60 Years Ago This Week

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Look; you don't want a good world enough. I cannot make you want it, but I will say with my dying breath that you should.

If the blessings of liberty are to extend to all men, those who would not permit this must be converted or neutralized. Why would you willingly see peoples left unfree, having freedom yourself? Better to exert yourself, to strike the shackles away. Dead slavemakers make no more slaves, and that is what is wanted, is it not? Isolationism stopped being an option many decades ago. Aggressive, expansionist slavemaking has been the threat that has strained and imperiled democracy and liberty worldwide. While it is in retreat now, will it remain so? I think the way that I espouse and advocate makes a way to blunt this kind of expansionism.

[Radar]

Non-interventionism is not isolationism. I wish freedom for all people, but freedom is to be earned by those who desire it, not won for them by someone else. America has absolutely no authority beyond our own borders unless it is to attack those who have directly attacked American soil or ships and nobody else.

The powers of the U.S. government are EXTREMELY limited and don't include spreading "democracy". In fact the United States is not a democracy. It never was, and hopefully it never will be.

Sticking our nose into the affairs of other nations is why we have so many enemies. Switzerland has been surrounded by war for more than 100 years and has not been in one. Why? Because they don't take sides in every dispute, they have a very strong DEFENSE but not an OFFENSE, and because they take care of their own.

I will never be "converted" or "neutralized" by you or your ilk. But I'm in Los Angeles and since you're in SoCal, we can meet up if you want to give it a shot.

Anyone who supports the war in Iraq is not worthy to call themselves American. They defile the U.S. Constitution and support violating each and every principle that made America great. America is supposed to always remain neutral, and never take part in the disputes of other nations. The U.S. Constitution (the highest law in the land) defines the role of the military as being a DEFENSIVE one.

It's too bad there are a lot of idiots out there who would misuse the U.S. military to violate that directive. These are the ones who truly need to be neutralized and when the day comes for violent revolution, I'll be among those doing the neutralizing.

"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
– John F. Kennedy

"No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."
– James Madison

"Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none."
– Thomas Jefferson

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
– Benjamin Franklin

"We have guided missiles and misguided men."
– Martin Luther King Jr.

"A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government."
– Edward Abbey

[Undertoad]

An Anniversary to Forget (NY Times, reg. reqd)

Since reg is reqd, here is most of the article. By Joichi Ito from Chiba, Japan.

At bottom, the bombings don't really matter to me or, for that matter, to most Japanese of my generation. My peers and I have little hatred or blame in our hearts for the Americans; the horrors of that war and its nuclear evils feel distant, even foreign. Instead, the bombs are simply the flashpoint marking the discontinuity that characterized the cultural world we grew up in.
...
My grandmother often spoke about the defeated voice of the emperor over the radio and how this shook the foundations of their beliefs, but signaled the end of a traumatic era. With the fall of the emperor, the Shinto religion also collapsed, since it had been co-opted from the decentralized animism of its roots into a state-sponsored war religion.

My mother used to talk about the American occupation of our hometown in northern Japan when she was a child. Our house, the largest in the area, was designated to be the Americans' local headquarters. When the soldiers arrived, my great-grandmother, nearly blind at the time, was head of the household, my grandfather having died during the war.

My great-grandmother and my grandmother faced the occupiers alone, having ordered the children to hide. The Japanese had been warned that the invading barbarians would rape and pillage. My great-grandmother, a battle-scarred early feminist, hissed, "Get your filthy barbarian shoes off of my floor!" The interpreter refused to interpret. The officer in command insisted. Upon hearing the translation from the red-faced interpreter, the officer sat on the floor and removed his boots, instructing his men to do the same. He apologized to my great-grandmother and grandmother.

It was a startling tipping-point experience for them, as the last bit of brainwashing that began with "we won't lose the war" and ended with "the barbarians will rape and kill you" collapsed.

Just one year later my uncle sailed to the United States to live in a Japanese ghetto in Chicago and work in a Y.M.C.A. Eventually his strivings led him to become the dean of the University of Detroit Business School. My mother followed my uncle, making the United States her base.

Postwar Japan followed a similar trajectory of renewal. The economy experienced an explosion of growth from the rubble of flattened cities, led by motivated entrepreneurs and a government focused on rebuilding Japan. The United States, in its struggle to keep communism in check, became a strong supporter of Japan and opened its markets to Japanese products. The Liberal Democratic Party thrived under the protection of the United States and pushed its simple party line of "growth, growth, growth," stomping out opposition, including efforts to educate Japanese about the war. No one had the opportunity to look back at the past, and by the time I can remember anything, Japan was about the bullet train, the 1970 Expo in Osaka, world-class electronics and automobiles, and even a vibrant Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

My grandparents' generation remembers the suffering, but tries to forget it. My parents' generation still does not trust the military. The pacifist stance of that generation comes in great part from the mistrust of the Japanese military.

[Bullitt]

Originally Posted by Radar

Non-interventionism is not isolationism. I wish freedom for all people, but freedom is to be earned by those who desire it, not won for them by someone else.

So a people who are in no position to help themselves and gain freedom, don't deserve it? If you saw someone pull up to your neighbor's house, don a ski mask and head in with a shotgun, would you call the police or let your neighbor suffer?

I don't see how helping people who need it when you have the power to do something is a bad thing.

[richlevy]

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

Radar, I wouldn't try having it both ways like this: every single war you've cited, and more besides, were wars fought with nondemocracies, autarchies, dictatorships. Such things are our business, particularly if we want a good world. Is not dictatorship the most easily found and most prevalent evil on the Earth's face? I want a good world, and I'm willing to hang slavemakers to get it. Will you join me?

Well, if we go back further, the Spanish-American war was with a constitutional monarchy. Japan was our ally in WWI, so we didn't complain about it's method of government then.

BTW, you do know that the Unites States isn't really a democracy, do you? Hint: "..and to the republic, for which it stands."

England is also a constitutional monarchy, a 'non-democracy'. Of course, we did go to war with them, twice, so I guess they bolster your theory.

We have propped up thugs and dictators in our self-interest and held down or subverted legitimate democracies. While I applaud the concept of our 'getting religion' and going after every single 'bad guy', we really aren't. The Saudi government is far from a 'democracy' even in the looser definition you seem to prefer. We have pretty much ignored Africa in favor of invading a country in a region with our strategic energy supply.

Of course, in the Spanish-American War, which was stared on the 'faulty intelligence' that the Spanish had sunk the Battleship Maine. In that War, the US annexed Hawaii and the Philippines, and took control of Guam. We also directly affected Cuba until 1934.

That was one 'faulty intelligence' war which really paid for itself.

Clinton was roundly criticized from both left and right for his involvement in Yugoslavia and the Balkans. Compared to Iraq, that conflict was a shining success. A lot of the criticism centered around the idea that there was nothing in it for us.

I actually like your honest desire to take on all thugs. I presume this means even if they happen to be our allies at the moment. However, if we were to measure the suffering of the population, Iraq under Hussein wouldn't top the list.

Unfortunately, if you believe that the US is only engaged in wars to support human rights, I will have to disagree. We are still at the point where we will support non-democratic caplitalist governments over democratic socialist ones. Economic theory plays a role in picking our enemies and friends.

Thanks for the article, UT. Very interesting. Was that in response to my question about the capacity of Japanese women to kill at the time?

My great-grandmother and my grandmother faced the occupiers alone, having ordered the children to hide. The Japanese had been warned that the invading barbarians would rape and pillage. My great-grandmother, a battle-scarred early feminist, hissed, "Get your filthy barbarian shoes off of my floor!" The interpreter refused to interpret. The officer in command insisted. Upon hearing the translation from the red-faced interpreter, the officer sat on the floor and removed his boots, instructing his men to do the same. He apologized to my great-grandmother and grandmother.

The old lady certainly sounds spunky, but she didn't run out with pistols blazing, either. That's kind of cool that the American officer would take off his boots and order his men to do the same, though.

[lookout123]

she wasn't charging out with pistols because they had already been defeated. up until the emperor's public statements they were not defeated.

[richlevy]

Originally Posted by Bullitt

So a people who are in no position to help themselves and gain freedom, don't deserve it? If you saw someone pull up to your neighbor's house, don a ski mask and head in with a shotgun, would you call the police or let your neighbor suffer?

I don't see how helping people who need it when you have the power to do something is a bad thing.

Well here in Philadelphia some people called the police to complain about their neighbors and they ended up burning down the neighborhood.

As many 'neighbors' have suffered under regimes we supported as have been freed from regimes we dissolved.

While we have a volunteer military, maybe an extreme interventionist philosophy will work for some. Eventually, however, we will have to draft 18-year-old kids to police the new world order this philsophy wishes to establish. And we will bankrupt ourselves in the same way the Soviet Union did trying to keep up with US spending during the cold war.

Originally Posted by lookout123

she wasn't charging out with pistols because they had already been defeated. up until the emperor's public statements they were not defeated.

Well, the article says she expected to be raped and pillaged. I'd have come out with pistols if I had them!

[xoxoxoBruce]

Did they have tiny rifles for the infants and toddlers?

No, their mothers were prepared to kill them if all was lost. The "civilians", anyone that could walk, had knives, spears, homemade grenades, some guns(ammo was a problem) but many of them were muzzle loaders. They were organized to reinforce a militia of several hundred thousand old men and boys. If you don't believe they were serious just look at the films from the islands of women throwing their children off the cliffs, before they themselves jumped, rather than surrender.......and that wasn't even the homeland.

[Dr. Zaius]

Some images of a new role for Japanese women. Pressed into service for Home Island defence with obsolete rifles, or whatever could be found. Don't know how long they would have lasted against Allied tanks but it would have made for some ugly newsreel footage.


(Kikuchi Shunkichi) Women training with bamboo spears, 1945



(Kageyama Kôyô) Neighbourhood Association women training with rifles, 1943

[Urbane Guerrilla]

And that was the kind of thing the Bomb trumped: the Japanese were going to try and defeat Operation Olympic with war emergency production fixed-sight Arisaka boltaction rifles, bamboo spears in phalanx, and smoothbore matchlocks. This up against the most experienced large amphibious forces in the world.

Southern Honshu and all of Shikoku would have been depopulated. Not merely decimated: empty. Then defeat still would have come to the Japanese. They knew full well that the only off switch to the world war was their unconditional surrender. Who lives, who dies? It's only a matter of timing. Hirohito, whatever his sins may have been, certainly had timing.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Rich, rest assured that here I am using democracy in its general sense, rather than pedantically lumbering my sentences with carefully parsed distinctions between the shades of representative governments, from tribal organization through bicameral legislatures and constitutional monarchies.

Representative governments with checks and balances incorporated beat all alternatives hands down. They are usually richer than all the alternatives, owing mainly to that one thing.

An aside to your aside: hardly anyone who isn't African is paying attention to Africa -- though I bet the Darfur's problems will end the day the Khartoum régime is hanged from lampposts or run into exile with all the bank accounts it can close.

[wolf]

Originally Posted by Griff

I'm also being a troll but its just that the anniversary passes without even a passing thought.

I always think of it, but then I have a particular interest in the Manhattan Project.

[wolf]

Originally Posted by richlevy

Well here in Philadelphia some people called the police to complain about their neighbors and they ended up burning down the neighborhood.

Most neighbors don't store incendiaries on their rooves and empty human waste into the backyard.