"There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in"
(Leonard Cohen)
"Ignore all proffered rules and create your own, suitable for what you want to say"
(Michael Moorcock)
"Look for your own. Do not do what someone else could do as well as you. Do not say, do not write what someone else could say, could write as well as you. Care for nothing in yourself but what you feel exists nowhere else. And, out of yourself create, impatiently or patiently, the most irreplaceable of beings."
(Andre Gide)

"I want my place, my own place, my true place in the world, my proper sphere, my thing which Nature intended me to perform when she fashioned me thus awry, and which I have vainly sought all my life-time."
(Nathaniel Hawthorne)
“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
(Franz Kafka)
"All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated"
(John Donne)
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
(Robert J. Hanlon)
"Life is beautiful, but the world is hell"
(Harold Pinter)

Friday, November 16, 2012

Apologia with Racist Characteristics


Morning Star and John Wight: China fans
EXTRACTMost damning of all - for comrade Wight, that is - is the following passage: “Western critics of China have long pointed to the lack of democratic and political rights enjoyed by its citizens. But this reflects the paucity of understanding in the west when it comes to the distinct development of Chinese culture and its fractured history. The relationship between the state and society in China is much different from its western counterpart. In China the state is seen as sacrosanct, with a premium placed on unity over the ability to change course through the election of a new government every few years and thus risk instability.”
Why did we not grasp this before? Chinese workers do not need or want democracy - an imperialist construct that we can safely treat with contempt. In fact, as comrade Wight so helpfully explains, democracy is somehow inherently ‘unChinese’ - just not part of the country’s psyche. Let’s face it, they will never understand this democracy business. Frankly, such comments are almost racist. In the last century these sorts of ideas were used to justify South African apartheid, British colonialism and the Nazi dictatorship.



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