Primate (Re)Visions

Or, further adventures with monkey metaphors.

The Hun as Black Beast

Simian suggestion in the war on terror.

Appropriation or Appreciation?

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Baldwin in London

‘Everybody knows, no matter what the professions of my unhappy country may be, that we are not bombing people out of existence in the name of freedom. If it was freedom we were concerned about, then long, long ago we would have done something about Johannesburg, South Africa. If we were concerned with freedom, boys and girls would not, as I stand here, be perishing in the streets of Harlem. We are concerned with power, nothing more than that. And most unluckily for the Western world, it has consolidated its power on the backs of people who are now willing to die rather than be used any longer. In short, the economic arrangement of the Western world proved to be too extensive for most of the world, and the Western world will change its arrangements, or its arrangements will be changed for them.’

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Black Sins, White Masks

Simian vituperation as multi-theatre asset.

‘What, then, does the “coloured” world include? Not only Africa, the Indians – as well as the Negroes and half-breeds – of the whole of America, the Islamic nations, China, and India extending to Java, but, above all, Japan and Russia, which has again become an Asiatic, “Mongolian” State. When the Japanese beat Russia, a ray of hope shot up all over Asia: a young Asiatic State had, by Western methods, forced the greatest power of the West to its knees and thereby destroyed the aureole of invincibility which surrounded Europe. It was as a beacon, in India, in Turkey, even in Cape Colony and the Sahara. So it was possible to pay back the white peoples for all the pains and humiliations of a century! Since then the profound cunning of the Asiatics has been thinking out methods inaccessible to European thought and superior to it. And now Russia, after suffering in 1916 its second great defeat, from the West, has removed its “white” mask, to the mocking satisfaction of its ally England, has again become Asiatic with all its soul, and is filled with a burning hatred of Europe. It took with it the experiences of Europe’s internal weakness and used its knowledge to invent new and crafty methods of fighting, which it has instilled into the whole of the earth’s coloured population, with the idea of a common resistance.’

Oswald Spengler, The Hour of Decision, 1933.

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