Really weird (/s) how quickly it went from a couple of Chinese tourists asking politely not be filmed to the guy embracing the racist Winnie the Pooh stereotype and talking about how oppressed Hong Kong and Taiwan are.
Really weird (/s) how quickly it went from a couple of Chinese tourists asking politely not be filmed to the guy embracing the racist Winnie the Pooh stereotype and talking about how oppressed Hong Kong and Taiwan are.
i never actually got the connection before now.. i just thought it was because he's kinda chubby and pooh is a little bit dopey.. didn't realize the yellow thing at all.. wow
Originally it was a meme about the way he and Obama looked while walking in a picture, and was innocuous. It began to be used as a way to refer to Xi Jinping in negative propaganda without directly putting his face on it and grew the racist connotations implicitly quickly after by new users of the meme, and the explicit usage with dog-whistled racism followed quickly thereafter with the excuse "we only do it because he doesn't like it."
If I had to guess he didn't care and maybe found it funny originally (if he even saw it early on) but using a caricature for politics instead of good critique is dumb and good to ban. And that's all this was
thinking about this stupid online phenomenon more generally, i dunno if westerners will ever realize that:
nobody in china or russia gives a shit about winnie the pooh or putler memes
posting such memes isn't going to stop the relative decline of the west
their own governments are much greater threats to their personal well-being than china or russia
I see it as a result of the way that imperialism gives Americans the feeling that whatever they do is influential because of the status given through imperialism. A hybrid which grows every time America announces that they will do something on the global stage and is received by vassals as god-given words.
So, no, they won't realize any of that until a significant shift in material circumstances allows for some class consciousness to grow, and that depends on Americans fighting to deepen and work out what that will look like.