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I'm not saying he's not racist/colonialist. You only have to read his article about 'flag-waving piccaninnies... tribal warriors will all break out in watermelon smiles to see the big white chief...' https://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/3571742/If.... Or his argument that Obama hated the UK because he was Kenyan and had an 'ancestral dislike of the British empire'. Or any of the other dozens examples.

I'm just saying that if he's as smart as people claim, if the whole bumbling idiot is a calculated act, then there's not much to benefit from idiotically reciting that poem, it's not like there's some vast constituency in the British public who love The Road to Mandalay. It's an obscure reference, most British people have never heard of the poem... He seemed genuinely surprised that he shouldn't recite the poem.

I think the bumbling idiot thing is genuine. That doesn't also exclude him from being a nasty vindictive racist colonialist.

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I have a weird sort of in on this, in that my grandparents are exactly the kind of people who love The Road to Mandalay. I think the clever thing about reciting a poem like that is it appeals to a broad spectrum of conservative voters: the low-end, who will enjoy the thumb in the eye of 'political correctness', the mid-level, who feel like the british empire was good, then the 'intellectuals' (like my grandparents), who are very fond of poetry and Kipling, and like to think of themselves as more intelligent and refined than their proletariat opposition.

The nice thing about it, is it's a spectrum. If you're in the conservative-intellectual bracket, you still probably enjoy the provocation of the politically correct, and the imperial nostalgia stuff. If you're in the conservative-middle-brow bracket, you still feel good about the fact that your racism is being associated with Great British poetry.

I don't think he's a genius, or that he's playing fifth-dimensional chess, or something. I think it's just an advantage of this whole bumbling persona - that he can go to events like this and basically do what he wants. So when he thinks up some kind of stunt - like reciting a colonialist poem, or getting stuck on a rope, or whatever - he can go ahead with it, because it fits with his image. That gives him a whole range of communicative strategies most politicians don't have. What he actually communicates (the blend of dogwhistle racism and attention-seeking) is actually pretty normal.

Isn't it much the same thing as Trump saying something racist that he can kind of get away with? Johnson can say it, incite some anger in people who won't vote for him anyway, get his name on the news again and appeal to his base. Many of his supporters are the kinds of people that want to "Make Britain Great Again". There isn't a vast constituency in Britain who love the poem, but there is a vast constituency who are mildly racist and look back to the "good old days".

Yes, Churchill said plenty of stuff that was racist/misogamist even back in those days. Bojo models himself after him. Btw I'm a big Churchill fan in spite of all that. The flawed hero.

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