Sunday, August 3, 2008

Stranger than Fiction

Readers of the Foreign Devil currently basking in the light of Liberty Illuminating the World may have heard something about the beast called Chinese nationalism, that seems to lurk at the margins of any discussion about this country. Chinese nationalism is neither more nor less frightening or unthinking than the European nationalisms that it cannot admit inspired it——if I keep on writing like this we'll be able to discover how much leeway my political sell-out has bought——and like the Italian and German nationalisms a hundred and some years and a few thousand miles distant, it's driven by a form of irredentism.


Now with the exception of Outer Mongolia (and if we wanted to be provocative, we could say Taiwan as well), China right now owns almost all the land it ever has. What is unredeemed is for the most part not land, since officially Taiwan is a part of China, and doesn't need to be annexed, but rather the national dignity which the greatest propaganda system on earth has convinced the Chinese people was lost to foreign powers over the course of the twentieth century. At a museum today (pictures to follow), my mother pro tempore informed me nonchalantly, as we passed a display of weapons won from the Japanese during the War of Resistance against Japan (we generally call it the Second World War), that she did not like Japanese people. Of course the crimes committed by the Japanese in China are horrific to recall——even if not quite so hard on civilians as our method of ending the war was——but China's bitterness about the matter sometimes reaches nearly incredible levels.


China does not forget——and if they did the party's there to remind them that China is a nation that has been taken advantage of by the West, by Japan——in short, by everyone——and which the party can restore to its rightful glory. This psychology of national victimhood has some truly fascinating expressions, like the following commercial, in English no less, which was not made by the government (they have better standards) but put out by a sports network. Any foreigner who has watched a basketball game here has probably seen it; since many of you have been denied that pleasure, I reproduce for you, esteemed Readers, in all its Chinglish glory:


Mother


The world laughed at you for being backward;
The world was full of envy and anxiety when you opened up and
progressed into a financial powerhouse;
The world condemned you when you put law and order into the
upheaval and lawlessness created by followers of a self proclaimed Robin Hood in
Tibet but failed to applaud when you used your influence to save the lives of
Burmese monks;
The world threatened to boycott and disrupt the August
Olympics on ground of your violations of human rights standards set by the West
who by apartheid policies and discrimination of coloured people blatantly
violated for ages the same standards set.


Let me tell you Mother as a dragon seed brought up outside
China:
They fear you Mother as you out compete them;
They fear you Mother as you are set to replace them at the
healm of word order faster than they can accept;
They fear you Mother as you have refused to take sides in
every international dispute as you believe that to each his own and from each
his best;
They fear you Mother as you have by hardwork hastened the
failure and decadence of self assumed western supremacy system;
And finally for the period 12th May to eternity, you have
shown the world the tenderness, love and care of the best guardian government
and leaders the Chinese People can ever have contrasting greatly with the
aftermath of the Florida and Burmese cyclone.


Mother, words of praises and admiration will never come from
the West as they have painted you falsely as a hardcore monster with no feelings
for your own for too long and the Western World is watching with total disbelief
on CNN,BBC,Fox Media, live, the search, rescue, care and rebuilding operations
to restore life and normalcy into the millions of displaced victims led by
brothers Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao demonstrating love care and simplicity with no
political agenda whatsoever.
Mother, we whether in or out of the Great Wall are lucky and
proud to be descendants of the ever Supreme Dragon.

Amen.

Mr. Ben 吕律师
Chairman / CEO,
Bensports Satellite TV
May 2008


To which, apart from some caustic comments about the importance of commas, this Foreign Devil has nothing to say.

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