BlackBodyRadiation started this discussion 3 weeks ago#132,177
I feel like this is a difficult thing to express without sounding like I’m judging white people or Asian people, but I’m not. Both cultures are decent in my opinion.
I’ve noticed this thing conservatives do, where since they don’t like blacks, and they notice that Asians aren’t black, that they assume there must be some cultural connection between Europeans and Asians. They’ll say things like Asians are more culturally similar to Europeans than Africans, or they’ll assume Asians are against diversity or Asians are more right wing than black people or that Asians and Europeans share some type of common interest.
Aside from maybe the Philippines, since they’re majority Catholic, I don’t think that any country in Asia is really culturally similar to the west.
Take Japan for example, some white people like Japan because they were allied with the Nazis in World War Two, but they don’t want to admit that so they’ll just pretend Japan has some especially perfect culture. How is Japan similar to the west culturally exactly? They’re not Christian, they’re not individualistic, they don’t speak a European language, they don’t write in the Latin alphabet. They don’t eat the same foods. There’s basically nothing in common. Now their culture is still a nice culture, but there’s no commonality in terms of shared beliefs or shared heritage or shared values there. The only similarity is a geopolitical alliance that the Japanese don’t actually have a say in, they can’t meaningfully oppose the west, since the west has military bases inside their country. But that doesn’t mean they actually have anything to do with us.
I guess I just don’t really understand the delusion that somehow Asians are similar to white people, when they’re the group of people that’s actually probably the least culturally related to white people. Which isn’t a bad thing. If Japan was colonized by the British the same way India was, there never would have been a Japanese Empire, and Japan never would have been a wealthy industrialized nation.
BlackBodyRadiation (OP) double-posted this 3 weeks ago, 6 minutes later[^][v]#1,411,968
It’s also weird because white conservatives project their own prejudices onto the Japanese and assume that the Japanese like all the same things that they like and hate all the same things that they hate. But the Japanese aren’t white and don’t see themselves as white. You can’t be a white person in Japan and ever be seen as Japanese. The fact that they’re culturally conservative doesn’t mean that they’re more compatible with western culture, that just seems kind of delusional to me.
BlackBodyRadiation (OP) triple-posted this 3 weeks ago, 6 minutes later, 13 minutes after the original post[^][v]#1,411,969
And I mean it is true that they were allied with the Nazis so sometimes white supremacists will fetishize Japan because it’s a blatant incoherence in their racist ideology of white supremacy. The actual reason Hitler allied with the Japanese is because Hitler wasn’t confident that Germany could defeat the Soviet Union so he wanted an ally in the east.
BlackBodyRadiation (OP) quadruple-posted this 3 weeks ago, 2 minutes later, 15 minutes after the original post[^][v]#1,411,970
Also that’s the same reason we’re allied with Japan. But in 80 years we’ve never actually had the guts to use Japan in this hypothetical anti Russian war that never happened. It’s just posturing for the sake of posturing.