Asanbonsam

Paint With Love is one of those shows that didn't get much attention apart for staring Singto in it, and that is something that I think is undeserved. The show has a very solid story about two very different characters, business man Maz and chaotic painter Phab, clashing with each other and ultimately being drawn to each other. Of course, and not just with these two but so many other characters in it, the main theme of the show is also "miscommunication", gosh there were sooooo many problems between the characters that simply could have been avoided if they managed to communicate directly what is up with them, especially Maz is someone very guilty of that accusation. I found the show very enjoyable and very adult. I was also surprised that it had a bit of a comedic critic of the going-ons behind the BL industry, albeit nothing too serious. If you want to watch the show, it can be found on Gagaoolala, with the first episode being available for free.

https://www.gagaoolala.com/en/videos/2433/paint-with-love-2021-e01

Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law

If you read this book and are fiercely pro-American than you might get pretty enraged. If you are anti-American, this will be a feast.

Based on the title you would be correct to assume that it deals with segregation in the US South, however, that is only a small part of it. The book is a short study on the interest the makers of the Nuremberg Laws had in and what inspiration they took from the US Race laws. Fun fact, based on the author this fact is actually known for a time by now but having constantly been downplayed because the American race laws did not deal with Jews, however I agree with the author that this is a bad line of reasoning because by that line “inspiration” would only be there if direct copying was involved but inspiration usually is not meant to mean that, in fact in art such copying would be considered plagiarizing.

However, the facts are pretty strong when it comes to the claim that not only did the makers of the Nuremberg Laws were heavily inspired by the USA but the most radical Nazis present were the most ardent champions of the lessons that American approaches held for Germany. Nor was this transcript the only record of Nazi engagement with American race law. In the late 1920s and early 1930s many Nazis, including not least Hitler himself, took a serious interest in the racist legislation of the US.

Furthermore, apparently it was long known that the Nazis praised Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal in the early 1930s. Looks like he was considered a man who had seized dictatorial power and embarked on bold experiments in the spirit of the Führer. They also called it sometimes the fascist New Deal and until 1937 or even 1939 FDR never singled Hitler out despite being troubled by the anti-Semitism and the New Deal heavily depended on the segregationist South. This is something that is not usually dealt with in the USA.

And that this is necessary is also shown by the short trips further into history, like the Naturalization Act of 1790 which stated that naturalization is open for "any alien, being a free white person," second class citizenship for Filipinos and Puerto Ricans, a literacy test trick that was also once applied to Irish and Australia had it as well and anti-miscegenation law was already in the Virginia statute of 1691. Not to mention the entire Anglophone world had restrictive immigration laws, but who talks about that?

And it really does not stop there, as we get to see thinks like: an almost fascist Jew being interested in American race law, the USA as THE model for race and immigration laws and being constantly monitored by Nazis and other racists for inspiration and hope that they will not "Fall to degeneracy of race mixing". And when Nazi lawyers considered the American deprivation of black rights, they saw, bizarrely, a precisely parallel effort to combat black "influence." For them, American blacks were not a desperately oppressed and impoverished population, but a menacing "alien race" of invaders that threatened to get "the upper hand," and therefore had to be thwarted. This view was one Nazis shared with American racists.

But don’t worry, they did not just invoke the American precedence, but others as well. You see prior to the Nuremberg Laws there was the Prussian Memorandum which was less radical than the Jim Crow laws, only targeted public interactions, while Jim Crow also did the personal race mixing and not only invoked American but also Australian immigration law. The Nazis searched across the world for kindred spirits and precedence in what they considered their basically holy mission. And American race laws often seemed almost perfect for them, especially since it applied race laws without having a clear definition of the races, something that bothered moderate Nazis but appealed to the radical ones.

In the end, what might be the most ironic points this book makes are:

The Nazis rejected the American one drop rule as too extreme when they wrote the Blood Law.

Someone contributing to the Nueremberg Laws not only was very knowledgeable of American race law, but he considered Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln his heroes and believed that had the latter not been assassinated, America would have become a "truly healthy race based order." And according to him American law was content to devide the population in whites and coloureds.... hm not much changed there."

Krieger noted that there was a growing tendency in judical practice to "assign a person to the group of coloreds whenever there is even a trace of visible Negro physical featuresm and beyond that to do so when the Negroe descent of the individual is common knowledge, without regard to how far the degree of descent reaches back. So in this case the USA seems to have gotten worse, according to my experience.

Apparently the Nazis were also interested in the American way of doing things, the innovation, realism and flexibility of the common law. Something Americans never question as it seems. What appealed to them about American common law is exactly what is praised today. You see it was only ordinary citizens who should blindly obey but Nazi officials were expected to take a different attitude. They were supposed to act in the spirit of Hitler, act more independently and they steadfastly opposed the traditions of the civil law as they had existed in Germany before the Nazi takeover. The author states that what was appealing to Nazis about America back then is, in regards to the common law, still appealing today.

PS. I think it is safe to say that no one reading this will live long enough to see the book’s content in a mainstream movie.

Link: The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited by Louisa Lim | Goodreads

There is an interesting allegory for Chinese politics. It is like the air in northern China. "If you can't breathe, you'll die. If you breathe, you'll be infected by these viruses. The air is so polluted, but who can't breathe?"

I can definitely recommend this book to anyone wanting to know about the uprisings in 1989 China.

Of course it begins with the Tiananmen square and its history (like its original Manchu name meaning "Gate of Heaven's pacification"), and goes to the most prominent military dissenter at the time, Xu Qinxian, and according to a classified speech 21 officers at division level command or higher and 90 others of lesser rank had "breached discipline in a serious manner". Leadership was suddenly reshuffled, and ammunition taken away from soldiers after the square had been cleared. The CCP seems to have been paranoid about troop loyalty, mutiny and armed uprising.

What is said about how it is all about survival via amnesia and following rules from above in China is depressing. Also, what is recalled about the students during the protests and how their organization developed sounds very reminiscent of the CCP itself. I think it shows how far away they still were from democracy. As much as the CCP is away from actual communism or being a people’s party.

You get even more here, like the riots between Uighurs and Han that had thousands of Han-Chinese patrolling the streets with clubs and shouting, "Exterminate the Uighurs" and the political causes that the students wrote about in their hunger-strike declaration remain not merely unsolved but worse than in 1989. Despite improvements in the standard of living, unrest has risen exponentially due to mounting discontent over land seizures, government corruption, and ethnic issues. "Mass incidents," as large protests are euphemistically known, have skyrocketed from 10.000 in 1994 to 180,000 in 2009, the last year for which there are reliable figures.

Reading about Feel and Moon and how their world looks as well as the wealth gap between Feel and one of his roommates, it makes it really sound like they are sort of bought. The old "it is not really bad if you benefit from it." However, they do not belong to the lowest of the low. In fact, in comparison Feel has it quite easy with his parents, even if they couldn't visit him for 2 years. An apparently, those preposterous stories about those corrupt party officials with their incredibly decadence might make party membership more attractive to the youth as it suggests the "first rung on the ladder to unimaginable wealth, power, and sex." The robber-baron official as an aspirational figure was further cemented by a video about a 6-year girl who said she wanted to be a corrupt official.

What was more interesting was the theory that paradoxically, the Chinese government's success in enforcing collective amnesia and whitewashing its own history may now threaten its control over information. Many of those too young to have lived through Tiananmen are completely ignorant about what happened, indeed dangerously ignorant from the government's perspective. Aka, in recent years their censors have several times failed to realize Tiananmen stuff.

What Zhang Xianling said about China's long feudal history being the reason she thinks many people look too much to the "imperial court" and some "enlightened leader, or an honest general, to bring about another Golden Age." reminds me of how it is stated that Xi Jinping is basically a new Chinese emperor.

And as for the whole century of national humiliation… you know, considering how often the Chinese dynasties were bullies and supremacists in the region, I think you could argue that it was karmic justice. If it even is that humiliating because several kingdoms/nations etc. had to deal with far worse and if you ask me this whole humiliation business is just there to shore up dangerous nationalism. Speaking of that, according to William Callahan between 1947 and 1990 there were no new book on national humiliation published domestically in China. However, the post-Tiananmen revision of the textbooks not only included this but was so comprehensive that certain historical figures were turned from villains into heroes (e.g. Qing dynasty general Zuo Zongtang was suddenly a hero because he defeated the Russians).

And of course the Japanese became the big baddies and given strict governmental controls over content - ghost stories, time travel, adultery, and even shows featuring spies have been variously banned by censors – so anti-Japanese shows have filled the void, to the point where the regulator reined in chop-socky anti-Japanese action sequences for being "overly dramatic." And in 2004, 15 approved shows featured battles with Japanese, in 2011/2012 it had risen to 177.

After 1989, the Communist Party gambled on nationalism as a way to extend its mandate and offer distractions from demands of political reform. As the beneficiaries of that gamble come of age, they just might end up undermining the Communist Party's mandate. And so steeped are many of these students - China's elite - in patriotic education that they simply cannot accept any other version of their country's history. Often, they ended up arguing with their professors, causing class discussions to degenerate into bitter squabbling. Not just with professors. I had my run in online with such people as well by now.

But back to the massacres: According to Bao's theory, the gradual escalation of tensions between the Communist leadership and the students may not have been due to mishandling by a divided party, but part of a deliberate strategy. Bao Tong believes that the timing of events supported this reading. Deng Xiaoping sending in the troops when the student numbers were at the lowest apparently is another piece of evidence.

The most important part of this book was however the Chengdu riots of 1989. Who knows what might have happened if more people from Tibet to Chengdu had protested? Or what might happen today. But it looks like the 1989 Chengdu riots and protests have been too efficiently erased from history for that to happen. Which speaks for the strength of censorship as according to the Tiananmen Papers, demonstrations against the brutality of the June 4th killings in Beijing broke out in 63 cities across China with thousands marching in cities including Harbin, Changchun, Shenyang, Jinan, and Hangzhou, in addition to Chengdu.

The Communist Party will take extreme measures to avoid unrest, using a hammer to crush a flea. However, the methods it uses slowly chip away at the government's mandate. Paying off protesters -like Tang Deying, whose son was beaten to death by Chengdu police- puts a price on stability. Rapacious land seizures, widespread official corruption, and choking environmental problems are creating pockets of discontent and who knows what might happen.