Year 501 (47 page)

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.

5. “Self-Pity” and other Character Flaws

The 50th anniversary was commemorated with cover stories in the major newsweeklies, articles in the press, and TV documentaries. Several were applauded by
Wall Street Joumal
critic Dorothy Rabinowitz for their “unrelentingly tough historic view of the Pearl Harbor attack,” with no ambiguities about the distinction between pure righteousness and absolute evil (December 2). She reserves her condemnations for the “journalists of the fashionable Left and the terminal Right” who “invariably” portray the Japanese “as victims” of the dastardly Americans. Examples of these lunacies are omitted; the actual historical issues receive not a phrase.

The opposite side of the page carries an article by Robert Greenberger headlined “U.S.-Vietnam Ties Remain Held Back By the MIA Issue,” describing a Vietnamese plan “to solve the main issue blocking a resumption of relations: accounting for Americans missing since the Vietnam War.” This news report is so conventional as to merit no particular notice, apart from the interesting layout. It is a staple of the media, and the culture generally, that we were the injured party in Vietnam. We were innocent victims of what John F. Kennedy called “the assault from the inside” (November 12, 1963), the “internal aggression” by South Vietnamese peasants against their legitimate government and the saviors who imposed it upon them and defended their country from them.
21
Later we were treacherously assaulted by the North Vietnamese. Not content with attacking us, they also imprisoned Americans who had mysteriously fallen into their hands. Unrelenting, the Vietnamese aggressors proceeded to abuse us shamefully after the war's end, refusing to cooperate fully on the fate of US pilots and MIAs, even failing to devote themselves with proper dedication to locating the remains of pilots they had viciously blasted from the skies.

Our suffering at the hands of these barbarians is the sole moral issue that remains after a quarter-century of violence, in which we vigorously backed the French effort to reconquer their former colonies; instantly demolished the 1954 diplomatic settlement; installed a regime of corrupt and murderous thugs and torturers in the southern sector where we had imposed our rule; attacked that sector directly when the terror and repression of our clients elicited a reaction that they could not withstand; expanded our aggression to all of Indochina with saturation bombing of densely-populated areas, chemical warfare attacks to destroy crops and vegetation, bombing of dikes, and huge mass murder operations and terror programs when refugee-generation, population removal, and bulldozing of villages failed; ultimately leaving three countries destroyed, perhaps beyond the hope of recovery, the devastated land strewn with millions of corpses and unexploded ordnance, with countless destitute and maimed, deformed fetuses in the hospitals of the South that do not touch the heartstrings of “pro-life” enthusiasts, and other horrors too awful to recount in a region “threatened with extinction...as a cultural and historic entity...as the countryside literally dies under the blows of the largest military machine ever unleashed on an area of this size,” in the words of the hawkish historian Bernard Fall, one of the leading experts on Vietnam, in 1967—that is, before the major US atrocities were set in motion.
22

From all of this, one single element remains: the terrible abuse we have suffered at the hands of our tormenters.

Reactions to our adversity are not entirely uniform. At the dovish extreme, we find Senator John Kerry, who warns that we should never again fight a war “without committing enough resources to win”; no other flaw is mentioned. And there is President Carter, the noted moral teacher and human rights apostle, who assured us that we owe Vietnam no debt and have no responsibility to render it any assistance because “the destruction was mutual,” an observation so uncontroversial as to pass with no reaction. Others less inclined to turn the other cheek forthrightly assign the blame to the Vietnamese Communists alone, denouncing the anti-American extremists who labor to detect lingering ambiguities.
23

In the
New York Times
, we read stories headlined “Vietnam, Trying to be Nicer, Still has a Long Way to Go,” with Asia correspondent Barbara Crossette reporting that though the Vietnamese are making some progress “on the missing Americans,” they are still far from approaching our lofty moral standards. And a hundred others with the same tone and content. Properly statesmanlike, President Bush announces that “It was a bitter conflict, but Hanoi knows today that we seek only answers without the threat of retribution for the past.” Their crimes against us can never be forgotten, but “we can begin writing the last chapter of the Vietnam war” if they dedicate themselves with sufficient zeal to the MIAs. We might even “begin helping the Vietnamese find and identify their own combatants missing in action,” Crossette reports. The adjacent front-page story reports Japan's failure, once again, to “unambiguously” accept the blame “for its wartime aggression.”
24

As the 1992 presidential campaign heated up, Vietnam's savage maltreatment of suffering America flared up into a major issue: had Washington done enough to end these abuses, or had it conspired to efface them. A front-page
New York Times
story by Patrick Tyler captured the mood. Tyler reported that the White House had rejected Ross Perot's 1987 proposal that easing the pressures against Hanoi might be “a way to win the repatriation of any American servicemen still held in Southeast Asia.” “At the time,” Tyler observes, “Washington was taking a harder diplomatic line with Hanoi to achieve the same end.” “History has shown that concessions prior to performance is death,” said Richard Childress, NSC official supervising POW/MIA policy. “They'll take and take and take,” he added. “We've learned that over 25 years.” “United States negotiators were holding onto their leverage until Hanoi made progress on a step-by-step ‘roadmap' to improved relations, through cooperation on P.O.W./M.I.A. investigations,” Tyler adds, without even the most timid query about Washington's declared intentions or a hint, however faint, that someone might fail to appreciate their righteousness.
25

As the country solemnly contemplated the “Mind of Japan,” deploring the disgraceful “self-pity” of the Japanese, their failure to offer reparations to their victims, or even to “come forward with a definitive statement of wartime responsibility,” the US government and press escalated their bitter denunciations of the criminals in Hanoi who not only refuse to confess their guilt but persist in their shameful mistreatment of innocent America. In a lengthy report on this rising indignation over Vietnam's morbid insistence on punishing us 17 years after the war's official end, Crossette wrote that expectations for diplomatic relations between the US and Vietnam “may be set back by a resurgence of interest in one piece of unfinished business that will not go away: the fate of missing Americans.” Properly incensed by Vietnam's iniquity, George Bush, opened Year 500 in October 1991 by intervening once again to block European and Japanese efforts to end the embargo that the US imposed in 1975, while Defense Secretary Dick Cheney reported to Congress that “despite improved cooperation,” the Vietnamese will have to do more before we grant them entry into the civilized world. “Substantial progress” on the MIA issue is required as a condition for normalizing ties, Secretary of State James Baker said, a process that could take several years. Meanwhile, officials in one of the world's poorest countries continue to show irritation, as they did “last week when the United States blocked a French proposal calling for the International Monetary Fund to lend money to Vietnam,” the
Times
reported.
26