John Lennon mocks the Japanese language while his wife Yoko Ono looks on adoringly, on national (U.S.) television in 1971. (See also: link)
(I think maybe I’ll just keep re-posting this until it gets some appropriate reaction.)
A guy named Ellis Sharp wrote this in an excellent article (Bob Dylan’s Racist Song) in 2005.
Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, envisioned the future Jewish State (Der Judenstaat, 1896) as “a part of the wall against Asia… an outpost of civilization against barbarism.” (See: 1, 2)
“People are just as happy as they make up their minds to be.”— Abraham Lincoln
Obviously this is a dumb and immoral attitude, but some of the context is funny. The statement is first of all a slight misquotation of words attributed to Lincoln by the early self-help author Orison Swett Marden in a 1917 book called How to Get What You Want. Marden was part of a movement espousing the idea that all disease is mental in origin and anybody can get what they want by thinking the right thoughts. He claimed that Abraham Lincoln said “folks are usually about as happy as they make up their minds to be.” Whether or not Lincoln really said it, that more measured statement has been altered and made more extreme and also much more widely circulated by the usual process, while the always dubious attribution to Lincoln has of course been preserved. Perhaps capping off the joke is the fact that much of this sloppiness is riding the coattails of someone whose real words include such gems as: “I, as much as any other man, am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”— Dwight D. Eisenhower (via f1oating)
It’s nice to say nice things. But Eisenhower’s less pious statements are more significant:
“We are always wrong when we believe that orientals think logically as we do”
“My whole picture of China is claws reaching at you because you looked like you had five cents”
Then there’s the human toll of Eisenhower’s actual policies, including 25 years of brutal dictatorship in Iran following Eisenhower’s active destruction of Iranian democracy and half a century of massive atrocities and war with hundreds of thousands killed in Guatemala after Eisenhower’s destruction of Guatemalan democracy.
(Source: wilwheaton, via wordsuperfluous-deactivated2011)
“When a person doesn’t have gratitude, something is missing in his or her humanity. A person can almost be defined by his or her attitude toward gratitude.”— Elie Wiesel (via 117elevenseven)
Elie Wiesel says, for example, that African Americans are not grateful enough (to Jews):
“I feel sorry for blacks. There is one thing they should learn from us and that is gratitude.”
“No more well-meaning ignorance, no more cooptation, no more assuming that this thing we’re all fighting for is the same; one revolution under man, with liberty and justice for all. No more. Let’s run it down. White males are most responsible for the destruction of human life and environment on the planet today. Yet…”1 “[w]hite women prefer white men to the exclusion of everyone else—and Asian and Hispanic women prefer them even more exclusively. These three types of women only respond well to white men. More significantly, these groups’ reply rates to non-whites is terrible.”2
1. Goodbye to All That, by Robin Morgan, 1970, reprinted in Rosalyn Fraad Baxandall and Linda Gordon, Dear Sisters: Dispatches from the Women’s Liberation Movement. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2000.
2. How Your Race Affects The Messages You Get, by Christian Rudder, 2009. OkTrends / Dating Research from OkCupid.
Amy Tan opens her Joy Luck Club with a fake Chinese fairy tale about a duck that wants to be a swan and a mother who dreams of her daughter being born in America, where she’ll grow up speaking perfect English and no one will laugh at her and where a “woman’s worth is [not] measured by the loudness of her husband’s belch.” The fairy tale is not Chinese but white racist. It is not informed by any Chinese intelligence. This is Confucian culture as seen through the interchangeable Chinese/Japanese/Korean/Vietnamese mix (depending on which is the yellow enemy of the moment) of Hollywood. “They sell their daughters at thirteen years old into marriage or worse… . They know nothing of the love we have for our women,” says Cary Grant in Destination Tokyo.
Ducks in the barnyard are not the subject of Chinese fairy tales, except as
food. Swans are not the symbols of physical female beauty, vanity, and promiscuity that they are in the West. Chinese admire the fact that swans mate for life;
they represent romantic love and familial bliss. There is nothing in Chinese fairy
tales to justify characterizing the Chinese as measuring a woman’s worth by the
loudness of her husband’s belch.
Frank Chin. “Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and the Fake”.
In Chan, Jeffery Paul; Chin, Frank; Inada, Lawson Fusao et al.. The Big Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Chinese American and Japanese American Literature. New York, N.Y., U.S.A.: Meridan, 1991.
4si4:
No communist should quote fascist pervert Gandhi.
Word.
In a nutshell this is the eternal and terminal justification for Western hegemony: Asian men (even Gandhi) are fascist perverts.
(See also: link)Except nobody made any blanket claim about ‘Asian’ men in the way you are implying - but of course you should feel free to read ‘Western hegemony’ into absolutely every statement you see. Personally, I don’t follow the logic that simply because Gandhi was non-Western any criticism of his character or ideology is necessarily racist or imperialist. It seems you are just trigger-happy when it comes to slinging post-colonialist indictments around. Such activity serves no intellectual or practical purpose.
Digital Pidgin expresses the standard (and insane) perspective of the orientalist white left:
A) If you call the most respected Asian figure of the 20th century a “fascist pervert” whose words should be excluded from discussion then there is no need to persuade anyone or provide any evidence.
B) Anyone who calls that Western racism is “trigger-happy when it comes to slinging post-colonialist indictments around.”
Digital Pidgin thinks the burden of proof is on me.
“[T]he whole of her [India’s] past history, if it be anything, is the history of the successive conquests she has undergone. Indian society has no history at all, at least no known history. What we call its history, is but the history of the successive intruders who founded their empires on the passive basis of that unresisting and unchanging society.”
- Karl Marx in 1853
“[W]hat our historical works record as his [the Chinaman’s] ‘history’ is nothing more than an enumeration of the various robber bands, by which the patient, shrewd and soulless people, without sacrificing an iota of its individuality, has allowed itself to be ruled”
- Houston Stewart Chamberlain in 1897
