I don’t even know where to start. The way the academia has lately co-opted the word “decolonization” while completely gutting its material foundations is already grotesque.
And now this? I guess this is what western/white decolonization looks like.
The way the academia has lately co-opted the word “decolonization”
Anything leftist or leftist-adjacent must be coopted or murked beyond recognition
See I’ve always been wondering how the academics would end up co-opting Lenin one day … Marx continues to be thoroughly co-opted of course, but the naive part of me thinks, well, Lenin who relentlessly fought the liberalization of Marx and all championed the “scaryyyyy violence” “dictatorshippppp (of the prol)” stuff can’t really be co-opted, right? :agony-soviet: (imm sure they’ll find a creative way to do so when some material conditions compel …)
I think there's already a partial co-option, which you see with anti-Stalin takes - where it was big bad Stalin who ruined everything, but Lenin was cool and if he had lived, the Soviet Union would have magically been better and not had any purges or famines. You see this kind of stuff with every socialist who died (or was otherwise removed from positions of power, like Trotsky :pika-pickaxe:) too early to do much stuff (although Lenin actually did a lot, it's just that the people dropping these takes haven't actually read anything) - people who lack proper materialist analysis will just assume that bad decisions happen because the people in charge are evil, and not because there's actual material conditions underlying things, and so if a different guy happened to be in charge, the bad things would have simply not happened.
or was otherwise removed from positions of power, like Trotsky
Trotsky. Of course. Freaking Trotsky. I don’t know why but I always forget about Trotsky.
it's like... someone's removed the part of your brain that remembers that... with some kind of... pick, perhaps of an ice-breaking variety :trot-shining:
meanwhile jeremy corbyn is hitler for saying that palestinians are human beings
decolonizing Japan from the US occupation by going all the way back to fascism. there's some logic to it ngl :)
After surrender, all the OG fascist japanese politicians just formed the Liberal Party, which has ruled since. No fascist politician was ever purged nor anything. Liberalism is just rational fascism.
One of the LDP prime ministers from the 1950s was outright a war criminal on the scale of Himmler (Kishi)
Liberalism is just rational fascism.
Damn someone should write a book about that. Maybe call it something snazzy, maybe about the uniforms soldiers wore? "Black Pants and Red" sounds good.
Is the British Museum still around? Oh it is? Curious how they'll sooner return some fascist flags than the, oh let's see here, Rosetta Stone to Egypt or Dunhuang manuscripts to China or the Hoa Hakananai'a to Chile or....
They even have the fucking Parthenon Marbles in there!
The return of this cumrag rings incredibly hollow when the (incredibly profitable) way more culturally important stuff is held hostage there.
also the Japanese famously tortured British soldiers I've met loads of people who still have trauma from being in Japanese concentration camps
I was going to disagree, but it appears I misread "purged" as "promoted to positions of high office".
It's weird as the Japanese also got away with doing horrific things to British prisoners of war
in exchange for information
Information that all bordered on useless, just to make it even better
Japan chuds are still shook over their princess abdicating to marry a commoner and leave the country.
nah. I'm with you. at this point, there isn't a point. Japan has undergone an extreme transformation at virtually every level.
When the yamato japanese arrived and removed the ainu/other jomon people
they were forced to accept capitalism at gunpoint and immediately started genociding and being fascist.
Of all the places in the world where the UK could do reparations and return stolen shit, they chose Japan? Didn't the British famously have very little to do with Japan's contact with the west? I seem to remember mostly the Portugeese and Dutch being the first to make contact, and when they got kicked out, the Americans showed up with big ass cannons to force Japan open.
the British built (or advised?) the railways and car-roads which is why they drive on the wrong side. Brits and other Euros were involved in the organisation of capitalism & the imperial army and navy there too.
i don't know too much about foreign investment and exploitation during Meiji and later but the British were definitely very present, even if they weren't the one's who 'opened' up the country. They also had tried to open it before.
the british were very involved during the meiji and taisho periods, which is why their schools and train system are more british than american.
These were personal items of dead soldiers that had previously been in a private house as war trophies.
The items are being returned to the families of the soldiers, not to the state.
Still not decolonization.
Liberals have internalized the theory of white supremacy to the point where they don't even understand Japan had the capacity to do what they did in early 20th century.
Literally inconceivable that a modern Asiatic Empire could exist.
Maybe something to be like “that was grandpa’s? I don’t know. People like artifacts. “ it sure wasn’t decolonization to return items between a clash of empires, unless it’s pre-imperial.
It’s also not an imperial sunburst flag, so it’s kind of.. not the same.
Absolute baby brained shit. Japanese nationalism is something else, and the rehabilitated cutesy view westerners have of modern day Japan gets so infuriating.
:japan-cool:
There’s literally nothing wrong with this. The people of Japan have more right to the relics of their nation’s fascist past than fucking Durham University does and it’s cool and good that Durham University recognises that and is willing to act on it.
That could be a really powerful statement if it was done by a Japanese institution.
But if the University of Durham did it it would at best be the University of Durham rejecting Japanese fascism, which, really who cares, and given the elements of “remember when our glorious empire beat down those uppity asiatics after they turned to fascism in reaction to all those unequal treaties we forced them to sign” and the whole “not trusting the people of Japan to do it themselves” bit it would almost certainly just be wild coloniser bullshit.
Minnesota has a confederate flag taken from Virginia at gettysburg and refuses to return it.
Could you imagine the sudden outrage at how DARE a white person treat a non-white person that way from 4chan, facebook, Fox, or Twitter if Sir Thomas Allen instead just burned it?
