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So I was having a conversation with a friend about old anime and in the middle of it she forgot the word "canonical" and she instead inflicted a spectacular new aesthetic and slew of mental images on me by saying the phrase "Biblically Accurate Ouran High School Host Club".

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let me be clear. i have a lot of fondness for the notion of drawing solidarity between brutalized people from across the world and im not a third worldist. it is seductive. but im genuinely sick of anti imperialists from the third world being characterised as people too stupid to know there is poverty and racism in the united states.

im responding to this being linked on my dash

But being that the ghetto is placeless, like Black people, the Fourth World is the only nominal representation these societies can have; third-worldists often times hold indirect and sometimes unspoken disdain for these Fourth World societies . Having never visited, they often times believing everyone has running water, a doctor, and a home — completely ignoring the police state that arrests and murders many urban Black people who dare to find themselves past the red line and in a green, grassy neighbourhood in Riverdale, or walking through the mansion-zoos in the corners of Newburgh.

cultural hegemony means we see all your media. the imperialised always understand their masters! even our bourgeoisie want to immigrate to the first world! said ghetto music is on our speakers! they speak of ferguson in palestine!!! how much contempt do you have for us?

but the worst thing is their are brutalized populations in the third world! their is unimaginable inequality! communities are subject to pogroms and police violence even in the uniform imagined poverty of the third world. while fourth world theorists talk like this – they also erase what arundhati roy talks about when she talks about bastar and kashmir. the fourth world inside the third world. the fourth world in that sense is occupied and it is entirely forgotten by the world at large – no, what matters is urban poverty in los angeles alone.

i also dont think characterising the fourth world like below helps

Subpopulations existing in a First World country, but with the living standards of those in a third world, or developing country.

because it concedes entirely the logics of imperialism, where what matters is the acquiring the living standards, not transforming the relations of power. which makes for allies and programs you cannot trust – happy to brutalise latin america for the next new deal if it was just distributed better. there is no analysis of the productive relations or value transfer. no concern for the costs of "living standards."

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what's going on in the congo since there's also a genocide happening over there as well:

to sum it up, people in the congo are literally being worked as slaves to mine for this material called coltan, which is very valuable as its used for things like phones, laptops, just electronics in general. Congo is the number 1 producer for this material and the places behind this genocide is America, Britain, France, and Israel, wow what an absolute shocker. The worst places probably to ever exist benefit from a genocide. These places are funding Rwanda and Uganda military groups, to go into the Congo and kill MILLIONS of people. This has also been going on for YEARS. Many women have been SA'd and men are forced to work in INHUMAN conditions, resulting in their death and the colonizers are absolutely benefitting from this. 6 MILLION people have been killed and half of them are literally kids. Many of the Congolese people have also been displaced.

Please speak out about and raise your voice

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this is probably my favorite proposed i/p solution—a two-state confederation with freedom of movement (a palestinian citizen can live in israel and vice versa). i think this is more likely to work than a single binational state, given the history of binational states.

it was developed by israelis and palestinians and has supporters from both backgrounds.

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How does a state become fascist? How did Russia do it?

A special kind of nationalism is needed here. To convince people that you were once great. That once you were a military empire — and then you were humiliated. This is what Hitler once said: “Germany was great, had colonies in Africa, but we were humiliated at Versailles

Under the terms of the Versailles Peace Treaty of 1919, which ended the First World War, Germany had to get rid of its numerous colonies in Africa, China and Micronesia, cede significant territories in Europe and pay reparations to the victorious states of the war in the amount of $442 billion at 2012 prices.. Our empire was taken from us, and our people in other countries and former territories faced genocide. We need a strong ruler to come and restore our empire. To show that we are a big powerful player. And Iʼm ready to do it.”

Putin behaved the same way. He even said that if Russia does not regain its greatness, it will destroy the world.

Also, often in countries that become fascist, there are many economic problems. And nationalism, this feeling of power, can replace food — you will draw your happiness from this feeling, or from the awareness of yourself as a German or a white American. After that, you say that representative democracy is evil. That it allows the existence of LGBT people and the like, that the state is weak because of democracy. Fascism appeals to conservative, religious people who would not call themselves fascists. He tells them: we will protect you from your children becoming gay, from someone destroying your churches. And they often call all their opponents communists. And they get votes. Sound familiar, right?

[...]

It is ironic that the Russians, who were once rightly regarded as the victors over fascism and who now practice fascism, call their war "anti-fascist."

It is necessary to pay attention not to words, but to ideology. Putin can say that he is a liberator — but he is closer to Hitler than to Brezhnev, to Peter I than to communists. And this is an important argument in favor of why the Russians should not leave a single piece of Ukrainian land. For the same reasons why it was not possible to leave, for example, Warsaw under the Nazis.

Now Putin is talking about Ukrainians like Hitler was talking about Jews. He says that there can be no Ukrainians, only Russians, and that all Ukrainians are actually Russians. This position means that he is going to get rid of everyone who speaks the Ukrainian language. That is why all this delusion of the West about territorial concessions must stop.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/03/12/african-countries-are-helping-china-go-green-that-may-have-downside-africans/

Big fan of how "opposing USA" immediately positions China as unilaterally good guys as if they are not very much another capitalist power with their own expansionist interest. Like. Reenacting the "neolib capitalists versus socialists (like totally socialist you guys don't think about it too hard)" cold war dichotomy is maybe not the best framework for analysing global economic politics.

I also find the ''''source''''' in twitter guy with russian flag in his name somewhat questionable, but maybe that's just me

gee I wonder why third world nations would prefer better relationships with China, since the US is so friendly and understanding and the neoliberal model has brought us so much prosperity

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💥🙌👏

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Speaking from personal experience, I am an Eastern European who's been in Germany for 8 years and I've yet to see a leftist space that condemns tankies. Not before the full on invasion and not after - not a single one. Every time I walk into a left space there is a hammer and sickle somewhere, and to point it out is to condemn myself to an exhausting gruelling discussion of how its a symbol with many meanings, of how Marxism predates USSR, of how yadda yadda yadda stop making unreasonable demands that generational trauma and history of hundreds of millions of people be respected.

I no longer bother with any group organising stuff in my town because the last straw was an anti-war demonstration that consisted of speaches condemning Ukraine for defending itself and calling for NATO to stop provoking Russia. I know Ukrainians who went to it, thinking it will be, you know, anti imperialist instead of the other way around. They felt betrayed and angry, unwilling to say anything except to each other, because - imagine that - refugees with families still in a war zone had enough to deal with. So they just left.

And this is how the left loses people. The several who went to the demo I spoke to directly want nothing to do with lefties anymore and I didn't gave a good argument for them. I still don't. I, also, am fucking tired.

Left spaces as of right now are tolerant towards tankies and therefore actively hostile to survivors of totalitarian regimes. This has to change, and western leftists have to be the ones to do it.

It is gonna be fun in 12-36 months when tankies are gradually accepted back into the left-wing fold and their unhinged and grotesque positions inch their way into becoming the default position again because people just wanna get along and don’t wanna do “left-wing infighting”. And gradually people on the left will start to believe (perhaps even sincerely claim to remember) that actually Ukraine started it in 2022 by shelling Donetsk. And gradually, after a few pieces of footage online from the 2014 invasion are erroneously labeled as being current 2022 footage of Ukraine, this will evolve into a consensus that all the Russian war crimes currently taking place were actually wildly exaggerated by the CIA.

It’s all happened before, it will happen again. This moment, where a lot of leftists have been shaken to their senses and recognize Russian imperialism, will fade—unless you stop it. Unless you commit to being confrontational about it. Unless you excise the Stalinist cancer.

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As Moscow rounds out its first month of an illicit war in Ukraine undertaken on a flimsy pretext of “de-Nazification,” these communications show it is thoroughly aligned with a host of extremist right-wing politicians and activists throughout Europe who come far closer to satisfying the definition of fascism than does the embattled government in Kyiv.

[...]

“Malofeev has carried out the Kremlin’s tasks, which have included interfering in the Bosnian and Polish elections,” according to Kalev Stoicescu, a researcher of Russian affairs at the International Centre for Defence Studies, a think tank in Tallinn, Estonia. “He has organized the meetings of European far rightists. He has mediated an 11 million euro [$12 million] loan from Russian banks to Marine Le Pen’s party.”

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do you have any book recs on anti intellectualism? love your blog btw<3

Oh, thank you!

Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman, while not totally dealing with anti-intellectualism, devotes a good amount of space and attention to discussing anti-intellectual elements and the dumbing down of discourse.

One of the classics is the appropriately and directly titled Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter which provides a good historical and foundational basis and which argues how much and how long it's been a strain through American life. It's very much a product of its time, though, and the view is a little limited, as one might expect from a historian from Columbia University.

Inventing the Egghead: The Battle over Brainpower in American Culture by Aaron Lecklider is kind of a partial rebuttal or challenge to Hofstadter, where Lecklider argues, at least in part, that Hofstadter and others narrowly defined what an "intellectual" is/was partly in response to the right-wing pushback of the time period (1950s and 1960s) to basically mean guys like them (white academic middle-class and up guys at or from the Ivies who were generally liberal in the left/progressive sense) and which ignored many of the other people (and peoples) that would and could be considered intellectuals and which sort of helped reinforce the argued divide between lower/working-class (and emphasis on Working) people and the Intellectuals.

The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump by Michiko Kakutani is a really good read in general but she specifically dives into the different elements (from all sides and parts of the political and ideological spectrum) which helped contribute to both the general atmosphere we find ourselves in but also specifically tied to the rise of Trump and the fake news/subjective reality environment, and Hannah Arendt and her ideas and arguments feature prominently and helped provide part of the frame she uses to discuss things.

Speaking of Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism would be another book recommendation, particularly because of how anti-intellectual fascism specifically and totalitarianism in general is (and which she goes into some detail discussing and analyzing). It's also just a (somewhat unfortunately) timeless book that goes into an analysis of what drives those kinds of movements and ideas.

The Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby is like a more up-to-date (but pre-Trump) version of Hofstadter's book and which helps, at least chronologically and thematically, in my mind, bridge the gap (with Lecklider) between Hofstadter and Kakutani. and which makes some of the same arguments as the latter.

While not specifically touching on anti-intellectualism, Chris Hayes's Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy does discuss how so many traditionally respected and trusted institutions and groups have been undermined and despised, among which would be analysts and intellectuals and educators, etc. It's also very much of its time (2012-ish).

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So I read this interesting post from the MensLib subreddit, about how men's issues are always blamed on men themselves and never on society. The post itself as well as the comments are a very good read in digging in to antimasculism & the ways in which feminism has failed to critically examine men's suffering under the patriarchy. For example (all bolding by me):

Here again, the problems predominantly affecting women are addressed by changing society, while those predominantly affecting men are addressed by changing men (or by telling men to change themselves). The difference is not that one approach is right and the other wrong; they are both 'right' in the sense that they highlight genuine issues, but the approach to men's problems is more superficial. When dealing with men's problems, we focus on the immediate cause, which is usually the men's failure to cope with mental strain ("he should have gone to therapy", "he should have learned to open up more"); in contrast, when dealing with women's problems, we focus on "the cause of the cause", and try to remove the systemic social issues causing the mental strain, rather than telling the victims what they should have done to better cope with it.

I think this is a great point, and something we really need to tackle. OP also goes on to talk about self-repression, comparing girls avoiding sexual harassment and boys avoiding bullying:

Boys (and men) are notorious for repressing their emotions. They have a good reason: in boys' peer groups, a failure to control your emotions is almost as shameful as a failure to control your bladder; it is a sign of weakness, and any sign of weakness makes you a target for bullying and ridicule. So boys learn to wear a permanent mask of aloof toughness to avoid inadvertently revealing any sign of weakness or uncontrolled emotion, and many keep this habit into adulthood. It is generally well recognized that suppressing emotions is unhealthy in the long run, but it seems to me that the commonly proposed antidote is misguided: boys (or men) are told to "just open up more and be vulnerable" or to "learn how to cry", as if their reluctance to show emotions were some kind of irrational emotion-phobia, rather than a perfectly reasonable, perhaps even necessary, defense against the ridicule, contempt and loss of respect that society inflicts upon those who can't keep their emotions in check in the proper "manly" way.

It's something we don't really question in mainstream feminism. Women's issues have a societal root, and men's issues are issues that men put on themselves, and therefore men just need to fix it themselves and change.

And while yes, we all have a responsibility to unlearn harmful societal teachings, just saying "men need to fix their shit" doesn't help anyone. I've been annoyed for a while at how people will react to men suffering under the patriarchy with "UGH they need to go to therapy", as if

Needing therapy is a sign of failure or a bad thing, and someone not going to therapy when they need to is them being an asshole on purpose and not potentially a sign of them not feeling safe enough to go to therapy, feeling too ashamed, not having enough money or time, etc.

Individual men getting individual therapy will solve the societal problems of forcing boys and men to repress their emotions and view themselves as only valuable if they can perform manual labor and have a lot of sex with women. It's a problem that is only perpetuated by men themselves and if they just stopped doing that, then the problem would disappear.

No self-respecting feminist would ever react to a woman obviously suffering from the patriarchy with "ugh, she needs to go to therapy and fix herself." Yes, therapy would be helpful most likely, but that's not going to actually fix the underlying cause of her issues. So why do we, as feminists, think that "men just need to fix themselves" is an okay response to societal suffering under the patriarchy?

Who does this help? Who benefits from us ignoring these issues? Why do we assume that men's experiences under the patriarchy are so one-dimensional and that we have no responsibility for unlearning our societal biases around men and masculinity?

Someone in the comments also added this quote from the "perpetually relevant" I Am A Transwoman. I Am In The Closet. I Am Not Coming Out essay by Jen Coates:

Have you noticed, when a product is marketed in an unnecessarily gendered way, that the blame shifts depending on the gender? That a pink pen made “for women” is (and this is, of course, true) the work of idiotic cynical marketing people trying insultingly to pander to what they imagine women want? But when they make yogurt “for men” it is suddenly about how hilarious and fragile masculinity is — how men can’t eat yogurt unless their poor widdle bwains can be sure it doesn’t make them gay? #MasculinitySoFragile is aimed, with smug malice, at men—not marketers.

And then another commenter left this (and referenced bell hooks' work on men!!):

"Do you agree that we tend to approach women's problems as systemic issues, and men's problems as personal issues?" Yes, and there's even a name for this: Hyperagency. Individual men are assumed to be immune to systemic pressures because the people at the top of the hierarchies generating those pressures are also men. "And if you do agree with that, do you think this difference in approach is justified, or do you rather think it is a case of an unfair bias?" It's pretty clearly not rooted in reality. The idea that billions of ordinary men aren't beholden to the social constructs under which they were raised is just plain silly. I'd blame the empathy gap, but honestly I feel like it's more than that. Patriarchy hyper-individualizes every struggle a man faces as a way to shield itself from critique and gaslight ordinary men. The motivations there are readily apparent. However, we see the same blind spot appear even in more academic Feminist spaces (taking for granted that "Feminist" spaces on social media are hardly representative of the cutting edge of Feminist thought). bell hooks once postulated that some Feminist women are deeply afraid of acknowledging how little they understand about men, let alone taking the steps to broach that gap.

Another person explained hyperagency by saying "Every single individual man is a hyper agent who is just expected to bootstrap his way out of the patriarchy through sheer force of will."

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There is also an assumption there that engaging with foreign media requires extra work to understand the context it's from, which. Yes, it is true, absolutely, but its worth noting that as a world at large we do it all the time. Foreign/International movies are a norm if you're not USAmerican. The idea that any non-domestic work is confusing and incomprehensible is worth unpacking because for is in no way unique to need to assume a point of view that is not immediately familiar: movies by and about minorities you're not a part of, books about professions you have no connection to, hell - domestic media that is old and needs to be situated in historical context of the era.

Why is it always media of other countries (the "weirder" aka the farther from US culturally the better) that gets singled out like that?

“Sorry I don’t want to spend my precious free time reading a 400 page Russian novel about depression”

“Film bros when you tell them you like having fun instead of watching a 1923 Greek film about divorce”

Okay so like I’ve already talked extensively about people who say this shit are largely shadowboxing against their insecurities about not having what they perceive to be elevated tastes rather than addressing any meaningful “gatekeeping” in the broad realm of media consumption as a whole, so rather than that I’d like to ask why everyone who says shit like this feels a need to emphasize the foreignness of a particular work as another aspect of how undesirable it is to engage with.

Like obviously these people are not literally saying “lmao I’d NEVER read a Russian/Greek/whatever book” but once you start noticing this you start seeing it everywhere and idk man! Not a fan

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Reading through the texts that have been written on the war since its outbreak in the West and especially by the Western left, we find three main frameworks that shape events in Ukraine – symmetrisation; generalisation; ideologisation.

Through symmetrisation, the conflict is presented as a clash between two equal, superpower partners, most often as Russia vs Nato, or Russia vs the US, and less often, Russia vs the EU. In this view, one has to look for some great game of superpowers behind everything, a clash of empires over spheres of influence on the global chessboard, and reduce Ukraine to a puppet controlled by a higher power. /.../

In the case of the war in Ukraine, the anti-imperialism of idiots does not lead to ignoring Russia’s role, but rather to the symmetrization of both sides of the conflict and the resulting relativisation of the war and a subsequent demobilisation of any aid. In fact, it ends up stating that both sides are actually equally to blame for the war and that taking a position in such a conflict is problematic.

Through generalisation and multiplication, the conflict is presented for a change either as a general example of a war that needs to be opposed in the same general way, or as one example of the many wars that are currently taking place in the world and that needs to be opposed in unison, because they are all wars on the same global chessboard. It is a view that fetishises global perspectives, universalism and seeing abstract similarities at the expense of concrete contexts and specificities. It seeks common global denominators so that it can declare that all wars are capitalist, neoliberal, and condemn them as such in a unified way, so that it does not have to take sides anywhere. In such a constellation, the local and regional perspective will always be, by nature, incommensurable, humiliated, provincial, immature and incomplete compared to the global one.

Last but not least, through ideologisation, the conflict is presented as a matter of mere opinion and debate, in which the purity of ideological positions is defended, which taints any practical, realistic and strategic proposals for resolving it, led by the conclusion of controversial alliances. It is an approach that is inherently risk-free – cultivated from the comfort of a home far enough away that it does not fall within the life-threatening sphere of influence of Russian neo-imperialism. It is ultimately an exit strategy not to fight a specific enemy, but to hide in the fold of privileged ideocracy, abstract and general attitudes, relativisation and symmetrisation, in order to continue living one’s carefree life somewhere far away from Ukraine. In this case, war is a matter of an opinion and ideology, not of life and death.

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Shoutout to, like, 14 year old me who thought he was bi cause he felt 0 attraction to men and 0 attraction to women and 0=0 which is equal attraction THEREFORE I was surely equally attracted to both men and women and, thus, bisexual, thank you for coming to my tedtalk

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These past couple months I'm been continuously thinking about how awful cultural erasure is. It has happened in my country, it has happened in the neighbouring countries, it has happened and happens all over the fucking world - it's an awful and brutal method of control, and right now it's happening in Ukraine.

Russian missile strikes Hryhorii Skovoroda Literary Memorial Museum. Extrack from the article:

"Firefighters and other locals worked through the night to extinguish the flames, hoping to salvage whatever they could. But the building and its contents were burned to the ground.

“This was intentional. It was a prepared plan. They knew that this legacy was here,” Micay said, wading through the scorched remains, pointing to where paintings, sculptures and books had filled the rooms during her nearly 30 years as the museum director.

“This was done so Russia can say that there is no Ukrainian culture, that Ukrainian identity does not exist.”"

Destroying culturally important sites is a war crime under the 1954 Hague Convention.

On its own the concept of destroying the culture of any demographic is aggravating - world history is full of horrid examples of it. In the case of Ukraine, Russia's attack on its cultural legacy has been going on for ages.

"Ukrainians fell victim to persecution as an ethnic group, their culture and language subjugated to persistent attempts of imposed structural erasure as early as 1627 when, under Tsar Mikhail’s orders, all copies of Ukrainian Didactic gospels were destroyed." (source: Retrospect Journal)

Now in 2022, in the on-going war, evidence points to Russia actively seeking to destroy Ukrainian culture.

"Lyudmila Denisova, Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman, told POLITICO that Russia is systematically working to wipe out Ukrainian people and culture, and she provided information and documents she said were obtained by Ukrainian intelligence services proving Russia’s plan for this began even before Feb. 24." (source: Politico)

The exact definition of cultural genocide is not well established, but considering the scale of material destruction Russia has caused, on top of the continuously surfacing cases of rape, torture and killing of civilians, I feel it's fair to argue Russia is using the destruction of cultural sites as an additional tool of genocide.

(wikpedia on cultural genocide) (cadmus.eui on the concept of cultural genocide)

How to help Ukraine fight cultural erasure (foreignpolicy.com)

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“It is standard today to link the French Revolution with nationalism (the Revolution made an appeal to a kingless people, thus invoking nationalist sentiments instead of subject loyalty); still, J.E.E. Dalberg-Acton has traced the rise of modern nationalism to the partitions of Poland, pointing out the pernicious results of “this famous measure, the most revolutionary act of old absolutism [which] deprived an entire people of its right to constitute an independent community.” He has put the blame for the rise of nationalism on empires rather than on revolutions, an observation that deserves more credit than it has received. In direct opposition to Acton’s view, Elie Kedourie and E.J. Hobsbawm have argued that the multinational European empires need not have been broken into nation-states, since the “historical consciousness” of the nations they encompassed was far from certifiable. Characteristically, they fail to acknowledge that within these multinational states, one nationality invariably prevailed and forced others into a relationship of colonial dependency. Kedourie’s argument in particular is typically dismissive of all but the best-armed nationalisms of the world. It is also ahistorical, in its invocation of a static historicity of nations, and it tends to exonerate colonialism at the expense of nationalism. Kedourie represents the Western dislike of nonwestern cultural and political identities that, as Leela Gandhi put it, echoes a conviction of an organic inadequacy of nonwestern peoples. Western scholars sometimes look with a disapproving eye at the rising sense of postcolonial nationhood in Asia, Africa, as well as in Central and Eastern Europe, implying that self-identification based on nationality is a kind of shameful disease, of which the guilty party should get rid as soon as possible, unless possessed of the army and rhetorical wit needed to argue its case worldwide. In Orientalism, Edward Said identifies numerous scholars who argued in this manner. Needless to say, the smaller and struggling nations cannot compete with the hundreds and thousands of books that etch condemnation of their identities into the memory of the educated in the first-world countries. Implicit in such rhetoric is the assumption that while the powerless national groups are culpable by virtue of their separate identities, the taxonomer himself or herself is wonderfully impartial and free of any national attachments whatsoever. Yet as Margaret Canovan has pointed out in a seminal book, “The modern liberal democratic ideals depend for the plausibility on the collective power generated by national loyalties that are inconsistent with the ideal themselves…General humanitarian principles and projects presuppose a power base sustained by particular solidarity, while the maintenance of that power base contradicts the very principles it renders plausible.” In other words, while Western democracies preach and support universalist ideals in the rest of world, their ability to do so is predicated on attachments to, and preferential treatment of, particular languages and cultures of Western provenance.”

—Ewa M. Thompson, Imperial Knowledge: Russian Literature and Colonialism