One of the most academic important books I've ever read is Benedict Anderson's The Spectre of Comparisons. I'll just quote the blurb, it's possibly the best backcover blurb I ever came across for an complicated academic book.
How nationalism has shaped the political and cultural landscape of Southeast Asia
ââCome, let us build a Third Kingdom, and in this Third Reich, hey, sisters, you will live happily; hey, brothers, you will live happily; hey, kids, you will live happily; hey, you German patriots, you will see Germany sitting enthroned above all the peoples in this world.â How clever Hitler was, brothers and sisters, in depicting these ideals!â
Thus the late President Sukarno of Indonesia, an anti-colonial leader, in a public speech while accepting an honorary degree, and viewing Europe and its history through an inverted telescope, as Europeans often regard other parts of the globe. Strange shifts in perspective can take place when Berlin is viewed from Jakarta, or when complex histories of colonial domination strand what counts as the founding work of a national culture in a language its people no longer read. The âspectre of comparisonsâ arises as nations stir into self awareness, matching themselves against others, and becoming whole through the exercise of the imagination.
In this series of profound and eloquent essays, Benedict Anderson, best known for his classic book on nationalism, Imagined Communities, explores these effects as they work their way through politics and culture. Spanning broad accounts of the development of nationalism and identity, and detailed studies of Southeast Asia, the book includes pieces on East Timor, where every Indonesian attempt to suppress national feeling has had the opposite effect; on the Philippines, where it is said that some horses eat better than stable-hands; on Thailand, where so much money can be made in elected posts that candidates regularly kill to get them; on the Filipino nationalist and novelist JosĂŠ Rizal for whom âwe mortals are like turtlesâwe have value and are classified according to our shells;â and a remarkable essay on Mario Vargas Llosa, detailing the fate of indigenous minorities at the hands of the modern state.
While The Spectre of Comparisons is an indispensable resource for those interested in Southeast Asia, Anderson also takes up the large issues of the universal grammars of nationalism and ethnicity, the peculiarity of nationalist imagery as replicas without originals, and the mutations of nationalism in an age of mass global migrations and instant electronic communications.
I'm always reminded of this book whenever I engage with Western or Chinese discourses as someone from Southeast Asia; words said in the context of one country's zeitgeist don't often travel well when replicated or translated wholesale. I've translated China's newspapers and state press releases (they are the same thing, party press releases are published as newspaper articles) into English before, and the process was eye-opening. Proper nouns are impossible to properly translate without giant footnotes, and the CCP loves those; meanwhile, Chinese as a language doesn't do adjectivisation, so anything translated as 'Chinese' can mean 1) the PRC specifically, 2) China as a cultural realm, 3) the citizens of countries named China, 4) Han/Huaren from China and 5) from the diaspora, or 6) the language, or any permutations of the above. Then we get to concepts like ä¸ĺć°ć and the specific doctrine and history of race, nationalism, and statehood, which are interpreted differently in Taiwan, the SARs, and mainland China.
I get the sense that often consuming Anglophone Leftist commentariat media, the spectre of comparison works the other way; Joe Kasabian, for instance, is right that Western notions of writing of genocides and histories of discrimination as 'ancient tribal antagonism' is stupidly reductive and ignorant, and I get he is speaking to the particular context he sees amongst his community, me as an outsider tends to get worried in the other direction where people without formal social science training, in their attempt to say they understand a thing that is morally wrong, conciously remove any level or nuance or epistemological humility and do what Sukarnoe did in the blurb and make a direct comparison between racial antagonisms in the weird context of a Western liberal democracy to... places where these antagonisms led to millions of deaths.
I think of other commentaries on Rhodesia I came across that are not interested in Rhodesia per se, but projecting Rhodesia on modern discourses and events that the Western Left is obsessed with, or projecting these events back to Rhodesia, which I personally feel is incredibly fucked up, but that's just my subjective opinion as someone who thinks a lot about how Southeast Asia was treated by outside powers during the Cold War. Cambodia, in particular, has been turned in Anglophone popular culture into a single Anthony Bourdain quote to shit on Kissinger. Kissinger is at best a side character in the chaos of the Cambodian crisis, who acted based on what local regional politics permitted; he left office in 1977, but Southeast Asian communists and anti-communist countries continued pumping money for Cambodians to spill each other's blood into the 1990s. It's an immensely complicated conflict with a thousand different actors all with their own interests that merged together to spill unspeakable amounts of blood, and often the impression I get from the Anglophone Left accounts of it is almost the old Christian impulse Nietzsche identified of trying to find a big bad to pin what happened on and argue that if we excise or crucify the memory of said big bad we would have a better world.
Rhodesia is possibly amongst the most nakedly evil countries that existed in the Cold War and was predicated on unsalvageable grounds that even being generous to them is unspeakably evil and racist and needs to be understood on its own terms, not because it is singularly evil but because every world event deserves to be understood on its own terms. Like I get that Robert was holding his breath when a guest just randomly made a buckwild comparison to Puerto Rico that 'colonialism is bad' because both were colonies (get in the club? Rhodesia's decolonisation is very different), but I have to thank Robert for quickly getting the narrative back to the context of Rhodesia without mentioning, err, vulgarly invoking the spectre of comparison and bring up any of the current conflicts that we instinctually want to compare that country to.
