i think the politically correct are on a hair-trigger to defend the 'weak', to protect poor 'black' people, and i find that attitude more racist than anything.
i don't think morrissey has ever said anything overtly racist. "chinese are a subspecies" comes closest, but it's in relation to the issue he's most passionate about: cruelty to animals. i dare anyone to sit through a few chinese fur farm videos as morrissey probably has and come away with any other conclusion. but even then i don't believe he's attacking the race: he's condemning the culture that allows cuelty.
as a vegetarian i find walking around the uk seeing halal everywhere extremely offensive and would consider islamic culture inferiority cruel purely on this issue. causing excess animal suffering in a 'civilized' society is offensive to my beliefs. am i therefore racist because i object to halal and simply don't understand how torturing animals for religious reasons is acceptable?
and i think that's what the politically correct don't get. cultures aren't equal. western society has better ideals (animal cruelty laws if we're sticking with this one issue for example). some cultures are better than others.
and condemning aspects of a culture isn't the same as racism.
it's saying 'this is better, we should do this, we shouldn't allow something else'.
the english should be protecting their culture, rather than letting another swamp it (and yes, morrissey's right... walk around parts of the north and it could be islambad, full of burkas (also offensive) and no one speaks english).
most of what morrissey has said isn't racist. it's just the glaring obvious elephant in the room no one wants to say for fear of being called 'racist' and that word is being used to shut down debate to the detriment of better cultures everywhere.
In some ways I agree with you. I'll be completely honest and I hope you will also. I think Islam is complete bullshit. I don't respect it and if it didn't exist the world would be a better place. I think the same thing about Christianity, though. Christianity has set the world back centuries and brainwashed hundreds of millions of innocent children. It's ridiculous that churches are tax exempt when they are obviously businesses.
I also agree with you about animal rights and I know that watching videos of the conditions animals endure legally, let alone when they are abused, does create anger. I do think that "meat is murder" for anyone who is not in a situation where they have to eat it to survive.
So I've said all that in an attempt to be honest and now I will ask you if you really believe that a statement about how he can't help but feel that the Chinese are a subspecies can be excused or explained. It doesn't matter that he was angry. That might have caused him to lower his guard a little and lose control. That isn't what I think happened, anyway. I think he knew exactly what he was saying. He was deliberately insulting "the Chinese" on the one hand, and he was also deliberately making the sort of statement that he knows gets a lot of attention.
Otherwise he's really incredibly unbelievably stupid. How long has he been scrutinized by the press? How many times have his words gotten him a lot of negative attention?
There are our choices.
1. He believes the Chinese are a subspecies but he will only say it if he's really angry.
2. He knows that saying something like that will get a lot of attention.
3. He's really stupid.
Now, the word "subspecies" is a deliberately genetic term. There is no way to think it's not racist unless you believe that he doesn't really have a very good grasp on English and wrote all those songs by accident. Looking at the ones he's written since he quit being so blatant about his plagiarism, as someone noted, might lead you to believe this is actually true, though.
Anyway, the short version is sure, I'll agree, murdering animals in the cruelest ways imaginable is bad and I wouldn't have a problem with people who do it being sent to labor camps or something useful. But that doesn't mean that calling the Chinese a subspecies meant something other than what he intentionally said and deliberately meant to convey. It's not about Chinese "culture." If it was he has had numerous opportunities to clear it up. He either meant what he said or he didn't and what he said could only be seen as racist. You're saying it's cultural, but he's talking about a nation, not a culture or a race. We don't know how he defines "Chinese" but Chinese is not a culture. China doesn't have one uniform group of people who share the same culture.
Anyone with any intelligence could have expressed their anger about what he saw on television in countless ways and never made a statement that referred explicitly to a term that both recalls Nazi propaganda and is associated with genetics.
I hate Mike Vick the guy that tortured his pit bulls when they lost fights. I wouldn't mind if he was executed and I am sure that he didn't deserve to play football again. PETA supported his rehabilitation and reentry into the public eye, by the way, probably because his case was very famous and they are thirsty attention whores above all else. Anyway, if I said I hate Mike Vick and think the world would be a better place if he were given a lethal injection people might think that's crazy. But if I said that when you see that pit bull fighting in the US seems to be largely a sport of African Americans and when I think of that "one can't help but feel that black people are a subspecies" that is racist. Is it not?