So much good stuff recently!

Where to start?

Well, logically, let’s start at the beginning. Let’s start with President Putin’s recent clarion call at the Valdai International Discussion Club to the recognition of the contradictions and collapse of the neoliberal world order, a collapse which he hints could (God forbid!) lead to another world war. Putin speaks measuredly, with care and with precision here, but delivers his blows against the reigning hegemon with all the acuity of a master fencer. He speaks like a classical European conservative, of the dangers of imposing order on the world by ‘universal diktat’. He details the threats facing his own country, and of the threats facing the world order: terrorism, organised crime, extremism of both political and religious varieties, piracy, trafficking in drugs and human flesh – all encouraged by breakdowns in the social order, and often ones following a direct or an indirect intervention by the United States government.

It’s well worth reading in its entirety, as one may do in English here. But the money quote is as follows:

We are well aware that the world has entered an era of changes and global transformations, when we all need a particular degree of caution, the ability to avoid thoughtless steps. In the years after the Cold War, participants in global politics lost these qualities somewhat. Now, we need to remember them. Otherwise, hopes for a peaceful, stable development will be a dangerous illusion, while today’s turmoil will simply serve as a prelude to the collapse of world order.

Yes, of course, I have already said that building a more stable world order is a difficult task. We are talking about long and hard work. We were able to develop rules for interaction after World War II, and we were able to reach an agreement in Helsinki in the 1970s. Our common duty is to resolve this fundamental challenge at this new stage of development.

On the other hand, we have this brilliant postmortem by veteran journalist Patrick L. Smith on the American news media’s non-coverage, or rather selective coverage, of this speech. Here’s one particularly enjoyable highlight:

Here is Schmemann on the Ukraine passages of the presentation: “In Mr. Putin’s version of the Ukrainian crisis, the United States was the instigator of the protests in Kiev that led to a ‘coup’ against President Viktor Yanukovych and the subsequent fighting. One American participant told Mr. Putin she was hard put to recognize her country as the one he was describing.”

Well, confused American participant, you make an interesting point. Washington has created a version of events in Ukraine that amounts to a parallel reality, and people such as Schmemann are paid to perpetuate it. If it is of any help: There was a coup, there were neo-fascists among its leaders, the State Department backed it, and the evidence of all this is indisputable.

And speaking of the lovely Grey Lady. She is quite put out, very clearly distressed and seemingly confused, the poor dear, about how to interpret Viktor Orbán’s successes in Hungary. Is it an atavistic regression toward the Soviet bloc, from a man who won his fame fighting the same? Or is it a new, dark and dangerous ‘right-wing populist’ star rising over the Magyar lands? Saying both at once leaves one with the impression that she doesn’t quite know which way to jump. Well, whatever it is, it is quite clear from her tone of distress that our dear Lady Grey simply doesn’t like it. Which is all the more reason for us to like it – those of us Americans who prefer our nation to be peaceful and law-abiding, that is!

Speaking of peaceful and law-abiding Americans – which is to say, Americans abiding by the eternal law of God rather than by the dictates of tourism-obsessed city governments gone mad – all hats off indeed to the inimitable nonagenarian Mr. Abbott of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, who has received his second criminal citation under a new city ordinance for the horrific crime of feeding homeless people. Bravissimo, Mr. Abbott! And Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig has an incredibly profound piece discussing this case.

Lots of positives for today, actually – little glints of hope amongst the flotsam! I’m in a pretty positive mood right now – just finished up with a conference in Nanjing on the topic of the New Silk Web. It was very productive; got to meet a lot of very smart, interesting and good people from China, from Pakistan, from England, from Germany and from my own country, and discuss with them everything from halal food to techno-anarchism, and from Thomas Piketty to Han-dynasty traditional Chinese thought. It’s been an exhausting but remarkably rewarding day.

Just asking

How is it that certain ideologically-driven elements of American court historiography (usually and unconvincingly self-describing as conservative), after rightly decrying the brutal and inhumane practice of mass human sacrifice by the Aztecs, then go on to excuse American race-based chattel slavery in historicist terms as a temporary glitch and a product of the times (and hey, everybody else was doing it too!)?

Amongst such ideologically-driven elements, one must wonder: do such historicist and moral-relativist excuses apply only to Americans and their forebears?

Again, just asking.

Pointless video post – ‘Ride’ by Cathedral

One of the traditional doom metal bands (well, not quite traditional) that I have come to really enjoy recently is Cathedral. Lee Dorrian, after a brief stint as the frontman for Napalm Death of grindcore fame, very clearly turned in a completely different direction after he formed the band. I have to admit, I have a certain guilty appreciation for all the instances of ‘hey’, ‘come on now’ and ‘alright’ that pepper his lyrics, but other than that this band takes its lyrics quite seriously. While they might not be as playful and pun-happy as, say, Skyclad, there’s definitely more than a bit of clever wordsmithing going on in these songs. One can look quite a bit deeper, of course, but the song titles themselves are quite tantalising in their sesquipedalian glory, with tracks like ‘Phantasmagoria’, ‘Karmacopia’ and ‘Fangalactic Supergoria’. And the tunes themselves are heavy and catchy as hell, to boot, with an old-school rock-and-roll vibe and more than a bit of psychedelia for good measure. Enjoy the ‘Ride’, gentle readers!

The illusion of ‘whiteness’

One of the biggest scams ever pulled on us so-called ‘white’ people – the one which has destroyed the great basis of our wealth and communal health in exchange for what has largely consisted of the illusion of power, the one which angry ‘white’ people should be really, really angry about – was rich landowners telling them that they were white. The white race is, in actuality, a nakedly artificial political description, and the sorts of conservatives who say that white people should be proud of their achievements are in actuality anything but conservative. What they are conserving is an imaginary norm rather than a real community of people and lifeways. They are perpetuating a scam, among the several aims of which is to dissolve the sense of communal belonging which ties the vestiges of Old World immigrant traditions to modern life.

In 1600, there was no such thing as the ‘white race’. One of the reasons why I am adamant that racism is a historically-circumscribed and explicitly-modern phenomenon is precisely because people had no grounds to think in ‘racial’ terms prior to their invention. Discrimination in one form or another may have always been a problem, but it is not only lazy but downright wrong to say that racism has been. I say this because the historical proof is in the texts themselves. The ‘white race’ was essentially legislated into existence by the Virginia colonial government in 1691. And it was legislated into existence as an act of class warfare not only against blacks but also against white people whose families had been brought over as uncompensated labourers – in other words, slaves – from Ireland and Scotland. Specifically, it was done to prevent poor Gaelic whites from commiserating with enslaved Africans, and to prevent the solidarity and collaboration of uncompensated labour across ‘racial’ lines.

People from Ireland and Scotland in the early colonial period were generally of two kinds. Some were political prisoners and debt slaves who were sold into forced servitude in the New World as a free and mobile labour class. Others were political and religious dissenters, often with Jacobite sympathies. However, political refugees and servants under indenture did not provide a broad enough labour pool for the needs of conquering a new continent – a gap which the Atlantic slave trade rushed in to fill.

Black slavery and ‘white’ Gaelic indenture were aimed toward the same end, but broadening the pool of rootless free mobile labour brought with it its own problems, the first of which was numerical strength. Early on in the history of the Middle Passage it was far from unheard-of for black and white slaves to raise joint insurrections. The solution to this problem devised by the Virginia colonial legislature, brilliant in its diabolical subtlety and simplicity, was to sow distrust between them by granting special privileges to the Gaelic slaves and denying them to the black slaves… on the basis of skin colour. The Marxist analysis is largely correct on the merits, that the ‘white race’ was a political wedge driven straight down the middle of the nascent working class, one that could disguise itself in a ‘natural’ camouflage.

‘Whiteness’ as a standard of informal and legal access to the mainstream American body politic demonstrably varied from generation to generation – and it could be granted or rescinded depending on the political climate. At the beginning of the century, immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe – classified ‘racially’ as Slavs and Iberians – were denied access to the American mainstream on the basis that they had ‘poorer physical and mental equipment’ and ‘radically different ideals and standards of living as compared with the Celtic and Teutonic races’. (I’ll be honest, it blew my mind that my Bohemian immigrant grandmother’s family would not have been considered ‘white’.) However, even the Teutonic ‘race’ was not exempt from exclusion – over the course of the twentieth century Americans of German descent were denied access to the American mainstream on the basis of political fear.

Thus far went the traditional leftist critique of race. But a potentially rich traditionalist-conservative critique of race lurks on the other side of the equation. Whereas old-guard leftists have been concerned with the economic inequalities associated with unequal access to the American mainstream, traditionalists are and should be concerned with the character of that mainstream. After all, one side effect of the political invention of race was that it served as an unspoken and infinitely flexible solvent of traditional communities as they immigrated in waves over to the United States. Even though Slavs and Iberians were denied access to the American mainstream on account of their foreignness and especially their Catholicism and Orthodoxy, assimilation to the bland liberal Anglo-Saxon Protestant norm was always an option. Heads could be kept down. Noses could be kept to the grindstone. Names could be changed. Languages could be forgotten. Religious practices could be kept under the table or outright abandoned.

Certain elements of the liberal project still seek to extend the cultural normativity of Anglo-Saxon Protestantism across the entirety of modern American society – as such, they are still having difficulties getting minorities, especially traditionally-conservative black, Irish and Eastern European working-class enclaves on-board with their project. But traditionalist conservatives themselves have no such weakness, since they tend to value the cultural uniqueness and close ties of each of the ethnic enclaves, whether they are rural Appalachian Scots-Irish, Midland Eastern European, northeastern Italian or even (especially in the case of some traditionalist Catholics) southwestern Latino.

The weakness of the traditionalist conservative position is that too many of them misdiagnose ‘whiteness’.

The ‘white’ identity is not under threat. Indeed, under the influence of modern mainstream liberalism, the ‘white’ identity has expanded to include a number of those previously considered racial minorities. The ‘white’ identity, being an identity with no reality outside of power politics, is infinitely flexible. Rather, because of this, the ‘white’ identity is a threat, precisely to the cultural uniqueness, religious values and informal communal ties of each ethnic enclave. ‘Whiteness’ is and always has been a political invitation into the American mainstream, deracinated, globalised and undifferentiated. And it has always been an invitation extended in bad faith.

Take for example the model minority du jour, the Asian-American minority. They are being used (most recently by one Mr. William James O’Reilly, Jr.) as a mascot to deny the very idea of ‘white privilege’ – because they work hard and play by the rules of American mainstream society, so the argument goes, they are rewarded with success. The failures of blacks and Hispanics to attain the same successes are, so the corollary goes, totally due to their own lack of initiative and shortcomings as measured by the standards of laisser-faire capitalism. Wait, what was the phrase again? Oh yes, ‘poorer physical and mental equipment’ and ‘radically different ideals and standards of living as compared with the Celtic and Teutonic races’. Asian-American ‘success’, which as Ms. Haruka Sakaguchi explains is to a significant degree the result of selective immigration policies, is being used to shield the wealthy from a systematic critique.

We’ve sacrificed our names, our cultural practices, and even our religious convictions in this attempt to ‘act white’ – and when we finally get there we’re no better off than when we started. Except our one-percenter overlords give us more opportunities to kick the black guy. Maybe it’s my ‘poorer mental equipment’, but to this stupid lazy bohunk it looks a lot like we slightly-more-ethnic newfangled whiteys have been getting played this whole time. We’ve sold off our birthrights, and not even for a mess of pottage. We didn’t even get the pottage! Instead we got to think of ourselves as ‘white’, as equal in an illusory way to the Teutonic Protestant norm – the norm of capitalist ‘success’. And we are now seeing the results of Asian-Americans having made the same Faustian bargain.

This should upset traditionalist conservatives as much as it upsets leftists, even if it is for different reasons. The last remnants of the organic communities of the Old World, and the transcendent values they brought with them, got sacrificed by their children for the sake of conforming to an imposed, nakedly-political community.

Hanfu – a tale of traditionalist resistance

Cross-posted from Solidarity Hall:

In 2003, a power-company worker named Wang Letian in Zhengzhou, Henan Province began doing something unprecedentedly strange, almost unthinkable in Chinese society with its subtly conformist pressures. He walked down the street, in broad daylight, wearing traditional Chinese clothing. And not just any traditional Chinese clothing – he did not choose, for example, the tangzhuang which was common during the Qing Dynasty. Mr. Wang chose to wear a pre-Qing hanfu (漢服) – and was the first person to do so in a public setting in 358 years. He may or may not have intended it, but his small act sparked a significant subcultural interest in reviving traditional Han clothing in China. Amongst many Chinese people, particularly young people, there is a desire to assert some material form of local, national and cultural pride which finds a ready expression in the hanfu.

The location here is significant. Zhengzhou is the capital of Henan Province, China’s cultural (and agricultural) heartland. Henan is home to Luoyang, Kaifeng and Anyang, three of China’s most important historical imperial capitals from the Xia, Yin, Zhou and Han Dynasties all the way down to the Song Dynasty. And yet, in recent years, Henan and its people have faced various difficulties. The famine of 1942 during the Sino-Japanese War hit Henan hardest of all, to the point where children were sold to other families so that they wouldn’t starve to death. In the wake of ‘reform and opening’, Henanese farmers were some of the hardest-hit by the corporate-driven land expropriation that followed hard on the heels of Deng’s privatisation programme – only the farmers of Anhui Province to the southeast suffered more. As a result, many migrant workers (mingong 民工) came out of Henan to work in urban centres of capital like Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen. Henan was routinely (and unfairly) portrayed and ridiculed in Chinese popular culture, particularly during the early 2000’s, as violent, criminal, backwards, superstitious, given to vice and (worst of all) poor.

It would be more than somewhat naïve to dismiss the class or regional origins of the hanfu subculture out-of-hand. Wang Letian was not, of course, a migrant worker, but in 2003 he was a proletarian power-plant worker in Henan’s biggest urban centre. And as an element of material culture, the hanfu of course hearkens back directly to a time when Henan was China’s centre and had not been left behind by the post-Deng rush to riches. Wang himself speaks of his gesture in nationalist and aesthetic terms, though: ‘In the end beautiful things will meet with people’s approval,’ he says. ‘Not to mention, the hanfu has always been our thing… in the great family of China’s 56 ethnic groups, only the Han do not have their traditional dress. Following [our] tragic history, only the Han traditional clothing style died out; we need to revive [this tradition].’

The hanfu subculture has not stayed in Henan. It has gained attention and interest from all over China, particularly from young people and particularly from young women. It has also attracted a great deal of criticism, which runs in several related veins. One WangYi (163.com) article from 2012 criticised the movement as ‘attention-seeking’, ‘awkward’ and reminiscent of ‘time-travel’, which covers most of the bases of the criticisms levelled at the hanfu subculture.

The first criticism, the criticism that gets the most air-time, is that the hanfu is ‘awkward’. It is ill-suited, the critics assert, for the practical demands of everyday clothing in modern urban life. The long design is imagined as impractical for the demands of work, school life, play and so on. The second, related criticism is that the adoption of the hanfu is essentially a form of misplaced nostalgia which has no place in modern Chinese society. The third criticism, running somewhat at odds with the first two, is that it is essentially a movement by individuals seeking to show off or an inauthentic attempt at copying a privilege enjoyed by other nations: that the current focus on clothing is superficial and shallow, and does nothing substantial for the spiritual question and the question of national dignity which it attempts to address. Still other critics do not dismiss the importance of the hanfu movement, but rather see it as trending dangerously in the direction of Han ethnic chauvinism, playing to historical victim complexes and potentially alienating China’s minorities.

The first and second criticisms are particularly interesting for their assumption, and indeed assertion, of a set of cultural norms governed by the demands of Western capitalism. In modern China the Western business suit is associated with ‘success’, defined in terms of monetary gain and superior social status. For women, western brands are practically always preferred to domestics. Practically the best thing one can say about a piece of clothing in Beijing or Shanghai is that it is ‘in vogue’ (shishang 時尚), and the types of clothing that invariably receive this assessment are European in design. One of the very last things one would say about the hanfu is that it is shishang – for this reason, it is dismissed as either a mere piece of nostalgia, as something that comes out of a period drama, or as something ‘impractical’ in the terms laid down by capitalist modernity.

The third criticism is somewhat more well-intentioned, but the idea is that the hanfu movement doesn’t go far enough and that it gets mired down in trivia in the quest for the Chinese national soul seems a bit grandiloquent and even misaimed. For one thing, the Bard’s (ironic?) quip in Hamlet that ‘the apparel oft proclaims the man’, though it is now used to enforce modern clothing norms, is not entirely untrue. What you wear does say something, and not necessarily something merely superficial. For another thing, the traditional Chinese classics outright proclaimed this. The Book of Rites states: ‘The son of Heaven, every five years, made a tour of Inspection through the fiefs… he ordered the superintendent of rites to examine the seasons and months, and fix the days, and to make uniform the standard tubes, the various ceremonies, the instruments of music, all measures, and the fashions of clothes. Whatever was wrong in these was rectified.’ Classical Chinese thought saw nothing ‘superficial’ about material culture calendars, weights and measures, music or clothing; all had the potential to either to proclaim or to blaspheme the sacred and transcendent. To limit this quest for the Chinese soul to more abstract pursuits is to reduce the Chinese soul itself to a modernist Cartesian abstraction, in a way that can only be self-defeating!

Nowadays, though, the risks for the hanfu movement are largely internal, and regard its relation to the culture around it. The big question for the movement is: to what extent does it seek to normalise the use of traditional dress? Many of the movement’s leaders, and certainly Mr. Wang himself, would say that they want to make hanfu a common and unremarkable sight in normal everyday Chinese urban life. Others would be content to keep the hanfu merely for important events – especially weddings, graduations, coming-of-age ceremonies. One real problem is touched on by thoughtful articulators of the third criticism, and that is that the hanfu is still sometimes broadly considered a novelty and a spectacle in modern Chinese culture. There is the risk of the ‘hipster’ factor, that hanfu becomes something worn for show in wilful or ironic self-alienation. Very obviously it isn’t a panacea for China’s national anxieties. But hopefully it can become and remain a form of healthy cultural expression in its own right.

That caution having been made. Here’s to the hanfu movement: with its local and proletarian roots; with its assertion of a national identity against the demands of deracinated, global capitalist anti-culture; with its ‘impracticality’; and with its attempt to bring something transcendent and beautiful back into China’s material culture.

The danger of ideological monarchism - Japan

Empress Myeongseong of Joseon

The Mad Monarchist is probably a textbook example of the dangers of making even a well-intentioned ideology out of monarchism – which is to say, when you reduce monarchism to an unreflective devotion to any system with monarchical characteristics, regardless of how those characteristics are reflected at the levels of theology, of politics or of policy. Now would probably be the proper point for me to point out that I am, to quote a certain Romanist saint, ‘the king’s good servant, and God’s first’. I am a monarchist, insofar as that is demanded by my religion and insofar as the saints, the apostles and the Tradition of the Orthodox Church support monarchy as just and wise. But my sympathy for monarchy ends precisely where its implementation eats away at its own legitimacy, where it undermines its own raison d’être. (And, unlike the Mad Monarchist, I neither conflate nor confuse the one with the other.)

Take, for example, the Mad Monarchist’s devotion to the Empire of Japan, a devotion of the most quixotic, naïve and even unfeeling character. Japan is a brightly-coloured but empty shell. The Emperor remains, but as essentially a cipher. And in history, the Empire of Japan has arguably done more in East Asia to undermine the cause of monarchy by its own actions, great and small, than Mao Zedong could ever hope to do. This is, obviously, a highly controversial claim, and certainly TMM himself would dispute it. But his history of Japan’s actions on the world stage is highly incomplete, and I think it would be well to look carefully at some of the bits he overlooks.

The fact that he does not begin with, but rather glosses over, the millennialist Donghak rebellion or with the First Sino-Japanese War is highly significant. Japan certainly did not act as a friend to the Korean monarchy (which had requested military assistance from the Qing Dynasty), but used the Donghak rebellion as an excuse to undermine the legitimacy of the Korean government.

It is clear that there were legitimate issues of government corruption at stake in the Donghak rebellion, and that the Joseon Dynasty had some real problems negotiating the power balance between their two hostile neighbours, as well as some truly unsavoury cultural practices. However, the Korean caste system – which by this point had already weakened and was beginning to show certain fractures – was gradually being reformed out of existence under Qing influence. The Donghak rebellion, however, created an opportunity for an expansionist Japan to claim that the Qing were in violation of treaty, and therefore to declare war on the Qing. Once the smoke had cleared, the Japanese were in control of Korea and had begun embarking on a course of reforms inspired by Donghak demands. To give credit where credit is due, the redeeming feature of these reforms was the abolition of serfdom and the dismantling of the caste system – though, again, that was already being reformed out of existence prior to the Sino-Japanese War. Other than that, everything that the Japanese did in Korea was practically perfectly calculated to humiliate and discredit the cultural values which underwrote Korea’s monarchy.

There is no question about this. East Asian monarchies have historically placed a great deal of emphasis on form, on ritual and on music. Joseon was no exception. One of its means of resisting Qing influence was its use of the Ming Dynasty calendar to determine dates – this was the Joseon state’s explicit way of expressing loyalty to the Ming Emperor and to the Confucian ideals that he represented. The Japanese, who fully understood this, abolished the Ming calendar and replaced it with the Japanese one. The two messages sent were crystal-clear: Joseon was no longer an independent monarchy, and the monarchical rituals demonstrating the Korean devotion to the Ming Emperor no longer applied. The Mad Monarchist says that ‘the Japanese were much more careful than other powers in ensuring that the monarchial principle was not damaged’ by allowing the Korean royal family to retain its lifestyle; but this is exactly wrong, and this must be attributed either to an ignorance of Confucian philosophy or to a blinkered devotion to the Japanese state. The Japanese had done something far worse to the monarchy: they had cut the taproot between the Joseon monarchs and their past allegiances, the Confucian inheritance, the Korean people themselves.

The Japanese added insult to injury by centralising and bureaucratising the administration (that is to say, making a legalist standard of merit normative rather than a Confucian one); by reorganising Korea’s geographical subdivisions; by robbing Korea of its own monetary policy, introducing Japanese currency and thus ensuring its finical dependence on Japan; and introducing the Western practice of remarriage for divorced and widowed women. In 1895, the Japanese orchestrated the murder of the Korean Empress Myeongseong (the woman responsible for rehabilitating Catholicism in Korea) – an historical tidbit that the Mad Monarchist quite conveniently elides. Still worse, they burned her body, which was from a Confucian view a calculated insult to her father and particularly her mother, and by extension the entire Korean royal family.

As far as Korea was concerned, the Japanese occupiers were regicides, though no doubt The Mad Monarchist considers this an ‘incredibly petty’ point. The Japanese managed to extradite the men responsible for this most heinous crime to a military tribunal in Hiroshima, and proceeded to acquit them all. It was after this constant barrage of crimes and insults directed specifically against the monarchy that traditionalist Confucian scholars and peasants united in the Uibyeong uprisings against the Japanese. TMM seems to be under the mistaken impression that the later act of keeping and educating the Korean crown prince in Tôkyô was some sort of act of friendship, but he seems utterly ignorant of the old warring-states Japanese practice of keeping the close kin of one’s enemies as hostages in the capital… just in case one of these Uibyeong uprisings came close to succeeding.

With regard to Russia, I have already talked some about the underappreciated life of Russia’s last monarch, the Tsar S. Nikolai II of Russia. The cowardly Japanese sneak attack on Port-Arthur, and the subsequent war between Russia and Japan, both gave significant intellectual ammunition to Tsar Nikolai’s domestic political opponents, who took every opportunity to portray him as both belligerent and incompetent when in truth he was neither. The Japanese military supported anti-Tsarist movements from that point on, particularly giving their logistical support and funding to Konni Zilliacus and the Menshevik revolutionary Georgiy Plehanov to coordinate with other anti-Tsarist and republican agitators in Paris and Geneva, whose activities culminated in the revolution of 1905. The Japanese were no friends to the Tsars. Only when it was demonstrably too late for the monarchist cause in Russia did Japan lend its aid to the White armies.

Towards Qing China, Japan was very little better. It is again highly convenient that The Mad Monarchist fails to recognise Japan’s active support for Sun Yat-sen’s revolutionary republican programme, both ideologically and materially. Sun fled to Japan when he sought asylum, and Japanese parliamentarians – especially Inukai Tsuyoshi – actively supported Sun’s anti-monarchist Tongmenghui. No such official support was given in Japan to Kang Youwei’s Confucian Qing loyalist reform movement, the Baohuanghui, which later became the Progressive Party. Again, only when it was too late for monarchist movements to stand on their own merits in China, did the Japanese give them anything resembling aid – and then always with the same strings attached as applied in Korea. What they did was never out of a desire to support monarchy with all of its local customs and characteristics intact. It was always to subvert the organic monarchical forms and replace them instead with imposed Japanese ones.

Speaking as an otherwise-sympathetic monarchist, The Mad Monarchist’s entire read of the history of East Asia is characterised by an extreme bias and a naïveté of the political and intellectual history of the region which borders on wilful ignorance. And of course, holding modern Japan up as any sort of monarchist model for the rest of Asia is utterly nonsensical.

Japanese society is sick – they have left off reproducing themselves to the point where they are in the midst of a horrific demographic crisis which will strain their society to the breaking point. Their public officials have long since cast off for vulgar capitalist reasons any sort of Confucian concern for their own elderly, let alone humane management of their own ecological or political resources for future generations. Those same public officials are seemingly making up for this by puffing out their chests and posturing with all their might over territorial disputes with China and South Korea. Not monarchism, but vulgar Caesarism rules – as long as Japanese men can afford to satisfy their perverse onanistic needs, and as long as Japanese women feel that making money in the Japanese corporate world is more important than the business of bearing and rearing the next generation, they will continue to support the most ugly and venal sorts of symbolic politics imaginable, particularly against their Chinese and Korean neighbours. The monarchy has done nothing to prevent this erosion of the bedrock on which it stands – and indeed, as long as Japan remains a subservient American client-state, its monarchy can do nothing.

Black Lagoon

I really can’t say I’m as much of a weeaboo as I used to be. Politically I’m not a Japanophile at all. Actually living and working in East Asia – China and Japan – cured me of that. And going to college pretty much turned me off from most Japanese cultural exports. There’s a plasticity and sterility to them which, to tell the truth, kind of rubs me the wrong way. Nowadays I mentally sort Japanese anime and manga into four broad categories:

• Art. Anime and manga with endearing characteristics that can pass for a soul on something deeper than a cursory inspection. Generally has one creator with a consistent, clear creative vision, who wants to do his own thing regardless of what the market pressures him to do – which in Japanese culture makes him or her essentially a megalomaniac or a crazy outcast bastard. Generally also has a storyline which doesn’t succumb to plot clichés and cardboard-cutout characters. Examples include: Last Exile, Jûni Kokki, Cowboy Bebop, Hakujaden, Samurai Champloo, Haibane Renmei, basically anything with Miyazaki Hayao’s name attached to it (and possibly anything by Studio Ghibli generally).
  
  
• Cheap, hackish commercial schlock. Anime and manga that blatantly and shamelessly ride the crest of some popular trend or obviously try to cash in on something. Usually accompanied by a collector card game or a line of overpriced plastic toys. Generally has a predictable paint-by-numbers plot populated by paint-by-numbers heroes fighting villains-of-the-week. Often accompanied by unrealistic huge piloted robots. Or unrealistic huge piloted robots capable of space travel. Or unrealistic huge piloted robots that can join together to form even more unrealistic, huger piloted robots. Or katanas. Or katanas that can destroy in one swing unrealistic huge piloted robots capable of space travel which can join together to form even more gAAAAHHHHHHggguurrrggggl… you get my drift. Basically heartless, soulless brightly-coloured crap, made as cheap as possible and animated, directed and produced by committee for maximum possible payout. Examples include: One Piece, Naruto, Yû-Gi-Oh!, Digimon, Fushigi Yûgi, Full Metal Alchemist, Cardcaptor Sakura, Transformers (the originals and especially the Michael Bay remakes), practically anything with Gundam in the title, practically anything that played on FOX Kids, and so on. Yes, I’m prejudiced. Go cry me a river.
  
  
• Cheap, hackish commercial schlock with a certain sense of comic self-awareness. Plays the irony factor occasionally. Slightly hipsterish in orientation, or at least comical in a certain sense. May have cardboard-cutout characters but at least plays them off each other, breaks the fourth wall for laughs, or undermines them in certain ways which are amusing for the viewer. May or may not have certain mo lei tau tendencies. Usually authored by at least one artist with a sense of humour, though probably also with a profit motive and a massive ego. Examples include: The Slayers (self-aware low-budget D&D-styled schlock par excellence!), Excel Saga (utter mo lei tau brilliance), FLCL, the original Dragon Ball (not any of the sequels), Dr. Slump and Rumic World.
  
  
• Pretentious poseurish bullshit. My very least favourite form of anime and manga – truly the bottom of the barrel. Tries to be deep. Fails miserably. Clearly influenced by the original run of Eva. Too much so. In all the wrong ways. Often to the point where it may include quotes by or allusions to Greek, German, French or Danish philosophers it clearly doesn’t understand (bonus points if it uses the original language in a flowery cursive font; triple points if it has Engrish misspellings; tenfold points if at any point it includes sakura flower petals floating by). Tries to be dark and edgy. Comes off as boring, mopey and emo. Features plots which are needlessly drawn-out, don’t make sense, or both. Features characters which are cardboard-cutouts but which tries its hardest to convince us they aren’t. Probably has an intentionally-misspelled title, a title with capital letters in the wrong place, or over- or misused punctuation marks. Has a single artist or author on medications, who is also possibly a suspect in multiple child molestation cases. Textbook example and my personal nemesis: DeathNote – which holds the distinction of being the only anime ever to make me actively root for the Chinese state censors. Other examples: SaiKano, any of the spinoffs or remakes of Eva (the original is debatable), Witch Hunter Robin, Rurôni Kenshin: Trust and Betrayal, Code Geass.

Which leaves me with the question of what to do with Black Lagoon, which I just recently watched. After having watched it, I still can’t decide if what I watched fell into the category of art, pretentious poseurish bullshit, or maybe a new category – self-aware pretentious poseurish bullshit.

What it is is remarkably entertaining and darkly funny. If Quentin Tarantino (complete with his brand of vaguely left-wing politics) directed Pirates of the Caribbean set in modern-day Southeast Asia, with an artistic style that is clearly trying to ape Cowboy Bebop, the result would look very similar to this. And one of the main characters is a chain-smoking, hard-drinking, blue-streaking, dual Beretta-wielding, hotpants-rocking tattooed Chinese-American badass raised on the wrong side of Manhattan. How badass, you say? Put it this way: anytime she opens her mouth or twitches her finger she can roundhouse kick Chuck Norris before shooting him in the damn face.

Citizen of the fucking year.

The series can’t avoid being political, though I’m not decided yet whether it’s a good thing or not. And because of its following the main character Rock, who as a low-ranking young Japanese salaryman is a minnow thrown into the shark pool that is Tortuga the fictional Thai port town Roanapur, its politics come off at first as vaguely quasi-anarchist. He gets kidnapped by pirates and his bosses essentially try to get him killed in order to prevent the pirates from completing their contract, but after he learns of and then foils their plan, disillusioned with the Japanese corporate world he turns pirate himself.

And, not to give away spoilers, but the ranking superpower on the world stage often makes its weight felt in this series. When the main characters aren’t Tarantino-ing neo-Nazis in the style of Inglourious Basterds, that is. Or getting into fights with unstoppable Colombian ex-mercenaries, busting the heads of Philippine Islamists, protecting a one-woman international counterfeiting ring from Cuban-American Mafiosi or abetting the massacre of entire yakuza clans by ex-Soviet gangsters. It’s a real mixed bag that way.

Where it gets into the pretentious bullshit territory, though, is when Rock ends up in a sort of pointless existential crisis on account of a sympathetic Heidegger- and Sartre-quoting villain-of-the-arc. Philosophically it is literate (unlike so many of Eva’s countless imitators) and it makes sense both for him and for the villain, but in terms of the story I’m not entirely sure it tells us anything we didn’t already know about Rock – and it certainly doesn’t resolve anything. (Though maybe that’s the point. Argh.)

I’m not undecided on the quality of this series. It is remarkably well-made. Gratuitous? Gleefully so. But even the gratuitousness has a point to make. And the characters really do grow on you, even the ones who would be the most unlikeable in real life, and that’s all to Rei Hiroe’s credit. The artwork is pretty derivative, but the story is better than decent! I’m giving it my recommendation.