Americans blindly embracing ideology
That quip comes from Col. Doug Macgregor commenting on the blind hatred against Russians by leading Americans inside the Beltway in their pursuit of war in Ukraine.
Living inside the beltway myself, I don’t believe it’s actually restricted to inside the Beltway; it has to include much of Virginia, and bases all around America, and also around the world. But it doesn’t include all Americans—just too many of them.
How do I know this? Well, I don’t actually know this as a Russian-American. I suspect that any Russian-American with a short last name is glad they underwent a name-change when they landed on American shores, but America has too many Poles, Slavs, and Eastern Europeans to really do “cancel culture” on Russian-Americans very effectively.
So what the Americans really do, I believe, with the help of mainstream media of course, and alt-media also, is transfer their “cancel culture” attitude towards an easy target: Asians.
Asian-Americans make an easy target because we look identifiably non-White. Whites aren’t obliged by all kinds of edicts to treat Asians as a protected class of historically persecuted and underrepresented enslaved peoples. Lawyers are not lining up to defend the rights of AAPI because it’s not the same kind of easy money. The police, the council, respected aides, and whatnot all too often even give themselves a reprieve when it comes to dissing Asians and cracking bad jokes and calling them names…
Blind ideology equates basically with fascism. The same demonic possessive forces which make people overcome with fear, hatred, vindictiveness, lust for revenge are also associated with the same perfunctory martial spirit which motivated citizens to use their petty authority against their neighbors during Covid-19. They reported on them if they didn’t mask up, banned them from shopping malls, chased them out of public parks and museums, and even helped get them fired from work.
It really doesn’t matter which side is in power, Democrat or Republican, under this toxic worldview. Under all recent presidents, the number of Executive Orders and the power of the White House is now unchecked. Anything that is vetoed by the Congress, the President can provide a work-around via Executive Order. The Supreme Court cannot undo the Executive Orders quickly enough under the time-frame of so many pending court cases.
If the President orders “cancel culture” against Chinese-Americans that will take place soon enough. In fact, from my perspective, it has already taken place. Americans love to project their frustrations onto other people and so that transfer of “cancel Russia” has become “cancel China.”
Except Americans are too hypocritical to consider canceling shopping, since so many of their goods come from or are partially manufactured in China. The idea of goods made in sweatshops via slave labor never stopped Americans from buying brand name shoes. The diamonds mined from forced slave labor or mica mined by slave-children never prevented Americans from boycotting diamonds or stopping to think about their mud-masks.
Today the Russians live very far away, an incomprehensible distance for the geographically befuddled Americans to ponder seriously. It took Americans a long time to understand where Ukraine was. Many don’t know that Germany has cities with subway systems far more vast than in the cities of the United States, and of course, so does China by now.
I asked a young man boarding the plane recently whether or not he had watched any recent footage on Turkiye’s earthquakes. The college-aged man shook his head, no. Most young adults apparently don’t have time to learn about the Turkiye-Syria earthquakes. I recall how professors even ten years ago kept students confined in a protectorate of remote academic personhood. Having been conditioned by K-12 teachers of the state-protectorate, students today adhere to strict lines of associative-functioning. The churches, too, mostly militate against discussion about geopolitics in any way, shape, or form nowadays, especially the largest conservative “faiths.”
Twenty years ago, board an airplane and there would be cheery talk among passengers about culture, books, music, politics, and destinations. Nowadays, a chilly silence abounds on most planes. People speak in hushed tones, and the tablet or smartphone absorbs more attention than any human being sitting nearby. An attorney took advantage of the empty seat next to me to spread out all her papers on her latest legal brief and busily tap away on her laptop while texting email on her smartphone during the entire journey. I really had to pray that she got all the work done that she needed to do on the plane.
Inside the Beltway I have become accustomed to a majority of the people being essentially nerdish types, neurotically checking in with their devices every five minutes. When not ensconced in virtual reality, they are intent on ‘looking cool’ which, as Americanuck Radio joked once, is like what someone says about the Lutherans.”You never say nothin’.” Looking cool, appearing to have a lot of sangfroid, per the people back east, means the neighbor only gets a quick size up, and it’s almost always based on dichotomous judgments.
So what evidence do I have of ‘cancel culture’ on Asians or Chinese-Americans?
Too many. We can start with all the small-Chinese-owned businesses going bust these days. I have personally seen at least half of the custom drycleaners shut down (many operators often of Chinese descent) inside D.C. Many small Chinese cafes or take-outs have also folded. Even those catering to their clientele, such as selling American-style fried chicken, fish-and-chips, and frothy drinks have closed. Of course at least 30% of busineses in the central downtown area have closed or continue to be in the process of closing. In some neighborhoods it is 50% of small businesses having shuttered since Covid.
In D.C.’s Chinatown, which was always only about three blocks squared in size at most, a rowdy set of teenagers from NE or Anacostia ride the subway and loiter about the historic gateway much of the afternoon and evenings. Nothing deters them from loitering in Chinatown all day and evening, since there are homeless adults doing the same. They sit on the steps of once-popular restaurants and drink and smoke dope. When it gets cold they wrap themselves up in a blanket and huddle against the walls.
The police have given these teens a free-pass to loiter and the business owners can’t sweep them off the steps. Even if they do, they come back soon enough or loiter just yards away. My wager is that some developer may even be paying some of these youths to loiter. They know how valuable these properties are in the market and if they push out a business, that property will be up for grabs. Everyday the business owners have to clean up the cigarette butts, spit, litter, and grafitti these teens or homeless adults leave behind. A group of men hang about near the tiny Chinese grocery store and gesticulate angrily up towards the sky, knowing that anyone at Wah Luck House can see their displays of power and authority.
Half of the businesses in Chinatown have gone bust since Covid, and what is worse, is these loiterers are nonchalantly targeting others to forward to their demise. They knowingly target this or that business and loiter near there all day, and so do the adults, and as business drops, their loitering even intensifies. Yet any tourist visiting the area would believe that this is just a bunch of teens having no where else to hang out, or adults needing to stand around because they have no other interesting place to go.
Is this not a form of ‘cancel culture’ when there are people who deliberately target businesses? At least, one might say, they are not actually robbing these stores. But they are doing so pretty much in all kinds of other ways, something I can personally attest to since I do in fact live inside this neighborhood.
White people and authorities are often complicit, even practicing schadenfreude when the small business must shutter its doors. “At last, at last, ha-ha, just what we thought was going to happen happened. See, look! We predicted that! That’s why we stopped patronizing this place long ago. We knew it was going to happen!“
Seriously there was a person of color who shook her head rather disdainfully at me when I pointed out a good sale at Modell’s, saying, “It’s still in business?” So the group-lemming effect runs very strong in such a significant segment of the consumer population that they even anticipate a closure and on account of that, refuse to shop there. This also happened to a Turkish clothing store in the same shopping center. No white person under thirty deigned to shop there because it didn’t look “brand name” even if the clothes were decent quality.
Anyone can still check via search engine and find out the lists of chain stores that have gone bust in the past five years, but the consumer memory is very short, especially in the limited memories and imaginations of urbanites newly relocated to D.C. here for attending university or to fulfill the internship of their dreams. The newbies cannot see the homeless for the latest trendy night spot or eatery, and it is all they can do to prevent themselves from stampeding over there. At the lucky spot, I can see the young white people sitting in socially cool cliques, enjoying their food and drink and looking very much as if they were in seventh-heaven, or reminding me of the British colonials visiting the public markets in Istanbul.
The exploitative imperialist mindset is definitely become the worldview, since that is what happens when the default narrative and culture is reinforced day and night. The socially conditioned become ideologically blind because they have never said “no” and they are only rewarded for saying “yes.” They are told what is acceptable which is climbing over the backs of all the poor and disenfranchised and dismissible and targeted and will-become-targeted and second-class and not-as-goods in order to experience their virtual high.
When someone like me presents a daring retrospective question or alternative view, they do not focus on the content of the conversation, rather, just like the media, they focus on the messenger. Their conditioning says, “kill the messenger,” while projecting a facsimile of smiling or nodding a little. By the way, that pretense is not granted to Chinese-Americans. As far as I know, I don’t even get a smile or nod or even a response. Especially the typical Yankee inside the Beltway, as brainwashed as he is, filled with ambitions of the Gilded Age, stares back as if he were looking past a dissected frog. They simply don’t see you, they don’t hear you, they don’t want to think about you, or anything you have to say.
(I am not even going to discuss, like the Homeland Security out-to-lunch flocks, one white dude recently jeered as I crossed the street to avoid them, “I hope she gets runned over!“)(Because those hungry flocks are often difficult, Asian fast-food owners even hire Latino service people to avoid their attempts at racial profiling).
Chinese-Americans and Asians in America are becoming “completely optional.” Never mind that President Biden is probably tommorrow going to have his Vice-President Kamala Harris probably appear before an AAPI crowd and pronounce all kinds of positive identity-politicking strokes. That’s just for show. Throughout the culture, in my humble opinion, the message is from the limited T.V. presence and in all directions: AAPI are an optional presence.
This is why most Americans do in fact neither hear me, see me, acknowledge me, or respond when I say anything most of the time. Now that is just the all-American identifying crowd. I have to admit that with the “noncool” types, such as more of the colored-folk, I hit it off much better. In fact, I was experiencing a bit of a vacation sitting in the section of the airport boarding where many passengers were bound for Baja California. The passengers smiled and even including at me. No such luck among the Inside-the-Beltway wonksville section.
In fact, in those sections, it is sad to admit that even certain Asians (including some relatives I know) have embraced an all-Red mentality, now meaning flag-waving Republicans. They don’t care that Trump actually launched more bombs than Obama did, including the MOAB in Afghanistan. They don’t care that his policies consistently punish or fail the poor. And they are so fiercely passionate about proving their loyalty that they actively attempt to “sniff out the traitors” among themselves, meaning any Chinese-American who walks left of the aisle becomes their hate-target.
Hate, divisiveness, and negativity gets America nowhere. This is why the administration quickly dismissed the 12-point China Peace Plan presented for Russia-Ukraine. Even if they eventually adapt it and call it the Biden Peace Plan, so far it appears that this cannot be the case. They have their controls over the media apparatus and the media were probably told to not cover the China Peace Plan proposal or if they did so, to present it in as dismissive an attitude as possible.
Everyday, whether alternative (such as Dave Hodges The Common Sense Show, Brighteon Prather Point with Jeffery Prather, even Stew Peters at Stew Peters Show) or the mainstream media, the slurs against China are taken or interpreted by lazy-minded egotistical or smug Americans for greenlighting Asian-American hatred or attacks. It’s a given because that has historically been the case which is that the historically oppressed race takes advantage of the idea that there is another race that can become the projection of their frustrations against white people. People who have been downsized can take it out on Asians that they lost their job even if those Asians they are psychologically abusing had nothing to do with that.
The climate of vindictiveness does not need to be held against the rubric of logic and reasoning, honesty or ethics. Especially if the American mob mentality has so taken hold that we need to “cancel culture” in order to bolster our sense of dignity, self-esteem, or virtue-signal socially reciprocal respect. There are no whites to target nor can blacks be easily targeted so therefore the AAPI are the ideal target, and never mind that our underwear, our household goods, our electronics, our car parts, our generic drugs, much of what we consume is cleanly sourced from China, hidden under “brand names” that we eagerly rush to buy. Never mind that we still need to have some Chinese take-out once in a while. Never mind that our manicures and pedicures are done in shops filled with Asian women. Never mind that the husbands and cold-knuckled nerds need to get Asian massages or something in addition to that. Never mind that at least some of our houses are cleaned and our toddlers are tended by faithful Filipino nannies who might have some Chinese-admixture. Never mind that a good percentage of Thai, and Vietnamese have some Chinese ancestry lineage or that is even a bragging point back home.
Never mind that we are so sourced from China that it’s practically in our DNA and all the things we handle day-in-day-out. No thank you, “we hate you.”
Yankees and today’s wonkish post-hipster collegiates fit the era from the 1920s Weimar Germany and even Germany under the Hitler regime almost to a tee when it comes to being able to think independently outside the box and really including all cultures including Chinese-Americans. The “completely optional” perspective that American culture is promoting is not only damaging Asian business, Asian commerce, and Asian pride and self-esteem, it is going to be hurtful for America in the long-run. Chinese are already beginning to realize that they are not welcome in America and should not immigrate here, even if racists such as Dave Hodges or Jeffery Prather believe that they are sneaking in among the brown hordes in some of their hate-filled invectives.
American geography and history is so weak that Americans don’t even know that there are huge cities and opportunities awaiting Asian immigrants around the globe besides their narrow vaunted vision of America as the greatest democracy in the world. They don’t realize that the “masses yearning to breathe free” from the Statue of Liberty poem is still supposed to apply today since they are intent on only proving how superior they are to all the people they need to stand on top of in order to experience a bit of seventh-heaven. The stony-faced pale young people are so intent on their mission to prove their superiority that they don’t really care who is going to bomb whom where anymore.
All they want to do is: OBEY.
(Opinion piece by AGN)