This is lib anti-colonialism, based not on Marx, Lenin, or Sakai, but on James Cameron’s Avatar and Disney’s Pocahantas. It never matures past the age of maybe 15, and it expresses itself as “everybody who isn’t European, Chinese, or a nasty dirty Slav is a complete Noble Savage we need to venerate.”
I’ve run into these types before, and it generally isn’t very long before they start getting misty-eyed about Japan in World War II.
It’s like how Afrocentrists (and regular libs) will urge people to remember that (some) black people were once kings and oppressors [and eventually leading to a call for black entrepreneurship], rather than calling for the liberation of all Afrikans from colonialism.
Are they really that insane that they defend WW2 Japan?
“Defend” is a little strong, but there’s certainly romanticization and a lot of fake nuance. People like this will admit atrocities happened, but they’ll try to spin it as “they were just following orders,” “it’s hard to tell right from wrong in wartime,” and a million variations of “they weren’t criminals, they were brave soldiers who believed in their Emperor.” You’ll never see this kind of nuance applied to the actions of communist governments.
In the US, some of this is obviously guilt over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But it very quickly veers off into the dumbest kind of orientalism.
Does this really happen on SLS?
I haven’t been on that sub in a very long time – not since around the r/genzedong migration – and I get the sense it was a lot better then. So no, I’ve never seen it there. But I’ve run into it elsewhere on the net, and a couple times in real life.
As an ethnic Chinese, I can somewhat understand it if nothing else. There were some genuine “pan-Asianists” even by the time of WW2 Japan, and I suppose someone whose family wasn’t directly affected (mine was) might romanticize Japan’s actions- the actions of a non-white nation that had built itself up (granted through some very questionable means) and struck back against the world’s greatest ongoing perpetrator of genocide and imperialism (USA).
Hell, I myself see what imperial Japan became- or what it perhaps always was, but the potential that it held and that was wasted- as a utter tragedy. They weren’t communist, sure, but IMO- if they had acted genuinely in regards to their pan-Asian, allegedly anti-imperialist ideals, they could have liberated not only all of ASEAN and India, but even as far as the Arab peninsula and east Africa.
It could even be argued that- for all the terror Japan unleashed in China and Korea, and the terror inflicted on ethnic Chinese populations (like my great-grandparents) in southeast Asia- that by-and-large in southeast Asia and certainly south Asia, the Japanese came as liberators for much of the population, deeply flawed liberators, but liberators nonetheless. The independence movements of Indonesia and India certainly owe much to them, at least. I don’t think it’s apologia to say that much.
Just imagine if the revolution happened in Japan and it became communist BEFORE WW2, they could have liberated whole Asia and Oceania!
Something like that would have required some other kind of change of power from the Tokugawa Shogunate right? Instead of the Meiji Restoration happening and the Emperor being reinstated, if there was say a republic which became the basis of the reformation of the country, maybe that would have worked?
I am just dumbfounded right now. The only people in that screenshot who even came close to mentioning the Armenian massacres were sgtpepper9764 and possibly ShinigamiLeaf and VoccioBiturix. The rest were romanticizing the Ottoman Empire. I’ll admit that it probably wasn’t among the worst empires in the premodern era, but I’d rather have something better entirely than a return to an empire!
What happpened to r/ShitLiberalsSay? I doubt that this would have gone unpunished half a decade ago, but here they are.
The Ottoman Empire did many things wrong
The worst was losing at Vienna
You’ve got to be kidding me.
The Armenian massacres were basically the Holocaust of WWI: the Ottoman Imperialists exterminated at least 800,000 Armenians in a ferocious campaign to make room for Turkish settlers, and it received a great deal of equipment and even some personnel from the German Empire for its extermination. In fact, there were so many links between the German and Ottoman Empires that it would have been quite a coincidence if these massacres weren’t on the German Fascists’ minds at all during the 1940s!
I hate begging people to read books since I’m assuming that few of us have that kind of time to spare, but I strongly recommend to anybody with little or no familiarity of the massacres to at least add Professor Stefan Ihrig’s Justifying Genocide: Germany and the Armenians from Bismarck to Hitler to your reading list. He not only describes the massacres theirselves but also their links to the German Empire and how many papers in Weimar Republic explicitly justified them. In fact, there could hardly be a better time to read this given the anti‐Palestinian sentiment in the West and its media right now; you are sure to get a sense of déjà vu.
Reading sgtpepper9764’s comment was one hell of a ride. He may mention the Armenian genocide but no mention of forcible conversions to islam or stuff like the blood tax.
This is what happens when you base your understanding of history entirely on taking the opposite stance on everything that white supremacists do.
Not always a terrible initial thought, but it very much falls into the “Hitler breathed air, therefore breathing air is bad” fallacy.
Exactly. The photonegative of a bad political philosophy still has the outline of that philosophy (one of my mentors, who clearly grew up in an era before digital photography, used to use that example a lot).
Also, about that “Polish winged bronies” bit – its true the Polish gentry are nobody to defend, but there is in certain sectors of the online left a sort of obnoxious dismissiveness bordering on racism of Polish history and culture, and this seems symptomatic of it. And I say that as someone with no connection to Poland whatsoever. It’s true that right-wing Polish-Americans are some of the most obnoxious people you will ever meet, and that the Polish government itself daily sets new records in the field of batshit insane anticommunism, but Polish history and identity can’t be reduced to Lech Walesa and Soladarnosc. Or to that one weird college friend whose sole online presence is pictures of her in traditional folk costume, with long rants (in English) about how the Evil Russians took her grandmother’s cow back in 1945.
That’s a great analogy for it, I can’t really think of a good modern replacement for that (and I am old enough to remember darkrooms and photo negatives thankfully)
That “Polish winged bronies” guy is very, very sus. “Socialism with nordic characteristics” sounds at best lib-left and at worst full on white supremacist. Could easily be admiring the Ottomans for their “superiority” to the untermensch in Poland. It must be unfortunate for Polish historians, having their field of study constantly just broken down to “Winged Hussars lol” every time.
A little “interesting” too that the guy agreeing with Nordic Socialist has “Austrian Marxist” as his flair. (Protip: you can safely ignore pretty much any type of politics that has “Austrian” attached to it).
Austria is just Germany without the nice beer and sausages, they’ve got nothing.
We are all Turks
Anything but supporting AES I suppose? I don’t know how else one might walk into such blind support for historical empires. Anyone have any ideas of what their thought process might have been?
It’s literally video games
