I was a native-born, nth-generation white and white-bread American citizen in the US. My reaction was “Huh. They finally lucked into something impactful. Had to happen sometime.”. I was in no way happy about it, but it seemed like any other distant tragedy.
I didn’t expect or understand the extreme American reaction, let alone any worldwide reaction, to what seemed to me like just another terrorist attack, largely predictable and differing only in scale from what had happened before.
All of a sudden everybody was saying the World Had Changed, and I was like “In what way?”. I tend to attribute the whole mythos around those attacks mostly to the political class (which lives in a weird bubble) and the gullible.
I doubt I was alone, either, but once the tide starts on something like that, it’s all you’ll hear. The rest (including me) don’t waste “ammunition” on trying to convince people it’s not as big a deal as they think. Not really a conspiracy, just not fighting on a question that’s not that important and will actually lose you points with people.
People were using it, quite successfully, to dismantle the values and institutions they claimed they wanted to protect and strengthen, and policy was more important to talk about.
This is blood-libel sounding stuff and absolutely fodder for anti-Chinese articles, and yet zero Americans have written about this?
I don’t think it would quite fit the vibe. The mythos is all about the Ultimate Tragedy Ever. The Whole World was supposed to be Weeping, except for the Literal Demons actually responsible. To make the most extreme possible claim about how Universally Obviously Evil the attack is, you have to avoid broadening your Literal Demons to include the uninvolved.
Also, American anti-Chinese sentiment isn’t “blood-libelish”, or it doesn’t feel that way to me anyway. “The Chinese” are, mostly, perceived as human adversaries acting for comprehensible reasons—or maybe as a force of nature—but not as irrationally hateful, or as totally insane apostles of evil for evil’s sake. Maybe Chinese people were fully dehumanized in 1955, and definitely in 1915, but not now, I think. It probably helps that in the US there are very widely held, substantive, philsophically consistent political disagreements with the way China is run, as well as real ecomic fear. That means that if you want to make an “anti-China” argument, you don’t have to run to ethnic dehumanization right off the bat.
On the other hand, in the US, if you want to be anti-people-who-want-to-reestablish-the-Caliphate, you have to be careful not to offend those of your “allies” who may think the problem with the Caliphate was less about its policies and more about who was running it. Ethnic or religious attacks are in some sense safer, and those lend themselves to more blood-libelish themes. And such attacks are also useful for lumping in people who might not want to reestablish the Caliphate, but might have grievances against you that you’d prefer to ignore.
I didn’t expect or understand the extreme American reaction, let alone any worldwide reaction, to what seemed to me like just another terrorist attack, largely predictable and differing only in scale from what had happened before.
I don’t think the scale carried any actually new information that should have caused anybody to, um, update on anything. “Largely predictable” is the main issue.
I was a native-born, nth-generation white and white-bread American citizen in the US. My reaction was “Huh. They finally lucked into something impactful. Had to happen sometime.”. I was in no way happy about it, but it seemed like any other distant tragedy.
I didn’t expect or understand the extreme American reaction, let alone any worldwide reaction, to what seemed to me like just another terrorist attack, largely predictable and differing only in scale from what had happened before.
All of a sudden everybody was saying the World Had Changed, and I was like “In what way?”. I tend to attribute the whole mythos around those attacks mostly to the political class (which lives in a weird bubble) and the gullible.
I doubt I was alone, either, but once the tide starts on something like that, it’s all you’ll hear. The rest (including me) don’t waste “ammunition” on trying to convince people it’s not as big a deal as they think. Not really a conspiracy, just not fighting on a question that’s not that important and will actually lose you points with people.
People were using it, quite successfully, to dismantle the values and institutions they claimed they wanted to protect and strengthen, and policy was more important to talk about.
I don’t think it would quite fit the vibe. The mythos is all about the Ultimate Tragedy Ever. The Whole World was supposed to be Weeping, except for the Literal Demons actually responsible. To make the most extreme possible claim about how Universally Obviously Evil the attack is, you have to avoid broadening your Literal Demons to include the uninvolved.
Also, American anti-Chinese sentiment isn’t “blood-libelish”, or it doesn’t feel that way to me anyway. “The Chinese” are, mostly, perceived as human adversaries acting for comprehensible reasons—or maybe as a force of nature—but not as irrationally hateful, or as totally insane apostles of evil for evil’s sake. Maybe Chinese people were fully dehumanized in 1955, and definitely in 1915, but not now, I think. It probably helps that in the US there are very widely held, substantive, philsophically consistent political disagreements with the way China is run, as well as real ecomic fear. That means that if you want to make an “anti-China” argument, you don’t have to run to ethnic dehumanization right off the bat.
On the other hand, in the US, if you want to be anti-people-who-want-to-reestablish-the-Caliphate, you have to be careful not to offend those of your “allies” who may think the problem with the Caliphate was less about its policies and more about who was running it. Ethnic or religious attacks are in some sense safer, and those lend themselves to more blood-libelish themes. And such attacks are also useful for lumping in people who might not want to reestablish the Caliphate, but might have grievances against you that you’d prefer to ignore.
Scale is important
I don’t think the scale carried any actually new information that should have caused anybody to, um, update on anything. “Largely predictable” is the main issue.