The ever splendid Natalie, once described as a ‘ninja librarian’, linked to a couple simply marvellous articles in the Guardian, and I really really wanted to leave a steaming, quivering pile of comment on them both. Alas… both have had their comments closed. So thank goodness we have Samizdata so that I can still share my thoughts with the wider world.
I was particularly taken with the ever dependable S.E. Smith’s article: ‘The people are so beautiful!’ That’s enough of the colonial tourism
While you’re drooling over Indian women in saris at the produce market, are you paying attention to the women organising against mining companies and western intrusions in India? Are you paying attention to the women opposing tourism and fighting objectifying activities in their communities?
Does this not SCREAM OUT for comment? My gratitude to Natalie for finding this positively buoyant paragraph knows no bounds. And so this is what I wanted to say…
It is essential to prevent anything that decreases the places that the ‘socially aware’ can go to feel good about themselves, thus tourism and the money it generates must be stopped. It must be replaced with tax transfers of course, sent directly to the Swiss Bank Accounts of the Mercedes Benz riding local ruling elite.
It should be clear that if poor brown skinned people start thinking they can lift themselves out of poverty via free exchange with willing visitors, they might start concluding they do not actually need the wise councils of the decaf latte drinking western bourgeois left and their NGOs, or even the bourgeois left’s associated third world auxiliaries.
This must not be permitted to occur. Bad things happen when the uppity lumpen proletariat (also known as ‘cashed up bogans’) are permitted to take high carbon cheap flight holidays away from the supervising catchment areas of their Guardian recruited social working betters. Take your eyes of them for a second and they start admiring the local crumpet, not for their picket line organising skills but rather for their agreeable curves! That will never do!
Let that happen and the next thing you know, they start intermarrying and miscegenating, greatly complicating the whole carefully constructed ‘identity politics’ balancing act that keeps statists of both left and right in power in oh so many places.
Yes Perry.
The left do NOT want poor people to make themselves better off – they want to use the poor as cannon fodder to create Revolution and a wonderful “new society”.
In Germany after the First World War the industrial workers “failed the Revolution” by not supporting the wiping out of “the capitalists” (i.e. business owners). So some Marxists started looking for new cannon fodder for the Revolution……
The Frankfurt School of Marxism (which later decamped to Columbia University in New York – and a few to California), which gave the world “Political Correctness” now “Critical Theory”, thought it had the answer – identity politics.
Reach out to groups – women, homosexuals, ethnic groups (whatever) teach them that they are “victims” (of “capitalism”) and use them as cannon fodder for the political structure.
Someone like this Guardian writer (regardless of their own “race”) could not care less about individual brown people (or green people – or whatever) they are just to be used as cannon fodder for the world Revolution (for the destruction of “capitalism” – as if there was much of that left) and that is all.
I realise this is written as a joke but in reality it is ENTIRELY correct. The truth REALLY IS that grotesque. They WANT people to be poor. They really DO send other people’s money to corrupt violent local thugs because they’re the GOVERNMENT, and they WORSHIP government. They HATE the uppity working class and their package holidays because that means they’re independent. Cashed up bogans are EXACTLY what they don’t want the Poor Brown Skinned People to become, because keeping them poor and culturally isolated makes them easier to control because they DESPISE anyone who does not conform to their GROUP classifications.
As the ‘Actonite’ above says, to be a Lefty, you have to hate. Lenin’s dictum ‘We must teach the children to hate‘, but you must hate in an ideologically correct way, if you hate, but you do not hate that which it is correct to hate, you become a Fascist.
People have always mixed with other people. Rich people have mixed with poor people. Black people have mixed with while people. Libertarians have mixed with socialists. This has often involved conversation, commerce, and sex. When these things have stopped happening, the cultures in question have pretty instantly become dead. The idea that there is somehow something “authentic” that will be ruined if it interacts with something else is just bollocks. Things will change, sure, but that has always been the case. The idea that things will homogonise – this is largely bollocks, too. Increased interaction makes things more complex, not less.
von Mises pointed out that for a socialist, the establishment and petrification of a set of social conditions was the aim. Clearly the anti-mining chap would hate to see jobs be created and green hillsides dug up if it meant a nice little poor paradise passed. He would have nothing and no one to patronise, or, in his daydreams, rule over.
If I want to drool over ladies in Saris probing the local produce at the market, the distance I have to travel is considerably less than a trip to India. A five minute walk down the hill to Gloucester Road usually does it. The man is an evil buffoon.
The man (SE Smith) is actually a woman, but I’d see little to disagree with RAB’s comment otherwise. I’d add that to me it seems her main characteristic is a great need to do exactly what she condemns others for in the article: to objectify, stereotype and label others. She starts with brown-skinned people in poorer countries, who she wants kept in the “grateful supplicants” box as described in Perry’s post and subsequent comments. But she doesn’t stop there. Obviously she stereotypes the straw-man white tourists who, she says, want to intrusively photograph the natives in their “natural habitat”. She puts quotes round those two words as if they were something she had regularly heard real people saying but I doubt she ever has. Slightly more interestingly she also stereotypes and condemns fellow lefties of the same general profile of herself, just not as well-versed in the latest PC terminology. (“In this corner of California, it comes with all these weird uncomfortable gross hippy-dippy trappings of peace, love and brown rice, but it also carries sinister colonialist overtones.”) On the same lines with all those angry statements in the last paragraph beginning with the word “You”, she pre-emptively denounces Guardian readers, who probably also fit the same general profile.
It must be hard work to constantly reassert your superiority to that degree.
These people do not understand reality, politics, law, morality or any other power beyond the force of arms.
Cripes! A woman eh? Best say no more… we can’t all be photogenic can we? 😉
And you are right Natalie, the effort this woman puts into being a pretentious self righteous prat, must be a real strain.
“The man (SE Smith) is actually a woman”
Sexist!
As the late Andrew Breitbart (that huge hard drinking Irish-American brought up in a Jewish family – now there is one for the nature/nurture debates) pointed out…..
When the Frankfurt School Marxists made it out to California after World War II they came upon one of the most wonderful places in human history – where people were living lives that were beyond the dreams of most of humanity in most of history.
The incoming leftists looked around them in the years after World War II in California, at all the wonders, and they thought…….
“How can we destroy all this?”
That is the mentality of someone like “SE Smith” – and it is not funny, it is evil.
Good luck finding “local crumpet” in India. The very pretty ones (regrettably few in number) are hidden away by their fathers, then married off.
You have about the same odds of chatting up a single Indian woman in a bar in, oh, Bangalore, as doing the same with a pretty Arab filly in a bistro in Bahrain: i.e. about zero. You have better odds with the Eurolottery.
It’s good to be a Westerner… but I digress.
Actually Kim, I know a counter-example (now married) who met in the very heart of Bollywood land 😛
People tell me I should visit such and such a place because “the people are so loving and gentle” and I want to vomit.
That’s just something people say when they come back from vacation. If they shrugged and said “Bah, one place is pretty much like the next” you’d have to wonder why they spent thousands on a vacation.
Are you paying attention to the women opposing tourism and fighting objectifying activities in their communities?
Opposing tourism? Opposing the practice of having locals gouge people from other countries engaged in the act of having a look around? Opposing the ability of others in their own community to put bread on the table. Or rice, I suppose. Yeah, lady, I’m paying attention to those women. The question is whether I’m coordinated enough to laugh and roll my eyes at the same time.
Hahahaha. From the comments: My Sri Lankan friend returned from a trip to Scotland saying the people there where “lovely”.
Paul
Just one point. I thought the term ‘Politically Correct” was originally from Maoist China. Maybe the Frankfurt school picked it up later ?
Perry, a single swallow maketh not a summer. I’ve spoken to dozens of guys who’ve been to India, and spent some time there myself. The overall impression is as I stated it. Even the Indian guys complain about the situation.
For those men who are attracted to Indian women, you have a better chance of landing one in the U.K. or the U.S. — and practically none in India. Of course, what you get in those cases are not native Indian women but the U.K./U.S. versions thereof.
Taylor – I do not know who used it first.
I suspect the Frankfurt School (because they were around first) – but I certainly would not have called Mao a copycat (at least not to his face – with his armed guards present).
Of course both were copying (whether they knew it or not) the French Revolutionary Jacobins – with their doctrine that NOTHING WAS OUTSIDE POLITICS (nothing was un political).
In turn the Jacobins (with their vision of a total transformation of society) remind me of various heretical religious cults.
I have to pass on an anecdote. I was on campus chatting to a Moroccan classmate, when two absolutely gorgeous girls sashayed past us, dressed in the height of modern girly fashion. Two Algerian guys were sitting close to us, and as the girls walked past them, one muttered someting in Arabic to his buddy, whereupon my friend chuckled.
“What did he say?” I asked.
“Persian whores.”
Kim, as said lady was a Bollywood starlette (by her own description, so I mean no disrespect by calling her that, for she is a sweetie) it may be that she operated within a rather different sub-culture. Certainly the stories I heard from them both about the sort of things that happened were quite ‘spicy’ 😀
I can’t help but think of this every time Indian women are mentioned – although I have no idea how much of it is real in terms of numbers, and how much is media/”activist” hype…
Yes Alisa.
And according to a leading figure in the Indian Socialist Party (the charming people with their Red and Green flag with a bicycle on it – not officially part of the present government but an important support for it in the Indian Parliament) women who consent to sexual intercourse (apart from with their masters) should be hanged.
On a totally unrelated point, the gentleman happens to be of the Islamic faith.