Ian Buruma (author most recently of Occidentalism) is always worth reading. Here he is (via The Marmot’s Hole) on ethnic nationalism in the Far East:
[P]atriotism, based on a sense of collective victimhood and a resolve to be a supreme survivor among nations, has come to replace Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought as the official ideology of the People’s Republic of China. We will no doubt hear more of it in this anniversary year. Chinese government leaders are adept at using Japanese war guilt as leverage in Sino-Japanese diplomacy. One of the main issues dividing the two nations is the fact that Japan’s prime minister Junichiro Koizumi pays his respects at the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, where the souls of those who have died for their emperor (including convicted war criminals) are worshipped. When Japan protested against a recent sortie by a Chinese submarine in Japanese waters, the Chinese once again brought up the issue of Yasukuni. […]
But there is something else too. Patriotic education is full of a type of nationalism, born in Europe and transplanted, often through Japan, to China and Korea, which has had lethal consequences: ethnic nationalism combined with social Darwinism. It is the struggle for survival of the fittest nations and races. The weak must perish. This ruthless notion was harnessed to the cause of American conquest and late European imperialism. First world war propaganda, particularly in Germany, was soaked in it. Nazi anti-Semitism, and the resulting genocide, was an extreme version. And it drove the Japanese conquistadors in China and Korea in the first half of the 20th century. As the superior race in Asia, so the Japanese were told, it was their duty to invigorate the weaker races of Asia with a firm crack of the imperial whip.
Now the Chinese are being told that only discipline, vigilance and ever greater national strength will save China from future humiliations. Civic patriotism of the French republican or traditional US kind has no place in an authoritarian system such as that of the People’s Republic of China, let alone the vague post-national idealism of the European Union. Japan’s official pacifism, which is fast crumbling anyway, certainly has little appeal. Ideologically, the PRC, like North Korea, and to a much lesser extent South Korea, is firmly stuck in the late 19th century, when Darwinist ideas made their first impression.
Leave a Reply