The progressive who happened upon this blog may find Neoreaction a little hard to swallow. Human Biodiversity … America Is A Communist Country … these freaks even use the word ‘patriarchy’ non-pejoratively! But there is one facet of policy on which we can agree: Imperialism.
Neoreactionaries are opposed to it, sincerely and in toto. Our policy is roughly that of Ron Paul, but even nicer to foreigners: after not bombing them, we won’t let them in our country. (There are all these tornados and Americans are awful drivers.)
Everything is copacetic, just need to cross the t’s and dot the i’s. Please participate in this short quiz:
1. Cultural Imperialism: I am opposed to America rearranging the native culture of less powerful nations for its profit and convenience.
2. Treaty Imperialism: America should respect treaties. Reinterpreting, renegotiating, or flat out ignoring those treaties is immoral.
3. Clandestine Imperialism: To act in secret to subvert another nation’s government — especially another democracy’s government — is the most flagrant violation of international law possible.
That wasn’t hard, was it? As for scoring:
For each “Yes”, score 5 points, redeemable at a UNICEF store near you.
For each “No,” score 0, and I hope you’re properly ashamed of yourself, warmonger.
For each “Yes” that was insincere because you actually support the form of imperialism in question, score -50 points. And if you lied without even knowing that you were lying, and are now gibbering with astonished resentment: don’t even bother with points. I just burned down the UNICEF store. And built a Chick-Fil-A over the ruins. (Even better: a Hooters. Trannies need not apply.)
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I live in Northern California; I work in the technology industry. Thus I am bombarded with flyers, emails, social media posts requesting support for this or that progressive cause. One such cause is that of educating girls in the Third World.
Some progressive shibboleths are controversial with the general public. Take global warming. Every time the East Coast goes through a record-setting cold snap, five different progressives pop up in my Facebook feed to snarl that “weather is not climate”.
I have never seen any progressive anywhere defend the education of girls. Girls’ education is self-evidently beneficial. It needs no defending.
One such program is “Girl Rising”. Another is “Peruvian Promise”, which is prominently featured on the home page of the Google-sponsored charity/NGO One Billion Acts of Peace:
When girls are educated and develop a sense of self-worth, they will in turn have a greater chance to succeed in life.
The mission of this important girls leadership and empowerment program, Peruvian Promise, is to unlock the potential of young women through scholarships for education and ongoing mentoring.
Which begs the following questions:
1. Is Peruvian culture suited for this program? 2. Will expanding education for girls lead to conflicts and unrealistic expectations?
3. What is the effect on existing Peruvian schools? 4. Will educators be unloaded from container vessels in Trujillo and Cailao? Or will existing programs benefiting boys be displaced? 5. If Peru is a traditional society, might this program perhaps worsen the education of the people who will actually hold jobs?
Of course these are all rhetorical questions. Rhetorical questions suck and are pointless. Rhetorical questions are most suckful and pointless when aimed at someone’s religious beliefs. A good Universalist’s answers to the above questions are 1. What? 2. Are you fucking kidding me? 3. Who cares? 4. Do you think my student loans pay for themselves? 5. If Peru is a traditional male-dominated society, we can fix that.
In other words, Peruvian Promise is precisely the pseudophod of the Cathedral that was suggested by the warning rattle of “leadership”, “empowerment”, and “ongoing mentoring”.
In other words, cultural imperialism.
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When I was a kid I watched a bit of Star Trek. THE Star Trek, with Kirk and Spock. And Star Trek: The Next Generation, with the bald guy and the robot. One episode that stuck in my mind: A military researcher/spook who installed a cloaking device on Enterprise: TNG and took it for a spin. This infuriated the bald guy, because apparently the Federation made nice with the Romulans and/or Klingons and promised not to research its own invisibility technology.
Even at the age of 16 I knew that there was something very wrong with this. Surely Mr. Cloaking Device Spook, and the government he represented, were behaving normally and prudently. But there was Captain Picard, veins throbbing, saying vehemently that the Federation “signed the treaty in good faith.”
Well. A few years before this episode aired, the British colony of Hong Kong prepared for its own sequel, HK: TNG. The Chinese promised that when they took over the colony in 1997:
In accordance with the One Country, Two Systems principle …, the socialist system of People’s Republic of China would not be practiced in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR), and Hong Kong’s previous capitalist system and its way of life would remain unchanged for a period of 50 years.
Have the Chicoms kept their promises? It’s been nearly two decades, and Hong Kong
– Maintains its own customs service, even for Chinese nationals
– Does not censor internet access
– Mints its own currency of pretty but rather clunky coinage
– Writes with traditional Chinese characters (a different script from that favored in the PRC)
– Drives on the left side of the road like crazy folk
Suppose the US somehow obtained the reversion of some valuable territory. The Vancouver Reversion, that’s not so hard to imagine. I’d be impressed if 18 years after the handover, Vancouver still used Canadian loons. Wouldn’t you?
Suppose the reversion territory had a private health care system. Do you think it would be allowed to opt out of Obamacare?
So the Chinese, and Hong Kong, have done pretty well. Thus the Umbrella Revolution was totally unnecessary, except as a manifestation of Cathedral evangelism/witless street theater. When my progressive friends and associates discussed the Umbrella Revolution, they were totally self-congratulatory, like … well, like all progressive projects. None of them had the slightest interest in whether the Chinese had held up their end of the bargain. If the Chinese signed the treaty in good faith. Even if they had, so what? Beijing is anti-democratic and the protesters are pro-democracy and what else matters?
In other words, treaty imperialism.
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A few weeks back some prog friends reshared an Atlantic article about Beate Gordon, a woman who wrote a clause in the Japanese constitution stipulating various forms of gender equity.
And she wrote this clause surreptitiously, with no input from the Japanese or American public. (“In February 1946, she worked in Tokyo on a top-secret project to draft a new Japanese constitution. Her assignment: women’s rights.”)
One bugaboo of the American left has always been “covert action”. Shadowy, secretive spies conduct dastardly deeds to thwart progressive regimes worldwide.
(This is is course silly — the CIA itself is left-wing, and lacks super powers. But what matters for our purposes is what progressives believe: that there exists a room somewhere in Langley with a giant world map, and periodically a spook twirls, let us say, a knob marked “Santiago” and sweet lovable Allende is replaced by vile Pinochet.)
So what did the covert-action-loathing left think of Ms. Gordon?
“It set a basis for a better, a more equal society,” Carol Gluck, a Columbia University professor of Japanese history, said in an excellent New York Times obituary of Gordon. “By just writing those things into the [Japanese] Constitution — our Constitution doesn’t have any of those things — Beate Gordon intervened at a critical moment. And what 22-year-old gets to write a constitution?”
Remember: This is an actual quote. This is not something I invented for purposes of mockery. When clandestinely writing another country’s laws suits progressive goals, it’s all hooray for our team. Not one progressive of my acquaintance showed the slightest qualm about Ms. Gordon’s activities.
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