Miscellaneous News

dxq4412 said:

As for Japan and Britain, you are partially right. However, I need to explain that most Chinese people do not hold a grudge against contemporary Japan and Britain. This is because the Communist Party has taught us to separate the interests of the people from those of the imperialist government. Mao Zedong famously stated: “The Japanese and Chinese people are both victims of Japanese militarism. The enemy of both peoples is Japanese militarism.” I won’t evaluate whether this dichotomy is right or wrong. It allows most Chinese people to treat Japan and Britain with an attitude of “They are crazy and may have an episode at any time, but as long as they don’t have an episode, we can be cool, but it doesn’t mean I forget that they are actually crazy.” I am a native of mainland China and have lived in Wuhan all my life. It’s common for young mainland Chinese to watch Japanese anime while criticizing Japanese right-wingers. It’s normal that you haven’t met a Chinese person who wants revenge. But forgiveness? No one can forgive things like the Japanese invasion and massacre of China or Britain’s forced opium trade. It’s too difficult. All we can do is hope they don’t have an episode so we can be cool.

Unless they die and are reborn twice like Russia, we might be able to forgive them.

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Why the Idea of Western Civilization is More Myth Than History​

Greeks did not give us Western Civilization. That there is no golden thread, unfurling unbroken through time from Plato to NATO. That we in the modern West are not the heirs of a unique and elevated cultural tradition, stretching back through Atlantic modernity to Enlightenment and Renaissance Europe, and from there through the darkness of the medieval period and ultimately back to the glories of classical Greece and Rome.

For most of us, it seems normal—even natural—to think of Western history in these terms. Unthinkingly, we assume that the modern West is the custodian of a privileged inheritance, passed down through a kind of cultural genealogy that we usually refer to as “Western Civilization.”

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Greeks and Romans were much more diverse than we might think. They were neither predominantly white nor predominantly European, and indeed did not conceive of racial and geographical categories in the same way that we now do. As a result, the monks of western Europe, laboriously copying Latin manuscripts in their dusty scriptoria, were not the only medieval heirs of classical antiquity.

So too were the merchants of fourteenth century Sudan, conducting their trade in Greek; and so too were the Buddhist sculptors of northern India and Pakistan, who drew on the artistic traditions of the Indo-Greek kingdoms.

But perhaps the greatest centre of medieval classical learning when it came to the sciences was in Baghdad, the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate, where classical scholarship was fused with new philosophical and scientific developments drawn from across Asia, Africa, and Europe.

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It was only with the expansion of European overseas imperialism over the course of the seventeenth century that a more coherent idea of the West began to emerge, being deployed as a conceptual tool to draw the distinction between the type of people who could legitimately be colonised, and those who could legitimately be colonizers.

With the invention of the West came the invention of Western history—an elevated and exclusive lineage that provided an historical justification for the Western domination. According to the English jurist and philosopher Francis Bacon, there were only three periods of learning and civilization in human history: “one among the Greeks, the second among the Romans, and the last among us, that is to say, the nations of Western Europe.”

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It was the privileged inheritance of Western Civilization, the cultural and intellectual correlate of race, that justified the differential treatment of different groups of Americans.

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Western Civilization is therefore not just a myth in the sense that it is a fiction that we tell ourselves, despite knowing that it is factually false. It is a myth that was invented to justify slavery, imperialism, and oppression. As such, it served the ideological needs of the time of its invention, reflecting the core values of the society that produced it.

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Breadbox said:

Most people don't really hate Britain because it is far away and not an internationally relevant country (being a US lackey does not make one internationally relevant). But this is not true for Japan, Japanese militarism is unquestionably the product of the unhinged mental tendency of the average Japanese as early as the Meiji restoration, almost everyone is pro-invasion. The proliferation of militarist thoughts and foreign policy is a bottom up process through and through, non-warlike Japanese leaders were assassinated, University students would protests for more wars, more escalation, more invasions and seizing of more land.

Faction that opposes invasion or believe in genuine peace do not exist in the wider Japanese society until the moment they got nuked, the closest thing you have are government officials who believe that Japan isn't strong enough to invade everyone just yet.

There's no need to seek common ground with the average Japanese as there are none, Japan is an exceptional country is this regard, this is not applicable to any other country in the world. The more you read their history the more it is obvious that the only way that commonality that can be established with the Japanese is with a nuclear weapon.

The Japanese "people" are "victims" of militarism in the same way that a mass shooter who was shot dead by others defending themselves is a victim of gun violence, no one actually considers that the shooter to be "as much of a victim" as those it shot. The idea that Japanese militarism is a product of "Individual warlords" are just happy lies we tell ourselves.

Also(unrelated, just thought I would bring it up) Hu Yaobang can go fuck himself, imagine bending over backwards for right wing Japanese nationalist(Yasuhiro Nakasone) who pioneered wartime sexual slavery, reading the things that China used to do just to woo their investments make me throw up. Let me say this is again, the thing that popularized the practice of comfort women is elected back into office while holding the exact same view as he had pre-war. I wouldn't be surprised if alot of people wants revenge, won't feel a single ounce of remorse if it got itself nuked again

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jwnz said:

@pmc go have more of whatever you prefer.

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Chevalier said:

Cathay gate gets worse as auntie Lu’s in senior roles tearfully proclaim their worship of white anglos

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1661588957082296320

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jwnz said:

@manqiangrexue @pmc

Don't you two have better things to do then wasting your time... and others...

@manqiangrexue go have more sex with your beautiful wife.

@pmc go have more of whatever you prefer.

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