A Persian Cafe, Edward Lord Weeks

Friday 6 May 2016

Ken Livingstone watches a kid's movie

I'm watching Shrek for the first time since I was about 9, and there are things about it which seem really different once you've read Seeing Like a State and such things. Lord Farquad orders that all "fairy-tale creatures" should be rounded up and quarantined. Back then I thought that this was a slightly humorous, slightly dystopian thing. Now it seems like a remarkably panglossian interpretation of state process of state formation. In the real world they wouldn't have confined Pinocchio. the Seven Dwarfs et al to a swamp, they'd have killed them. See for example the Holocaust, the Balkan wars of the 90s, US treatment of Native Americans (and in particular the disease blankets).

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