Remember the “China Incident” - Japan's endless war in China in the 1930s?
Consider Foreign Minister Matsuoka in 1937, explaining that Japan was fighting for two goals, to prevent Asia from falling completely under white man's domination, and to prevent the spread of Communism in China:
“No treasure trove is in her eyes – only sacrifices upon sacrifices. No one realizes this more than she does. But her very life depends on it, as do those of her neighbors as well. The all-absorbing question before Japan today is: Can she bear the cross?”
History shows that this assertion of purity was complete nonsense, but I have no doubt that Matsuoka was sincere. To live with themselves, oppressors and robbers must bewitch themselves with the nobility of their undertakings, just as Jesus said, “They rob widows’ houses, and for a pretense make long prayers.”
Now Bush and his people talk just like Matsuoka, and American foreign policy is more and more driven by narrow military thinking, as happened to Japan in the 1930s. Just as Japan looted Asia in the 1930s, the new American militarists openly plunder even their own citizens - never mind Iraqis and other foreigners. Haven't we in California been ripped off by Dick Cheney and his friends at Enron just as they are doing to the Iraqi people, putting the Iraqi economy up for sale contrary to the Hague Convention? To this day Cheney is stonewalling Congress about the energy swindle, just as the Bush administration is stonewalling Congress about 9/11.
Like Japan in China, today's militarists keep winning in Afghanistan, Iraq, Columbia, and elsewhere, killing and dispossessing many thousands - and yet final victory eludes them as they antagonize the whole world. The Japanese drive for empire and conquest was in fact driven by weakness, the fear of being starved for oil and other raw materials, and an exaggerated fear of Communism and instability in China. The American drive for empire is driven by the same cowardly fear of not being in control of everything - fearing hostile ideology and instability, and fearing to be cut off from raw materials, notably petroleum. As Japanese parliamentary politics gradually gave way under this endless war to a militarized, though ostensibly civilian, dictatorship, the US will reap at home the oppression it sows abroad, as we are already seeing. It will be interesting to see in coming years how far the American empire will go to solve its impending water crisis by looting it from Canada, especially as global warming increases the pressure.
My coworker came by my desk to crow about the parade of American tanks in Tikrit, because now the Iraqis would know the Americans mean business - and what a triumph it was that the Americans had Iraqi civil defense guys in their parade. Yes, I reminded him, and they've been blowing up the houses of people they suspect of fighting against them, just like the Israelis in their occupation. “Its not like Israel at all! Its not an occupation, it's a liberation! You know that!” was his response. In vain did I point out that how he wants to see it will not determine how others see it, and how it actually is.
He is a Christian Zionist who considers himself a born again Christian, although welcoming hard truth, as Jesus taught, is no part of his religion – much the contrary. My point here is that his mentality is that of the ideologues running this show - like that of the Japanese militarists, Stalinists as documented in Solzhenitsyn, and other fanatics of that type, for whom reality is defined by their view of the world, rather than their view of the world being disciplined by truth as real life teaches it. That's why they will keep on doing astonishingly stupid things, as they've been doing right along. Fanatical ideology makes drunk.
New York Times correspondent Otto Tolischus wrote of the Japanese just before Pearl Harbor:
As members of a divine family state, in which religion and patriotism merge, they do not merely say, "My country right or wrong!" but they are convinced with all the fervor of religious faith that their country is right, whatever mistakes individual statesmen may make.
Is this not just how Americans think of their own country, especially American Christians, who can only think this way by rejecting everything that Jesus and the prophets teach about the nations of this world?
For Japan, the only cure for this fever was to lose. Anything short of a debacle meant ongoing torment for everyone else until that day. The final end of such ideological madness must be a hard stop, at least for the ideologues, although the South African case shows that if the nation as a whole wises up in time there is hope. But even in that case, as with the Greek colonels in 1974 or the Argentine military dictatorship in 1981, at least the ideologues must experience a humiliating defeat if sanity is to find a place.
The same applies to the madmen in the present US regime, and as in the case of Japan back then, their madness expresses a disease in the American national character. Vietnam was not strong enough medicine to cure it. Japan and Germany show that the sooner the cure is administered the better for all, especially for the ailing nation itself. American success in Iraq can only lead to more adventures like it, with more anguish for the whole world. If anything decent in our national character is to survive this darkness, only failure is an option.