Majored in Western Hypocrisy: Difference between revisions

 

{{examples}}

* Lawrence in the [[The Flash|Rogues']] "New Year's Evil" story is the demon-summoning nephew of a modern-day Asian warlord and has an Oxford education.

 

* ''[[Die Another Day]]'': The aforementioned [[Trope Namer]].

{{quote|'''Colonel Moon''': I know all about the UN. I studied at Oxford and Harvard. ''Majored in Western hypocrisy''.}}

* In ''The Mask of Fu Manchu'', it is mentioned that [[Fu Manchu]] has a doctorate of philosophy from Edinburgh, a doctorate in law from Christ's College, and a doctorate in medicine from Harvard.

 

** Kamran Shah from ''[[The Living Daylights]]'' and Tiger Tanaka from ''[[You Only Live Twice]]''.

* [[Fu Manchu]] is one of the earliest examples.

* [[Axis of Time]]: The monstrous Hideki.

* ''Babar'' may be a colonial allegory, with the Elephant King representing Western-educated leaders are looked upon favorably by European powers (in this case France).

* [[Evelyn Waugh]]'s novel ''Black Mischief'' has the Emperor Seth of the fictional African country Azania, who includes among his numerous titles a bachelor of arts degree at Oxford. The character is an interesting combination of [[Strawman Political|strawman liberal]], [[Well-Intentioned Extremist]] and [[Tragic Hero]].

* In the [[Lord Darcy]] novel ''A Study In Sorcery'', some Native American warriors deliver a note to the Angevin camp by tying it to an arrow fired into the officers' tent. The attached message ends with the signature of a tribal leader, Laughs-Last, complete with the initials for his Oxbridge-awarded graduate degree.

 

** YMMV. He's not presented as being corrupt, just as manipulative as any successful politician. Part of the joke of the episode is that the British characters were expecting to deal with an uneducated dictator and end up being outplayed at their own political game.

* An episode of ''[[Jeeves and Wooster (TV series)|Jeeves and Wooster]]'' where Bertie blacks up and attempts [[You No Take Candle|caveman-speak]] to impersonate a visiting African chief is [[Your Mileage May Vary|arguably]] [[Subverted Trope|saved from cringeworthiness]] when the real chief shows up and turns out to have been educated in England and be better-spoken than Bertie. I say, not that being better spoken than Bertie Wooster is much of a feat, mind you.

* Referenced in ''[[Blackadder]] III''. After the Prince has a drunken night with the Duke of Wellington's nieces, he considers fleeing as far as Mongolia to avoid the Duke's revenge. Blackadder points out that the Duke is a close personal friend of the Chief Mongol. "They were at Eton together."

* Usutu makes a fool of Matt Parkman in ''[[Heroes]]'':

'''Usutu:''' Carl Jung, Analytical Psychology. You don't read much, do you? }}

 

 

* In one episode of ''[[The Wild Thornberries]]'', the Thornberries encounter a tribe of natives who were planning on cooking and eating a runaway Darwin. When Nigel tried to apologize and explain that Darwin was their pet, the chieftain revealed that he knew how to speak English thanks to language tapes. The chief then picks up a call from his friends on his cellphone and tells them that they won't be eating Darwin, so they'll just drive into town for steak.

 

* The leaders of the Negritude movement in France's colonies, the London-educated barrister Gandhi, the Egyptian Islamic fundamentalist and U. of Northern Colorado alum Sayyid Qutb, sometime Prime Minister of Vietnam Ho Chi Minh, Sun Yat-Sen, founder of both Modern Chinas, and many, many more. More or less every revolution against colonial powers in the last three centuries was started by a small group of highly Western-educated native countrymen. The man that takes the cake may be Jawaharlal Nehru, big-shot in the British Indian National Congress and the first Prime Minister of the Indian Republic; his upbringing and outlook was so (nigh-painfully) British he described himself as "the last Englishman to rule India."

* Many of the people responsible for the worst human rights violations in 1970s-1980s Latin America were military or security personnel trained at the School of the Americas (now renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation in an attempt at re-branding), run by the US government.

** One of his officers, Admiral Chūichi Nagumo, spent several years as part of a Japanese mission studying naval tactics in the United Kingdom and the United States between the world wars. Not at all surprising when one recalls that the Anglo-Japanese alliance was only dropped in the early '20s and that both Empires had received some measure of [[We Used to Be Friends|US assistance]] in the latter part of their [[World War I|War against Germany.]]

* Jose Marti, (a Cuban revolutionary from the turn of the 20th century) once said (in relation to American, where he got his education), "I know the monster, because I have lived in its lair."

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Characters As Device]]

[[Category:Politics Tropes]]