.
"It feels like a little America," Mark Schroeder said as we sat by the pool on a scorching afternoon, sipping water bottled in the United Arab Emirates. [None of the food or drink served in the Green Zone is allowed to come from Iraq in case it's poisoned.] Schroeder, who was 24 at the time, had been working for a Republican congressman in Washington when he heard that the CPA needed more staff. He sent his résumé to the Pentagon. A few months later, he was in the Republican Palace.
"...Schroeder was incredulous when I told him that I lived in what he and others called the Red Zone, that I drove around without a security detail, that I ate at local restaurants, that I visited Iraqis in their homes. "What's it like out there?" he asked.
"I described the pleasure of walking through al-Shorja market, and of having tea in cafes in the old quarter. I spoke about discussions of Iraqi culture and history that occurred when I went to the homes of my Iraqi friends for lunch. The more I talked, the more I felt like an extraterrestrial describing life on another planet."
This complete out-of-touchness is the reason the New Dragons will fail just as utterly as the Old Dragons did. In fifty years time their deeds will be as synonymous with pure, indisputable evil as the Old Dragons' deeds currently are. It's just a shame that some of the better ideas generated by Western liberalism will inevitably be babies thrown out with the bathwater of Western neo-imperialism. Will ideas like "human rights" be as sullied by association with the New Dragons as eugenics is now, thanks to its co-option by the Old Dragons?
Don't flog dead horses, and don't waste your time fighting pre-slayed dragons! Please be vigilant, because today's dragon wears sheep's clothing!Today's dragon is cunning. His fire breath is manufactured by BAE Systems -- stop the corruption investigation, cynics! -- and his rhetoric has been gently hammered out in the white forge of 1960s and 1970s left liberal identity politics. That's why he's such a hard fascist to slay; he sounds like your old sociology prof! The only difference is that your old sociology prof didn't invade Iraq to "bring democracy and human rights"!
Here's a f'rinstance. Over on Neomarxisme there's a debate going on about blood types. Today's Japanese are very interested in blood type. It's one of the first things Japanese people ask you, after your birthday. It's taken to be an indicator of your personality, and to be a good predictor of relationship compatibility. You'd think that linking this to Nazism would be something even Marxy wouldn't stoop to, but that's exactly what he does, quoting Eiji Oguma's book "A Genealogy of 'Japanese' Self-Images".
Oguma has examined editions of magazines called Racial Hygiene and Eugenics published in Japan in the first half of the 1930s (the era of the Original Dragons!) and has found that "a great deal of research was carried out on the connection between intelligence and physical abilities on the one hand, and blood type on the other". He concludes (somewhat illogically) that "the origin of the contemporary theory of blood types which is so popular in Japan today can be seen here". (This is illogical because we're not told definitively that this is the first appearance of these ideas in Japan.) He then makes the link with fascism (the Dead Dragons, but not, remember, today's Living Dragons!) by saying that "within the eugenic school, some argued that each race and nation had a specific distribution ratio of blood types, which was an index of the nation's temperament and of its superiority or inferiority" and that this in turn connects to the belief that "the Japanese nation is a superior, great family nation created in the Japanese islands and presided over by the unbroken line of Emperors, and the only homeland of the Japanese nation is the Japanese islands."The comments below the piece are full of condemnation of this "pseudoscience". "I can't tell you how much I loathe the blood type personality bullshit and all the other annoying superstitious nonsense in Japan," writes one American. Another is keen to distinguish this superstition from another closer to home: in her family, "our personalities are *nothing* like our blood types... I don't believe in astrology, but for what it's worth, my sign under either zodiac is accurate enough that I can tell people my sign without worrying that they will get the wrong idea about me, were they into that sort of thing."
A British person who fights living rather than dead dragons, and thinks that one of the identifying marks of a dragon is that it attacks other races and other ways of living, at this point smells smoke. "All Japanese people I have known have been very interested in blood type," he writes -- okay, I write. "All Japanese people I have known have believed in ghosts. Hisae tells me that speaking to rice kindly will make it resist decay longer. I accept these things -- not as dogma I must believe myself, but as part of the make-up of the average Japanese person."
Apparently this acceptance makes me a conservative. "I understand your conservative (defining conservatism as support for the status quo) perspective," says someone called Brown, who's often on my side in these debates, "and appreciate it. But do you also disapprove of such social tinkering as say, various civil rights movements, or increased political intervention in the economy? Pretty strange version of Leftism you're working with there."Brown's view of liberalism, apparently, is that we should get upset and intervene when we disapprove of other people's way of doing things, including running their own countries a certain way, or entertaining their own superstitions. It's actually that discredited interventionist dragon, that saurian in sheep's clothing, Neo-Liberalism.
Other people's customs are not beyond criticism, snarls the New Dragon (not the Old One, the Nazi one)! Look, in some parts of Africa they cut off a woman's clitoris! That's totally against the identity politics we pioneered in our own societies as long ago as the 1970s! (The Old Dragon would just have said "They're inferior!") Human rights, although we made them up, are universal! So let's invade! (The Old Dragon would just have said "We're more powerful! So let's invade!")
Tony Blair uses concepts like democracy, humanitarianism, women's rights and global interdependence as justifications for pre-emptive war in this interview, given to John Humphries yesterday at 10 Downing Street. Globalization is making us all depend on each other more, he says, so we need to nip problems in the bud. Strip out the New Dragonspeak, though, and that means making an inversion of strength and weakness, using the future as a space for creative accountancy. Again and again we see the New Dragons doing this. Sure, NOW we are powerful, say the New Dragons, and they are weak. But SOMETIME IN THE FUTURE (as short a period as twenty minutes, according to the Dodgy Dossier's assessment of Saddam's ability to threaten the UK) the weak will rise up against us, and become the strong. We will, for instance, see Europe become Eurabia, and the white race become dhimmis. We will see Arabs becoming the majority in Israel, and enslaving the Jews behind a wall. To nip these things in the bud, the New Dragons must kill, maim, invade, disable, paralyse the weak NOW. They must breathe pre-emptive fire on a merely potential threat. A threat portrayed as illiberalism, and yet "forestalled" (actually, fire-fanned) by a far, far worse illiberalism.
Hitler is the model of the Old Dragons, and the New Dragons (including those who run Israel) have every interest in keeping our definition of "dragon" pinned to Hitler, who is eternally synonymous with evil. Who, though, is the model of the New Dragons? I'd pick Pim Fortuyn. He's as dead as Hitler, having been assassinated by an animal rights campaigner. But his project lives on. He's the most extreme and sincere example of New Dragonism. Not only did he attack Muslims in Holland using liberal-sounding arguments (they can't understand our tolerance, he said, citing Muslims' condemnation of his own homosexuality -- therefore they must go), he actually was a sociology professor. His lieutenant -- the man who took over his party when Pim was shot dead -- was a black man.If the ideology of universal, transcendental liberalism and human rights is to the New Dragons what eugenics and racial purity was to the Old Dragons, their mythical locus (replacing concentration camps and Hitler's bunker) must be Baghdad's Green Zone. Bloomsbury has just published Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran. The Guardian has been running extracts. In the first, Chandrasekaran describes just how out of touch with Iraqi culture the Green Zone is. This is what happens when "transcendental" neo-liberalism touches down in a real place -- total surreal disconnection, pure imposition.
"The Green Zone was Baghdad's Little America... Americans drove around in new GMC Suburbans, dutifully obeying the 35mph speed limit signs posted by the CPA on the flat, wide streets. When they cruised around, they kept the air-conditioning on high and the radio tuned to 107.7 FM - Freedom Radio, an American-run station that played classic rock and rah-rah messages. Every two weeks, the vehicles were cleaned at a Halliburton car wash.
"...Most of the CPA's staff had never worked outside the United States. More than half, according to one estimate, had got their first passport in order to travel to Iraq. If they were going to survive in Baghdad, they needed the same sort of bubble that American oil companies had built for their workers in Saudi Arabia, Nigeria and Indonesia.
"It feels like a little America," Mark Schroeder said as we sat by the pool on a scorching afternoon, sipping water bottled in the United Arab Emirates. [None of the food or drink served in the Green Zone is allowed to come from Iraq in case it's poisoned.] Schroeder, who was 24 at the time, had been working for a Republican congressman in Washington when he heard that the CPA needed more staff. He sent his résumé to the Pentagon. A few months later, he was in the Republican Palace."...Schroeder was incredulous when I told him that I lived in what he and others called the Red Zone, that I drove around without a security detail, that I ate at local restaurants, that I visited Iraqis in their homes. "What's it like out there?" he asked.
"I described the pleasure of walking through al-Shorja market, and of having tea in cafes in the old quarter. I spoke about discussions of Iraqi culture and history that occurred when I went to the homes of my Iraqi friends for lunch. The more I talked, the more I felt like an extraterrestrial describing life on another planet."
This complete out-of-touchness is the reason the New Dragons will fail just as utterly as the Old Dragons did. In fifty years time their deeds will be as synonymous with pure, indisputable evil as the Old Dragons' deeds currently are. It's just a shame that some of the better ideas generated by Western liberalism will inevitably be babies thrown out with the bathwater of Western neo-imperialism. Will ideas like "human rights" be as sullied by association with the New Dragons as eugenics is now, thanks to its co-option by the Old Dragons?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-23 11:33 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-23 11:42 am (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2007-02-23 12:32 pm (UTC)Funny also that your old disciple scaleman so playfully exposes the randomness of your method in his comment. And how you wiggle out again with the `I choose to criticise my culture' (and that's what everybody has to do) argument. (Guess this makes Oguma non-japanese.)
It seems to me that if anyone is fighting the old wars, it's you. You still seem stuck on ideas from the 70s / 80s most people have moved away from. With good reasons. (From a recent article on Clifford Geertz: `Othering' has become a cuss word amongs anthropologists, something nearly as wicked as `essentialism'.')
Lastly, there's this perennial paradox: no one forces you to read neomarxisme. Why bother? (Unless you feel your interpretation hegemony threatened.) [Yes, this paradox holds for me as well. Why do I bother commenting here?]
der.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-23 12:49 pm (UTC)1. You should focus on actual power relationships in the present, not on historical situations like Nazism nor potential scenarios extrapolated from assumed intentions and projected into the future.
2. There is no neutral cultural ground when it comes to thinking about the world. It's a mistake to think a culture can be criticized from some kind of objective, transcendental metaphysical no-space. It can only be criticized from within the ideological assumptions of a particular culture. I believe that cultures should be changed from within. Change from without is warfare.
3. No culture can ever repeat the exact same gestures and stages as another. It's very common to hear people say that x culture is going through now what y culture did in the 1960s. This cannot be so, because y culture is still around. Pim Fortuyn, for instance, thought that current Islam was a "pre-modern" culture. I disagree. It's post-modern, a creation of the post-modern West. Again, we make these assumptions by failing to see ourselves, our own power, as part of the picture. Like someone who fails to hear his own accent.
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Date: 2007-02-23 12:36 pm (UTC)Maybe he was simply defending Dutch idiosyncrasy the way you defend Japanese idiosyncrasy.
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Date: 2007-02-23 06:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2007-02-23 01:24 pm (UTC)der.
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Date: 2007-02-23 01:15 pm (UTC)(Or perhaps this was your essay autopilot at work again that somehow got you from one to the other.)
der.
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Date: 2007-02-23 01:26 pm (UTC)Marxy
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-23 06:22 pm (UTC)You must be joking here.
I've been sickened all afternoon from reading those discussions and now i can't get the stupid image of George fckn w Bush's stupid grin off my mind. i hold you responsible for it.
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Date: 2007-02-23 01:35 pm (UTC)Click Here (http://macrochan.org/source/O/I/OIAKFWLAYUYKEOPU5EGBXHWCSLS4NOAQ.jpeg)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-23 01:38 pm (UTC)Consider that the main qualification for working in the Green Zone was personal loyalty to Bush, and being anti-abortion, anti-gay rights, and so on.
Their rationale for the war is to frighten other Middle Eastern nations into line, not to spread democracy. They're really a feeble form of the Old Dragon ideology.
Blair went along with the war, but he would never have started it on his own.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-23 07:32 pm (UTC)(no subject)
From:(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-23 02:02 pm (UTC)A question though: do you think the New Dragons actually believe in the neoliberal ideals they spout, or are they simply using them as an excuse to indulge their greed for power and wealth? I tend to think that most of them (the leaders, anyway) tend more towards the latter option, but I'd be curious to know what you think.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-23 02:55 pm (UTC)(no subject)
From:(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-23 02:06 pm (UTC)Most of us Westerners would prefer to live in the relatively free societies that we do. It makes sense that if we place any value on our own freedom, that we would want to share it with other people around the world (who are presumably human beings just like us).
Or are we saying that there is something unique about Western people. Why are we so special that we need this freedom, when others don't?
Are all human rights concepts relative? Or are some, like slavery, absolute?
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-23 06:03 pm (UTC)What's special about Western people, perhaps, is that we have a metaphysical tradition which makes us locate "desireableness" as something outside the known world -- family ties, community, society -- rather than inside it. An absence. Freedom. Others are more inclined to locate desireableness in belonging, integration, ties of family and community, and so on.
Human rights, since they use concepts like freedom very centrally, are of course culturally relative. Which doesn't mean I don't personally support some of them. I am, after all, a Westerner too. I'd just be cautious about forcing them on others. Particularly in these times, when all too often we see them used as a pretext for neo-imperialist sabre-rattling and worse.
(no subject)
From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2007-02-23 07:05 pm (UTC) - ExpandI did say it wasn't a big deal but
Date: 2007-02-23 02:18 pm (UTC)It would be easier if my blood type was more in line with my personality though, because as it is people sometimes make poor assumptions about me and I don't like that. What's wrong with that?
Re: I did say it wasn't a big deal but
Date: 2007-02-23 03:19 pm (UTC)Re: I did say it wasn't a big deal but
From:(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-23 02:41 pm (UTC)This is also fails to recognize that the old and new dragons are ultimately allies. Cultural nationalism is promoted by Japanese right, and the Japanese right is not all that different from Bush/Blair.
In Japan, dissent is actually possible. The left was politically crushed in the 1960's and neo-liberalism runs rampant (as throughout much of the rest of the world), but there have always been voices of dissent like Oguma who challenge the Right's monopoly to define "Japaneseness". (that obviously doesn't mean that everyone who believes in ghosts is a right-winger)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-23 02:46 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2007-02-23 05:17 pm (UTC) - Expandder you often sound like marxy's vicious id.
From:Re: der you often sound like marxy's vicious id.
From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2007-02-23 08:33 pm (UTC) - ExpandRe: der you often sound like marxy's vicious id.
From:(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-23 03:04 pm (UTC)just not if they're racially or ethnically based. it should be about mental capacity. (Although it's probably better to keep even that in the realm of fantasy, because therein lies the cavalcade of potentially horrific slippery-slopes to begin). But I still think some people should just be compulsorily sterilized.
Let the firestorm begin.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-24 12:49 am (UTC)Having read your blog I must ask when is your mandatory surgical appointment coming up?
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From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2007-02-24 10:30 am (UTC) - ExpandSPAYATHON!
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Date: 2007-02-23 03:14 pm (UTC)I really haven't anything to add to it other than now I know why the friendship-card given to me by my new Japanese friend earlier this year included a space for "blood type".
I am quite sure that was the most in-depth friendship card I've ever seen in my life!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-23 03:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-23 03:46 pm (UTC)better than 5 o'clock. pass the bullshit protector, duchess.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-23 03:59 pm (UTC)Arguing that neo-conservatism is neo-liberalism is like arguing that opponants of affirmative action are civil rights activists, since they are agitating for the civil rights of white people.
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Date: 2007-02-23 04:32 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2007-02-23 05:58 pm (UTC)1) People like Bush and Cheney are not neo-liberals. I'm sorry, but you've got that completely wrong. Their regime is almost a reaction to neo-liberalism (which, in America, means post-Reagan liberalism), which pissed most Americans off precisely by being incredibly non-critical and non-judgmental. Blair might be the British version of a neo-liberal...but the cultures of American politics and British simply do not translate from one to another. In America, your implied position of total non-judgment of other culture's mores would be considered extremely liberal.
2) "Other people's customs are not beyond criticism, snarls the New Dragon (not the Old One, the Nazi one)!"
...which you follow up, directly, with an implied criticism of American cultural isolationism, as embodied by American expats in Baghdad. Do you criticize Muslims who live in Britain or America and exist within their own self-imposed isolation, to protect themselves and their children from the perceived decadence and dangers of the outside cultures?
Or, as is so common in the world these days, is it just shithead behavior if us Americans do it?
(Personally, I refuse to take cultural criticism from Europeans until y'all learn to serve cola in large glasses, with ice. Until then, Europe is just one big Renaissance Faire, as far as I'm concerned. :-) )
I agree that this tendency to compare anything we don't like to Hitler is incredibly annoying. But, look: are you really going to tell me that you don't think the Japanese are, generally speaking, a pretty racist society? My Korean friends might disagree with you. My kokojin friend, whose grandparents refused to accept her existence because she was half-black, might disagree with you. Is racism okay when Japanese people practice it?
I agree that linking the Japanese cultural fad for blood type to old-school eugenic and fascism is more than a touch hysterical...but that's because Japanese culture in general seems so incredibly ephemeral and superficial to me that I don't bother to take much of it seriously, because it won't exist in ten years. (Remember the big fad for neon-covered semi trucks?)
But there's a big difference between seeing fascism in Japanese pop culture and condemning societies who hack bits off their women. Unless you simply don't believe in the notion of basic, universal human rights at all, in which case I don't really know what to say.
I haven't traveled as extensively as you have, but I've traveled a good deal more than most Americans, and I've learned to simply accept a lot of what I see overseas. (Except the large drinks thing, which I will bloody-mindedly pursue until either I am dead or I can buy a one-liter drink anywhere from the jungles of Sulawesi to the Portobello Road.)
But when it comes to larger issues, such as racism and sexism, then yeah, I think it's worth pointing out when people are acting like assholes.
That doesn't mean I'm in favor of invading their countries and lighting them on fire. (And come on, Momus, you're not seriously suggesting that Bush actually invaded Iraq for the reasons he said he did? You can't blame neo-liberalism for Iraq any more than you can blame Nietzsche for Auschwitz.) At least, not most of the time -- there's always some reprehensible shit going down in Africa that makes me doubt my nonviolent stance.
But if we're not going to kill 'em all and let [insert deity here] sort 'em out, does that mean we have to simply accept their ways, even if we find them objectionable in the extreme? I don't think so.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-23 06:13 pm (UTC)There is no level playing field here. Power changes everything. A rich man can do everything a poor man does (slumming trustafarians come to mind) and yet his behaviour will have a completely different meaning. I think Jarvis explains why in "Common People".
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From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2007-02-23 11:42 pm (UTC) - Expand(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-23 05:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-24 12:47 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-23 06:08 pm (UTC)That's the only time I was involved in politics, as well, to stop myself from headdesking constantly for two years. Glad that's all over now.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-23 06:26 pm (UTC)New-style totalitarianisms permit dissent readily (the protests against the Iraq war in the USA, the million signatures on the Downing Street petition, the Japanese student riots of the early 1960s), but feel confident enough to ignore them and proceed with their plans anyway.
After a while, the situations they create are accepted by the general population as having been inevitable, or certainly not possible to be changed now.
Stop demonizing Marxy! (or should that be dragonizing?)
Date: 2007-02-23 06:56 pm (UTC)But Momus, aren't you the one who is throwing out the baby of liberalism with the bathwater? I mean, even the most timid liberal criticism of anything associated with mainstream Japanese society seems to provoke rather hysterical rants on your side. In this post by Marxy, it's not even criticism, just a quote without commentary from a text analyzing the genealogy of some part of Japanese identity discourse, and from a Japanese scholar to boot. You're the one who is lumping that together with Militarism, war mongering, Tony Blair, Dutch right-wing populism, Israel, neo-conservatism, and the reincarnated ghost of Adolf Hitler.
How dare you criticize Oguma's writing, by the way? I mean, he's not from your culture! And then you even use that imperialist Western concept of "logic" to attack him.
Re: Stop demonizing Marxy! (or should that be dragonizing?)
Date: 2007-02-23 08:21 pm (UTC)Its all poetry and who can tell the best story.
People just don't realise how big an influence on the West Yoko Ono really is.
Re: Stop demonizing Marxy! (or should that be dragonizing?)
From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2007-02-24 12:56 am (UTC) - Expandnew age underpins liberal reason
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Date: 2007-02-23 07:05 pm (UTC)http://davidthompson.typepad.com/davidthompson/2007/02/the_perils_of_m.html
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Date: 2007-02-23 07:23 pm (UTC)"Especially helpful is what Bourdieu writes in Distinction: social identity lies in difference, and difference is asserted against what is closest, which represents the greatest threat. An outline of a general theory of power and violence should include a consideration of the narcissism of minor differences, also because its counterpart - hierarchy and large differences - makes for relative stability and peace."
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From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2007-02-24 01:47 am (UTC) - Expand(no subject)
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From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2007-02-24 11:56 am (UTC) - Expand(no subject)
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