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US Cannot Be Said To Be Good
By Philip J Cunningham
11/04/07 "Informed
Comment" -- -- George W. Bush may indeed be
the worst president ever, and Dick Cheney the worst
vice-president imaginable but that does not exonerate the
American people because Americans have the constitutional right
and responsibility to remove miscreants from office.
The Bush-Cheney administration has not just given freedom a
hollow ring, they have not just made a mockery of American
democracy and human rights in the present, and they have not
just put future generations at risk with reckless deficit
spending, environmental degradation and the burden of war
without end, but they have effectively caused the past to be
rewritten as well. America is beginning to understand what it’s
like to be on the wrong side of history.
This point was driven home to me when I read that respected
American historian Herbert Bix, author of “Hirohito and the
Making of Modern Japan” recently pointed out some striking
similarities between Tojo’s Japan and Bush-Cheney’s America,
particularly the willful disregard of international law, the
pursuit of diplomacy by force and failure to account for war
criminality.
Let’s consider for the moment that current US policy bears some
eerie parallels to that of Tojo’s Japan. Is that a result of
having judged militarist Japan unfairly, or has America gotten
worse? Is that to say Japan's criminal past was not as bad as we
used to say it was, or is it still every bit as bad, only now,
we, the American interlocutors, are debased in such a way that
the moral distance is less distant?
Scholars have long been familiar with US lapses in civilized
behavior, even in the great and just war carried out by the
"greatest generation." The enemy was understandably viewed with
contempt for his actions, but improperly viewed with racist
contempt. Indiscriminate killing took untold innocent life,
nowhere more vividly than in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, but with equal cold-blooded consequences in the
fire-bombing of Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka.
For decades now, scholars have been effectively challenging the
Truman era myth that the atomic bombing was necessary and saved
millions of lives. While reasonable interpretations differ, the
twin atomic bombings remain a uniquely uncomfortable and awkward
topic for Americans who subscribe to the otherwise generally
positive national narrative that starts with the day of infamy,
the day on which the peace-loving US was sneakily attacked at
Pearl Harbor, and continues with a series of heroic battles for
sea, sky and land control across the Pacific, followed by a
generally enlightened occupation of Japan’s home islands.
Given the incessant mutual violence that the war extracted from
both sides, epitomized by the brutal battles of Iwo Jima and
Okinawa, it took decades for ordinary soldiers on both sides to
be viewed with sympathetic respect --basically unfree men
following orders as required by the tragedy of the time. Last
year Clint Eastwood did a remarkably even-handed job of
conveying the equivalency of the rank and file on both sides of
the Pacific with the twin films “Flags of Our Fathers” and
“Letters from Iwo Jima.”
The US occupation of Japan saw many a samurai’s sword turned
into treasured souvenir, if not plowshare. It was none other
than US war hero Douglas MacArthur who set the tone for
sanitizing and containing Japan's war criminality at the elite
level by letting the Emperor off the hook and selectively
exonerating war criminals who were of utility to the US. But if
it wasn't the people, and it wasn't the penultimate leader, then
who takes the blame?
To blame everything on a few bad apples is bad history,
incongruent with the complex, interactive way things usually
happen, but it allows nagging, difficult-to-resolve issues to be
buried or put on the back burner as happened at the Tokyo
trials. The entirety of Japan’s war guilt was deftly shifted
onto the shoulders of Tojo and a handful of "Class A War
Criminals.
Scapegoating, even of the obviously odious, is not fair, but it
is expedient because it staves off more damaging and nuanced
reckonings. That's not to say scapegoated Class A war criminals
are innocent in the same way their hapless victims were; the
criminality of the Class A men is clearly documented. But they
were unfairly singled out and unfairly apportioned more of the
blame than even their cruel shoulders could bear. They were made
caricatures of evil in contrast to the aloof, doddering emperor
and the witless soldier in the field.
George W. Bush publicity handlers take note; better to spin your
client as a dodderer playing with something less than a full
deck than have him be held accountable. In today’s America, as
in wartime Japan, there is plenty of blame to be passed around,
but no takers. It's too hurtful to the American ego to even
contemplate war criminality. US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says
impeachment is not an option. The State Department has granted
immunity to the criminally negligible including the thugs of
Blackwater. Is this apparent benevolence not just another type
of denial, that Americans don't torture, Americans don't commit
crimes of war?
Eventually, narratives that blame no one have to round up a few
suspects, and that's where the bad apples come in. But this sort
of selective justice unduly burdens middling war criminals with
more historical agency than they ever possessed.
Does making Tojo an example of evil incarnate exonerate Japanese
war veterans, among them mean-spirited soldiers who violated the
conventions of war by gratuitously killing, raping and torturing
non-combatant Chinese? And what about Japanese civilians on the
home front, making weapons, churning out propaganda, feeding the
beast? Blame it on Tojo?
What about people like Akira Kurosawa who worked uninterrupted
with ample state support during a war that wreaked murder and
mayhem on Japan's neighbors under the guise of racial
superiority? To hear Kurosawa tell it in his biography, his main
beef with the Tojo authorities was over artistic control, not
the insane politics of the time.
The bad apple school of thought thrives in national narratives
because it aids and abets denial for proud individuals and
powerful constituencies.
The problem with Japanese rightists, and America's problem
understanding them, is not so much the seemingly futile attempt
polish up the bad apples, the futile attempt to make the class A
Criminals shine. It's not even the rightists' dubious campaign
to re-configure war criminals as honorable Shinto spirits at
Yasukuni Shrine. The problem with the rightists is they are
bound to honor the penultimate leader at all costs, which
short-circuits all other arguments and prevents blame from being
fairly apportioned.
The result of this implacable cognitive dissonance is denial.
Denial is the worst thing about the Japan's rightists, not their
contrarian desire to challenge the America-centric narrative as
articulated in the admittedly clumsy and compromised Tokyo War
Crimes Trials.
Americans are starting to learn more about war crimes and denial
they they ever dreamed of. The divisive words and belligerent
actions of George W. Bush, the contempt for diplomacy, the lack
of accountability, the tortured rhetoric and the rhetoric
defending torture have caused America’s global prestige to drop
to an unprecedented low. America is increasingly seen as the
crux of the problem rather than a flawed but otherwise normal
country, let alone a beacon of hope.
The horror of an unjust and unnecessary war is forcing Americans
to confront the opacity of their own self-image, and in doing
so, to seek lessons and parallels than now, in a way not
possible even four years ago, make it possible to see Tojo and
Japan's war criminality in slightly more sympathetic way. This
is not to exonerate but rather to heave a heavy sigh of
understanding, to acknowledge that even the most refined and
civilized of nations can be disfigured and disabled by the
politics of fear and denial.
America has been diminished to such an extent under the
Bush-Cheney “unitary presidency” that a crime like torture --
once comfortably seen as beyond the pale because it was only
associated with the most despicable of enemies-- suddenly
resonates in an uncomfortably familiar way.
Just as it should be acknowledged that the people of Japan share
a certain culpability in Tokyo’s terrible war, a war that
ravaged Asia and eventually Japan itself, Americans have to own
up to Iraq. But it can also be said in defense of the average
Japanese in the days after Pearl Harbor that there was much they
didn’t know and couldn’t talk about; --the media was completely
censored and the Kempeitai dealt brutally with domestic
opposition.
When the day of reckoning comes for ordinary Americans to assess
their culpability in the debacle of Iraq, a hideous and heinous
war fought in view of a free media and in the context of
relatively unfettered freedom to protest, what will the excuse
be?
If Bush is unjust, if he is, as they say, the worst ever, then
the free people who support, tolerate and enable him cannot be
said to be good.
PHILIP J CUNNINGHAM TEACHES AT DOSHISHA UNIVERSITY IN JAPAN
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