Ok I’m gonna stop contributing to Squid Game discourse soon but the reason the apolitical consumption of it is so disturbing is that the show’s premise of mass killings being hidden from society isn’t fictional for south Korea. It’s a huge feature of our modern history
The most famous of these outside Korea is the No Gun Ri massacre during the Korean War, when US soldiers massacred 400 refugees. During the Korean War the US actually ordered troops to fire on refugees in battle zones. Hundreds of these incidents have been recorded
Just one year after the division of Korea, a massive uprising took place in the south against the US military govt. The families of those arrested or killed were surveilled and discriminated against for the rest of their lives bc of south Korea’s collective punishment law
There was also the Jeju Uprising of 1948-49, when ROK soldiers & police killed up to 60,000 people and burned over half of Jeju island’s villages. This all happened under US observation, support & direction
Survivors of these and literally 1000s of other massacres were kept from telling their stories for 50 years by fascist regimes propped up by the US. In most cases, US personnel were present, aware, or directly responsible for killings. The white “VIPs” in Squid Game are real
That scene where Gi-Hoon tries to go to the police is mild compared to what actual survivors of these massacres went through. In 1960 some of the families of those killed in Daejeon tried to give their relatives proper burials, many of them were imprisoned for years for it
So yes! Squid Game is about capitalism—specifically in Korea, where it’s inseparable from US imperialism. To be real, not everyone watching the show is in the game. Some of you are wearing the mask, or even watching from the VIP section. Do you really know which side you’re on?
Asians* are successful** bc of immigration policies designed to source highly specialized labor from peripheries & exclude economic/political “undesirables” (communists & the poor)
*a specific class of specific migrants & their descendants
**overrepresented in particular fields
Idea of docile, smart & striving Asians comes from the US occupation of Japan. It’s the antithesis of the yellow peril after the “enemy” is conquered. It was applied to domestic US politics in response to our rising numbers as part of anticommunist & white supremacist ideology
What we now call model minority developed out of global economic changes: an industrializing East Asia, the end of the Vietnam War, outsourcing of labor from the US, the rise of neoliberalism, ongoing poverty for Black & other racialized peoples despite the legal integration
i wish people would share grace lee boggs' cuddly quotes less and more of the ones where she tells everyone to get off their ass and do communism already
Couldn't fit everything in the alt text for the last picture so here's the missing para:
These young people have substituted for the pragmatic, antiintellectual attitudes of their forebears, a new anti-intellectual attitude which is the unique product of the post-World War II...
The point of resisting carceral solutions to anti-Asian violence is not to fulfill some conspiracy to leave Asian people vulnerable to violence. It's because the imperialist state cannot be trusted to protect us; they will use that mandate to protect to brutalize others & us.
Empowering law enforcement to "stop hate crimes" will not result in them going after the most dangerous threat to our communities: organized state, capitalist, vigilante white supremacist violence. Generally speaking, the police do not arrest their colleagues.
This understandably raises some questions. What do we do about the violence then? What about perpetrators who are not white and therefore COULD be allayed by police intervention?
The richest country in the world uses money it could spend helping its people to bomb other nations, it’s true. But why is the US the richest country on earth? Because US wealth doesn’t just come from workers here, the surplus of the whole world is expropriated—at gunpoint.
They have money for wars because wars make the money. Not only through arms deals, defense contracts etc but the ability to use force to ensure US finance sets the rules of the global economy. It’s not just about ending wars to reinvest domestically, but redistributing worldwide.
Most people in the US don’t share in that wealth in terms of the superprofits condensed in the hands of a few capitalists, but we do have (unequal) access to cheap commodities & credit bc of the exploitation of overseas labor. We can’t take that imperialist prosperity for granted
This is the logical conclusion of making media attention a metric of progress for our communities. We clamored for corporate media monopoly to “pay attention,” now here they are, distorting the story to their own ends, lifting up the most reactionary voices
Tbh part of why I find this convo less and less worth engaging is precisely this dynamic: we don’t control the means through which these discourses get generated. Media monopoly always broadcasts further, and people take things like this at face value as faithful reflections.
To extend the self crit: I think we (AsAm left) have placed way too much faith in the power of our words. What good does another panel do? We need actual programs that link communities together in a concrete, shared struggle for survival + liberation