GUILT OF WAR BELONGS TO ALL
THE year 1995 is one of memories, and for some, regrets and apologies as
well. The victors of the second world war have ruled out any apology or
expression of remorse for the atomic bombings or other actions, but Japan
has repeatedly
been condemned for failing to confess its war guilt fully and adequately as
the anniversary of VJ day approaches.
The argument over the atomic bomb has a point. The bombings of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, however awful, were not acts of aggression, but atrocities in
response to aggression.
But to paint Japan as a singularly evil aggressor which refuses to
apologise for its past ignores not only the gestures which the Tokyo
government has made, but also the gestures which the West has not.
Visiting China in May, Japanese Prime minister Tomiichi Murayama marked
the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war by expressing 'sincere
repentance for our past . . . including aggression and colonial rule that
caused unbearable suffering
and sorrow for many people in your country and other Asian nations.'
Not long before, Nicholas Kristof, the Tokyo correspondent of the New
York Times, reported a poll showing that the Japanese 'believe four to one
that their government has not adequately compensated the people of countries
that Japan
invaded or colonised.' He also noted that, two years earlier, the Japanese
Prime Minister had offered Japan's victims an 'explicit apology for the war'.
Kristof went on to write, however, of his concern for Japan's failure to
offer an adequate apology 'for invading other Asian countries and killing
millions of people'. One of his articles was headlined, 'Why Japan hasn't
said that word',
expressing our bewilderment over Japan's unwillingness to acknowledge guilt.
The same cry was taken up in Britain by the Daily Telegraph's defence
correspondent, John Keegan. 'Why won't the Japanese say sorry?' he asked.
Presidents Kohl and Mitterrand made a joint pilgrimage to Verdun to settle
their differences;
Germany; acknowleged its guilt for the Holocaust and paid some reparations
to survivors; but the Japanese, he complained, had 'wriggled out' of
expressing remorse. Keegan noted that in June the Japanese parliament
passed, a motion
changing 'apology' to something vaguer meaning 'reflection' or
'self-examination'.
The New York Times can be relied on to give a balanced view. Thus,
Kristof argued that: 'Japan is not the only country that has difficulty
saying it is sorry. American officials have toppled governments over the
last half century, and
Americans do not lose much sleep over the American invasion of Canada during
the War of 1812 or the incursions into Mexico in 1914 and 1916- the obvious
cases that come to mind when we consider the possible reasons to "say that
word".'
Aggressors only have to apologise when they lose wars, and, even then,
there are exceptions. Some Japanese intellectuals are said to have admitted
that Germany is more remorseful than Japan over the second world war, but
they explain that
Germany's mighty neighbours would not let the Germans forget what they had
done. Weaker nations, such as China and Korea, have not been in a position
to exert such pressure on Japan.
FEW intellectuals in the United States have asked whether similar
factors might have something to do with the American talent that so amazed
Alexis de Tocqueville, the nineteenth century French writer, as he watched
the 'triumphal march
of civilisation across the desert'; namely the miraculous destruction of the
natives with 'complete respect for the laws of humanity... with singular
felicity, tranquilly, legally, philanthropically, without shedding blood,
and without violating a singl
great principle of morality in the eyes of the world.'
Or, as Theodore Roosevelt, the racist historian who became President of
the United States, put it in The Winning of the West, his 1890s' four-volume
celebration of the American spirit: 'As a nation, our Indian policy is to be
blamed, because
of the weakness it displayed, because of its short-sightedness, and its
occasional leaning to the policy of sentimental humanitarians; and we have
often promised what was impossible to perform; but there has been no wilful
wrongdoing.'
According to Keegan, it is a Japanese tribal custom, 'not to admit that
the tribe itself has done wrong, either in the present or the past. It would
indeed be wrong to make such an admission; wrong for the tribe, wrong for
any individual
member.'
Could 200 years of a history of crushing weaker adversaries have something
to do with the fact that the very idea of 'saying that word' is even less
comprehensible in American culture? Such questions occur only to 'wild men
in the wings', to
borrow former national security adviser McGeorge Bundy's description in 1967
of those who failed to perceive the nobility of the US crusade in Vietnam.
The twentieth anniversary in April of the departure of US forces from
Vietnam caused much commentary, but nothing approaching Japan's 'sincere
repentance for having caused unbearable suffering and sorrow' to the Asian
people. The
concept is unintelligible to Americans.
The toll of Indo-Chinese dead during the US wars is impressive even by
twentieth century standards. In the run-up to the anniversary, the
Vietnamese government released new figures on casualties, which have been
generally accepted.
Hanoi reported that 2 million civilians had been killed, the overwhelming
majority in the south, along with l.l m North Vietnamese and southern
resistance fighters (Viet Cong, in the terminology of US propaganda). An
additional 300,000 were
listed missing in action.
Washington reports 225,000 killed in the amny of its client regime ('South
Vietnam') and the CIA estimates 600,000 Cambodians killed during the US
phase of what the one independent govemmental inquiry (by Finland) calls the
'Decade of
Genocide' in Cambodia: 1969 to 1978. Thousands more were killed in Laos,
mainly by US attacks that were in large part unrelated to the war in Vietnam.
The US bears responsibility for these dead, just as Japan is responsible
for deaths in China and Russia for deaths in Afghanistan. The same applies
to whoever pulled the trigger, a truism understood very well by Western
intellectuals when
responsibility can be laid at someone else's door.
It is a tribute to the US educational system that Americans estimate
Vietnamese deaths at a mere 100,000. But only 'wild men' will ask what the
reaction would be to comparable estimates of victims in Germany or Japan, or
pre-Gorbachov
Russia, and what the answer tells us about ourselves.
IN Somalia recently, the US command did not count Somali casualties. Marine
Lt General Anthony Zinni, who commanded the US troops withdrawal, informed
the press: 'I'm not counting bodies...I'm not interested. '
But, according to Charles Maynes, editor of Foreign Policy: 'CIA
officials privately concede the US military may have killed from 7,000 to
10,000 Somalis,' while losing 34 US soldiers.
This was nothing to lose any sleep over, of course, hardly more than a
footnote to the record compiled from the days when the founders were caring
for 'that hapless race of native Americans which we are exterminating with
such merciless
and perfidious cruelty', as President John Quincy Adams (1825-29) described
the project long after his own contribution to it was over. As Secretary of
State in the early nineteenth century, he was the originator of the doctrine
of unauthorised
executive war that has a long history, up to Vietnam. In Britain, there
has at least been some serious soul-searching over the bombing of Dresden by
the British and US forces, destroying the city and killing tens of thousands
of civilians. Britain
was then under serious attack, something the US has not suffered since the
War of 1812.
In contrast, the fiftieth anniversary of the American firebombing of
Tokyo, which was so devastating that it was removed from the list of
potential atom bomb targets because further destruction would merely pile
rubble upon rubble and
bodies upon bodies, was marked by an article in the Washington Post bearing
the headline 'Japan revising past role: more aggressor, less victim.'
As with the long list of other crimes, the reaction to the anniversary of
the firebombing was narrow: if that's what it took to win, that's what
should have been done.
In his recent memoirs In Retrospect, Robert McNamara, the architect of
America's intervention in Vietnam, relates that, by 1967, 'the stresses and
tensions' were so bad that he sometimes had to take a sleeping pill.
Fortunately, for the nation's health, there is not much else that might
cause Americans to 'lose sleep' as we commemorate events of recent history.
FREEDOM PRESS
http://www.lglobal.com/TAO/Freedom