Militarism, Pacifism and War?

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What the heck? So, it's our own fault that they had attacked Pearl Harbor? And every time a bully victimizes someone it must be the victim's fault.... yeah right... NOT!

@Tahitiii

If you are looking for some info on the Japanese post-war cognitive dissonance the best place to start would be to study Mitsuo Fuchida and his experiences related to the war crimes tribunals.

If Japan believed their attack on Pearl Harbor was provoked, then why the comment about awakening sleeping giants?

9-11 syndrome. America is always to blame.

ruveyn

Okay I sort of agree with what you say at the end about corporate media but I am seriously disturbed by your strange revelations about World War II. Do you use Japanese high school history text books as your source? Because they say pretty similar things- glossing over the entirety of their war crimes, for example, and saying vague statements such as 'then the war came' instead of 'then we killed 500,000 civilians in Nanjing and when the Americans didn't want to sell us oil anymore we bombed the hell out of their naval base as a show of force'. Something tells me I should expect a long winded post about allied war crimes in reply. The Germans on the other hand don't do this and are open with their history

The German people and their governments have been straightforward in admitting the crimes of the Nazis and the lack of opposition by the majority of the Germans to the rise of the Nazis. Whereas in Japan, to this day there is only a half hearted admission of wrong doing. In Japanese text books you will find phrasing such as "and then war came..." As it if were an accidental happening. The Japanese were utterly beastly in the ways they behaved in Manchuria and China. Also their treatment of prisoners was nigh unto unspeakable. They had an evil government which evil intentions that did evil things. The U.S. attempts to push on Japan because of their actions in Manchuria and China were economic policies and not acts of war. At no time prior to Pearl Harbor did the U.S interfere with Japanese shipping on the high seas or mine the harbors of Japanese territory. The U.S. did NOT provoke Japan. Japan was on a tear dominating Asia and making war against the colonial powers.

ruveyn

Exactly. Anyone who claims otherwise is crazy. They even had rather Orwellian terms for their empire including the 'Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere' and so on. They were a textbook expansionist imperial power

1/ Iraq attacked Iran as a US proxy, Iran neither provoked nor initiated armed conflict, and once it had chemical weapons [technology supplied by western powers] used against it it chose not to stoop to such low methods - check your history, check your facts, perhaps listening to someone other than Murdochs propaganda empire and TV preachers would be a good place to start.

2/ I most certainly am 45 - what relevance has this to do with it? or is this another of your 'I can't cope' tangental bursts of diahorea?

So you come out ultimately as a US imperialist fascist in the end 'might is right', 'god is on our side', 'your'e all evil', 'are you with us or agin us?'... blah, blah, blah. Why I even attempted to maintain a civil and adult exchange with you I don't know you have the mind of an adolescent and an unstable temper - goodbye.

Not really true... they attacked Iran because they (and most of the middle east feared the spread of their revolution, they didn't see that the revolution was unlikely to cross the shia sunni divide) the other reason was the desire of the Iraqi leadership to exploit what they saw as an opportunity to expand into Iranian Baluchistan and the Iranian oil fields. The US had very little to do with the start of the war and while the US a very important actor in the Middle East, it is not always the decisive actor it is made out to be.

Seems that way, or rather is always blamed somehow or another. The twisting of spin knows no bounds.

And people wonder why I don't care what the rest of the world's opinion is.

Really, it's the news outlets and other "official" means of publishing political opinions that are more often slanted against America, Israel, and the political right. There are at least a few citizens of other countries who don't think that way. There are political conservatives in England and Australia that I know about at least, and their presses there do the same to them that ours do to any Republicans who aren't completely RINO.

This is a matter of opinion, the facts remain that Iraq attacked Iran, Iran has no history of aggression towards it's neighbours and in my opinion any rhetoric from it's extremists should be treated as just that rhetoric just as we have to treat alarmist and threatening rhetoric from US extremists with little seriousness until action is taken.

How exactly have you disproven my main point? You admit to Iraqs aggression [categorical historical fact], and as for my assertion as to US involvement? that is as I said open to much debate, however many commentators outside the US have seen the strength of connection and ongoing bias on the part of US use of Iraqi ambitions to suit it's own ends. Just as the US uses Israel to suit both foreign and domestic agendas.

I aren't actually interested in any 'he says, she says' debate over particulars in a forum dominated by US citzens many of whom do little but parrot their favourite commentator or are 'three book experts'. I had hoped to initiate an intelligent and ongoing exploration of the ethics and philosophies underpinning human communal warfare and all it has become is the same old sloganering, utterly boring and pointless...

peace j

That's not true. The Iranians (under the many names they have gone by for the past few thousand years) have been one of the most aggressive and expansionist powers in history.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Military_history_of_Iran

Setting aside the media angle for the moment and going back to the idea surrounding provocation and how peacetime policies can lead to war. The Japanese expansionist agenda, it's rise as an industrial nation and the depression of western capitalist ecconomies are all intertwined.

Part of the US response to it's ecconomic depression was to hinder ease of Japanese imports which were undercutting US producers, part of the 'new deal' was huge state investment in various projects intended to stimulate the ecconomy by building new infrastructure [Hoover Dam] and by putting wages into working peoples pockets which they would spend rather than invest and thereby stimulate growth of conventional capitalist enterprise and ending state intervention the costs of which could be recouped by taxes [and possibly expansionism?].
One of the larger projects was the commissioning of huge upgrade of the US navy, which on top of the trade issues between the US and Japan was seen as intimidating, it was leading to a perceived 'inevitable' conflict of interest as the US could be seen to be ensuring it's existing influence in the Pacific and [given we see most readily in others that which occurs in ourselves] possible if not probable expansionism.
As to this being provocation? well to a rational modern mind - certainly not! however given the mindset so dominant through the thirties and given Japans extreme expression of this, some might percieve a certain innevitability.
The Japanese chose to strike first, they didn't manufacture some mythical aggression, they just struck, their 'moral high ground' was not manufactured, they just believed they had the right and sold it to their people along these lines.
The US authorities had ample intelligence to predict the looming attack on Pearl harbour, they chose to let it happen in order to manipulate an essentially isolationist and reluctant public into supporting a war which gave ample opportunity to capitalism for profits and the state to micro manage most aspects of the ecconomy through the imposition of war time strictures [this has it's own convoluted logic but pacifies capital in some ways].

The US went to war.

As for the use of the nuclear weapons on Japan? The Japanese were beaten and although they initially refused 'unconditional surrender' terms, after the incendary destruction of Tokyo they changed their minds and were pursuing the reopening of talks with a near desperation.
Many modern comentators and historians are in agreement that the US destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki not to subdue and obdurate Japan but to intimidate a powerful Russian Bear - the USSR, who had the best armed and largest conventional army on the planet at the close of WWII, with the exception of air power which most people would agree the US had the edge in.
With the close of the European war the emnity between Western Capitalism and Soviet Socialism resumed as if it had never been interupted [see 1984 'we have always been at war....' for Orwell's dry insight on media and state on that one], tensions were high in central Europe and the western Allies were fully aware that had they given Stalin the least 'saleable' excuse for conflict that the Soviet army would prevail [if the JSII was not intimidating enough the new JSIII was, not to mention thousands of T-34's mainly T-34/85's, the best anti tank guns and the largest standing ground forces and an ecconomy to support it]. This is widely seen as the primary motivator for the crimes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Now peacetime policies again, After German defeat in WWI insanely harsh conditions were imposed and a brutal reparations program, the German mindset and ecconomy went into a nose dive, fertile ground for the new uber nationalism so widespread in the first half of the 20th century - the Nazi's were almost an inevitability.
The colapse of the German ecconomy in the early twenties led to capital flight into Germany as foreign capitalists scooped up bargain priced industries [particularly US capital] The rise of the other extremism of the age 'socialism' threatened these investments, a strong fascist government promised more profitable conditions for foreign capital than socialism would, the Nazi's were allowed to rise just as Mussolini was seen as a good guy and Franco preferable to the success of the second republic in Spain.

So, these are the foundations on which WWII was built, these are also the foundations of a shift in the global ecconomy toward more militaristic modes and the 'Cold War'. The current problems we face with the much touted 'clash of civilisations' is just the same except [and now the media comes in] we don't discuss the core motivators that make a naturally co-operative and fairly peacable ape become war hungry.
That core problem is inequity, hungry people are desperate people and desperate people do extreme things like cling to ideologies, religions and identity through such things as diverse as football teams through to historical distortions and nation states.
It is a sad irony that if even a half of the money spent on militarism was spent on global justice and the measures nescasary to achieve an alieviation of the sense of injustice in the world, if our media were not controlled by the same group of global uber capitalists who share the same venal agendas then we wouldn't have extremist nationalism or religious fundamentalism to any degree worth considering a threat to our security.

peace j

I am speaking in the context of contemporary Iran, I am fully aware of Persian history.

peace j