Some went beyond George Bush's dismissal of any thought of apology for the use of nuclear weapons to kill 200,000 civilians. Democratic Senator Ernest Hollings told South Carolina workers they “should draw a mushroom cloud and put underneath it: âMade in America by lazy and illiterate Americans and tested in Japan',” drawing applause from the crowd. Hollings defended his remark as a “joke,” a reaction to Japan's “America bashing.” The humorless Japanese did not find the joke amusing. The event was briefly reported, provoking no inquiries into the American psyche.
3
Japan's obsessions with the bomb, which provoke much scorn here, were also revealed after the Texas air shows where the atomic bombing was reenacted annually for many years (perhaps still is) before an admiring audience of tens of thousands, with a B-29 flown by retired Air Force General Paul Tibbets, who lifted the curtain on the atomic age at Hiroshima. Japan condemned the display as “in bad taste and offensive to the Japanese people,” to no avail. Perhaps the hypersensitive Japanese would have expressed similar reservations about the showing of a film entitled “Hiroshima” in the early 1950s in Boston's “combat zone,” a red-light district where pornographic films were featured: it was a Japanese documentary with live footage of scenes too horrendous to describe, eliciting gales of laughter and enthusiastic applause.
In more sedate intellectual circles, few have considered the observation by Justice Röling of the Netherlands after the Tokyo Tribunal where Japanese war criminals were tried and convicted: “From the Second World War above all two things are remembered: the German gas chambers and the American atomic bombings.” Or the impressive dissent by the one independent Asian Justice, Radhabinod Pal of India, who wrote: “When the conduct of the nations is taken into account the law will perhaps be found to be
that only a lost cause is a crime
...if any indiscriminate destruction of civilian life and property is still illegitimate in warfare, then, in the Pacific war, this decision to use the atom bomb is the only near approach to the directives...of the Nazi leaders... Nothing like this could be traced to the present accused” at Tokyo, seven of whom were hanged along with over 900 other Japanese executed for war crimes; among them General Yamashita, executed for atrocities committed by troops over whom he had no control at the war's end. Even the reactions of high-ranking US military officials have been little noted, for example, Admiral William Leahy, chief of staff under the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations, who regarded nuclear weapons as “new and terrible instruments of uncivilized warfare,” “a modern type of barbarism not worthy of Christian man,” a reversion to the “ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages”; its use “would take us back in cruelty toward noncombatants to the days of Genghis Khan.”
4
Recognizing where power lies, Prime Minister Watanabe adopted US conventions in expressing Japan's regrets: he traced Japan's crimes to December 7, 1941, thus implicitly discounting hideous atrocities that killed 10 to 13 million Chinese, by conservative estimate, from 1937 through 1945, not to speak of earlier crimes.
5
Passing silently over Watanabe's dating of the guilt, Weisman raises only one question: the evasiveness of the gesture at apology. The anniversary commemoration was based upon the same principle: killing, torturing, and otherwise abusing tens of millions of people may not be wholly meritorious, but a “sneak attack” on a naval base in a US colony is a crime of a completely different order. True, to heighten the recognition of Japan's iniquity, its atrocities and aggression in Asia are regularly tacked on to the indictment, but as an afterthought: the Pearl Harbor attack is the real crime, the initial act of aggression.
That decision has many merits. It enables us to ruminate on the strange defects of the Japanese character without having to confront some facts that are better removed from history. For example, the fact that pre-Pearl Harbor, much of the American business community and many US officials rejected “the generally accepted theory that Japan has been a big bully and China the downtrodden victim” (Ambassador Joseph Grew, an influential figure in Far East policy). The US objection to Japan's New Order in Asia, Grew explained in a speech in Tokyo in 1939, was that it imposed “a system of closed economy,...depriving Americans of their long-established rights in China.” He had nothing to say about China's right to national independence, the rape of Nanking, the invasion of Manchuria, and other such marginal issues. Secretary of State Cordell Hull adopted much the same priorities in the negotiations with Japanese Admiral Nomura before the Pearl Harbor attack, stressing US rights to equal access to the territories conquered by Japan in China. On November 7, Japan finally agreed to the US demand, offering to accept “the principle of nondiscrimination in commercial relations” in the Pacific, including China. But the wily Japanese added a qualifying clause: they would accept the principle only if it “were adopted throughout the world.”
Hull was greatly shocked at this insolence. The principle was to apply in the Japanese sphere alone, he admonished the impudent
arrivistes
. The US and other Western powers could not be expected to respond in kind in their dominions, including India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Cuba, and other vast regions from which the Japanese had been effectively barred by extremely high tariffs when they unfairly began to win the competitive game in the 1920s.
Dismissing Japan's frivolous appeal to the British and American precedent, Hull deplored the “simplicity of mind that made it difficult for...[Japanese generals]...to see why the United States, on the one hand, should assert leadership in the Western Hemisphere with the Monroe Doctrine and, on the other, want to interfere with Japan's assuming leadership in Asia.” He urged the Japanese government to “educate the generals” about this elementary distinction, reminding his backward pupils that the Monroe Doctrine, “as we interpret and apply it uniformly since 1823 only contemplates steps for our physical safety.” Respected scholars chimed in with their endorsement, expressing their outrage over the inability of the little yellow men to perceive the difference between a great power like the US and a small-time operator like Japan, and to recognize that “The United States does not need to use military force to induce the Caribbean republics to permit American capital to find profitable investment. The doors are voluntarily open”âas even the most cursory look at history will show.
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3. Missing Pieces
Also unmentioned in the historical musings is an air of familiarity about Japan's actions in Manchuria, as they established the “independent” state of Manchukuo in 1932 under the former Manchu emperor. The procedure was “a familiar one,” Walter Lippmann wrote at the time, not unlike US precedents “in Nicaragua, Haiti, and elsewhere.” Manchuria had claims to independent status, surely stronger claims than, say, South Vietnam 25 years later, a fact recognized by the US client regime, which always defined itself as the Government of all of Vietnam, even in an unamendable article of its US-imposed Constitution. Scholars noted that had it not been for Western intervention in support of Chinese rule over the outer regions, motivated by the desire to increase “the sphere of future Western investment and exploitation,” the Tibetans, Mongols, and Manchurians might well have moved towards independence (Owen Lattimore, 1934). Japan undertook to “defend” the “independent state” against “bandits” who attacked it from China. The goal of Japan's Kwantung army was to “liberate the masses” from exploitation by military and feudal cliques and to protect them from Communist terrorists. Adopting the policies favored by Kennedy doves in later years, its military leadership undertook counterinsurgency campaigns, complete with “collective hamlets,” earnest measures to win hearts and minds, and other ideas that have a certain resonance. Among a series of unpleasantâhence unmentionableâfacts is the similarity of these operations to the no less brutal and atrocious ones conducted by the United States a few years later near China's southern border, operations that peaked in murderous violence shortly after the Japanese documents on Manchuria were released by the RAND Corporation in 1967, to be shelved with appropriate silence by the cultural managers.
7
The similarity is not entirely accidental. Apart from the fact that the same thoughts naturally come to the minds of similar actors facing similar circumstances, US counterinsurgency doctrine was consciously modelled on the practices and achievements of World War II fascism, though it was the Nazis who were the preferred model. Reviewing US Army manuals of the 1950s, Michael McClintock notes the “disturbing similarity between the Nazi's view of the world and the American stance in the Cold War.” The manuals recognize Hitler's tasks to have been much the same as those undertaken by the US worldwide as it took over the struggle against the anti-fascist resistance and other criminals (labelled “Communists” or “terrorists”). They adopt the Nazi frame of reference as a matter of course: the partisans were “terrorists,” while the Nazis were “protecting” the population from their violence and coercion. Killing of anyone “furnishing aid or comfort, directly or indirectly, to such partisans, or any person withholding information on partisans,” was “legally well within the provisions of the Geneva Convention,” the manuals explain. The Germans and their collaborators were the “liberators” of the Russian people. Former
Wehrmacht
officers helped to prepare the army manuals, which culled important lessons from the practices of their models: for example, the utility of “evacuation of all natives from partisan-infested areas and the destruction of all farms, villages, and buildings in the areas following the evacuations”âthe policies advocated by Kennedy's dovish advisors, and standard US practice in Central America. The same logic was adopted by the civilian leadership from the late 1940s, as Nazi war criminals were resurrected and reassigned to their former tasks (Reinhard Gehlen, Klaus Barbie, and others), or spirited to safety in Latin America and elsewhere to pursue their work, if they could no longer be protected at home.
8
The notions were refined in the Kennedy years, under the impetus of the President's well-known fascination with unconventional warfare. US military manuals and “antiterrorism experts” of the period advocate “the tactic of intimidating, kidnapping, or assassinating carefully selected members of the opposition in a manner that will reap the maximum psychological benefit,” the objective being “to frighten everyone from collaborating with the guerrilla movement.” Respected American historians and moralists were later to provide the intellectual and moral underpinnings, notably Guenter Lewy, who explains in his much-admired history of the Vietnam war that the US was guilty of no crimes against “innocent civilians,” indeed could not be. Those who joined our righteous cause were free from harm's way (except by inadvertence, at worst a crime of involuntary manslaughter). Those who failed to cooperate with the “legitimate government” imposed by US violence are not innocent, by definition; they lose any such claim if they refuse to flee to the “safety” provided by their liberators: infants in a village in the Mekong Delta or inner Cambodia, for example. They therefore deserve their fate.
9
Some lack innocence because they happened to be in the wrong place; for example, the population of the city of Vinh, “the Vietnamese Dresden,” Philip Shenon casually observes in a
Times Magazine
cover story on the belated victory of capitalism in Vietnam: it was “leveled by American B-52 bombers” because it was “cursed by location” and hence “was a natural target” for the bombers, much like Rotterdam and Coventry. This city of 60,000 was “flattened” in 1965, Canadian officials reported, while vast surrounding areas were turned into a moonscape.
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One could learn the facts outside the mainstream, where they were generally ignored, or even flatly denied; for example, by Lewy, who assures us, on the authority of US government pronouncements, that the bombing was aimed at military targets and damage to civilians was minimal.
Plainly, it is better to keep the history under wraps. The Politically Correct approach, adopted without notable deviation on the anniversary, is to date Japan's criminal course to the “sneak attack” on Pearl Harbor; to bring in Japan's earlier atrocities only as a device to sharpen the distinction between their evil nature and our purity; to put aside the uneasy relation between the doctrine that the war began on December 7, 1941 and the fact that we denounce Japan for atrocities committed through the 1930s, which were, furthermore, deemed acceptable in influential circles; and more generally, to eliminate from the mind discordant notes from past and present history.
It is interesting to see the reaction when the rules of decorum are occasionally violated by comparisons between Japan's policies and actions and ours in Vietnam. For the most part, the comparisons are so unthinkable as to be unnoticed, or are dismissed as absurdity. Or they may be denounced as apologetics for Japan's crimes, an interpretation that is quite natural. Given that our perfection is axiomatic, it follows that any comparison drawn confers upon others a share of our nobility, and thus counts as apologetics for their crimes. By the same irrefutable logic, it follows that applause for our crimes is not apologetics, but merely a proper tribute to our magnificence; and silence about them is only a shade less meritorious than enthusiastic approval. Those who fall to comprehend these truths can be condemned for their “irrational hatred of America.” Or, if not so completely beyond the pale, they can be offered a course of instruction, like the Japanese generals.