Growing up in America in the 1960’s there was only America and the rest. We American’s, with the remainder of the West at our bootstraps, were still riding the triumphant wave from World War II, and were heading to the moon. The Vietnam War was fully underway, and the body counts were tallied on the evening news, but we were always superior with our technological military might. Vietnam and its neighbor countries along with China and the U.S.S.R. were the enemy and backward to America. Orientalism was taught in school under the guise of geography to learn of where the ignorant, poor, backward people lived. The image in the video at 3:52 captures this exceptionally well. The Whites are dressed in suites, hat, and tie, with a woman in a white dress, while the native people are draped in cloth, not really clothing, or have no body covering at all. This was my anthropocentric indoctrination! It is clear I have been trained to be the White speaking subject, it is not just ok but my right to study other people, to dehumanize everyone for my own benefit. The video brings this out at 4:51, “orientalism, that’s equivalent to sinology, and sinology equivalent to zoology!”. This is who I really am. I may think I am not prejudice because I have friends that are minorities or I am woke because I accept people who are LGBT, but in actuality I am just ticking off an endless list of who I accept as equal. My prejudice runs so deep and board, it really is a birth defect, one that I believe all westerners inherit, handed down from Hegel and amplified by Modernity. Us westerners need to change our mindset from Me vs. Them to We. We are not equal or the same, but We can get along by giving others the ideological, economic, political, space to be left alone, living happy lives, without beings studied or indoctrinated.

According to the Western classification, I am an Oriental (I’m from Japan). Growing up, hearing the word “Oriental” being used for Japan was very odd to me (and still is - what is “oriental food” anyway?). Having said that, I didn’t feel the same kind of uneasiness when Japan was categorized into the Far East or when I heard the related terms such as the Middle East and the Near East. To me they were just technical terms used in news stories. Being a product of the westernized education system but growing up outside of the West, I was well brainwashed but not enough to lose the nagging voice in my head telling me something was off. I just didn’t know where that discomfort was coming from. Now I know it was caused by the discordance between the simulation created by Eurocentrism and the actual life of mine. In the Japanese psyche, a desire to be accepted as part of the West (so to be part of the culmination of the History) is strong. I wonder this stems from the fact that Prussia was the prototype for the first westernized Japanese government established in the late 1800s. Since then, the Japanese have been busy trying to catch up with the West, which, in the first half of 1900s, led to several disastrous decisions that fit so well to Hegel’s ideas. Fast forward to today, the country still seems to be under the spell of Hegel. But then, what if there is no such a thing as History? Baudrillard says ‘History itself is a product for Western export.’ (0:10) Also, in this video “and he (Baudrillard) was saying that this pure concept “History” is over because that was never true.” (6:10) Although there are the chronicles of people lived in the past, when they are transformed into History, they become simulation. How they are recorded in history completely depends on who is the Speaking Subject and who is the Object. Under the traditional Western mindset, the non-West should never be given the title of the Speaking Subject in History. But will this hegemony last forever? So much commotion regarding China in recent years likely illustrates the premonition the West is sensing that it is not the case. Will the West choose to keep living in the simulated world? Or to begin with, will the West accept that History is their own fabrication?

While going to school, I was required to take various history classes, which included “World History”. However, I always felt that there was something missing in those classes I was required to take. As I continue learn more over the years since then, it has become more and more apparent that the “history” I was being taught in those classes was nothing more than a narrowly focused, sugar coated, view from the perspective of Western expansionism, colonialism, and domination, which was brought about by some of the most violent, or otherwise subversive, means available for destabilizing countries and creating power vacuums that were then filled by Western powers. All through school, the history that was taught typically spoke in gilded terms of the greatness of the Western empires, with maybe the only the briefest of mentions of the great empires to the “East”, but it would never mention that these empires of the East often had political systems and technology were far more advanced of those in the West’s in corresponding time periods. The only attempt if ever made at presenting the history of the East (near, middle, or far) was by way of Orientalism, as is mentioned in the in video at 3:22. It never delved into the history of the East like it did of the Greeks, Romans, and Europeans, and the United States. These classes also tried desperately to avoid mentioning the booming slave trade that was perpetuated and sustained by Europe and the Americas and which was used to help drive their economic engines. Also, some may have briefly mentioned the historic silk road trade along on the terrestrial routes (again based on notes and interpretations from westerners), but totally omitted the burgeoning maritime trade that was also occurring at the time between the East and West, or of the cultural exchanges occurring therein. And these classes never, ever mentioned, the promotion and weaponization of the opium trade by European countries used to offset trade imbalances caused by demand by Europeans for high-quality goods being produced in China. There are other huge omissions of less than glorious acts that should also be included as part of these history classes, but in most cases never are. As such, I consider myself very fortunate to have had the opportunity to study and learn more about different historical perspectives than through that of the classical approach taught in our Western institutions. It is this glimpse of a different historical perspective that has served to make me question the validity of anything that was, or is, being taught using the current Western Euroamerican centric view that provides a highly skewed and distorted historical representation of the past.

Growing up as a child in the nineties, I remember the triumphant ethos of America as “the end point of man’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy.” (Fukuyama) The narrative stated that America was the most powerful and prosperous nation, not only in the world at that moment; but in the history of all mankind due to it being built from the only humane and legitimate methods of governance and trade: democracy and capitalism. Any other nation, system, or way of life paled in comparison and was not worth mentioning. In essence, there was no need for history, for America had “realized” the goal of history itself; it was the embodiment of all of mankind’s eternal aspirations. Everything you could ever dream of or want could be found on American soil-we had it all. To realize heaven on earth, the planet must become The United States of the World. I remember going to France as a child and being relieved to see America’s embassy of freedom in the heart of Paris: McDonalds. While on the streets of Paris, the first thing I first purchased was a dancing figurine of Mickey Mouse from a street merchant. But even as such, in the words of Baudrillard, speaking about Europeans in relation to American culture, to me “America [was] the original version of modernity. [French and Europeans] are the dubbed or subtitled version.” (Baudrillard, quoted in Fann, This Self We Deserve, p. 45-46). They clearly could never fully be American, for at McDonalds, they mislabeled a Double-Quarter Pounder with Cheese as a Double Royal Cheese or something of the sort. In summary, America was number one and would remain so, forever. Fast forward a bit in life; I remember looking out my window into the heart of suburbia and being confronted with the disturbing thought of how banal this modern triumph was. Everyone’s house and lives were nearly the same: go to school, then college; get a job, then go to work; watch TV when you're home from work or school, then take a vacation once a year; retire and then watch TV all the time; finally-death. This had to be the most ironic and anticlimactic of all victories; it was as if we had entered into a pointless rerun that would run on indefinitely, without any discernable meaning. Looking around at America today, I am amazed at how little has changed, minus the obvious decay. It is still suburbia and strip malls, and there has been no substantial noteworthy development in the skylines of major cities. It is as if one can literally see the end of history before their own eyes, at least in America. The only new development seems to be the development of major issues, be it national debt, homelessness, random violence, political disagreement-you name it, we have it all. Of a much more profound nature, outside the scope of American civilization, is the Western tradition’s monopoly on this concept of history that was discussed in this video. The West’s history, with its classifications of nations and civilizations based on their geographic proximity to the the "West"-the “Near East,” the “Middle East,” and the “Far East,”-and with the imposition of an “objective” calendar, which takes the death of its theological savior (Christ) as a chronological reference point for all historical events, is untenable and problematic to say the least. As displayed in this video, just take the orientation in which we view the globe: why has it been oriented in the way it is? All this bears the stamp of Western history. Today, we are clearly seeing this hegemonic imposition of Western history, or “History,” begin to crumble: The End of History.

History, as my western education has taught me, is supposed to be the facts of a series of events, but more often than not we realize that the history recorded is not universal around the world. This is reflected in the titles of wars. For example, in the United States we know the Vietnam War, but in Vietnam that same war is referred to as the American War. There is no universal/ absolute approach to events as there will always be conflicting views. This makes me think of Foucault’s argument that “The human sciences are… pseudo-sciences… because they do not see through the compulsion to a problematic doubling of the self-relating subject;” This Self We Deserve, p. 68. The west uses a narrow viewpoint to evaluate others (Eastern cultures). As if our superior position allows us to deem the lifestyles and abilities worthy of attention. This goes deeper if the west holds the power to study and judge other cultures, when it becomes beneficial to the west, what stops them from saying that a culture is barbarous and needs democratic institutions to “help” them? Thus, bringing a reason for modern day colonial power to be enforceable.

I wonder if the roles were reversed and animals began to study humans, what our reaction would be. We have no problem as long as we are the speaking subject, but, blatantly turn us into the object and all hell would break loose. Although as Foucault points out, in modern society we are all turned into subjects/objects and we don’t even recognize it. That history is now just a free-floating self-referential discourse is made so clear by Orientalism. Europeans and Americans created a view of the “East” that had little basis in reality and then have been referring back to their own view for 200+ years to validate their own view. A nice little trick that. This is supported by mass media and has been drummed into our head so long that when the reality intrudes, we can’t handle it. I remember going to China in 2011 and being shocked by how advanced and booming the country was even back then. I can only imagine what it is like now- particularly because the US media doesn’t openly cover that aspect of it (e.g. BYD). This approach to history can’t go on forever, particularly as “the East”, be it China, India, Saudi Arabia etc…, gain in political, economic, and military power. It will be quite eye opening to see how history is re-written and the West becomes the object of study.

Looking back, ‘history’ appeared to me as one of those terms that emulated a generalized chronology everyone shared, or at least that’s what I thought “World History” meant. Until college, I realized that histories become more and more specialized with time frames, regions, languages, etc. Students can major in a subject relating to a specific period of history, in a specific country, and/or under a specific perspective. In this case, we really take on the roles of subjects here, as everything else (people, animals, nations, everything outside of ourselves) is objectified, with the exception that we become objectified by others. Essentially, it makes sense that “History, or the History of the World, is a Western fabrication-it is the Western writing that conquers” (This Self We Deserve, 48) and our knowledge becomes fabricated, as mentioned in the previous lecture (Foucault: Double Genealogy, Double Archaeology). Additionally, terms like ‘sinology’ and ‘orientalism’ really point out a clear objectification here. Seeing a subject like zoology next to a subject like sinology really reveal that there’s little difference in our approach to these studies. In our current society, it’s also common to hear people generalize the term ‘East’ thinking it’s only China or Japan. Hegel’s quote on 4:28 clearly reflects attitudes and perspectives we see today in terms of how ‘Eastern’ something or someone is, but again, it’s another objectification. It reminds me of other western imperialistic perspectives such as Alain Peyrefitte’s book “The Immobile Empire” stating that westerners “overturned [the Chinese] entire view of life, imposing rationality upon them and wrenching them away from magical thought” (The Immobile Empire, 531), as if the Chinese had no understanding or reasoning to begin with. Historical perspectives like these clearly show a bias and can certainly fabricate others’ views of ‘history’ and peoples. It’s like the west is the painter and portrays its version of scene for all to see.

We have these concepts which seem as solid as the objects around us, and therefore we don’t have much inclination to question them. We are taught a single view of History in school. Without a wider scope, an outside perspective, we may be oblivious to how illusory our concepts are. As the video correctly points out (3:31), I thought of Orientalism as having to do with China and Japan. My view was very narrow, excluding huge areas and billions of people in the Orient. But, even if I had included them, the position of observer of “the other” still persists. “Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient-dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western Style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (Said, Orientalism, 3). Seems our superior scientism invaded our every endeavor. If we can study it, dissect it, name it, then we will have the authority to define the ontological truth. It is much easier to understand what History is from the perspective laid out. (6:08) That our history is not an objective account of events, rather narratives of Western export that became the unquestioned simulation of our past.