Re: Occidentalism

From: Spudboy100@aol.com
Date: Fri Feb 14 2003 - 01:47:31 MST

  • Next message: scerir: "Re: a faint distant rustling of mice"

    A mighty intense article, that. There's a shifting essence of irrationality,
    that extremists hope will see them through to total victory. To quote Bruce
    Sterling, we must become "flexible and persistant" to beat such fanatics.

    Nanowave point out:
    <<In 1942, not long after the attack on Pearl Harbor, a group of Japanese
    philosophers got together in Kyoto to discuss Japan's role in the world. The
    project of this ultra-nationalist gathering was, as they put it, to find a
    way to "overcome modern civilization." Since modern civilization was another
    term for Western civilization, the conference might just as well have been
    entitled "Overcoming the West." In a complete reversal of the
    late-nineteenth-century goal of "leaving Asia and joining the West," Japan
    was now fighting a "holy war" to liberate Asia from the West and purify
    Asian minds of Western ideas. Part of the holy war was, as it were, an
    exercise in philosophical cleansing . . .
    http://www.nybooks.com/articles/15100>>



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