Racism is comparing black
people to animals, particularly monkeys – something Roberto Calderoni, a
politician from Italy’s Lega Nord party, did with Cécile Kyenge, Italy’s
Congo-born Minister for Integration, whom he compared to an orang-utan. This is
often associated with the notion that black people come from the jungle, from
wild, untamed nature, and that they belong there. The 1933 film King Kong, for example, was shaped by
the racist stereotype of a “primitive negro”. The giant gorilla from the
jungle, who has designs on a blonde girl and who goes marauding through the
streets New York City, i.e. a metropolis of the Western civilisation he doesn’t
fit into, symbolises a black African who has been demonised by the whites and
belittled into a primitive beast (1). He is put on display in chains at a
theatre on Broadway as Kong, the Eighth
Wonder of the World, reflecting the custom at the time of presenting exotic
people like exotic animals to large audiences of curious onlookers. The film
theory thus compares King Kong to Ota Benga, a pygmy from the Congo, who was
put in a monkey enclosure at the Bronx Zoo in 1906 because the whites were
convinced he had remained very close to the monkeys, and thus belonged with
them; the New York Times (11 Sept. 1906)
even wrote an article about, entitled Send
him back to the woods:
Ota Benga … is a normal specimen of his race or tribe,
with a brain as much developed as are those of its other members. Whether they
are held to be illustrations of arrested development, and really closer to the
anthropoid apes than the other African savages …, they are of equal interest to
the student of ethology, and can be studied with profit.
…
… it is absurd to make moan over the imagined humiliation and degradation Benga
is suffering. The pygmies are a fairly efficient people in their native
forests, with enough intelligence to be successful hunters ant to secrete
themselves from hostile, but they are very low in the human scale, and the
suggestion that Benga should be in a school instead of a cage ignores the high
probability that school would be a place of torture to him and one from which
he could draw no advantage whatever. The idea that men are much alike except as
they have had or lacked opportunities for getting an education out of books is
now far out of date. … The best place for him is probably his native forest.
The whites’ view of him at the
time is also revealed in the way they photographed
him, e.g. with a monkey on his arm; in other words, as a natural pairing
with a creature only just below his own level of evolution (2).
Racism is also white people seeing a black man as a threat to his white wife,
as a black rapist”. The white girl is forbidden fruit to the “negro”, who is
not allowed to touch her, and thus needs to be bullied – the mere suspicion of
a black man wanting to approach a white woman could result in him being
lynched. This racist fear of interracial sex also shapes the film King Kong. Kong, who claims the blonde
Ann Darrow for himself, embodies the black man who wants to defy the colour
bar. He was made a monkey because interracial sex was considered to be as
abnormal, primitive and bestial as sex between a human and an animal (3). And
the idea of the giant gorilla denotes the fact that, even anatomically,
anything that should not be, cannot be. Black Africans come from the
jungle, are closer to animals than Westerners are, and need to be cowed to
prevent them from violating white women – while the widespread opinion is that
this is the deprecating, racist view of the far-right, that is not totally
true. Many elements of this notion also exist in the hearts and minds of the
left – not the image of the black racist, but of the native, who lives in
harmony with nature, and remains part of it, instead of estranging themselves
from it. This was how the racist fantasy creature King Kong inspired American
directors to produce remakes steeped in anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist
spirit, even though they still retained the aspect that made the first film so
racist: The fact that the native from the jungle, from the Third World, is a
monkey. In the 1976 version of King Kong,
he features as a revered savage with whom Dwan, Ann Darrow’s blonde successor,
falls in love and has a tender romance. And in 2017, Kong: Skull Island, he embodies a Vietcong fighter whose island is
being attacked by a US military troop which has just been fighting in the
Vietnam War. The soldiers are frustrated at losing the war against the Vietcong
and having to ingloriously return to civilian life, when, at just the right
time, they are suddenly sent on a mission to explore Skull Island, and King
Kong’s island becomes a second Vietnam for them. They initially make solid
advances. Just as they had done in Vietnam, they drop bombs onto Skull Island
from their helicopters. While these are “seismic” bombs that do not kill
anyone, and instead only seek to shake the earth as a means of measuring the
vibrations and finding out what treasures it holds, it is still considered
imperialist aggression, since the “seismic” bombing serves to explore the
wealth, e.g. crude oil or gold, the island has to offer, thus marking the start
of the soldiers’ plundering. The explosions spur Kong, the king and guardian of
the island and its nature, to action. He annihilates the military troop and
destroys their helicopters. He even survives a Napalm attack launched by the
invaders using leftovers of the agent from their time in Vietnam – and the
imperialist aggressors lose the Vietnam War for a second time. Che Guevara’s
call to “Create two, three, many Vietnams!” was fulfilled by the left-wing
filmmakers, clearly tying in with the leftist world view in that the Third
World guerrilla fighter is a monkey, which racists consider to be an inferior
person, a primitive “negro”. Even the
Vietnamese, who allowed the filmmakers to shoot the movie in their country, did
not seem to take issue with this.
Is there some overlap between
the way racists and do-gooders view human beings? And if so, why? We will be
examining some more examples to find an answer to this question.
The bear in Paul King’s 2014 film Paddington
is an example ofan animal symbolising
an immigrant from the Third World. He is an unaccompanied, underage refugee
from the primeval forests of “darkest Peru” who arrives in the metropolis of
London, where he is taken in by the white Brown family. The Browns are thus the
good guys representing a welcoming culture, while Millicent Clyde, taxidermist
and director of a natural history museum, represents the evil white
imperialists. She wants to stuff the Paddington Bear and display it in her
museum, so that he can become an object of study along with the other stuffed
exotic animals and skeletons of extinct dinosaurs. In other words, he is at
risk of suffering the same fate as King Kong in the 1933 film and Ota Benga –
ending up as an exhibition. While the black African man in King Kong is seen as a threat and therefore demonised and made into
a monster, a savage beast, Paul King goes to a different extreme in his film:
He de-demonises the young male immigrant from the brutally machista South
America to such an extent that he becomes a cuddly toy. It was this same
romanticism that filled the minds of the Germans who welcomed migrants at train
stations with teddy bears in 2015; that New Year’s Eve in Cologne brought them
harshly back to reality. Men from the Third World who come to our country
should be neither demonised nor idealised – the truth is usually somewhere in
between.
Right-wing racists and left-wing do-gooders thus both define people from the
Third World by their greater proximity to nature and animals, and by the fact
that they are uncivilised or less civilised. That is one thing they have in
common. Their judgements of his, however, are at opposite ends of the spectrum:
While the right-wingers see this as being a shortcoming, the left-wingers see
it as an asset. People from the Third World are therefore viewed as morally
inferior by the right, and morally superior by the left, because they have not
yet been, or have only marginally been corrupted by Western civilisation. It is
precisely because they have alienated themselves from nature through
civilisation, and have come decadent and consumerist, that the Western left
hate themselves and see Third-World immigrants as real-life savages, as
Turkish, Arab or black African Winnetous who should stay the way they are
rather than become westernised. German-Turkish
feminist Seyran Ates criticised these types of multiculturalism advocates in
the taz newspaper on 5/12/2007:
… the multiculturalism advocates, the Multikultis, have declared that
minorities need to be protected. This irresponsible “heal the world with
multiculturalism” propaganda is also a form of racism. Because these people don’t
want my people, who come from Turkey, to settle down andassimilate into the community here. They themselves feel
uncomfortable as Germans, and so don’t want foreigners to integrate here
either. …
They love anything that’s foreign, and don’t want to be German – and if you
have a migrant background, you’re the best person in the world for these
so-called multiculturalism advocates. But these Multikultis have always considered migrants to have a lower IQ than
Germans. They look at our development as if they were at a zoo, as if to say ‘look
how the Anatolian peasant has developed’. …
Oh yes – the Multikultis love me; for
them, my very existence is lunacy. I’m there to make these people happy simply
by existing. But I also need to stay tucked away, I’m not allowed to develop, I
need to remain as the foreigner, I’m always the ‘exotic one’. Above all, I am
not allowed to call myself German. Because being German is unbearable for Multikultis.
The greater proximity to
nature, i.e. to animals, is precisely one of the aspects the left most value in
people from the Third World. They admire the way these people seemingly cannot
“shake nature off”. And this is also evident in H. G. Wells’ anti-colonialist
novel The War of the Worlds, in which
the left-wing author imagines his homeland of Great Britain being colonised by
Martians who suck the Britons’ blood – symbolising the notion of exploitation.
The Martians thus feed on the Britons, and live at their expense, just as the
Britons live at the expense of the local people in their colonies. Wells
presents the Martian invasion of imperialist Great Britain as deserved
punishment for Britain’s subjugation and exploitation of the Third World. The
tables have turned; the colonisers themselves have been colonised. The War of the Worlds is thus considered
a work of invasion literature, and
the phenomenon befalling the Brits is known as reverse colonisation (4). Wells’
novel ties in with the 1933 film King
Kong, which is classified as an invasion film due to the fact that King
Kong, who is put on show in New York, who breaks his shackles and who marauds
around the imperialist metropolis, can also be seen as a form of reverse
colonisation – a deserved punishment for animal photographer and filmmaker
Denham invading Kong’s kingdom, a small Third World island of untouched nature.
This advance made by a sensation-seeking explorer is of course the first phase
of a country’s colonisation. He is soon followed by workers who clear the
primeval forest to make way for banana plantations or luxury hotels for wealthy
Americans.
But back to Wells’ The War of the Worlds,
which preaches to readers that the Britons deserved to be invaded by the
Martians:
And before
we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter
destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the
vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its own inferior races. The Tasmanians,
in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war
of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are
we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same
spirit?
H. G. Wells lists indigenous
people and animals in the same breath as victims of colonialism, because, like
many leftists, he is not only anti-imperialist, but also a conservationist and
animal rights activist, which is a problematic combination, because what he
holds dear – what he wants to protect from the evil Westerners – is nature,
i.e. plants, animals, and the people
of the Third World who live in harmony with nature. The pathos with which he
illustrates the Britons’ justified punishment through reverse colonisation in The War of the Worlds is expressed in
the feelings of guilt felt by the Westerner not only towards people of the
Third World, but also towards nature in his own country and the colonies. This
is similarly apparent in the following passage, in which he describes the
Martians’ vampiric act of sucking blood:
Instead,
they took the fresh, living blood of other creatures, and injected it
into their own veins. I have myself seen this being done, as I shall mention in
its place. But, squeamish as I may seem, I cannot bring myself to describe what
I could not endure even to continue watching. Let it suffice to say, blood
obtained from a still living animal, in most cases from a human being, was run
directly by means of a little pipette into the recipient canal.…
The bare idea of this is no doubt horribly repulsive to us, but at the same
time I think that we should remember how repulsive our carnivorous habits would
seem to an intelligent rabbit.
Western do-gooders feel the
same guilt about indigenous peoples like the Aboriginal Tasmanians as they do
about many animal species like the bison or dodo – all of which are nature that
the Westerner has manipulated, used as servants, or even caused to become
extinct. And before attacking the nature – animals, forests and people living
in harmony with nature – in the Third World, Westerners had already been doing
the same to their own nature. In H. G. Wells’ homeland of Great Britain and
other Western nations, almost all primeval forests have been cleared, and wild
animals like wolves and bears have become extinct – Paul King returns to the
latter in his film Paddington to make
amends for the long-standing guilt generated by generations past (5).
Westerners have also attacked the nature of their own mind and body by killing
the primitive element within themselves. This murder has given rise to a
feeling of guilt that plagues them, and which they try to quell by protecting
nature in their own country and the Third World. It is for this reason that the
German government is not only wildly adopting a “welcome culture” for wolves
and bears, but also for patriarchal migrants from less civilised nations.
Westerners thus feel guilty about all of nature: About indigenous peoples,
about the primitive element within themselves that they have stunted, and about
flora and fauna. In the imaginary punishments they conjure up as a result, they
are not only vengefully beset by people from the Third World and animals, but
also by plants. One example of this is the 1951 film The Thing from Another World, in which an American North Pole
station is threatened by an alien plant. Another example is John Wyndham’s 1951
invasion novel The Day of the Triffids.
The triffids are killer plants which first appear in Indochina where, at the
time the novel was published, the Indochina War was raging, with Vietnamese
Communists fighting the French colonial power. From there, the triffids start
encroaching on other tropical countries like the Belgian Congo and Colombia,
i.e. countries which have been colonised by the West and often exploited
through murderous brutality. They treat a traveller from the West the same way
indigenous guerrilla fighters treat an enemy invader:
In temperate countries, where
man had succeeded in putting most forms of nature save his own under a reasonable
degree of restraint, the status of the triffid was thus made quite clear. But
in the tropics, particularly in the dense forest areas, they quickly became a
scourge. The traveler very easily failed to notice one among the normal bushes
and undergrowth, and the moment he was in range the venomous sting would slash
out.
As an analogy for the blacks
who were taken from Africa to the USA to be exploited as slaves, these plants
ultimately reach imperialist Great Britain, where they are farmed for their cooking
oil. In other words, they are literally wrung out by the whites who live off
them. Until they free themselves, fight and decimate the Brits, and destroy
their civilisation. The fact that the triffids symbolise people from the Third
World, e.g. black Africans, is also made clear by the fact that they
communicate with each other via drumming. Through “rattlings of the triffids’
little sticks against their stems”, they exchange “secret messages” which annoy
the people in Great Britain (with whom they are at war) because they cannot
decode them (6). Nature, which also includes the people of the Third World,
fights back.
1) Cf.
Fatimah Tobing Rony: The Third Eye. Race,
Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle, p. 157-191
2) Rony, loc. cit. p. 157 interprets the photos as
follows: “The few documents that remain of his time in the zoo include
photographs of him looking seriously at the camera, posed in characteristic
anthropometric style: he is photographed frontally, from the back, and in
profile, holding props – a monkey in one arm and a club in another – which
reinforced his publicized ‘missing link’ status.”
3) Cf. Rony loc. cit., p. 181: “The forbidden … is above
all the interracial, interspecies intercourse of Ann and Kong”
5) Paddington Bear is a brown bear not found in South
America.
6) Enslaved black Africans brought the art of drum
telegraphy with them to the USA, visibly annoying their slaveholders – the Wikipedia
article Drums in communication states
that:
“Among the famous communication drums are the drums of West Africa … . From
regions known today as Nigeria and Ghana they spread across West Africa and to
America and the Caribbean during the slave trade. There they were banned
because they were being used by the slaves to communicate over long distances
in a code unknown to their enslavers.”
Perhaps it was these sorts of reports that inspired John Wyndham to create his
drumming triffids.