OK, so that was the stupidest title. But the real story is even more stupid.
Australian TV producers were casting for a TeleDocumentary TV series “The Legend of Billy Sing” about a Chinese-Australian soldier who is lauded as a hero of Gallipoli. One of the Stupidest military campaigns in history, and that says much. Billy Sing was called the “Suvla Assassin” because he was apparently single-handedly responsible for the deaths of 200 Turkish soldiers. Imagine an Australian version of Sgt York, (every time I see some of this jingoistic crap I think of the film that didn’t-quite-star-John Lennon, he had a supporting role, “How I Won The War”.) but instead of Sgt Alvin York being portrayed by whoever the hell played him he was played and cast as say, an English or French or whoever Recent Immigrant instead of a hillbilly from the Cumberland Gap, imagine how well that would play in Tennessee.
So, Billy Sing, cultural folk hero to all Chinese-Australians, in the Television Drama, is being cast and played not as an Asian, but as a Caucasian.
Read the quote from the director:
The director, Geoff Davis, actually picked his son, Josh, to play the role, and defended the decision by saying that he could not find a 60-year-old Chinese actor to play Billy Sing’s father
SAY WHAT? How far did that freak peckerhead peckerwood look? Even in MEXICO you could find Ethnic Chinese neighborhoods. Far less Australia, which shares a large stretch of ocean with China. If nothing else, he could have gone to Goddamn Hong Kong, the Chinese answer to Hollywood, and I bet he would have found thousands of 60-year old Chinese actors with the necessary screen credentials AND probably a better command of the Queens English than he has. And since it’s Chinese Australians, what, did all the Chinese Australians sign some kind of pact to just freakin’ disappear before turning 60?
The dude is playing Nannie Nannie Boo Boo Stick your head in Doo Doo with every non-white Australian. “Hey, guys, we realize your culture was extant and fully developed, socially, economically, scientifically and even had a Written Language and advanced mathematics, back before the English stopped painting themselves blue, and lighting their hair on fire when they went into battle, naked… But gosh-darn it, we need a Hero from OUR much superior Culture. Not that we think YOURS is inferior, mind you, it’s just that, well, we’re racially and culturally better than you”.
I’m not a big fan of Jingoism rally-round-the-flag-boys Military Propaganda, and if Winston Churchill had been half the Gentleman he pretended to be, he wouldn’t have taken a Field Officers command subsequent to resigning from the Flag Rank he had held, but instead written a note to his wife, stuck his service revolver in his mouth and Done The Proper Thing. Because it was HIS stupid idea to jump the Turks in Gallipoli.
but the Band, played Waltzing Matilda
As we stopped, to bury our slain
We buried ours
and the Turks, buried theirs.
Then we started all over again…
Gary Cooper played Sgt York in the 1941 b & w Hollywood movie. They had to pull up a WW I “hero” to get people emotionally involved in WW II.
I remembered it after I wrote the article. I was kind of overwhelmed by the sheer chutzpah of the whole deal.
I suppose it’s approximately what they’re feeling in Australia right now. Or at least some and probably most people. Maybe I’m in some kind of denial about the extent of GroupThink in our many cultures.
Samuel Clemens wrote a few parables about it, one where he cast himself as a wannabee Missouri Volunteers Confederate. One he wrote about ants fighting a war. And one short essay he wrote in 1909 I think. About the rush to war, the madness that overcomes and overwhelms at least two societies. “The Loud Little Handful”.
But i like just about everybody I meet on an individual basis. Maybe not as good at it as Will Rogers but it just happens, don’t even have to try.
My brother Luke had a tee-shirt saying “never underestimate the destructive power of large groups of heavily armed stupid people”.
Which is where my much lauded individual tolerance breaks down.
OK so maybe I’m one of a tiny minority who laud it, but..
When I think of Suvla, The Somme, Guernica, the Crusades… I want so badly to believe that people couldn’t be that damn stupid.
and as individuals, they’re not. Walk up to a rank stranger on the street, hand him a gun, tell him to go and kill another person just because you told him to, It would be rightly seen as an Insane Suggestion.
Every army in the world does it every day and it’s called Heroics and Patriotism.
fightdemback.org
Apparently an Anti-Nazi sight, didn’t delve into it deeply. They had the same service picture…
But the page it was on, they were laughing their collective arse off about the lunatics at StormFront thinking they had them a real first class Aryan hero…
Apparently they got their information from the movie.