• Gosplan14 [any]
    ·
    3 years ago

    A thing that comes to mind is the anti-Japanese panic of the 1980s, that was pretty similar to antisemitic conspiracies about "sneaky [ethnic group] are trying to take us over with their bankers", and of course due to the lack of any form of class consciousness, it very often veered into the racist. For an example, Cyberpunk as a genre often reached for it and minor stuff like the say the "You're fired" scene from Back to the Future 2.

    Interestingly, there was a wave of Antisemitism in the 1980s in Japan with some bestseller books around 1985 which were basically the OG Protocols of the Elders of Zion repackaged for the Japanese public who probably didn't even know what Judaism was. The hostility between the US and Japan back then were basically explained by "It's the Jews trying to impede out rise to power" by the fash.

    Eventually the economic bubble was brought down by Japanese capitalists doing capitalism (and thus inevitably face a crisis by inflating the real estate prices into the unaffordable for the sake of profit) and iirc the US and allies doing some imperialism in the form of currency shenanigans? I don't recall.

    TL;DR - Capitalism promotes racism and other similar phenomena regardless if the countries are rich ("they're trying to force us into submission/outcompete us") or exploited ("they're uppity savages that need "education"")