Historical parallax

It’s the 67th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. So it’s interesting to be reminded that Japan as a nation still refuses to own up to its past. A WSJ piece notes the firing of the commander of Japan’s Air Force for winning a history essay contest by writing that FDR “entrapped” Japan into attacking Pearl Harbor and that Japan’s foreign adventures in the 1930s and 1940s did not constitute aggressive warfare.

It’s notable that General Tamogami Toshio was given the sack over this, because the Japanese have never really absorbed the idea that, starting with the invasion of Manchuria and continuing with attacks on China, Southeast Asia & islands all the way to spitting distance of Australia, they were doing anything wrong. Tamogami’s views are shared by many of his countrymen.

Two years ago then-Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro sparked outrage in the rest of Asia, Australia and the US when he publicly visited the Yasukuni Shrine. The source of the controversy lies in the fact that Yasukuni, a memorial to the fallen of WWII, enshrines convicted war criminals as well as soldiers.

In Japan Koizumi was seen as a courageous leader honoring the fallen, even if it meant pissing off pretty much everyone else involved in the Pacific theatre.

As the Journal’s Walter Kozak points out, Japan isn’t the only country to skew history. I actually had a laugh at the Taiwanese museum that lauds Chiang’s valiant fight alone against the Japanese and the Communists. The sorrow is that way too many Americans swallowed and continue to swallow that bilge.

The Germans indeed have owned up to the past, although it took them a generation—and the student uprisings of 1968—to make it happen.

There is controversy over FDR’s announcement—surprising to both Churchill and Stalin—at Casablanca in 1943 that the Allies would accept nothing less than unconditional surrender by Germany; no negotiated peace. The argument runs that this forced the Germans to fight to the bitter end because they had no hope of bargaining with their enemies.

Well, even with unconditional surrender, even with their homeland literally nothing but rubble, even with complete occupation by four enemy armies—none of which featured in the peace following WWI—for 20 years the Germans denied that they’d caused their own destruction. When they said they were sorry about the war, what they were actually sorry about was that it ended the way it did.

And that attitude persisted until the late 60s, when the scales finally fell from their eyes.

(My view is that there was no real alternative to that policy, if the nations of the world wanted to avoid another global conflagration in 20 years’ time.)

The Austrians, as Kozak notes, are still playing the role of first martyrs to Nazi tyranny. You should read William L. Shirer’s account of the arrival of German troops in Vienna in 1938 for a description of how “tyrannized” the Austrians felt.

And lest you think that we in the US are immune to collective amnesia, look at how we acknowledge our history of human chattel slavery, or at how long it took Japanese Americans to receive compensation for their forced removal from their homes and businesses to concentration camps in pretty much the most desolate parts of the country the US military could find.

I also weep at how this administration is violating not just the Constitutional rights of American citizens, but also trampling completely the Geneva Convention in its treatment of prisoners of war. We decry—rightly so—the barbarities practiced by Japan on our POWs during WWII, but call what’s going on at Guantanamo and “third-party” countries vital to national security.

I really, really wish we would learn from history.