Posts by Simon Grigg
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Hard News: "Orderly transition" in #Egypt, in reply to Dismal Soyanz,
However, whether the average Singaporean thinks they are "Western" or "Asian" is quite a different matter. I never felt that any of the Singaporeans I knew/interacted with ever considered themselves "westernised".
I was talking about the government, not the population at large and they've been very open in their desire to aspire to the west. In the Museum of Singapore some of Lee Kwan Yew's speeches from the early 1960s are available to view. They're quite illuminating. We need to 'westernize' was a recurrent theme.
to generate massive protests.
The water cannons were out in KL twice last year too - I witnessed the aftermath of one such incident. It hardy caused a murmur in the media but it happened.
I don't think we will see Egyptian level protests in the near future there but there is increasingly vocal and growing discontent especially amongst the South Asian population who have neither economic (Chinese) nor political (Malay) power.
Malaysia seems to exist at the moment as several nations running rather unequally on parallel tracks rather than one unitary state.
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Hard News: "Orderly transition" in #Egypt, in reply to nzlemming,
They have a venue called "WTF"?
Which gives out Do Not Disturb door tags which substitute the words "Fuck Off"
What about people from outside "the West"?
Which may or may not bring us back to that person from Malaysia and then, by a stretch, down to Singapore (KL feeling more and more like a wannabe Sg) where Old Man Lee has spent decades trying subsume the East in favour of aping the west. He has done so, however, in a particularly Asian way - he's closer to a Chinese patriarch than any Western styled leader could ever be. In 2011, technically retired, he's urging Singapore's Muslim community to be 'less strict' and fit in - words which carry some weight.
Singapore does see itself as 'west' though and the desire of a smallish sector in Malaysia to do likewise is a reason amongst many that festering hodge podge of discontent could explode at any time.
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Hard News: "Orderly transition" in #Egypt, in reply to nzlemming,
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Charles Mabbett from The Asia New Zealand Foundation just reminded me of this by tweet:
TED / Martin Jacques on China and the West.
The angry comments under it are sadly predictable.
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Hard News: "Orderly transition" in #Egypt, in reply to giovanni tiso,
I am wearing your clothes, I speak your language, I watch your films and today is whatever date it is because you say so
The clothes I see here are made in this part of the world, designed by local designers mashing together influences from all over the region - and the planet. The music that the kids listen to is predominately K-pop, or J-pop or T-Pop with the likes of Justin Beiber taking a distant place (there was an interview on a podcast I listen to where the guy being interviewed explained that he turned down an offered JB interview simply because nobody cared - the US label was aghast).
They local indie acts pull hip-hop and rap into the mix but what comes out sounds nothing like the stuff you'd hear on US radio. I can say with some confidence that you've not heard of any of the acts in the Top 20 - Japan is the same.
The cinemas down the road play a mix of the western blockbusters, but only the blockbusters, and mix it with Bollywood, and the hundreds of movies made in this part of the world which tend to run forever if they are popular.
The TV comes from just about every nation you can think of but those silly South American supernatural soap operas and their local offspring are huge all over Asia. I don't think they show in NZ.
Where I am right now the year is 2554 (about to slip over to 2555) and when I was in Indonesia it was 1427/28/29/31 - the same as much of the middle east. We have three New Years - the one last week and the one coming up take precedence.
That said, the record store in Lat Prao has the best collection of James Brown albums I've ever seen. I just don't know who buys it.
An influence - hugely of course, but dominant?
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Hard News: "Orderly transition" in #Egypt, in reply to Angus Robertson,
Are they looking West?
They're looking everywhere including inwards. West, in cultural terms, is almost a redundant word now.
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Hard News: "Orderly transition" in #Egypt, in reply to Angus Robertson,
Modernised
That carries all sorts of uneasy implications that are less than acceptable too, including some that point to the moral justifications used by colonial powers.
I've used the phrase "west-facing" before, which I think is more accurate than "westernised"
There are problems with any term that includes the word 'west' simply because of the historic baggage. Young, educated, worldwise Islamic or Hindu folk have a particular reaction to the word.
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Hard News: Book review: 'Wikileaks:…, in reply to Russell Brown,
It appears that the Guardian's redacting team may already have placed Morgan Tsvangirai in mortal peril by failing to remove his name from a diplomatic cable from Zimbabwe.
I found the commentary from Zimbabweans under the Op piece from the US DOD blogger (name escapes) who first attacked Wikileaks over this fairly interesting. I learned more about the complicated mechanisms of power in that land from the running discussion than I had in a decade of Western analysis and editorial. All parties however seemed to agree, for different reasons, that Tsvangirai was already in mortal danger, both extra judicial and from the Zimbabwean legal system, and that there was nothing in the cables that Mugabe didn't already know.
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Hard News: "Orderly transition" in #Egypt, in reply to Dismal Soyanz,
Seems a tad patronising to me.
And it's a term received with derision in much of the developing world. That said I'm having trouble coming up with a single replacement word that doesn't carry other baggage.
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I'd also mention this analysis of the complex power structure in the country. The balancing act and power pendulum between the military, the police, the repressive mechanisms of state and a monied elite seem to repeat themselves through much of the developing world.
Western commentators, whether liberal, left or conservative, tend to see all forces of coercion in non-democratic states as the hammers of "dictatorship" or as expressions of the will of an authoritarian leader. But each police, military and security institution has its own history, culture, class-allegiances, and, often its own autonomous sources of revenue and support as well.