"Racial Antagonism"

February 25, 2023 12:29 PM

Tragically, one of the forces responsible for catalyzing Hobson’s own national security imagination, and the primary tool with which he sought to awaken it in others, was racism. That’s something we’d do well to remember today. As we turn, once again, to confront a geopolitical rival in the Pacific against a backdrop of rising anti-Asian violence at home, the story of Hobson’s hateful career ought to stand as a powerful warning to all of us. Its protagonist was a demagogue who used racism to hammer home an inflammatory message of inevitable conflict. We should be wary of anyone else who attempts to do the same. from “Yellow Peril” and Naval Power: Richmond P. Hobson and the Racist Imagination of American National Security

[Content warning: examples of historical racism & racist propaganda]

posted by chavenet (7 comments total)

I don’t really have anything to say about this that isn’t in TFA, but it was an interesting read. Thanks for posting it.
posted by GenjiandProust at 6:37 PM on February 25, 2023 [3 favorites]

What an amazing article.

How about this for a revelation?

But before Hobson had a chance to put his plan into action, a series of unfortunate events occurred that would transform his preoccupation with the “yellow peril” into a dangerous obsession. The chain of causation began not in China but in San Francisco, California, which had long been a hotbed of anti-Asian racism in the United States. In October 1906, the San Francisco school board attempted to segregate students of Japanese ancestry from their white peers. The school board’s action elicited a formal protest from the Japanese government, unnerving President Roosevelt, who opted to avoid a diplomatic incident by compelling the board to rescind the segregation order. When political leaders from California objected to the federal government’s intervention in what they considered a local affair, the president and his principal advisors warned them privately that allowing the crisis to escalate out of control would risk provoking a military response from Japan. Shocked, one of the Californians promptly leaked the warning to the Washington Post, dramatically escalating a simmering war scare that was starting to alarm officials on both sides of the Pacific.[10]

Aside from the endemic anti-Asian racism of San Francisco and the rest of California as well, I have never previously heard a peep about any of that.
posted by jamjam at 9:36 PM on February 25, 2023 [7 favorites]

It's an interesting article, and I didn't know much about Hobson before reading it, but I'm not sure what the overall thesis is.

Hobson was racist, and his constituency was racist, and his political messaging was racist, and his speeches and writings are racist. Duly noted.

Setting aside his hilariously bad take on "race" in Asia—which certainly wasn't the monolithic bloc that he apparently imagined and feared, and which itself seems suspiciously like a projection of an aspirational "white" identity—some of his conclusions weren't wrong, in the sense of being incorrect.

Japan in 1909 was a rising imperial power, having recently defeated China (on the Korean peninsula) in 1895 and Russia in 1905. The United States had defeated Spain in 1898 and picked up the last remnants of the Spanish Empire, including the Philippines, which the US maintained as a de facto colony. You don't have to be a genius to predict that this situation had a very high likelihood of ending badly.

Hobson was off by a few decades, perhaps because his racism blinded him to the possibility of a catastrophic European land war between fellow members of the "white race". But the US and Japan did eventually end up at war over the Pacific... only it happened with China as a US ally, and after years of brutal occupation of the mainland by Japan that certainly didn't lead to any sort of pan-continental alliance on the basis of similar melanin levels.

But you would have been making an error if you had dismissed Hobson's conclusion in 1909, simply on the grounds that he was an obnoxious racist from Alabama. (Ignoring him might have been safe, though.) He was a broken clock who happened to be pointing at the right time.

The overall lesson to me seems to be: you can't reliably tell the time by looking at a broken clock, but you also can't look at a broken clock and be assured that what it's telling you isn't correct. Sometimes really repugnant people get something right, and the kneejerk tendency to dismiss as incorrect anything that comes out of the mouth of a moron, can eventually lead you to miss something that probably should have been obvious (since even the moron saw it).
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:11 PM on February 25, 2023 [4 favorites]

Sometimes really repugnant people get something right, and the kneejerk tendency to dismiss as incorrect anything that comes out of the mouth of a moron, can eventually lead you to miss something that probably should have been obvious (since even the moron saw it).

I dunno, when conspiracy theorists are right for the wrong reasons, they are still wrong. They will happily take their “win” and use it to bolster their other claims. Alex Jones notably disbelieved Jussie Smollett’s accusation of a hate attack (which was staged) and used that “correct deduction” to defend Jones’ similar dismissal of Sandy Hook. However, Jones’ suspicions about Smollett arose from knee-jerk racist denial of hate crimes rather than any facts about the case. Similarly, what can you do with Hobson’s “geopolitical analysis?” His reasoning is so wrong that it will diverge from reality quickly even if it touches reality at random points.

A correct guess by a malignant actor is still a guess and can’t support any further analysis.
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:29 AM on February 26, 2023 [2 favorites]

It’s a shame that the prevailing orthodoxies means that, of the many people who immediately knew the Smollet thing was a put-on, all but people like Alex Jones were afraid to say so … which of course led to an even further digging-in by the orthodox to deny the obvious and everyone ultimately looking that much stupider.

We need some authorized court jesters who are free to be contrarians without penalty.
posted by MattD at 7:50 AM on February 26, 2023 [1 favorite]

It’s a fascinating article. Hobson’s being both a racist and an anti-imperialist of sorts has a bright reflection in a far-right isolationist strain that began with Pat Buchannan’s anti-neocon stuff 25 years ago and is now reflected in the ardent opposition of much of the far right to US intervention in the Russia-Ukraine war.
posted by MattD at 8:03 AM on February 26, 2023 [2 favorites]

There's the benefit of cherry-picking the things that were kind-of-sort-of correct: Japan joined the Allied Powers a few years later in World War I, and certainly people speculate as to if Japan would have gone south if Khalkhin Gol had gone differently.

With time, some of the other super-questionable conclusions of the underlying theory have faded; as an example, I believe a novel of the time predicted a seaborne invasion of the United States from Asia which was relieved by German troops coming to the rescue at the last minute.

That is to say, parts of a vague prediction about future conflict between the United States and Japan may have worked out to be true, but the overall prediction was not useful because of its underlying basis.
posted by Comrade_robot at 8:18 AM on February 27, 2023 [2 favorites]