1.
The Religion of Whiteness Becomes a Suicide
Cult
A
wounded and swaggering identity geopolitics puts the world in grave danger.
The New York Times Aug. 30, 2018
“White men,” an obscure Australian academic
named Charles Henry Pearson predicted in his 1893 book “National Life and
Character: A Forecast,” would be “elbowed and hustled, and perhaps even thrust
aside” by people they had long regarded as their inferiors — “black and yellow
races.” China, in particular, would be a major threat. Pearson, prone to
terrors of racial extinction while living in a settler colony in an Asian
neighborhood, thought it was imperative to defend “the last part of the world,
in which the higher races can live and increase freely, for the higher
civilization.”
His
prescriptions for racial self-defense thunderously echoed around the white
Anglosphere, the community of men with shared historical ties to Britain.
Theodore Roosevelt, who held a complacent 19th-century faith, buttressed by
racist pseudoscience, that nonwhite peoples were hopelessly inferior, reported
to Pearson the “great effect” of his book among “all our men here in
Washington.”
In
the years that followed, politicians and pundits in Britain and its settler
colonies of Australia, Canada and the United States would jointly forge an
identity geopolitics of the “higher races.” Today it has reached its final and
most desperate phase, with existential fears about endangered white power
feverishly circulating once again between the core and periphery of the
greatest modern empire. “The fundamental question of our time is whether the
West has the will to survive,” President Trump said last yearin a speech hailed
by the British
journalist Douglas Murray, the Canadian columnist Mark Steyn and the American
editor Rich Lowry. More recently, Mr. Trump tweeted (falsely) about “large-scale
killing” of white farmers in South Africa — a preoccupation, deepened by Rupert
Murdoch’s media, of white supremacists around the world.
To
understand the rapid mainstreaming of white supremacism in English-speaking
liberal democracies today, we must examine the experience of unprecedented
global migration and racial mixing in the Anglosphere in the late 19th century:
countries such as the United States and Australia where, as Roosevelt wrote
admiringly in 1897, “democracy, with the clear instinct of race selfishness,
saw the race foe, and kept out the dangerous alien.” It is in the motherlands
of democracy rather than in fascist Europe that racial hierarchies first
defined the modern world. It is also where a last-ditch and potentially
calamitous battle to preserve them is being fought today.
This
“race selfishness” was sharpened in the late 19th century, as the elites of the
“higher races” struggled to contain mass disaffection generated by the
traumatic change of globalization: loss of jobs and livelihoods amid rapid
economic growth and intensified movements of capital, goods and labor. For
fearful ruling classes, political order depended on their ability to forge an
alliance between, as Hannah Arendt wrote, “capital and mob,” between rich and
powerful whites and those rendered superfluous by industrial capitalism.
Exclusion or degradation of nonwhite peoples seemed one way of securing dignity
for those marginalized by economic and technological shifts.
The
political climate was prepared by intellectuals with clear-cut racial theories,
such as Brooks Adams, a Boston Brahmin friend of Roosevelt, and Charles B.
Davenport, the leading American exponent of eugenics. In Australia, Pearson’s
social Darwinism was amplified by media barons like Keith Murdoch (father of
Rupert and a stalwart of the eugenics movement) and institutionalized in a
“White Australia” policy that restricted “colored” migration for most of the
20th century. Anti-minority passions in the United States peaked with the 1924
immigration law (much admired by Hitler and, more recently, by Jeff
Sessions), which impeded Jewish immigrants and barred Asians entirely. By the
early 20th century, violence against indigenous peoples, immigrants and
African-Americans reached a new ferocity, and nativist and racist demagogues
entrenched a politics of dispossession, segregation and disenfranchisement.
Seeking
to maintain white power globally, Roosevelt helped transform the United States
into a major imperialist power. Woodrow Wilson, too, worked to preserve, as he
put it, “white civilization and its domination of the planet” even as he
patented the emollient rhetoric of liberal internationalism that many in the
American political and media establishment still parrot. At the post-World War
I Paris Peace Conference, which Wilson supervised, the leaders of Britain, the
United States, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand and Canada not only
humiliated the many Asians and Africans demanding self-determination; they also
jointly defeated an attempt by Japan, their wartime ally, to have a racial
equality clause included in the Covenant of the League of Nations.
2.
Review:
‘Crazy Rich Asians’ Is a Party With a First-Rate Guest List
The New York Times
Aug.
14, 2018
From
left, Michelle Yeoh, Henry Golding and Ms. Wu in the film.CreditSanja
Bucko/Warner Bros.
As
of the moment as an Instergram feed, “Crazy Rich Asians” revisits Jane Austen’s
timeless universal truth about a man in possession of a fortune being in want
of a wife. The man in question is Nick Young (Henry Golding), the exquisitely
eligible scion of a Singapore real estate family. The scale of his fortune is
suggested by the first scene, in which his mother, insulted by the manager of a
fancy London hotel, buys it out from under him.
There’s
no doubt in Nick’s mind about whom he wants to marry: Rachel Chu (Constance
Wu), an economics professor at N.Y.U. originally from Queens. She and Nick, who
have been together for a year, are clearly a perfect match. At least in
Manhattan. But when they travel back to Singapore for a wedding, Rachel finds
herself subjected to the disapproving scrutiny of the older generation and
vicious sniping from potential rivals.
Every
romantic comedy depends on obstacles to the central couple’s ultimate
happiness. “Crazy Rich Asians,” a busy, fizzy movie winnowed from Kevin Kwan’s sprawling, dishy novel, sets up a series of
clashes — between tradition and individualism, between the heart’s desire and
familial duty, between insane wealth and prudent upward mobility — that are
resolved with more laughter than tears. There are squalls of intrigue and a
melodramatic cloudburst or two, but nothing that threatens to spoil the
festivities.
The
venue is fabulous — if there is any part of Singapore that is less than
dazzlingly picturesque, we don’t see it here — the music is great, and the food
includes homemade dumplings, street-stall delicacies and lavish banquet dishes.
But the key to this party is surely the guest list. It has been noted that this
is the first Hollywood movie in a long time with a mostly Asian and
Asian-American cast, and if anything this observation understates the diversity
of the performers onscreen, in terms of both their origins and their
pop-cultural affiliations. They include Michelle Yeoh, one of the great
international movie stars of the past quarter-century; Ken Jeong, a staple of
naughty American comedy for almost as long; and Awkwafina, a hip-hop artist,
actress and web celebrity of more recent vintage.
That’s
only a small sampling. Mr. Kwan’s book, a best-seller that has spawned two
sequels since it was published in 2013, runs to more than 500 pages and
includes footnotes, genealogical charts and a telephone directory’s worth of
names. Its digressions and tangents would easily fill up a television season or
two, and the movie, directed by Jon M. Chu, can feel a bit rushed and cramped.
There’s too much and also not enough.
Still,
it’s hard not to have fun, though not always for poor Rachel. After a pleasant
excursion with the soon-to-be newlyweds, Nick’s boyhood friend Colin (Chris
Pang) and his fiancée, Araminta (Sonoya Mizuno), the family drama and the
peripheral silliness kick into high gear. Rachel meets an ex-girlfriend of
Nick’s, Amanda (Jing Lusi), who is less of an ally than she seems. More
simpatico is Astrid (Gemma Chan), Nick’s ultraglamorous cousin, whose marital
troubles provide the most developed secondary plot. Her husband, Michael
(Pierre Png), is, like Rachel, an outsider; his insecurity about his wife’s
money and status turns their marriage into a potential cautionary tale.
A
more serious intimation of trouble arrives every time Nick’s mother, Eleanor
(Ms. Yeoh), looks in Rachel’s direction. (His father is away on a business
trip.) Her judgment seems severe and unfair, but she also possesses an undeniable
grandeur, a seriousness about family, power and her own identity that is noble
as well as cruel. While there is never any real doubt that “Crazy Rich Asians”
will come down on the side of free choice and true love, it does pay lip
service to the gravity and durability of other values.
Mostly,
the movie is committed to the value of a good time. It is an unabashed
celebration of luxury and money, with hints of class conflict that have more to
do with aspiration than envy or anger, set in an Asia miraculously free of
history or politics.
3.
Nana na naaa! How Hey Jude became our
favourite Beatles song
It’s
50 years since Paul McCartney came up with Hey Jude while driving from London
to Surrey – and made a song that’s sung everywhere from football terraces to
Oxford colleges. Here’s the story of how it came to be
The
Beatles in February 1968, the year Hey Jude was written. Photograph: Rex
Features/Blackbrow
You
could argue forever about which of the Beatles’ songs is the greatest.
According to the Daily Telegraph, it’s something nostalgic: In My Life.
According to the NME, it’s something
psychedelic: Strawberry Fields Forever, which wasn’t even the best song on the
single it appeared on, alongside Penny Lane. According to Rolling Stone and USA Today, it’s something epic: A
Day in the Life, which often does well in polls, perhaps because it’s written
by both Lennon and McCartney.
The
debate is diverting but doomed. The Beatles’ range was so broad that it would
be easier to name Matisse’s best painting or Meryl Streep’s best performance –
which wouldn’t be easy at all. This isn’t just apples and oranges, it’s the
whole fruit stall, so if we must use superlatives, we’d better narrow them
down. The most covered Beatles song is Yesterday, the biggest seller is She Loves You
and the biggest crowdpleaser is Hey Jude.
Hey
Jude, which turns 50 on 30 August, is the Beatles song most likely to be
bellowed by a choir of thousands. At Manchester City, fans sang it after the
team won their first Premier League title in 2012. At Arsenal, Gooners used it
to serenade Olivier Giroud, the team’s sleek French striker, who said of the
track before he left for Chelsea : “It gives me goosebumps.” It also rings out
at Newcastle and Cardiff, thus spanning the four points of the Premier League
compass. Any decent song needs to be singable, but Hey Jude goes further: it’s
yellable and flexible. Into the gap after “Nahh, na, na, nahh-na-na, nahhh”,
you can slot almost any pair of syllables – Giroud, City, Geordie.
The
song has also become a cricket chant. England supporters sing it for Joe Root,
the team’s boyish captain. And it has been sung for the rain – at Edgbaston
last year, when a shower sent England and Australia off the field. “The only
good thing that came out of [the match],” said Shane Warne, commentating on
Sky, “was the crowd’s wonderful rendition of Hey Jude.”
Those
nahh-nahs know no class boundaries. At Westminster School, at which fees cost
more than £23,000 a year, the boys and girls went into Latin prayers one day in
2012 and pulled a stunt planned on Facebook, singing Hey Jude as the organist
launched into Deus Misereatur. Contacted by the London Evening Standard, the headteacher kept
his cool. “Their Hey Jude stopped after the first verse because I don’t think
they knew any more of the words,” Stephen Spurr said. “I felt tempted to sing
them.” At Oxford in 2016, the matriculation ceremony that welcomes every
undergraduate was enlivened by a group of students deciding that what the
Sheldonian Theatre needed, on a Saturday morning, was a drunken rendition of
Hey Jude. So they walked into the building, designed by Sir Christopher Wren,
wearing gowns and mortarboards and belted out the Beatles classic.
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