Lethe
Captain
Again proof that anti asian hate is rooted in native genocide because natives are just darker skinned chinese phenotypes
I think there is a seed of truth to this, at least in relation to my own country, Australia, though I suspect it holds true for the other Anglo settler-colonial states also. There is a kind of psychic wound deep in the unconscious heart of the country, knowing that much of what it now claims was ill-gotten, the product of violence and injustice, a moral debt that could, at least in the realm of monotheistic religion that acknowledges neither limits to ideals, nor relations of power, could one day be called in. This buried guilt produces the anxiety common to those who cannot sleep with a clean conscience, with all its hostility and deflections.
In any case, reading this stirred a memory of a line from Gore Vidal that I encountered long ago, and I'm pleased that Google eventually allowed me to dig it up. It is from an at the Edinburgh Book Festival in November 2001: "We’re so excited about terrorism in America because we’ve done so many awful things to other people that we’re afraid they might retaliate. And it’s amazing how seldom they do."
This in turn led me on a lovely and refreshing journey revisiting some of Gore Vidal's contributions to public debate over the decades. His deep familial roots in the American political establishment, coupled with his searing criticism of the US government and foreign policy, informed by his background in classics (i.e. Greece and Rome) and delivered with the wit of a talented writer and essayist, remains a singular and formidable combination. He passed away some years ago now. I would urge those (perhaps of a younger generation), not already acquainted with him to check him out. I really need to get around to reading his "narratives of Empire" novels at some point. In the meantime, here are a few other of my favourite lines of his:
Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is increasing evidence that they can't read them either.
There is no human problem that could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.
We have plenty of would-be progressives. But how do you organize? The Democratic Party is just a machine to get votes for its people, probably none of whom should be trusted with high office. The Republican Party is fundamentally crooked and might well be outlawed one of these days. Le Pen, you know, in France, who is an out-and-out fascist, the French have managed in some clever way to contain him. He's always running for president, but his votes never seem to show up. I don't know how they do that.
What is going on here is a deliberate revision of Lincoln in order to serve the saint in the 1980s as opposed to the saint at earlier times when blacks were still colored, having only just stopped being Negroes. In colored and Negro days the saint might have wanted them out of the country, as he did. But in the age of Martin Luther King even the most covertly racist of school boards must agree that a saint like Abraham Lincoln could never have wanted a single black person to leave freedom’s land much less bravery’s home. So all the hagiographers are redoing their plaster images and anyone who draws attention to the discrepancy between their own past crudities and their current falsities is a very bad person indeed, and not a scholar, and probably a communist as well.
At least when the Emperor Justinian decided to outlaw sodomy, he had to come up with a good, practical reason. It is well known, Justinian declared, that buggery is a principal cause of earthquakes. But our lot still quote Leviticus, as if that loony text had anything useful to say about anything except, perhaps, the inadvisability of eating shellfish in the Jerusalem area.
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