Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
with China: America wanted rather to trample China beneath its feet,
America obtained considerable strategic benefit from its bombing of
the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, patriotism for Americans amounts
to world domination, and America is the most unfriendly nation in
the world.
As with paranoid conspiracy theorists and ultranationalists every-
where, they filled their writing with bold-faced type and half-digested
works of real scholars they sought both to denigrate and to emulate.
Also like conspiracy theorists the world over, they speculated on the
hostile intentions of foreign nations, bemoaned their fellow country-
men's lack of nationalistic consciousness, exhorted them to recover their
former greatness, and railed against liberalism, intellectuals, globaliza-
tion, and free trade. They themselves were middle-aged men born in
the 1950s, but they were trying their best to convert China's younger
generations to their xenophobic point of view.
Their topic contained a discussion of race and a crude treatment of the
“biological differences between races.” White Americans and other
Westerners, they claimed, were looking into the possibility of con-
ducting race-discriminating biological warfare (195), and it was undeni-
able that most of the people able to utilize the technology of the
information age are currently white people (196). African Americans
avoided racial extinction at the hands of white Americans because they
were “physically stronger and more suited to slavery in plantations”
(192), and regional separatism is not the problem in the United States
that it is in Canada or Northern Ireland because white Americans came
very close to “completely and utterly wiping out all Indians” (193-94).
They seemed unable to grasp the essential points and arguments of
distinguished Harvard scholar of international relations Samuel
Huntington in other than racist terms. The “clash of civilizations” that
Huntington and other Western scholars foresee was, they argued,
actually a conflict between races (222). There is a Chinese saying that
perfectly describes their approach to Huntington: “With the hearts of
petty men, they attempt to measure the innards of a gentleman.” If
the paranoia and ultranationalism of the topic could somehow be
divorced from its cultural particulars, the topic's overall paranoid
approach and xenophobic tone might well have been indistinguish-
able from the far right-wing neo-fascist trash available at a typical
American gun show.
It would be comforting and reassuring to assume that the people
who adhered to such extremist ideas were amateur autodidacts and
other frustrated cranks who washed out of Ph.D. programs because
of their lack of focus and discipline. In fact some such ultranationalists
