The Plot To Remilitarize Japan

Tags

abe, japan, japanese militarism, north korea, nuclear war, USA

 

You like conspiracy theories? If so, try this one, born and bred right here. Article Nine of the 1947 Japanese Constitution – largely drafted of course by America in the wake of WWII – prohibits the nation from resolving international disputes by force. In other words it imposes pacifism on a country that, in the light of its shamefully bellicose and brutally imperialist conduct over the first half of the 20^th Century, could use some pacifying. This is of course not saying that other countries – Holland, France, the UK, Spain, etc. – were not also shamefully bellicose and brutally imperialistic – or that Germany was not history’s most deplorable of all monsters. But none of those countries was ever denied by the global community an army, and Germany was very soon remilitarized after 1945. So why was Japan thus singled out? It was just chess – simple as that. A perennial threat to the area, particularly to China and Korea, it was thought best to defang Japan and let Reconstruction under US aegis take hold. We must remember that the country was devastated by American attacks, two of them the world’s only examples so far of nuclear warfare. We must also remember that this was an era — and it lasted well into the sixties — when “Made in Japan” meant cheap shit, often the kind of dross you got in Christmas crackers and bubble-gum machines. The nation couldn’t have afforded a military with modern armaments even if it had been allowed to possess one. But, tempus fugit, all that has certainly changed. Yet Article Nine is still there, still an ineluctable feature of the Japanese Constitution, as difficult to budge as the Second Amendment.

 

But all this is changing, or being pushed towards change; and Prime Minister Abe is at the forefront of this effort – or he seems to be. The nation’s single longest-serving PM, and scion of a political dynasty (his grandfather was PM from 1957 to 1960), you could say Abe was completing the ancestral legacy of restoring Japan to its dignity as a fully-fledged player on the world stage – this was his grandfather’s stated and unsuccessful mission. Except that, very quietly indeed, Japan has been throwing its (admittedly unarmed in any serious way) military might around for some time now, and unabashedly on behalf of the US. It was a (rather limp-wristed) member of the so-called coalition to invade Iraq in 2003; and it has participated in more recent actions in the East China Sea and elsewhere in the area. As unpublicized as these ventures were, they nonetheless send a message to other countries in the region – China, North Korea – which have historical reasons to fear a remilitarized Japan, since they were despoiled in the most appalling fashion during the years leading up to WWII. But the country is divided around 50-50 on the issue of rearming. This is why they need a forceful nudge to vote Yes – and they are getting it.

 

It is surely no coincidence that the missiles fired today and recently by North Korea, although putatively announced as capable of hitting the US mainland, in fact threaten mostly Japan, violating airspace and landing off the Japanese coast. We must ask ourselves why Rocket Man would taunt the US in such a wanton manner, when he knows beyond all doubt that a war with America would result in the utter destruction of his country, his regime and probably himself too. I have suggested previously here that Pyongyang must know something we don’t about its security from US attacks to continue with this brazen baiting. I am inclined to think now that this something is an agreement with the US administration to willfully menace Japan in order to sway public opinion there towards remilitarization. It’s working too, the percentages changing in favour of Yes with every missile launch. Incredible, you say. Yet if the Trump government does not take action against Pyongyang for this latest affront then I shall be forced to conclude it’s true. We know that back-channel discussions with Pyongyang have been in progress for some time, but we are never told what is being discussed on them. In the game of chess that is, and always has been international geo-politics, such duplicitous scams are far from unusual.

 

Why would Trump or anyone condone such a policy? There are two simple and highly persuasive answers to this. First is money – of course it is. The trillions Japan would inevitably spend on rearming would go straight into the coffers of America’s biggest business, the military-industrial complex, in which the Trump organization is heavily invested, and which always generously rewards its collaborators (take Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld, whose net worth increased ten-thousand-fold after the Iraq War) . The second answer is pure geo-politics. With China roaring its way into becoming an economic powerhouse rivalling the US, if not far exceeding the world’s most chronic debtor-nation, it is useful to have a sworn enemy in the immediate locale and armed to the teeth, missiles just a hop away. Essentially a slave-state since the war, Japan rearmed will indubitably continue on as an American vassal, obeying any and all orders from the State Department and whomsoever else in Washington is impelled to order them. It wouldn’t have to get to the brink of war, though. The Chinese leadership, more subtle and forward-thinking than any other government on earth, won’t need hostilities to tell them what a remilitarized Japan on their doorstep means. When American might moves closer, China may also make a move somewhere uncomfortable for Washington. And so the game proceeds, as it always has done, with the muggles picking up the tab, trembling in their boots, and electing increasingly autocratic governments to defend their paltry stake in life. Call it history. The only anomaly here is that a rearmed Japan would pose a clear and present danger to North Korea as well. But Rocket Man is clearly not the sharpest tool in the workshop, and who’s to say he’s been confided with the whole plan? Those who doubt such nefarious schemes go forward in governments ought to look up how Winston Churchill allowed Coventry to be bombed rather than reveal that the Brits had cracked the famous Nazi Enigma code, thereby obviating any further intelligence via the code. Thousands have been slaughtered to further a strategy or policy. As they say, All’s fair in love and war.

 

Paul William Roberts

robertspaulwilliam@gmail.com

The Purgatorial Papers

Tags

anarchy, christopher hitchens, george harrison, income tax, madonna, offshore banking, panama papers, paradise papers, queen elizabeth, tax evasion, tax reform, the beatles

 

 

Let’s face it, the classless society is a fantasy, one among many carrots dangled in front of the lumbering masses for encouragement in their slogging travail. The so-called Paradise Papers are just a wrapper around the root vegetable. Does it really come as a shock to find the Queen and Madonna entrusting funds to skillful money-managers for the purpose of saving on taxes? The only salient phrase in all the pullulating news blather on this superfluous topic is that such offshore transactions were “perfectly legal” (i.e. for those still uncertain, they were not illegal). When you’re already paying countless millions in taxes, is it difficult to understand the urge to save as much as possible wherever and however it’s possible to do so? I remember when the Beatles were grumbling about being fleeced for 95% of their income, and George Harrison wrote his marvellous Taxman:

 

Should five percent appear too small

Be careful I don’t take it all

‘Cos I’m the Taxman

Be careful when you die –

Declare the pennies on your eyes

‘Cos I’m etc. etc.

 

There is possibly a case to be made for a cap on personal income tax, a ceiling above which you can keep all your money. The shameful grab known as Death Duties also needs to be revised in a more equitable fashion. I was at school with the scion of one of England’s more historic and venerable dukedoms, which endured the worst of all possible scenarios. Two dukes died in quick succession, and so the estate underwent the payment of two sets of death duty. They were asset rich but cash poor, yet the assets, including property, were mostly family heirlooms. A Holbein portrait is not merely a valuable painting when its subject is your ancestor. This family had prime ministers and eminent generals in its line, and therefore many mementoes that were far more than just collectable stuff. The taxmen didn’t care, of course; and to avoid selling everything to pay off their debt, the family ended up gifting their ancient country seat and its contents to the government, in exchange for continuing to occupy a few apartments in it, as well as to supervise the opening of their erstwhile home to the public. This the new duke quite enjoyed, sitting in his booth collecting half-crowns from visitors and signing autographs. Even so, the overhead was steep enough that, before long, they had a wild game park and antique market in the grounds. It should not be hard to comprehend that those faced with this or similar situations will take advantage of every available means to hang onto a little of the wealth by consulting experts in the field.  We should not punish success, not even the success of antiquity.

 

Brits today were risibly horrified to learn that Her Majesty’s offshore investments included shares in a couple of morally questionable enterprises. Does anyone seriously imagine that old Elizabeth sits around with her shady brokers, saying, “Oh, that does seem like a profitable little racket, doesn’t it? I think we should buy in!” She’s probably never even met the men who deal with the men who advise on investments – and as long as the advice seems good she probably doesn’t want to know about any of its boring machinations. At 90, after a lifetime of dutiful service to an undeserving rabble, she ought to be spared the aggravation. Yes, those investing on behalf of the monarchy should be a little more cautious what they invest in than they would be for, say, Madonna, but at the end of the day they did nothing illegal – so why don’t we shut up about it!

 

Supposedly there are 3,300 Canadians whose financial affairs have been unethically exposed to public scrutiny by this leak of private documents. These people too have done nothing illegal. But, like allegations of sexual harassment, being on this list is treated as if it’s proof of tax-evasion and some other species of financial skullduggery. The allegation alone is enough – and this is not good for the world. The recent revelation of Finance Minister Bill Morneau’s surprising wealth was similarly treated by hypocritical bleats from the opposition parties – as if the very fact of having millions were in itself conclusive proof of malfeasance. No doubt those politicians past and present now mentioned in the Paradise Papers – mentioned for doing nothing illegal – will be pilloried in a similar fashion, until the public, curtesy of the media, loses interest in the subject. I should not want my financial affairs made available to all and sundry – if only for their embarrassing paucity. But like poverty, though, wealth ought not to be a cause for shame. It is of course the cause of jealousy – and that is really at the root of these half-baked non-news stories. Those puerile anarchic elements who imagine this latest non-expose will usher in a golden age of egalitarian reforms will be left griping about conspiracies of the wealthy and the unfairness of it all, as the rest of us sail into the sunset of yet another year. Does the ever-tardy Revolution even remember the Panama Papers, that considerably more damning deluge of documents about which nothing was also done? It’s lonely up on the apex of the social pyramid, looking down at all the shaking fists and rattling billhooks – yet one must assume it has its consolations. I am reminded of an old joke that Christopher Hitchens used to tell, bless him:

 

An American student revisits his old professor at Oxford. The professor asks him what he’s up to now. “I’m finishing my Ph.D. thesis on the survival of the ruling class in America,” says the student.

“Oh,” says the professor, “I thought there wasn’t supposed to be a ruling class in America anymore?”

“No one does,” says the boy. “That’s how it survives…”

 

Paul William Roberts

robertspaulwilliam@gmail.com

 

Devisive Devision

Tags

minorities, muslim, politics, weinstein

 

Divide and conquer: that was the principle behind Britain’s old imperial adventures, nowhere more apparent than in the parting fuck-you gesture given to a newly-created Pakistan and an anciently decimated India. Bangladesh used to be East Pakistan (and before that it was East Bengal) – a nation in two pieces separated by hundreds of miles has a great future ahead of it, doesn’t it? While virtually all non-Muslims left Pakistan – and those that remained, mostly Christians, lived to regret it – most Indian Muslims remained in India, feeling fairly certain that whatever Pakistan became it wouldn’t be good for business. It was also obvious that the new Islamic state and the old, nominally Hindu state would not coexist in harmony – which indeed they did not and have not ever since, waging both hot war and cold for the past seventy years. Such was Britain’s obvious intention. Generations of Raj officers, officials and exploiters had seen the mounting hostility between Hindus and Muslims directly caused by the overt British tendency to favour Muslims for positions in the Indian Civil Service. Such communal strife had not been especially evident before, not even during the centuries of Moghul rule in Delhi. Indeed India has a unique history of religious tolerance, and remains the only nation never to have persecuted the Jews, who have been there for over three thousand years. Britain’s first concern was in creating a buffer state between Soviet Russia and the once-Marxist-leaning India, where, when I lived there in the nineteen-seventies, Soviet propaganda was for sale in all the sidewalk bookstalls (fortunately along with all the magisterial Russian novels). Presumably, London’s fading imperial warriors surmised that a faintly theocratic state would repel the godless Ruskies? When Pakistan proved less tractable and more inclined to accept Moscow’s entreaties, along with its weaponry, the Brits evidently decided that another buffer state was required in the subcontinent. Although the ham-fisted cartographers assigned the task of delineating Pakistan gave no mind to inhabitants of the Punjab, through whose state and villages the inexorable line was drawn (some even awoke the next day to find that their parlour or bedroom was now in another country), the new and vastly reduced, predominantly Sikh state was suddenly viewed with great interest. A Sikh-separatist movement was encouraged and sponsored by London, which trained Sikh fighters in British Columbia, and was behind such outrages as both the siege of the Golden Temple and the assassination of Indira Ghandi (since both assaults on Sikhs and on Hindus served the same nefarious purpose). It is why the appalling Air India bombing is still shrouded in so many layers of obscurity and mystery). But Pakistan bent under pressure, turned its gaze westward (and to the munificent Saudis), and suddenly an independent Sikh buffer state was no longer desirable, dropped as if it burnt the hands. Those Sikhs aware of the plan have never forgiven London for this betrayal, joining those other disaffected hordes who are only all too aware that post-imperialism can be as nasty and ruthless as its earlier form – if not more so in its relative invisibility. Divide and rule.

 

If one wanted to be conspiracy-minded, one could view the recent trend towards greater and greater divisions in western societies as a contemporary refinement of the old divide and rule principle – except that there is nothing secretive about it. We are thus forced to accept the fact that human beings have a natural tendency towards tribalism and factionalism, now encouraged by governments, groups and individuals too stupid, uneducated or blind to the fact that all fragmentation in any society is deleterious to the continued health and prosperity of that society. It pits one faction against another, usually the ones most vociferous in their demands of the whole society – which of course is also so factionalized that it effectively doesn’t exist as a whole of any kind. Think of the clearly defined interest-groups currently well-established: the Indigenous; the LGBTQ community; the black, white, brown, yellow communities; the Christians, Muslims, Jews, Sikhs, Fundamentalists of all stripes demanding a voice; the white-separatists (less popularly but equally stridently demanding a say); the Feminists of many kinds; the Vegans, insisting we only eat what they eat; and all the various other less prominent groupings, most of whom do not agree or partially disagree with what the others want. To the media – which have not given this matter any serious thought – they all have a case, and a right to express their discontent, even though this right in fact obviates the rights of many other factions. Governments themselves have become maquettes of the larger malaise, with the left attacking the right over every issue as a matter of principle, regardless of whether one side truly and fundamentally disagrees with the other’s position or not. The result is a Babel of futile arguments that in the end achieve nothing whatsoever except confusion, doubt and chaos. In Canada, for example, we have the so-called Commission of Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. Such is the pressure exerted by a Liberal Government intent on expunging four or more centuries of guilt in four years that this Commission’s hearings have become an agora of grief and tragedy-porn, with family after family pouring out their sorrow in essentially the same terms: they loved their daughter, whose smile was magical, whose life was precious, and whose unsolved disappearance now squats like a black mountain over their days and years. The loss and sorrow are tangible – and so they should be. But the Commission is supposed to be about discovering why the police were so appallingly lax or incompetent in investigating these disappearances. Statements by the families belong in the dossier, of course they do; but the media attention is so irresistible that these relatives demand to be part of the inquiry itself – and no one dares point out that this public grieving is inappropriate, unnecessary and is costing taxpayers millions in fees for the commissioners who have to sit listening to a story they’ve already heard a thousand times. The whole point of this inquiry – which is NOT a truth and reconciliation hearing – is to discover why and how the police were so negligent, and to recommend ways of preventing such negligence from ever occurring again. This purpose threatens to become lost in hearings that the media – ever-hungry for tragedy-porn – report for their grief-value, seemingly forgetting what the actual purpose of them is supposed to be. I despair that, after spending many, many millions, the Commission will fail to achieve the only goal it was set. Long and unjustly deprived of a voice, the Indigenous are now in danger of undermining themselves by insisting that the Commission be what they want it to be – which will assuredly defeat its own purpose. We see the same thing happening on a smaller scale with the imagined rights proclaimed by every other interest-group, no matter how minor, no matter how irrational.

 

As someone who is legally blind, and a card-carrying member of the Canadian National Institute for the Blind, I could easily trumpet the many violations of my rights, and those of all the 200,000-odd blind Canadians, encountered in everyday life, from opportunities for employment to accessibility issues. But I recognize the severe limitations I face in terms of any employment, and the immense problems and massive expense involved in making the world blind-friendly, just as I recognize the easily-understandable lack of organizational skills that prevent the blind from forming advocacy-groups as effective as those formed by the disabled in other ways. I also don’t think of myself as a blind Canadian, but rather as a Canadian who happens to be blind. I am, however, well aware of the uncomfortable deference my condition elicits, particularly in areas of government with which I need to deal and to whom I also happen to mention it. My calls are returned with unnerving alacrity, and I know my gripes – why don’t all traffic lights have an audible signal? – will be taken most seriously and respectfully, even if nothing whatsoever can practically be done about them. But I have no desire to be considered as among a disadvantaged minority, and especially not among one whose unrealistic demands cause yet another commission of inquiry based upon the principle that society is somehow to blame for my inability to function in it. In today’s climate of opinion, no one would dare refute such a charge, as erroneous as it is or would be. The politics of division may seem to empower all, but in reality they disempower those who imagine their empowerment, relegating them to a fragment of the whole, a fragment in which their genuine rights can just as easily be dismissed as their claimed rights – after of course a commission has exhaustively and expensively looked into them for so long that the media and thence the public loses all interest in the issue. Just as war memorials dispense with the need to question all wars, so commissions of inquiry remove the urgency of examining real causes for grievance.

 

Perhaps the most dangerous division yet to have emerged is that currently reaching new heights of intensity between men and women. It is a fact that the empowerment of women – ensuring their rights to contraception and abortion, freeing them from compulsory reproduction like farm animals – is possibly the sole way to ameliorate poverty in the less-developed areas of the world. Only men in those areas, some of them, oppose this provable assertion. Our problem in the west is not that. It is the contention that men and women are in some way the same. We accept that all human beings are in a sense to be regarded as equal under the law. They’re not of course, and the classless society is an impossible fantasy dangled like the carrot you can never catch to inspire the masses in their enslavement. But while equal under the law, men and women are different in many ways, if not in every way. It is also true that all preceding eras to our own did not claim or aspire to the enlightenment that some of us imagine we have now attained. Over the past decade I have listened to all of the arguments patiently, especially the one that says all of history should have been as liberally enlightened as we think we are now – and, what’s more, in not being so enlightened they are all culpable and ought to be punished in some way (in what way, though?). Artists and writers, not just legislators, need to be pilloried – which now means ignored or obliterated – for their sexist sins. Naturally enough, it is usually those whose ignorance is radiant who condemn, say, Shakespeare for his rampant male chauvinism – when in fact no playwright before him wrote so many and such powerful roles for female characters (even if young boys had to act them – which is open to dispute). Yet it is not just ages half a millennium ago where social mores and opinions were vastly different to our own. The ever-burgeoning container of sexual grievances, many dating from decades ago, ought to be forcing us to concede that ideas of sexual propriety have been transformed almost overnight (but certainly within a remarkably brief decade). No one has ever disputed the fact that Harvey Weinstein is not a very nice or likeable man, one whose power in the entertainment business allowed him to treat people like shit. David Lynch’s brilliant film, Mulholland Drive, contains a parodic portrait of him as the bastard obsessed with his espresso. But, as inadmissible to the human race as Weinstein may well be, this witch hunt treating him as guilty when, so far, he has not been charged with any crime is shameful and a violation of those unalienable rights he supposedly still possesses. When he said in his feeble defense that he grew up in times when attitudes were substantially different from our own, he was telling the truth. For people to come forward after forty years trembles the credibility of a law that places no statute of limitations on sexual offenses. Kevin Spacey, and many others are now falling prey to a law that accords the victims with undisputed veracity, while denying the alleged perpetrators their right to be innocent until proven guilty. Why? It happened here with Jian Gomeshoi, and it continued happening even after the court found him not guilty as charged. Like most people, I don’t know if he was guilty or not – and I don’t pretend to know, forced therefore to accept the court’s verdict, whether or not I wish it were otherwise. I had my share of sexual predators in the past – when I was young and pretty – but I wouldn’t dream of dredging this up now. When I was sixteen, the Financial Times drama critic (now long dead), B.A. (Freddie) Young invited me to attend the Royal Shakespeare Company’s preview of their new season in Stratford. Naive as I ten was, I still knew it wasn’t my delightful company he wanted in the hotel with him, so I politely declined the offer. Had I accepted it, I can honestly say that I would have deserved any sexual predations on his part, and I certainly wouldn’t have harboured a grievance for over fifty years, choosing to give vent to it now. You go to someone’s hotel room, you know what’s likely to happen, and it’s as much your fault as it is that of the powerful person from whom you were hoping to get some kind of favour. Even back in the distant days of the casting couch, it was conventional wisdom that you couldn’t fuck your way to success. The abuse of power works both ways too. When I was a television producer and advertising in the papers for interns, I received a number of applications that included, besides the requested resume, an 8 x 10 glamour photograph (from females, I should add), an addition that presumed enticing good looks would succeed where experience failed. It is good indeed that we are leaving such debased times behind us, yet it is not at all good that we are indulging in retrospective outrage, shame or whatever it is up to half a century later and from the safety of a different era – one that may not be as morally flawless as it imagines itself to be. It is not good for the world that women are perceived as history’s victims, no matter how recent the history. And it is far from good or healthy for the law to be so bended that it breaks, branding the innocent as guilty for crimes more imagined than defined by any court or body of law enforcement. Those men who claim to agree with this persecution are also denying the truth of urges most or all males experience, even if they are rarely acted upon. The denial of reality is a most pernicious trend, one that augurs the disintegration of society. Unless we are one in our ideals and goals we can never achieve them, and our society will be risibly easy for those who richly deserve to be identified and condemned to rule with the most velvety of iron fists, pitting faction against faction and destroying the real conversation, which needs to continue forever in the vain hope that it might elicit those changes we truly need to come. We do not need to be politically correct; we need to be morally and ethically correct.

 

Paul William Roberts

 

robertspaulwilliam@gmail.com