A new memorial in southern Taiwan has been unveiled to remember the 1,000s of Taiwanese youths who volunteered to help the Japanese war effort during World War II.
This is essentially, ideology anyway, the same as Eastern European (Ukrainians specifically I recall several years back way before the current Russia shit) diaspora who love to put those “in remembrance of the brave Ukrainians who died fighting evil ideologies.” And then its very clearly supporting the collaborators with the Nazis against the Soviets.
Also the same as the “daughters of the confederacy” type statues. I think most Americans, liberals mostly, but even some of the less completely brainbroken conservatives/republican types recognize the confederacy just stood for maintaining the institution of chattel slavery in the US and thus was dogshit, inhumane, indefensible ideology for that alone. But yet they’ll often defend those statues of like General Lee and Jefferson Davis, etc. There’s something fucking weird about statues. And this is just my opinion, but whatever, it’s like people just want to mythologize and whatever else this made up past or heavily altered vision of the past. Like thinking David and Lee were “generally respectable southern gentlemen who just happened by historical standards now to do abhorrent things.” And it’s just weird, man. Sometimes people are just bad people. If you owned other humans you were bad. Is that so fucking controversial? If you fought for an army willingly that advocated genocide of people based solely on weird racial and religious grounds, I don’t really care WHY you did it: that was fucking bad! And you do not deserve to be remembered as anything other than a person who died for a bad thing. And not individually remembered, no, just a fucking sack of bones and sludge along with your former pieces of shit. If your grandfather was one of these soldiers, yeah, that’s not your fault. But it IS your fault to embrace that person when no one is fucking making you and choose to hold them up on a pedestal. You’re actively tying yourself to some of the worst shit in history and doing so willingly when you could also reject such people and their ideologies. It’s ok to condemn shitty family members. Nazi grandpa, Nazi brother, I don’t care, you aren’t doing some good thing by honoring them especially when they died way way outside your lifetime. You’re just choosing to do so because you like their ideology. And that makes you also a shitty person.
Got off on a rant there, but fuck it.
Ultimately these monuments don’t mean much on their own. However, there is absolutely an undertone, a bad vibe maybe the zoomers call it. Material conditions are worsening in the first world for many reasons. People are looking for “why” and more importantly seeking a solution. As leftist movements become more pronounced in the third world, such as Africa, it makes sense to see a reactionary turn in the first world to further fascist ideology. The mixture of worsening first conditions and the rise of some leftist, socialist, communist, whatever else, governments and such is exactly the perfect climate to push the underlying fascist tendencies of the first world forward and accelerate them. Fear of the other, fear of retribution (a favorite for white liberals), just… fear. Fear from ignorance. It’s not good. These statues, who cares ultimately. But they symbolize a lot and not in the way they intend to. Symbols of untaught history, willful and forced ignorance, fears of the unknown, fears of different people and cultures. I dunno. I’m not proposing any cheat codes to fix anything. Just saying what I’m observing. It’s hard to see anything going the “good way,” but I guess we’ll see…
This is essentially, ideology anyway, the same as Eastern European (Ukrainians specifically I recall several years back way before the current Russia shit) diaspora who love to put those “in remembrance of the brave Ukrainians who died fighting evil ideologies.” And then its very clearly supporting the collaborators with the Nazis against the Soviets.
Also the same as the “daughters of the confederacy” type statues. I think most Americans, liberals mostly, but even some of the less completely brainbroken conservatives/republican types recognize the confederacy just stood for maintaining the institution of chattel slavery in the US and thus was dogshit, inhumane, indefensible ideology for that alone. But yet they’ll often defend those statues of like General Lee and Jefferson Davis, etc. There’s something fucking weird about statues. And this is just my opinion, but whatever, it’s like people just want to mythologize and whatever else this made up past or heavily altered vision of the past. Like thinking David and Lee were “generally respectable southern gentlemen who just happened by historical standards now to do abhorrent things.” And it’s just weird, man. Sometimes people are just bad people. If you owned other humans you were bad. Is that so fucking controversial? If you fought for an army willingly that advocated genocide of people based solely on weird racial and religious grounds, I don’t really care WHY you did it: that was fucking bad! And you do not deserve to be remembered as anything other than a person who died for a bad thing. And not individually remembered, no, just a fucking sack of bones and sludge along with your former pieces of shit. If your grandfather was one of these soldiers, yeah, that’s not your fault. But it IS your fault to embrace that person when no one is fucking making you and choose to hold them up on a pedestal. You’re actively tying yourself to some of the worst shit in history and doing so willingly when you could also reject such people and their ideologies. It’s ok to condemn shitty family members. Nazi grandpa, Nazi brother, I don’t care, you aren’t doing some good thing by honoring them especially when they died way way outside your lifetime. You’re just choosing to do so because you like their ideology. And that makes you also a shitty person.
Got off on a rant there, but fuck it.
Ultimately these monuments don’t mean much on their own. However, there is absolutely an undertone, a bad vibe maybe the zoomers call it. Material conditions are worsening in the first world for many reasons. People are looking for “why” and more importantly seeking a solution. As leftist movements become more pronounced in the third world, such as Africa, it makes sense to see a reactionary turn in the first world to further fascist ideology. The mixture of worsening first conditions and the rise of some leftist, socialist, communist, whatever else, governments and such is exactly the perfect climate to push the underlying fascist tendencies of the first world forward and accelerate them. Fear of the other, fear of retribution (a favorite for white liberals), just… fear. Fear from ignorance. It’s not good. These statues, who cares ultimately. But they symbolize a lot and not in the way they intend to. Symbols of untaught history, willful and forced ignorance, fears of the unknown, fears of different people and cultures. I dunno. I’m not proposing any cheat codes to fix anything. Just saying what I’m observing. It’s hard to see anything going the “good way,” but I guess we’ll see…