Year 501 Copyright © 1993 by Noam Chomsky. Published by South End Press.
Chapter 10: Murdering History Segment 6/17
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Weisman does concede a measure of US responsibility: not for what happened, but for Japan's failure to face up to its crimes. The US wanted "to create a democracy" after the war, but "After China fell to the Communists in 1949 and the Korean War broke out a year later, Washington changed its mind, deciding to foster a stable conservative Government in Japan to challenge Communism in Asia," even sometimes allowing war criminals to regain authority.

This revision of history also has its functional utility: under the laws of Political Correctness, it is permissible to recognize our occasional lapses from perfection if they can be interpreted as an all-too-understandable overreaction to the evil deeds of selected malefactors. In fact, as Weisman surely knows, Washington's "reverse course" was in 1947, hence well before the "fall of China" (to translate: the overthrow of a corrupt US-backed tyranny by an indigenous movement); and 3 years before the officially-recognized Korean war, at a time when the pre-official phase was charging full-speed ahead, as the US-imposed regime, aided by fascist collaborators restored by the US occupying army, was busy slaughtering some 100,000 anti-fascists and other adherents of the popular movements that the US clients could never hope to face in political competition.

Washington's "reverse course" called a halt to democratic experiments that threatened established power. The US moved decisively to break Japanese unions and reconstruct the traditional industrial-financial conglomerates, supporting fascist collaborators, excluding anti-fascist elements, and restoring traditional conservative business rule. As explained in a 1947 paper prepared under the direction of the primary author of the reverse course, George Kennan, the US had "a moral right to intervene" to preserve "stability" against "stooge groups" of the Communists: "Recognizing that the former industrial and commercial leaders of Japan are the ablest leaders in the country, that they are the most stable element, that they have the strongest natural ties with the US, it should be US policy to remove obstacles to their finding their natural level in Japanese leadership." The purge of war criminals was ended, and the essential structure of the fascist regime restored. The reverse course in Japan was one element in a worldwide US campaign at the same time with the same goals, all prior to 1949.18

The reconstruction of what US technical experts angrily condemned as "totalitarian state capitalism," with popular and democratic forces suppressed, was underway well before the reverse course of 1947. The Occupation also determined at once that the basic issues of war guilt would be shelved. General MacArthur "would neither allow the emperor to be indicted, nor take the stand as a witness, nor even be interviewed by International Prosecution investigators" at the War Crimes trials, Herbert Bix writes, despite ample evidence of his direct responsibility for Japanese war crimes -- available to MacArthur, but kept secret. This whitewashing of the monarchy had "momentous" consequences for reestablishing the traditional conservative order and defeating a far more democratic alternative, Bix concludes.19

Weisman observes correctly that Japan's "goal was to assure access to natural resources, markets and freedom of the seas." These goals it has now attained, he adds, by "its own hard work" and "the generosity (and self-interest) of the United States." The implication is that Japan could have achieved the same goals 50 years ago, had it not been in the grip of fascist ideology and primitive delusion. Overlooked are some obvious questions. If Japan could have achieved these ends by accepting Western norms, then why did the British, the Americans, and the other imperial states not simply abandon the high tariff walls they had erected around their colonies to bar Japan? Or, assuming that such idealism would be too much to ask, why did Hull not at least accept the Japanese offer for mutuality of exploitation? Such thoughts go beyond legitimate bounds, reaching into the forbidden territory of "American motives."

In the real world, Japan's aggression gave an impetus to the nationalist movements that displaced colonial rule in favor of the more subtle mechanisms of domination of the postwar period. Furthermore, the war left the US in a position to design the new world order. Under these new conditions, Japan could be offered its "Empire toward the South" (as Kennan put it) under US control, though within limits: the US intended to maintain its "power over what Japan imports in the way of oil and such other things" so that "we would have veto power on what she does need in the military and industrial field," as Kennan advised in 1949.20 This stance was maintained until unexpected factors intervened, notably the Vietnam war with its costs to the US and benefits to Japan and other industrial rivals.

Yet another fault of the Japanese, Weisman observes, is the "bellicose terms" in which they frame Japanese-American relations, thus revealing their penchant for militarism. The Japanese speak of "their `second strike': if Washington cuts off Japanese imports, Tokyo can strangle the American economy by cutting off investments or purchases of Treasury bonds." Even if we adopt Weisman's unexamined judgment on the impropriety of such retaliation, it would hardly seem to rank high in comparison to standard US practices: for example, the devastating and illegal economic warfare regularly waged against such enemies as Cuba, Chile, Nicaragua, and Vietnam; or the efforts of Jacksonian Democrats to "place all other nations at our feet," primarily the British enemy, by gaining a monopoly over the most important commodity in world trade.

Japan's worst sin, however, is its tendency towards "self-pity," its refusal to offer reparations to its victims, its "clumsy attempts to sanitize the past" and in general, its failure to "come forward with a definitive statement of wartime responsibility." Here Weisman is on firm ground -- or would be, if he, or his editors, or their colleagues in the doctrinal system were even to consider the principles they espouse for others. They do not, not for a moment, as the record shows with utter clarity.


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18 DD, ch. 11, and sources cited. Kennan, cited in Cumings, Origins, II, 57; see volumes I, II on the mass murder campaign in US-occupied Korea prior to what is called "the Korean war."

19 Sherwood Fine, quoted by Moore, Japanese Workers, p. 18; Moore, on the general topic. Bix, "The Showa Emperor's `Monologue' and the Problem of War Responsibility," J. of Japanese Studies, 18.2, 1992 (citing John Dower, Japan Times, Jan. 9, 1989).

20 Cumings, Origins, II, 57.