Wanderthread Redux (Part 1)

Wanderfound · November 24, 2019, 8:32pm

Wanderfound · November 24, 2019, 11:40pm

Wanderfound · November 24, 2019, 11:42pm

Wanderfound · November 24, 2019, 11:49pm

Wanderfound · November 25, 2019, 2:03am

Thread:

I often hesitate to discuss this because it makes me sound like a reactionary Catholic wowser, but I do think that the authoritarian themes and increasing brutalisation apparent in American (and global) pop culture over the last few decades are not unrelated to the reemergence of fascism.

Wanderfound · November 25, 2019, 10:00pm

Establishment liberal America is, as always, 100% complicit in the crimes of empire.

Wanderfound · November 26, 2019, 1:12am

Wanderfound · November 26, 2019, 11:42pm

Wanderfound · November 26, 2019, 11:44pm

This:

Is why this:

Is disqualifying.

Wanderfound · November 29, 2019, 10:46pm

Wanderfound · November 30, 2019, 12:14am

Wanderfound · December 2, 2019, 1:01am

Wanderfound · December 4, 2019, 7:46am

Wanderfound · December 4, 2019, 9:55pm

Wanderfound · December 6, 2019, 1:11am

AndyHilmer · December 6, 2019, 3:29am

(Turner diaries shit)

Given that a desire expressed in the book is to hang troublesome women, it is right and good that the concern be linked. Maybe with some context. And a cartoon of some dead-eyed incel in red and black mufti getting knocked the fuck out.

Wanderfound · December 6, 2019, 1:35pm

Wanderfound · December 6, 2019, 10:02pm

Like Choi, many of the Koreans who seek justice for camp-town sex workers refer to them as “comfort women”—an especially charged designation. That term traditionally refers to Korean women whom the Japanese Imperial Army kidnapped and forced to work in military brothels called “comfort stations” during World War II. In Korea, North and South, the survivors of that systemare living symbols of the country’s 35 years of subjugation to Japanese colonialism. And, due to Japan’s conservative ruling party’s refusal to fully admit its military’s role in enslaving the comfort women and importing forced laborers from Korea, the topic remains a source of deep tension between South Korea and Japan that recently escalated into a full-fledged trade war and Seoul’s cancellation of an intelligence-sharing pact with Tokyo. (Japan’s war crimes have also become a political issue in the United States, where, much to the chagrin of the Japanese government, memorials to Japan’s comfort women have been built in 10 cities, including San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York.)

By and large, however, the Korean public has refrained from treating the kichijong women as victims of a heartless imperial power, in the manner of the comfort women. Instead, many Koreans see the camp-town prostitutes as “fallen women bringing shame to the nation,” said Park Jeong-mi, a professor at Chungbuk National University who was an expert witness in the 2014 lawsuit against the South Korean government. But Park argues that this sentiment is misleading and unfair, and in her research she has found a direct historical link between the Japanese and American systems that supplied Korean women to their troops. This key connection clearly undermines the long-standing Korean perception of U.S.-brokered military prostitution as a system of more-or-less voluntary labor, prompting moral disapproval and public shaming within the traditional Korean patriarchy.

During the years of direct U.S. occupation from 1945 to 1948, the U.S. military government created an administrative state that was dominated by Koreans who had collaborated with Japan’s colonial rulers. The leaders of this first occupying regime outlawed prostitution, but got around the prohibition by building brothels for U.S. troops. These outposts were dubbed “comfort stations” after the Japanese wartime model, according to documents Park recently unearthed from South Korea’s Ministry of Health. The shift from Japanese- to American-coerced sex work was an easy transition, she said: “High-ranking Korean officials who served under Japanese colonial rule were familiar with the comfort station system.”

Park also found U.S. documents showing that, after the Korean War, American commanders rejected the idea of the Korean state running brothels as the Japanese military had done. Instead, they did what future generations of the military would practice in Iraq and Afghanistan: They privatized military functions—in this case, the provision of sex workers to American troops.

Wanderfound · December 6, 2019, 11:38pm

Wanderfound · December 7, 2019, 9:19pm

Thread.