SplitDik, it's not obvious to me what the contrition of the Japanese, either together or in some generationally relevant part, has to do with whether the atom bomb should have been used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Such emotions are long after the political and military facts of 1945. So "
" - perish the thought - changes nothing.
I don't believe I suggested that young Japanese should feel ashamed of what their parents and grandparents did. Yet they've been systematically denied the opportunity to form their own opinion by the distortion or omission of information about their country's actions. It means nothing to talk about shame or the absence of shame while most people remain unaware. The attitude of Japan toward its history is not a moral response, it's a corrupt evasion, as China is pointing out. The purpose of this evasion is to maintain the illusion that the Japanese nation can do no wrong. Such an illusion encourages aggressive policy.
I did not note that "t
SplitDik (imported) wrote: Wed Aug 10, 2005 11:20 am
he people who were in Japan during the war do for the most part feel deep shame.
" What I said was that veterans who had personally participated in atrocities are suffering because their families and neighbors are unwilling to hear their confessions. Most people who were adults in Japan during the war, just like most Germans of that generation, felt, and still feel, that what was done in those years was, on the whole, OK. That should be no surprise. Wholesale abuse could not have gone on unless most people were uninformed or sympathetic. But again, none of this has to do with the decision to drop the bomb.
"
SplitDik (imported) wrote: Wed Aug 10, 2005 11:20 am
Hiding something proves that it is a point of shame!
" Only if you're the one doing the hiding. The few government officials who keep information from children have political motives. The scholars, media commentators, etc., who step around the subject know that their audience will be most unappreciative of such bad news. They act out of career calculus. What is striking is how few Japanese say "we must look at this for our moral health, no matter how painful." Germans have done the hard work of introspection. Americans have made a virtual industry out of self-criticism. (After all, what are Democrats for?) The evasiveness of the Japanese looks extraordinary.
To suggest that there is moral equivalence between our prison for terrorist murderers at Guantanamo Bay and the Japanese conduct of the war is frankly monstrous. The Japanese killed over 8,000,000 innocent people, ran hundreds of slave labor camps where torture (real torture, not wearing underpants on your head) was routine, slaughtered millions of civilians, forced hundreds of thousands of women to prostitute themselves, etc. My understanding of Guantanamo is that the prisoners - bear in mind that these are all terrorist murderers - have air conditioning, nutritious food cooked according to middle-eastern taste, excellent medical care, clean clothes, ample access to showers, Moslem mullahs, copies of the Koran, etc. In other words, it's far more comfortable than most maximum security prisons in the U.S. I'd guess it's far more comfortable than any comparable prisons in France. If a Koran was abused, it was a Koran given to the prisoner by the U.S. If prisoners have sometimes been slapped around, etc., tell me how discipline can be maintained inside a prison. In every prison, guards must have a way to punish misbehavior, since the inmates are already in prison. I'm aware that among the political opponents of the current administration, there is a world-wide effort to inflate the significance of some petty misdemeanors at Guantanamo into a moral indictment of the U.S., but such efforts have failed to convince anyone not captive to partisan polemics. Only ignorance excuses the equation of the Japanese camps, with their starvation, epidemic disease, lack of medicine, brutal labor, and torture with Guantanamo.
I did not say that Japan poses a military threat today. Again, this has nothing to do with the decision to drop the bomb. The Japan of 1945 was certainly a threat. Saying that "the average young Japanese person [is]
SplitDik (imported) wrote: Wed Aug 10, 2005 11:20 am
not particularly interested in expansionism
" is not true. Decades ago, Japan discovered that, under the cost-free military umbrella provided by the U.S., aggressive economic, political, and cultural expansionism could be profitably pursued. You may have forgotten the panic of the 1980s, when the Japanese, relying on illegal tactics like "dumping," stormed world markets, buying up valuable assets in the U.S. and elsewhere. Your news that young Japanese are not expansionist would surprise the people of the many Asian nations which have suffered for decades under the economic and political domination of Japan. It's Japan, not the U.S., that built a business model based on exploitation of cheap foreign labor (only there are no protests in Japan), removal of natural resources from other countries, and exports priced to stifle the development of other countries' industries. It's only the emergence of China and India as powers that threatens to loosen the Japanese stranglehold on Asia. Right now, Chinese and Japanese businessmen and politicians are engaged in a bitter, country by country, contest across Asia. It's disingenuous to say that, because the Japanese expand without the use of (their own) military force, that they are uninterested in expansion.
Yes, we have far greater threats than Japan. This does not sanctify the Japanese, and it certainly doesn't mean we should have refrained from using the a-bomb to end the war.
A-1 