Book Club

solarz

solarz

Brigadier
Bellum_Romanum said:
Anyone here read this horrendous racist book titled "Ways that Are Dark: The Truth About China" by the piece of shit racist, Ralph Townsend written back in 1933 detailing his experience and understanding of contemporary China during her most trying and troubled times.

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I think this book and the impression it left to it's readers is still what animates a lot of the idiots in America and in the west. Reading this passage alone makes my blood boil.

"Finally, in chapter ten Townsend affirms that the "backward Chinese" are America’s "only legitimate problem in Asia"
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and asks what can be done to deal with a nation that spends aid money corruptly, does not respect its loans, mistreats and attacks foreigners, ignores international drug laws, will not protect foreign investment, and does not engage in productive diplomacy with other nations.
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He warns Americans that the Chinese see kindness only as weakness and thus can never respond to any type of
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. "For every Chinese, from highest to lowest," he argues, "all the acts of life are concentrated upon extracting, from those who mean nothing to him, what he can for the benefit of himself and his clan."
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By contrast, he believes that the Chinese do understand force and respect strength. Therefore, he advocates that the United States forgo naive "sentimentalist" thinking and adopt a policy of "stern insistence upon our rights without cruel abuse of our strength",
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including withholding further loans without strict conditions and holding on to
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and
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.
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Nothing much has changed since 1933.

The above passage exemplifies the American way of thinking about other nations and cultures. They hold their own successes to be the fruit of their exceptional values, and ascribe the struggles of other nations as symptoms of degenerate values.

Look at the way Americans see the Afghans, even in the middle of their hasty retreat from Kabul. They blame the failure of "democracy" in Afghanistan on their "primitive culture"and the fall of their puppet government on Afghan cowardice.

Look at the situation in Ukraine. I will wager that when they can no longer hide the Russians' certain victory, they will start blaming the loss on Ukrainian values.
 
T

tygyg1111

Captain
Registered Member
solarz said:
Nothing much has changed since 1933.

The above passage exemplifies the American way of thinking about other nations and cultures. They hold their own successes to be the fruit of their exceptional values, and ascribe the struggles of other nations as symptoms of degenerate values.

Look at the way Americans see the Afghans, even in the middle of their hasty retreat from Kabul. They blame the failure of "democracy" in Afghanistan on their "primitive culture"and the fall of their puppet government on Afghan cowardice.

Look at the situation in Ukraine. I will wager that when they can no longer hide the Russians' certain victory, they will start blaming the loss on Ukrainian values.
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You can see this with their deflection, projection and lack of self reflection when faced with their own country's failures as well. Covid was the best example
 
Lethe

Lethe

Captain
Has anyone read this? Agents of Subersion: The Fate of John T. Downey and the CIA's Covert War in China by John Delury. Alternatively, are there other good English-language works on American intelligence operations in the PRC?

I recently became aware of Delury's book via
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article wherein the author reflects on the current balloon controversy, and also
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Q&A.
 
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Lethe

Lethe

Captain
I recently encountered this
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of E. H. Carr's The Twenty Years' Crisis 1919-1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations.

I read Carr's What Is History? a decade or more back and some of its more evocative passages still stick in my mind ("just because a mountain takes on different shapes from different perspectives does not imply that it has objectively either no shape at all, or an infinity of shapes"), but to date I had missed this earlier work. In reading the review, Carr's book seems to address subjects that are of great interest to me, namely the formation and role of national mythologies in shaping the behaviour of nations.

[Carr] was intent on revealing the absence of “any absolute and disinterested standard for the conduct of international affairs [....] if, as Carr contended, utopian theories are the weapons of state interests, then those theories, by disguising those interests, in fact further those interests—and hence they are entirely consistent with a realist foreign policy [....] Carr, then, wasn’t concerned that statesmen would mask their real interests in woolly-minded theories but that statesmen had actually assimilated those theories and were now conducting their foreign policies accordingly.

In a novel development in international affairs, Wilson had, as Carr put it, “transplanted” liberalism’s “half-discarded nineteenth-century assumptions … to the almost virgin soil of international politics”—“virgin” because, while hitherto liberal ideals and theories may have disguised state interests, they had not actually defined those interests and motivated policy. To be sure, those ideals still served specific American interests, which was the reason they had taken root in the American political establishment in the first place. But what seems to have deeply troubled Carr about “this transplantation of democratic rationalism from the national to the international sphere” was that, by the “unconscious process” he had noted, those universalist ideals, unmoored from comprehensible, definable state interests, had become for American statesmen an end in themselves.
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When folks critique western (particularly American) rhetorical commitment to notions of "freedom", "democracy", "human rights", etc. it is easy enough for anyone who is even vaguely curious about the world and its recent history to demonstrate the eminently selective and outright hypocritical nature of this rhetoric. Yet while some of it is indeed simply a cloak for the pursuit of national self-interest, it's difficult to avoid the conclusion that much of it is sincere. To a considerable extent, these people believe what they are saying. Which is, to return to one of my perennial points, what makes them so dangerous.

In any case I shall have to read this.
 
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Lethe

Lethe

Captain
I have previously referred to Patrick Smith's book Time No Longer: Americans after the American Century. I am currently reading his earlier book, Somebody Else's Century: East and West in a Post-Western World. As with Time No Longer, Somebody Else's Century is a compilation of three extended essays ("Calligraphy and Clocks", "The Buddhas at Qixia", "The Skyward Garden") drawing on his experiences as a journalist in Japan, China, and India. There is a wonderful epigram at the beginning:

"But surely," I said, "the real Japan must still exist someplace or other if you look around for it."
He shook his head.
"Is there no way to save it?" I wondered.
"No," he said, "there is nothing left to save."
- Donald Richie, in conversation with Yukio Mishima (1970)
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Today I received the Folio Society edition of Monkey, an abridged English translation of the Chinese novel Journey to the West. As with all Folio Society releases, the production qualities are fantastic, though in light of my reading pile I cannot promise to get to it anytime soon:

 
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