Logan Paul’s suicide forest video — analysis of implications
So, by now we have all heard of Logan Paul’s video mocking the dead body of a man who hanged himself from a tree in Japan’s Aokigahara forest.
In brief, this is a guy who went through a whole pre-meditated effort of travelling across the world with his entourage to approach the dead body of an asian male; filming just a few feet away, wearing a stupid hat, and making distasteful jokes with the entourage who laughed along in the background.
Most people acknowledge the reprehensible nature of his act, but not the racist aspect of it. This falls in line with the nature of the furore last year about David Dao’s experiences of his United Airlines flight. It was framed as a customer service issue by many outside socially aware circles, not as a racist incident. Some people will no doubt claim that Paul is not racist because he would probably have done the same for a white body as well; but they fail to include a priori data, his prior history of anti-Asian racism. The mainstream is very keen to brush away all accusations of anti-Asian racism existing even in such extreme examples.
The reason? Wider society is complicit and ignorant about such issues:
- News team ignorantly share racially insensitive names in the aftermath of a plane crash
- AF dying under tragic circumstances mocked with disgustingly racist comments
- During the aftermath of the Tianjin chemical explosion where 173 people died, there were so many racist Asian jokes on reddit, on youtube, on news sites. For example, Tianjin explosion video captures fear of eyewitnesses — BBC News , see the jokes on the comments section.
- NBC’s scandal re Kim Jonghyun. Fool me once shame on me, fool me twice shame on you
Whenever people try to gaslight and claim that #antiasianracism isn’t real? Show them all of these incidents. If they still disagree? Tell them to get fucking real because their ignorance is complicity. Ignorance has to be fought hard.
The aftermath of this video reveals yet more troubling findings. Before the backlash, there was 600k likes, most likely future racists in the making (mostly children and teenagers now). Youtube rewarded this behavior by putting it in the trending page. As we know, Youtube handpicks their trending videos.
As a company they are basically saying Asians cannot even be treated as humans. They are depicted as a humorous prop for American entertainment. Imagine millions of children/people thinking it’s okay to see an Asian corpse and to see it as a normal thing. American society is trying to justify Asian deaths, so that they could condition today’s youth to see that Asian bodies are dispensable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_mutilation_of_Japanese_war_dead
It is 2018 and they still mentally dehumanize us the same way as they did in the World War II.
Empathy gap. You will not find Americans treating nazi German enemies in the same way. This simply proves that white American racists think of Asians in a way fundamentally less than other whites, even their worst white enemies don’t get the same treatment that modern Asians friendly to whites (Japanese) do.
What Logan Paul did would simply be unthinkable if the victim was another white. Making jokes and laughing, trying to monetize the death of suicide victim? This would be unthinkable even if they are douchebag whites. They would not have made this video if this is a suicide in white neighborhood America. It should always be remembered that he got 600k likes before he deleted the video. That is the gravity of hatred that is prevalent with his sympathizers. Fundamentally, they cannot mentally equate the gravity of the death of an Asian man with the death of a white man.
Logan Paul has a long history of racism. It is easy to see why he did what he did when you realize he already thinks of all the citizens of the country he visited as somehow less than human. Logan Paul is part of the zeitgeist of Donald Trump’s America. One that poorly postures as a friend, but then all too readily shows his most ugly face.
Quite clearly, such dehumanizing racism runs in the family. His brother Jake Paul, received backlash after mocking a fan from Kazakhstan for being a “terrorist”.
B-But I can’t be racist my girlfriend is Asian!
To those that defend Chloe Bennett, who poses as a leading activist in the Asian American and Pacific Islander community. She claims to be pro Asian: yet acts the completely opposite. She is not our voice and will never be. As an “Asian activist” she should be the loudest of his critics. Anything less, especially passivity, won’t even qualify for the bare minimum.
From her free will and knowing she represented “Asian activism”, she chose to be in a relationship with Paul despite countless previous instances of Paul making racist jokes against Asian men. This is a man who created a career out of humiliating Asian people. Paul rose to Internet fame in 2013 on Vine, where he shot a short video of himself sticking “Made in China” labels on products, including Instagram star Daniel “DAN” Nguyen, aka Nampaikid, who is Vietnamese-American.
However, if that is the threshold level (making fun of an asian male corpse, in the presence of a forest of asian corpses) necessary to sever ties then that is just a demonstration of her lack of character.
The privilege that she and fake asian feminists allow them.
The Chloe Bennetts of this world enable such white male bigotry and excess. Imagine a white man calling a light skinned black girl, “half breed” like Chloe’s ex boyfriend called Chloe. I have no doubt that first the mixed race black girl in Chloe’s position would dump the guy, and second, the black community would publicly criticize the guy en masse.
This all brings up another question. Where are the asian female voices directly calling this what it is? Toxic white masculinity. While there are the few public figures like Anna Akana calling out his behaviour due to personal experiences, it would be progress for the wider community to describe his behaviour as symptomatic of toxic white masculinity. His behaviours are not an isolated, his brother’s behaviours are not isolated, they don’t exist in a vacuum. It is cultural. Who walks into a foreign country and laughs at the dead bodies of their inhabitants? It is imperialistic behaviour.
We are all tired of having to tiptoe around this issue.
Logan Paul is a racist piece of shit who specifically targets Asians, because he has the hallmarks of a sadist and relishes pursuing soft targets. In his world there are no rules, no boundaries, those are thrown out of the window for the populist nihilist sentiment that has gripped western white populations. He is the savior for racist young white males in their bizarre world where he promotes himself under his “maverick” brand, just like how Trump behaves as the “maverick” a lot of racist older white males look up to. Chloe “Wang” Bennett is the self-described Asian activist, who supported this piece of shit in particular.
It is all deeply ironic and almost theatrical. We see it play out over and over and over and over and over again…
It’s to the point of ridiculousness where nobody even calls it out because OF COURSE the white guy who is racist against Asians has an enabling Asian girlfriend. EVERYBODY knows this because it’s the huge elephant in the room.
WHITE GUYS know this. Even the white guys who are racist and have Asian girlfriends know this. Asian women know this. Asian guys certainly know this.
But nobody can say a goddamn thing about it, because the only ones who have true standing — Asian women themselves apart from a select few — refuse to call it out. They are often directly complicit. I wrote an exploration on this issue, how their alignment with white supremacy overrides all sense of moral decency. In Chloe’s case, his toxic white masculinity was given a huge pass until this incident.
They may say: “It’s none of your goddamn business who Asian women date.” Well, when it’s a professional racist, it is everyone’s business, because he made it everyone’s business.
Asian women have to start criticizing this incident en masse if they are to maintain any vestige of credibility. I believe that the few Asian women who are condemning such actions are being greatly let down by their sisters. The bubble will burst, as they often did historically as anti-racist movements gathered momentum.
Call it out for real, and don’t pretend it’s an isolated incident.
