When Coronavirus hit East-Asia and the world simply carried on as normal, you kinda just knew that the earth was going to a pretty fucked up place. Of course we all know how shit has played out since, and there are very few of us that have not been under some form of lockdown. And all of this with the caveat of the as the global economy exploded in front of our eyes.
Then instead of people all just being good and helping each other get through things, the world decided to throw in a real curve ball with George Floyd. After the planet witnessed Mr. Floyd being cruelly murdered by police it was like a proverbial molotov cocktail was thrown into the mix.
Thus came the #blacklivesmatter movement, which has seen a mixture of extremely legitimate protest across the world, but also a whole heap of rioting, a war on statues and a big fat lot of stupid.
We recently reported how Mahatma Gandhi has now been rebranded as fascist by people who clearly don’t know the meaning of the word, Guitar Centre milking the incident and a lot of white-hating, usually by white people themselves.
And it was under these circumstances that I saw today’s stupidest comment on the internet.
On a thread talking about how Ryukyu has never been invaded by China a user by the handle of @Minibob_torres tweeted;
“Regrettably, an invasive, militarized Japanese Empire rising out of the 19th century and WWII changed everything…Imperialism has been the name of the game for the Europeans for centuries, and the Japanese got those evil ideas from those guys during the Meji restoration.”
In case you might have read that wrongly I’ll direct it for you. The reason the Japanese became evil colonialists was because during the Meji Restoration they had western advisors and learned from them.
The implication here, of course, is that prior to the European colonial period, invading people had not even entered the mindset of East Asians.
This ignores a somewhat huge elephant in the fucking room. Genghis Khan went on a bloodthirsty fuck rampage of the world, which created the biggest empire the earth has EVER seen. But you know what? I don’t feel that Mongolians need to repent. It’s almost as if you look at the history of the world and see people all over have been invading others – even in East Asia!
What might even be most amusing about this is that thread is about Ryukyu, which was, well, erm colonised by the Japanese in 1606. One might even say before the Meji Restoration.
There are many things that European colonialism should be sorry about, but Japanese war crimes just ain’t one of them…
