ITEM 1, Anti-Post. AGAIN the Post publishes the insane ravings of the bloodthirsty psychopath Ralph Peters, who seems actually to be trying to provoke violence against us with ridiculous "fighting words" about all Arab countries being miserable, anti-modern failures. In the middle of his rant, he does finally utter the one word that makes any sense of his lunacy: "Israel". The pretense that this war, and all the others against the Arab world by the United States, was to help Arabs is blown away with the mention of Israel. Israel is the be-all and end-all of U.S. policy in the Middle East, the only reason we are attacked and hated by Islam.
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Arab failure is not all the doing of Arabs without any subversion from the U.S. Government and other Western powers. From early in the 20th Century, the West's role in the Arab world has been destructive, starting with the betrayal of Arab nationalism by the British after World War I. Instead of uniting the Arabs in a great and progressive federation, Britain and France, with the tacit assent of the United States, balkanized Arabia and imposed Western colonial rule over Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine -- which are all doing so well today!
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Worse, the British Empire established a Zionist state in Palestine, against warnings from the U.S. Government of the day that that would cause endless war. It has, and it's Britain's fault. Now the British, who misruled Iraq after World War I and produced endless war in Palestine, are co-conspirators in the humiliation of Iraq, again, but Ralph Peters pretends that the endless undermining of the Arab world by the U.S. and Britain has nothing to do with failures in some parts of that world. Bull.
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If Britain had been defeated in World War II and Germany had taken the whole of Great Britain but eventually returned everything but Greater London to the British, would the British simply accept the permanent loss of London and move on? Or would retaking lost London become an obsession that prevented Britain from moving on? That is the story of Palestine, and Jerusalem.
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To pretend that the creation of Israel and its defense by endless subversion of Arab unity by the U.S. and Britain has nothing to do with Arab failure is inexcusable dishonesty. (Responsive to "Escaping Arab Failure", April 23)
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ITEM 2, Slimy Japan. AOL hilited a story today about the hostile reception that former hostages in Iraq received from the Japanese. "The young Japanese civilians taken hostage in Iraq returned home this week, not to the warmth of a yellow-ribbon embrace but to a disapproving nation's cold stare. * * * 'You got what you deserve!' read one hand-written sign at the airport where they landed. * * * They had "caused trouble" for everybody. The government, not to be outdone, announced it would bill the former hostages $6,000 for air fare."
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What?!? Most Americans will be astonished by such a reception. Sadly, I know too much about the slimy monstrosity called "Japan" to be surprised at all.
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Japan is a HORRIBLE country that needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. To this day Japan has never apologized for its hideous crimes in World War II, which, if anything, dwarf those of Germany. We will never have an accurate count of how many people Japan killed in pursuing empire under the euphemism "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere". But Chinese students protesting the first President Bush's impending trip to Japan asserted that Japan had killed 34 million Chinese! 34 million. I have no way to check such figures, because China didn't have reliable censuses.
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What I can say is that it is known with certitude that some of the stories of Japanese atrocities, such as Japanese soldiers tossing Chinese babies into the air and catching them on upraised bayonets, are confirmed as absolutely true. At the end of the Japanese occupation of the Philippines, as MacArthur landed in Luzon, the Japanese set fire to large parts of Manila and shot the civilians fleeing from the flames! That is Japan.
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Japan got off almost scot-free for its massive crimes, including the use of prisoners of war, including Americans, in bomb-blast tests and other hideous experiments that were at least as bad as anything Germany's notorious Josef Mengele committed. Surviving Australians and Britons liberated from POW camps at the end of the war bore a stark resemblance to the cadaverously emaciated survivors of Nazi concentration camps in Europe.
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A Korean woman -- Korea was once (mis)ruled by Japan -- interviewed by TV as to whether it was wrong and excessive for the U.S. to drop two atomic bombs on Japan, said NO, that maybe 10 would have been the right number to drop on that horrible country.
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So what did we do to reconstruct Japan after the war? We left the Emperor who oversaw Japan's rampage of blood, on the throne! Saddam was a piker compared to Hirohito, but we left Hirohito in a place of great honor, even tho people killed, in his name, dozens of times as many people as Saddam killed.
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We established a British-style parliamentary government, even tho the British played essentially no part in defeating Japan. In Iraq too, we are establishing a non-American, even anti-American parliamentary government. What's wrong with our form of government? It has done well by us. Why do our rulers have no confidence in its utility for Japan or Iraq?
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We even let the Japanese continue to drive on the wrong side of the road, which set us up for massive harm to our auto industry because we couldn't sell cars in Japan because our steering wheels are on the wrong side for Japan. Japanese manufacturers, eager to invade our market — economic imperialism to get even for their military defeat — were perfectly willing to manufacture millions of cars with the steering wheel on our side.
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We did nothing to change the rigidly hierarchical structure of Japanese society. Indeed, we entrenched it in keeping Hirohito on the throne — indeed, retaining a throne rather than creating Japan into a republic. We should have hanged Hirohito in a public execution and abolished the monarchy, to make plain that a new day had arrived and the people of Japan were freed from the past, free to rise as high as their talents might take them, free from a culture where birth determines social status.
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The result of our trivial reconstruction of Japanese society, with no interference in the crazy mindset that produced Japan's rampage, is that Japan today is a pseudo-democracy that crushes the human spirit.
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Ordinary people must bow and scrape to their "superiors" every day. The greater the social difference, the deeper they must bow! Workers have to schmooze with their superiors after work, rather than return to their own home to tend to their own lives. The Japanese have an immovable, corrupt government that has been controlled by the same party for the entire postwar period, almost 60 years, and counting.
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Japanese pay something like 7 times the world price for rice, a staple of their diet. They pay thru the nose for meat, fruit, and other things for which we pay almost nothing, by contrast. The lives of ordinary people are awful, a constant grind of having to work long hours (tho not as long as ours) and put up with extraordinarily long commutes into their overcrowded cities. Japanese schools, like much of Japanese society, are regimented and filled with bullying. Each year dozens of Japanese children commit suicide because they can't stand the harassment — harassment the authorities do nothing to stop.
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Japanese kids are in a pressure cooker for a dozen years, having to go to extra classes after school, before school, on weekends and thru summers, if they want to get into the best colleges. Once they are there, however, they tend to goof off and not make best use of those superlative facilities.
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Japanese culture still looks fondly upon violence, with programming, even comic books for adults, that are filled with horrifying violence, castration, and other madness. It's an escape from the reality of being crushed by a horrible society they can fight back against only in fantasy.
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Americans and other people around the world should loudly denounce Japan's mistreatment of returned hostages, and tell the Japanese that they are miserable excuses for human beings who need to shake up society and join the modern world. They need a wake-up call. Let us shout out loud: "Japan is a hellhole! Change it!"
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:50 AM