https://twitter.com/evanchill/status/1371821581111078922
I'd love to sit down and have a talk with one of the people who answered Japan in 2020. Those are some mighty fine brainworms they're cultivating.
The eighties was when Japan had really transitioned from producing cheap consumer goods for the US market to producing a lot of high-tech electronics and cars, with the low-tech consumer goods instead being manufactured further down the supply chain. There was a lot of fear-mongering over the threat that Japan's tech industry posed to American tech dominance. I don't know that the CIA was behind that, though, since at least the State Department policy since the 1950s had been to build up Japan as a more privileged client state that would serve as a hub for what was basically a recreation of the old Imperial Japanese Co-Prosperity Sphere as an arm of American hegemony and imperial wealth extraction in the Pacific and Asia; Japan's rising prominence and utility to the US market was a problem for some individual capitalists and some sectors of American labor aristocracy, but was actively part of American geopolitical strategy and overall very beneficial to American capitalism (and the same can be said of China opening as a market which broke the stagnation and decay that otherwise could have been the ruin of American capitalism, despite the damage it did to some American capitalists and some sectors of American labor aristocracy).
Oh God you reminded me there was an actual panic in the US over headlight shapes going from round to angular because of the influence of Japanese auto manufacturing
This is a good write up, makes my comment look really basic lol
Might not have been official US policy, but didn't stop racists from murdering Vincent Chin because they thought he was Japanese.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Vincent_Chin
Basically there was a ton of fear mongering between the 70s-90s that Japan would overtake the US technologically, as heavy industry in the USA was suffering and Japan was making major inroads into the US economy through car companies such as Toyota, Honda, Nissan and Mitsubishi, as well as in electronics with Sony, Panasonic and Toshiba. A lot of Orientalism and "super-humanising" was going on at the time. Practically every second movie basically had American characters working hesitantly under Japanese superiors. I mean Blade Runner is the most obvious example of this on the movie side, it's pretty much Los Angeles under complete Japanese control.
The whole thing peaked in the late 80s when it was revealed that Toshiba sold industrial milling equipment to the Soviet Union, which was a violation of some bs sanction. With the fall of the USSR in the 90s and the rise of the early internet it died down as the media stopped pushing the narratives and the US could present itself as a tech leader with the birth of the internet.
The US absolutely dominates the software sector and the internet being a US invention is one of they key reasons for that. The PR switched because the Japanese economy crashed (I suspect the US forced it through threat of hard power) and Japan has had demographic problems preventing it from growing in the traditional line chart way again. The CPC is acutely aware they have the same demographic crisis coming soon and is doing everything they can to avoid it with little success especially since the one child policy has left a huge generational gap and a cultural expectation of single child households in the current child rearing generation. If China can overcome this crisis, they become the mono power of the world, but if they can’t they become one of the major powers in a multipolar world.
I remember even in the 90s' my parents complaining about the Japanese taking over.
Japan was going through an economic and technology boom during the 80s' and 90s'
It seems like whenever any nonwhite country starts doing better then America, people see it as a threat.
Why do you think Blade Runner has that weird USA-Japan culture mashup?
A couple other movies that take place in the future also have this as well though the names slip my mind.
Studio Gainax was created in a top secret pact between the USSR and China.
That's right, the Sino-Soviet split was mended in secret, all to craft the ultimate in anti-CIA agitprop.
:epsteingelion:
I was leaving that part out but yes, this is true.
Specifically NGE is part of an ongoing series of seemingly unrelated (but actually interrelated) anime from the Gainax founders as a covert deprogramming operation, the aim of which is to free the victims of MKUltra's Project MONARCH mind control.
Nadia was the first attempt but Amano hadn't yet been trusted with the horrific truth so the results were mixed. That infamous depression he fell into was a direct result of learning the scale of the CIA's child abuse. The lie about the reason for his depression was just the first and it was necessary to protect themselves.
The greatest lie of all about NGE is that they used Christian imagery and mythology just because they thought it was cool. Bullshit. Watch Nadia and tell me that with a straight face.
The reason Christianity needed to be a central theme for these anime has everything to do with the mind control methods used by the CIA. The same can be said for why child abuse has been a central theme in all of these anime.
The two most important anime made for this are Gurren Lagann and Kill La Kill. NGE provides the foundation but these two are the real key. Also FLCL.
lol there was a point around the end of fall of the USSR where the movie industrial complex (lol) had to realign their sights for who the baddies where. Somehow Japan and Germany became something of a boogeyman for awhile and I just have to imagine those flicks essentially brain wormed a portion of the country into thinking it was both a real and relevant threat. I only base this off of speculation in all seriousness, but at the same time, whatever the dumbest possible reason people think the way they do about foreign countries is high up there as why it's common.
I mean there are plenty of people who think Saddam Hussein did 9/11 and shit like that, to this day. You have to just assume the most ridiculous shit constantly to even attempt to understand why people may think the way they do.
lol there was a point around the end of fall of the USSR where the movie industrial complex (lol) had to realign their sights for who the baddies where
I just rewatched Goldeneye recently, and they did it in a really interesting way. They make a big point of saying "the USSR fell, nothing is the same anymore", the opening song's visuals has a bunch of women with sledgehammers destroying Lenin statues, and the beginning of the climax of the second act takes place in a statuary park, but one that has the visual appearance of being a junkyard where they're getting rid of all the old Soviet statues. But then they just fall right back into the exact same Cold War anti-USSR tropes without a hint of irony. It's pretty wild
dude i haven't watched that movie in a decade at least. holy shit thank you for reminding me lol
Possible ex-Atari employees with a grudge against Nintendo for becoming more popular than them
Probably the one Chinese American they asked, and they'd be right. Any Pacific attack on China would likely be proxied through Japan
Americans: "what really happened to Kennedy? Bush did 911! There were no WMDs!"
Also Americans: "You're telling me this blurry satellite photo is actually a death camp? Mr Joe Biden sir please sir nuke Beijing."
I genuinely don't pay much attention to most major media, I mean I don't actively go and read it but of course see popular/viral headlines all the time. That said, I noticed about two to three years ago the anti-China propaganda was just being churned out A LOT. It's hard not to notice how much there is. Nevermind the fact that a lot of it from the same few people, especially adrian zenz pushing the main part of the stories, and the media just references stuff he says constantly. If it's not those people it's straight up just coming from the state department.
It doesn't take an expert to connect the dots with a lot of topics like the Hong Kong stuff, South China Sea military shit, Belt and Road stuff, IP theft and hacking shit. It's pretty clear to me at least that we're in an even dumber cold war and red scare. The UK and big EU countries are also pretty much doing exactly the same as well. Oh and Australia, of course. The west has their mark and the millions of rubes who fall for the idea the west needs to be the world police on every little thing are more than happy to continue to be foot soldiers in this propaganda war.
It will never not be annoying and frustrating to me though that all those people or so called activists are so vehemently anti-China/CCP and critique them constantly while absolutely turning a blind eye to what their own country is doing or even just the greater global political shit happening around them. The boogyman is China and it's not going to go away anytime soon. I don't personally think there will be a real war with China but it has been increasingly worrying to me how much rhetoric is spawning from this that is essentially manufacturing the consent for a proxy war or economic war. Meanwhile virtually nothing is actually changing with the west's dependence on Chinese manufacturing. If China was as big of a threat or as problematic as the west claims, one of the first things I'd have to imagine countries would do is stop buying shit from them and stop having them manufacture so much stuff. But aside from like Apple and a few clothing companies attempting to find new manufacturers, I don't anyone doing anything about it lol. And part of why those companies are evens switching is because it's cheaper now to go to Africa, or India and Bangladesh.
I'd just like to mention how big of a topic China is for climate change stuff too, it's the crutch so many reactionaries and centrists lean on when we talk about how we need to start changing how we do things. They just plug their ears and point to China as if the US and the rest of the west isn't the bigger problem here. It's so tiring.
I’d just like to mention how big of a topic China is for climate change stuff too, it’s the crutch so many reactionaries and centrists lean on when we talk about how we need to start changing how we do things
Meanwhile...
hmm I wonder what might have been happening in February of 2020 to make people think Iran's our "greatest enemy."
why Iraq and Afghanistan? You've already completed regime changes & installed democracy there...
I assure you a good percentage of the people who answered Russia did so with the Soviet Union in mind.
Have you ever been to Iraq and Afghanistan? I didn't see any brown people there.
Nice to see Iran and other ME countries plummet I guess. The risk of the US starting a another war in the ME is a lot higher than China.
Granted, this is likely mostly linked to people regarding covid-19 as a Chinese bioweapon.
If anyone created it as a bioweapon, it was the CIA. They've been waging war against China using biological weapons since the end of WWII so it wouldn't be new territory for them.
Like I don't necessarily believe that to be the case but I've found more than a bit of credible evidence pointing to us (the most fucked up of which I found in a book from a few decades ago while researching something connected to the coverup of the Kennedy assassination so I wasn't even looking for this rabbit hole, the rabbit dragged me down dammit) and none pointing to China.
The fucking racist brainworms it takes to believe all the lies about China without questioning our government or media.
:shinji-screm:
The risk of the US starting a another war in the ME is a lot higher than China.
It just depends on the media's mood at the moment. All this indicates is our current media hype, not our future foreign policy. Not to get all 1984, but... maybe EastAsia ends up being our ally and it was EurAsia we were fighting the whole time.
Granted, this is likely mostly linked to people regarding covid-19 as a Chinese bioweapon.
Our plunging economic prospects have been China's fault since the Bush Era. De-industrialization is a foreign policy problem that we can only fix by doing a Third World War.
This is now actually an interesting question to me. As a leftist... what's the right answer? The US being its own greatest enemy? Capitalism? General decay?
When people say "the US" they usually mean the American bourgeoisie. They fight smaller imperialists when their interests clash, but their biggest enemy will always be the international working class.
As for the American working class, their biggest enemy is the one closest to home, the American bourgeoisie. The American capitalists directly exploit them in the work place, but are also crushing the workers all over the world and devouring the Earth in search of ever greater profits. They need to be removed from power and cease to exist as a class if humanity is to keep existing at all.
Only 1% get it?
Only they too know that we are our own worst enemy.
