Posts Tagged ‘imperialism’
“Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography”*…
There are lessons to be learned from history. Noah Smith cautions us to be sure that we’re learning the right ones…
… 2022 saw authoritarian powers suddenly on the back foot. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a military and geopolitical disaster, and Xi’s economic mismanagement brought China’s growth to a momentary halt. Meanwhile, the U.S. started looking a bit more politically stable and started to take action to preserve its remaining industrial advantages, Asian democracies like Japan and the fast-growing India continued to flex their muscle, and Europe seemed more united than it had in…well, ever. All of this naturally had some people in the West optimistic that Cold War 2 would ultimately end much like World War 2 and the first Cold War.
Unfortunately, early optimism can easily give way to complacency and cockiness. We’re still in the opening moves of Cold War 2, and the minor victories of 2022 are likely to revert to the mean. 2023 is already shaping up to be a year in which the authoritarian powers recalibrate their strategy and find their footing.
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Americans need to realize that Cold War 2 is fundamentally unlike Cold War 1 or World War 2. Those 20th century contests were ideological battles, where people fought and died for communism, fascism, and liberal democracy. But China is not an ideological, proselytizing power; its ideology, basically, is just “China.” Xi Jinping doesn’t care whether you have elections and protect civil rights or send minorities to the death camps, as long as you support Chinese hegemony abroad.
Cold War 2 is therefore a bit more like World War 1 — a naked contest of national power and interests. And if the U.S. tries to turn it into an ideological battle, it could backfire…
A provocative argument that we shouldn’t make too much of what are only the opening moves in “Cold War 2”: “2023 is when the empires strike back,” from @Noahpinion.
* Edward Said
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As we grapple with geopolitics, we might recall that it was on this date in 1975 that South Vietnamese forces withdrew from the town of Xuan Loc in the last major battle of the Vietnam War. The North Vietnamese victory there occasioned the resignation of South Vietnamese President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu, who was replaced by Trần Văn Hương, who was ordered by the National Assembly to seek a negotiated peace with North Vietnam at any cost.
“We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell”*…
Artist unknown (Cristovão de Figueiredo?), Hell, Museu da Arte Antiga, Lisbon, ca. 1515. Oil on oak, 119 x 217.5 cm.
Naked people are tumbling into the picture through a circular opening at top right, their features immediately blurred by rising heat and smoke. Below, various bodies are being put to the flames, a traditional punishment for those consumed by lust in their lifetimes…
No one knows who painted this depiction of hell, or who asked for it to be made, or even what purpose it served. We only know that it was done in about 1515 in Lisbon. To my eye, the facial types resemble those of the royal painter Cristovão de Figueiredo, who died in 1525. Several of the strange motifs—the figure with bent knee on a crutch, the pig orifice, the spurting fire, the beak-nosed figure, and the albino monster—are closely drawn from a triptych by Hieronymus Bosch that was in Portugal (probably in the Portuguese royal collection) at the time, and now hangs in the same museum as this painting.
Our painting of hell is big, much bigger than you might expect from looking at a photo. It doesn’t fit clearly into any category of picture known at the time. It is an independent panel, not a scene in a fresco cycle that gains meaning from the larger program. It’s not an altarpiece, nor is it a typical private devotional image, which would have been smaller. Its oblong shape suggests it was not part of a larger structure, as in triptychs by Bosch and others, where hell occupies one compartment, one part of a larger statement about human life and the world. This is a big stand-alone painting of a subject that normally didn’t stand alone. The painting lowers you right down to the sub-basement of hell and lets you look. The looking begins as voyeuristic fascination and then sinks into self-reflection…
There had been paintings of hell before, showing people (much like the people for whom the paintings were made) undergoing various punishments for their sins. But this painting no longer represents generic humanity. Here, the tortured are marked as white Europeans, being punished by mostly swarthy monsters with distinctly exotic trappings drawn from the newly encountered inhabitants of the farthest ends of the world—all the way down the African coast, all the way across the (Atlantic) Western Ocean, and, possibly, as far as India. And the punishments seem to concentrate on the sins unleashed by the European expeditions, the sins of rapaciousness: lust, gluttony, and greed. The monks and friars who accompanied these expeditions, tacking missionary work onto commercial exploits, are emphatically included among the damned…
Turning the colonial gaze back on the colonizers, the painting presents the hairstyles of the Europeans, such as the tonsures, in the manner of recent European reports and images depicting the strange hair and stylings of outlandish natives. Here, Europeans themselves go naked, just as bestselling accounts were then describing the inhabitants of America, Africa, and India. Here, white people are the rapacious ones, the lusty ones, the ridiculous ones, and the defeated ones. Two faces, the albino monster to the left and the flame mask to the right, turn toward us as if to say, yes, I know you’re enjoying watching this, and have you considered this might be you?
Some images from the period—just a few—show the costs of subjection and colonization for the native populations of America, Asia, and Africa. Almost none, apart from this one, prod their viewers to imagine the costs for the colonizers themselves…
Alexander Nagel offers a close reading of a remarkable work, a 1515 painting that turns a mirror on its viewers: “Hell is for White People” (much larger reproduction of the painting available there).
* Oscar Wilde
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As we see ourselves in others, we might recall that Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro González died on this date in 1541. In the event Pizarro was assassinated in the palace he’d built himself to rule over Peru, after he’d conquered the Incas (and executed their leader Atahuapla). Pizarro’s death was in retaliation for his own murder of an old partner, then rival, Diego de Almagro.
The pursuit of the hirsute…
From the doers…
…to the done…
… it’s all at The Hair Hall of Fame.
As we let it all go to our heads, we might wish a mystically happy birthday to mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, alchemist/occultist, navigator, and champion of English expansionism John Dee; he was born on this date in 1527. Widely regarded as the smartest man and/or most powerful magician in the Europe of his time, Dee was an intimate advisor to Queen Elizabeth I and her closest ministers. But Dee, a student of Copernicus and a friend of Tycho Brahe, was also a serious scholar (his library was the largest in England, perhaps in Europe) and one of the most learned men of his day– a central figure in the development of modern science… and underneath that cap, he had a killer head of hair.
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