I was browsing Substack Notes today and noticed an eye-catching graphic. The Great Canadian Darkness was one of the top 5 articles under the “culture” category, one of my favourite categories.

As a denizen of the English-speaking Internet and thoroughly exposed to the rants of North Americans and other Westerners, I more or less guessed what it was about. But even then I was floored. My initial reaction to this article wasn’t …. positive:

I couldn’t believe what I just read, and it was one of the “top culture” posts on Substack.

The writer called Filipinos “SEA monkeys”, claims that Indian people who get into govt jobs only do so cos they cheat through diploma mills and says Chinese people are purposely poisoning the west with drugs.

The worst part were the people agreeing with the writer in the comments.

The eff did I just read?

That’s why I never took the hullabaloo over Nazis on Substack seriously because such racist toilet paper exists on Substack and people 👏 them. 🥴

PS: May need to reread it again to understand it better because I found it so hard to finish it due to people being called monkeys and such 😵

After taking a breather, I listened to this article using text to speech …

On the one hand I appreciate that I get a peek at the ennui besetting the working class (I assume) in Canada.

There’s also a part of me that finally appreciate having an example of “the negativity in the West” Singaporean geopolitical commentator Kishore Mahbubani talks about. Some parts of me are even empathetic to the melancholy about one’s country, having most of my life lived with the “Malaysia no hope” message. (I no longer think that, but that took me moving to Australia and realising Malaysia is pretty fab in many ways.)

Yet, I’m hugely disgusted by how the writer depicts minorities and foreigners in this newsletter. I’m not sure whether he’s being allegorical or honest or …

“A family of four SEA monkeys are chirping away in Tagalog…”

“… the Arab family with the creepy hijab-wearing woman”

“You watch a Tamil woman in full traditional garb scoop up a handful of curried white rice with her bare hands, bring it to her mouth, and eat it … You think there’s practically no excuse for this. It’s not simply their culture; this is objectively unhygienic, primitive, and disgusting.”

“…. smoking opioids that are mass-produced in the Chinese Mainland for the purpose of warfare against Westerners”

WOW.

BTW a lot of Malaysians eat with their hands.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding something here. But there’s so much hatred against non-whites in this newsletter I’m not sure what to think.

I’m sure most Canadians don’t think this way.

Do they??

Anyway, I’m not calling for it to be banned or anything. I believe that free speech is important. I’m currently reading “White Working Class” by Joan C. Williams and it’s pretty aligned with the themes in the book, the same fears, the same anger.

I think this anger needs expression, and these people need to be heard, and people need to understand why this anger exists.

One main message by White Working Class is that people feel powerless about changing their lives in a world set up to make them fail. We need to turn their lives around to create real change.

PS: Even in Malaysia we have this same tide beneath society, and the “Bangsar Bubble” (our equivalent of NY upper East side people) are pretty ignorant or ambivalent to their anger. They often call these people “stupid” and “ignorant”.

We ignore them to society’s peril.