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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   32223 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 21, 2025

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When Uganda decolonized it immediately engaged in ethnic expulsion of 90% of it's businesses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_Asians_from_Uganda

At the time of their deportation Indians owned 90% of the country's businesses and accounted for 90% of Uganda's tax revenue. The real value of salaries and wages plummeted by 90% in less than a decade following the expulsion

Zimbabwe promptly used literally North Korea trained death squads to commit genocide against the Ndebele as soon as it could.

Algeria promptly ethnically cleansed 10% of it's population upon de-colonization. About 1 million Pied Noir were expelled. No one calls it ethnic cleansing or genocide though, because they were told they had a choice. the choice given to them:

the suitcase or the coffin

Kenyan independence immediately led the the complete destruction of the Arabs of Zanzibar.

Even Singapore itself was effectively born from ethnic race riots. See the 1964 Race Riots. Plural.

I blame our collective forgetting about it all on Franz Fanon. Who made it clear that ethnic hate wasn't a coincidence, it was the point. He would regard modern Singapore as a failure and modern Zimbabwe as success.

I blame our collective forgetting about it all on Franz Fanon. Who made it clear that ethnic hate wasn't a coincidence, it was the point. He would regard modern Singapore as a failure and modern Zimbabwe as success.

Could you elaborate more on this point?

tl; dr

“Once their rage explodes, they recover their lost coherence, they experience self-knowledge through reconstruction of themselves; from afar we see their war as the triumph of barbarity; but it proceeds on its own to gradually emancipate the fighter and progressively eliminates the colonial darkness inside and out. As soon as it begins it is merciless. Either one must remain terrified or become terrifying—which means surrendering to the dissociations of a fabricated life or conquering the unity of one’s native soil. When the peasants lay hands on a gun, the old myths fade, and one by one the taboos are overturned: a fighter’s weapon is his humanity. For in the first phase of the revolt killing is a necessity: killing a European is killing two birds with one stone, eliminating in one go oppressor and oppressed: leaving one man dead and the other man free;” ― Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

epistemic status: Not a Fanon scholar. Pretty much this.

Everything I say is going to be crude but direct. A Fanon-ist would disagree with my characterization, instead opting for language and terms that takes his world view in more gushing tones. Nevertheless I think my characterization is broadly correctly.

Fanon believed colonization had wormed its way into the character and self-conception of every colonized people. That the very ethnic identity of everyone living under colonial rule had altered their morals, values, ethnic self-conception, and ultimately, their own personal psychology. He mixes Marxism, esoteric psychology, and Race/ethnicity and comes up with own model of colonization as psychological totalitarianism. That colonial rule has tainted everything with no escape. So what is to be done? How do you liberate your people and also yourself when you live in a totalitarian system?

You commit acts of violence. You get your whole community together and bomb innocent civilians. You beat up innocent passerby's because they are of the race of your colonial masters. Because there are no innocents. Because they are part of the colonial power structure.

and when you do that you personally rupture yourself away from the Colonial Worldview. Your personal acts of violence emancipate you from the totalitarian thought control of your overlords. All of this from exploding disco's where young people went to dance.

He structures this all in extremely high-falutin terms. terms which are absolute catnip to a certain type of intellectual inclined to give the status of High Cause to what is, on the ground, really just old tribal-brain us vs them hatred. Colonialism is frozen Hegelian dialectic between colonizer and colonized. Violence breaks the frozen system and restarts the dialectic so that the oppressed can restart progress.

"In the colonies the economic substructure is also a superstructure. The cause is the consequence; you are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich"

So lets compare to Singapore & Zimbabwe

Lee Kuan Yee's first language was English. His grandfather named him Harry. He once had the British Foreign Secretary

threw an arm around Lee. "Harry," he said, "You're the best bloody Englishman East of Suez."

Later he visits London and notices

"...he travelled to Piccadilly Circus by tube train, and as he emerged onto the pavement he stood and watched an unsupervised newspaper stall. He saw people stop and take a newspaper and then put their money in an old cardboard box next to the stall. He even saw people put in money notes and take out exactly the right change. Otherwise, no one interfered with or touched the money left uncovered and open to the world. He said to himself 'This is a well-ordered and disciplined society.'

....."he returned to Singapore determined that his country would be run on the principles he saw in operation in this country. Inspired by the level of social order and respect for private property he had witnessed during his visit to the UK, he not only changed Singapore from a war-ravaged and desperately poor country into one of the wealthiest of nations, but he also made it one of the safest; it now has one of the lowest crime ate of any modern developed country."

LKY then works tirelessly to work with an incredibly complicated multi-ethnic city-state. But everything is done pragmatically. It's about making sure every community feels like they are being given a fair shake in their city. That not one is exploiting them just because they are small, but also that meritocracy itself isn't being dismantled for the sake of equity. There is a ruthless pragmatism, but never an outlook of resentment.

For Fanon this hard fought public safety & ethnic harmony isn't success. This is total failure. Abdication of the fight for Liberation & Decolonization. Algeria ethnically cleansed itself of 13% of it's population to free itself from European influence/psychology/ways of knowing/epistemics/ethics/etc. Now it has dignity. That's success. Meanwhile LKY has become the colonizer himself. His society is a farcical continuation of colonization by "westernized elites". Only now without the British having to do the heavy work.

In this sense even Zimbabwe is richer than Singapore. Because Zimbabwe has overthrown is colonial superstructure for native rule. It's people might be poorer as a matter of GDP. But they are mentally far richer since, having committed prolonged acts of violence against their colonial masters, they've emancipated their minds from colonial influence.

“For a colonized people the most essential value, because [it is] the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity.” ― Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

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