Discussion Why do writers love sucking their own country's ****

Discussion in 'Novel General' started by aliyothman83, Feb 5, 2020.

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  1. elengee

    elengee Daoist Ninefaps

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    That word choice though, as it was the 'cleansing' that got them into the problems to begin with. :blobcheeky: But yeah, they did make an effort to pay reparations and various other things. Also, a lot of the 'dirty things' that happened were behind the scenes and the survivors of the war don't really have as deep a remaining resentment. Even now, it feels more like a statistic than an actual genocide and some even claim the holocaust never happened.

    Not exactly sure what the Japanese did, but what was it 'the rape of nankong' or whatever was mentioned before? that's a pretty easy way to form long lasting grudges as it's also more in the open to the surrounding victims. There being no segregation in play. The Jews etc. were dehumanized before they ever got on the trains which lowered empathy from the surrounding.
    To be fair my grandmother was sole survivor from her family in auschwitz (and only because she was 6-8 and others pushed her back in line to die in her place...) but it's something i only heard in passing, a long time after she died. (so i have no emotional connection with it)
    Like the Chinese say 'to weed the grass you cut the roots'. In that regard, the Germans were pretty surgical.

    I'm guessing Germany also had more reason to step forth pro-actively as they're right in the center of the surrounding countries whereas Japan is still somewhat more secluded on the geographical map. Along with the 'sense of honour' that wouldn't let them apologize at the time and the longer it's taken, the less they feel like doing so as they weren't even the ones that were connected to the event to begin with but their grandparents (although i highly doubt any of them would openly admit to what they did to their family).

    I'm guessing that even if Japan did try to offer an apology at this point, it'd be received very coldly since these grudges have been passed on. Like having a family feud but not even knowing why yet still being unable to resolve it because damage has been done.
     
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  2. Walter vi Britannia

    Walter vi Britannia Well-Known Member

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    Well, I've not actually read many stuff that belittles other countries. But yea, there are a lot that really praises their own country...but is that really bad? They can't talk about other countries if their whole world consist of their own country, right?

    Plus, the author sounds like a shit human being if they compare their own country and call it inferior to other countries.
    Like a famous poet from my country, Michael Madhusudan Dutta, who loved Eurpean culture so much that he changed his religion and adopted an English name too. But he never found his place there and all his later poems contained his nostalgia and regret of leaving home.
    He never made other countries look like shit, in fact he used to hold it high above his head while belittling his own country.
    But when he was at the worst point in his life he came around and damn did he praise his own country like it's the best thing there ever existed...cause to him it did feel like that. That was truly how he felt at that moment.

    And also, since I'm a weeb and spend all my time on the internet I know the culture and whatnot of various countries to a fair degree, but my friends know next to nothing about the outside world. If they ever wrote a book where the main character travels to another world, I bet they'd be stumped to write anything about another country so they'd just stick to what they know in their own country...basically, self-inserting themselves into the main-character. That's probably what these authors do too.

    So I never blamed American movies when they looked at their countries as if it was the world because the people in my country are the same. And through reading various mangas I realize the Japanese too. Maybe every country is actually that way.
    Online we all come together as one so it's more obvious when we see something like that here cause all of us are from various places.

    This makes me wonder when was the last time I talked to my friends about anything concerning stuff outside of my country? It's scary how I can't answer that.

    Edit: Also, these things were written with the audience being their own country's people in mind. What you're reading is something that has been adapted to English for your understanding...but you can't forget you were never the intended audience.
     
    Last edited: Feb 20, 2020
  3. PotatoZero

    PotatoZero Well-known Potato

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    Yeah, and people don't usually call China PRC, either, so calling USA as America is no different
     
  4. Liron

    Liron Well-Known (Failed) Prophet

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    No. It is just America. The “division” between south, central and north is just arbitrary and not official. It makes it easier to locate a country in your head if you use those divisions, but they also show the differences in culture and language mostly.
     
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  5. Anra7777

    Anra7777 All powerful magic grammar hamster queen pirate.

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    Just to play devil’s advocate here: if I say “New York,” are you going to kick up a fuss that the majority of people would think I’m talking about the city and not the state? After all, the city doesn’t span the whole of the state, it’s not even the state capital. Is every single person who thinks I’m thinking of the city and not the state arrogant? Because that seems to be what you’re saying...
     
  6. Liron

    Liron Well-Known (Failed) Prophet

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    Of course it is. America is a continent, not a country. If China was People’s Republic of Asia it would probably be called PRA, not Asia. America is a continent. The United States of America are a country. You can’t generalize stuff like that. The difference between China and Canada, as used in the examples, is that those names are references only to those countries themselves, not continents or other countries. The contraction of the United
    States of America should be only United States, not America, as the reference to the continent supersedes the possible reference to the country.
     
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  7. Feng Tian

    Feng Tian Well-Known Member

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    Germany formally apologized, and made up for it to extends. Japan tho? Ahahaha no. The mass rape? Yeah, "comfort women", even today. Heck, one of the commanders present during the mess was a prince. Neither he or his father were punished. Japans governments after WW2 had multiple class-A war criminals (Class A is the highest, Hitler would have been class A despite being quite literally off the charts). In general Japan is compareable to germany in its track record of war crimes and genocides. And they never apologized or even admitted it.
     
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  8. PotatoZero

    PotatoZero Well-known Potato

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    China is not one country, there's PRC and ROC, people usually refer to PRC when they say China
     
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  9. Deleted member 213850

    Deleted member 213850 Guest

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    Wow what a way to generalize an entire continent huh. Also China = / = entire Asia, sorry but numerous countries exist here.
     
  10. Mordreth

    Mordreth Well-Known Member

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    Umm, remind me which countries had Atomic Bombs dropped on them? Two bombs on populated cities. Massive death toll. Continued radiation damages and death. Forbidden from having a military.

    Yeah, I know Japan was the aggressor and they performed a whole lot of despicable acts during WW2, but that was like 75 years ago. War sucks, bad things happen during them, people become monsters in war. That is what war is.

    When a country is decimated so thoroughly and it surrenders, don't expect an apology. If you can't find any justice or revenge in what happened to them, then an apology wouldn't really help anyway.
     
  11. Feng Tian

    Feng Tian Well-Known Member

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    Nuclear weapons are portrayed worse than they are. Go look up pictures of post war Tokyo and Nagasaki. If you don't know which is which there is no way to tell. Germany got fucked way harder, and apologized. Japan is not even ACKNOWLEDGING THAT IT FUCKING HAPPENED. No surprise that the chinese are still salty af about it.
     
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  12. Wujigege

    Wujigege *Christian*SIMP*Comedian

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    You need to get out more..
    It's pretty hard to take you seriously with this thread title Wei Xiaobao :facepalm:
     
  13. bf

    bf Well-Known Member

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    There are now so many things to cover in this thread...

    Nuffians typically read CJK stories. The C element is so important, it needs to be handled first. The C culture has never paid attention to outsiders. For millennia, there had been no civilisation capable of challenging them intellectually, and even if improvements came, they didn't recognise it. They were such a dominant force that you cannot understand Japan and Korean without first understanding how C influenced them. In fact, when the C state media wanted to accurately portray the Song dynasty and the Tang dynasty from C history, the C public would write in complaints about why they were dressing up the actors as ancient Koreans or Japanese---the real reason is that the Koreans and the Japanese simply took on the clothing of Song dynasty and Tang dynasty. The C state media got so fed up that they decided that all ancient dynasties should now look like Han dynasty.

    The narcissism of the C culture is just impossible to underestimate. In fact, when the Koreans and the Japanese copy a little of the C culture's narcissism, it never struck them as ironic when they laugh at the Koreans and the Japanese for the shortsightedness of only celebrating Korean or Japanese culture. The Japanese were infamous for their isolationism before USA knocked on their doors, but that is actually what the Tang dynasty did. The hilarity really bloomed when the famous Tang dynasty monk decided that the fragmented pieces of Buddhism that came to C from India was insufficient, and it caused a lot of bickering, and he had to circumvent the Tang dynasty isolationism to get out. Yes, this is the story of the Monkey God "Journey to the West". The monk actually managed to get there, and make proper copies of all the important religious texts, and brought them back to C. The emperor got some scholars to lightly skim them, and then decided that the original texts are talking about stuff completely orthogonal to what the C bickering was about, and just constructed a temple and parked the painstakingly copied text in there, never to touch them ever again.

    But that is also the level of narcissism that so strongly ignored the rest of humanity, that when the Jews ran all the way here, they got ignored so hard, that, for once, the Jews could lay down the stress of existential crisis. It is also the only place where they successfully, and willingly, naturalised. However, this is one of the rarest cases---typically, what the Han culture does is not that different from cultural genocide. Breed with them until the underlying culture is wiped out.

    So, keep that in mind as you consider that, when Marco Polo finally reached the far East, Europe was way way behind in science and tech, except maybe ships and circumnavigation. Even hundreds of years after that, when the Qing dynasty was in power, the famously good emperor Qian Long haughtily sent a message to Europe that the C had nothing to learn from Europe, and communications would be unilaterally broken off. Even that is after Qian Long had already learnt from the Jesuits about how using the purely solar calendar from Europe was a lot more accurate than the best lunisolar calendar still used today. In a sense, that is only to be expected, since the Manchurian Qing dynasty themselves followed Han culture and adopted their haughtiness, and at the time, trade with Europe was a ridiculous win.

    Like, our current conception is that gold is worth more than silver, and that is just due to how gold is rarer than silver. But apparently, some history YT videos informed me that the real history of money was that C only wanted silver from the trading. That meant that so much silver flowed to C coffers that global silver supplies became super scarce. That then meant that it is impractical for European citizenry to be using silver for commerce, and gold was chosen as the replacement. Imagine being so superlatively rich.

    You have to keep these ideas in mind, to understand why the current C ruling party rhetoric is always on about their hundred years of shame, how they were dethroned from global dominance and shalt quickly ascend back to their rightful throne, that no force in history can prevent their ascension back, etc. They do not see themselves as backward people. They see themselves as the rightful rulers, only temporarily inconvenienced.

    And given so much time (you need to think of it on the timescale of the entire Roman empire's symbolic existence), the haughtiness is literally bred into the bones. Evolution imprinted that right into the DNA.

    Couple that with how they don't see other countries enough to compare, and you get a really inward looking country filled with insecure folks that need to continually praise themselves. Especially with threat of violence / death for failing to praise the country. It is not even like, say, India, whose citizenry could see global news and thus know how much better things could have been. And yet it is quite comical how the C citizenry also halfway knows it is mere lip service---given a choice between buying any Western products and C products, they would go for the foreign option. Life is really awkward and cognitive dissonance is everywhere.

    USA is another really crazy place. You just need to remember that MCU writers had to make Captain America be judged worthy by Mjölnir, and the outrageous celebration that came with that. That level of self-aggrandising can only be paralleled by North Korea, or the various Mother Russia jokes. But you guys definitely know all about that.

    I'd like to defend CJK, though. Because while I really hate postmodernism, it really does help attack internal biases, and the West at least had exposure to that. C and K (and R) often do not---their zeitgeist is still a century behind, and hence their motivations are closer to Nazis than to those reeling from the aftermath. That they are nowhere near as bad as the Nazis is a thing we should all be grateful for.

    Even the French, who are well known for being stuck up about nationalism (speak French!!!), are more nuanced than that. But otherwise noted, everywhere else in the world, the nationalism/patriotism is nowhere near as bad. In fact, for example, Scandinavians care a lot about the rest of the world and do a tonne of good with their charities, and they never feel the need to exclude the rest of the world when writing stories. And they certainly love their own countries too.

    So, I think, in general, it takes a lot of culture, a lot of introspectiveness, a lot of overseas exposure, and so forth, to stop a culture/person from only caring about their immediate neighbourhood and feeling pride just for being born somewhere, without contributing any iota. It will be difficult to change them, but if their obnoxiousness causes you to introspect a little, that is your good deed for the day.

    ===

    I felt the need to also comment on the hate on Japan. The Germans seriously took steps, including outlawing the denial of Holocaust, to make sure no such shenanigan happens again. This contributes greatly to how modern Europeans do not want to ruffle feathers by bringing up the topic in front of the Germans. Both sides choose to play nice with each other.

    That did not happen with Japan. Their history textbooks do not cover WWII except for a paragraph or so. Their history curriculum is literally hilarious, spending a huge amount of time on dinosaurs, sengoku period (I suppose you have to allow them their own history), etc, but specifically designed to have insufficient time to cover WWI and WWII, precisely so that they do not have to confront any of these issues. This means that the average Japanese are not even aware of the atrocities they have done. So, even though the Emperor of Japan, Prime Minister, etc, come out to apologise, they are never taken seriously---what is the point of token gestures when you are actively preventing progress? And FFS the current Prime Minister literally campaigned on the idea that Japan should stop apologising because it had been so long and he is sick of the incessant apologies. This is "Do you know the Democrats are the REAL racist party of KKK?" level of gaslighting, and even though I am sick to shreds of C level demonising Japan, I cannot see how people should be forgiving to such douchbaggery.

    And I speak as from a tiny red dot of a country far away from the troubled triangle, that did try to play nice with the Japanese after the war, and thus the Japanese did help us rebuild the country that they left partly still in smithereens. Of course, you cannot expect the poor post-war Japan to pay for reparations for the huge chunk of C it decimated, but hey, they did do something for us, if you aren't so antagonistic in the first place nor too greedy.

    History is superbly complicated, but it is really useful to learn, if only to make sense of all the crazy things happening all over the place.
     
  14. Nmaan

    Nmaan Well-Known Member

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    There's a few sure but it's still one of the most Jingoistic states in the world. Take Kapernick look at the amount of hate he got for pointing out police brutality. Sooooo accepting.
    Don't be naive
     
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  15. Bright_Lucky_Star

    Bright_Lucky_Star [Previously Known as OrdinaryUser] The Blessed One

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    Threads like this will always amuse me
    [​IMG]
     
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  16. kenar

    kenar ヽ(`・ω・´)ゝ

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    A surprisingly nice read.
     
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  17. bf

    bf Well-Known Member

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    Awww thanks.

    It wasn't nice typing that all out :cry::cry::cry:
     
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  18. Effugium

    Effugium [Investigator], Praise Shigure-sama

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    Hmm, why would you thinking of the city be arrogant? :blobconfused:
     
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  19. Anra7777

    Anra7777 All powerful magic grammar hamster queen pirate.

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    That was my point. That it’s not. I was using New York City as an analogy.
     
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  20. Effugium

    Effugium [Investigator], Praise Shigure-sama

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    Ahh i see...:hmm:
    But if i am a citizen of the other city in that state and a citizen from NYC talk about new york city as if they are talking about the state then i would also think they are arrogant:blob_tilt:
     
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