What is true for individuals is also true for nations when it comes to the question of national memory and national identity. A nation may collectively look to the established narrative of the past for guidance in the present, as well it should. But this only works when the past is correctly apprehended. If the historical narrative is false, decisions in the present will be based on false premises.
In seeking the ultimate narrative of American righteousness, and the requisite belief in the inherent tendency of all the world's cultures to naturally prefer American-style, American-friendly democracy, there is no offering that even comes close to the status of World War 2. Thanks to this particular mythos, conveniently unlike all subsequent narratives of military intervention in that it actually seems to have achieved its stated goals, neo-styled interventionists of all stripes have the ostensibly perfect counter-argument to the claims of American hubris and failure. In the abstract, the narrative includes all of the Axis powers, but inevitably the focus comes to one nation in particular: Japan. If Japan could be "democratized," so the narrative goes, so can the Middle East.
This, in fact, was the subject of a recent speech by President George W. Bush, on August 22 at the Veterans of Foreign Wars National Convention. I will quote from the speech at length, as it is the best recent example of a common misapprehension:
Thank you all for letting me come by. I want to open today's speech with a story that begins on a sunny morning, when thousands of Americans were murdered in a surprise attack -- and our nation was propelled into a conflict that would take us to every corner of the globe.
The enemy who attacked us despises freedom, and harbors resentment at the slights he believes America and Western nations have inflicted on his people. He fights to establish his rule over an entire region. And over time, he turns to a strategy of suicide attacks destined to create so much carnage that the American people will tire of the violence and give up the fight.
If this story sounds familiar, it is -- except for one thing. The enemy I have just described is not al Qaeda, and the attack is not 9/11, and the empire is not the radical caliphate envisioned by Osama bin Laden. Instead, what I've described is the war machine of Imperial Japan in the 1940s, its surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, and its attempt to impose its empire throughout East Asia.
Ultimately, the United States prevailed in World War II, and we have fought two more land wars in Asia. And many in this hall were veterans of those campaigns. Yet even the most optimistic among you probably would not have foreseen that the Japanese would transform themselves into one of America's strongest and most steadfast allies, or that the South Koreans would recover from enemy invasion to raise up one of the world's most powerful economies, or that Asia would pull itself out of poverty and hopelessness as it embraced markets and freedom.
The lesson from Asia's development is that the heart's desire for liberty will not be denied. Once people even get a small taste of liberty, they're not going to rest until they're free. Today's dynamic and hopeful Asia -- a region that brings us countless benefits -- would not have been possible without America's presence and perseverance. It would not have been possible without the veterans in this hall today. And I thank you for your service. (Applause.)
What is remarkable here is that every parallel Bush is attempting to draw between imperial Japan and Al-Qaeda is based on a demonstrable fallacy.
Take first the issue of threat. Japan in 1941 was an advanced industrial nation which had already established extensive control throughout East Asia. Al Qaeda is a nation-less organization, with a small handful of members and no centralized organizing principle. While Japan, in fact, may have been capable of maintaining rule over a significant portion of East Asia, there is no chance - none - that Al Qaeda could ever establish a caliphate. Bush is essentially comparing one of the most powerful and organized military powers of the past century to a small handful of extremists, operating on a shoe-string budget. Currently, the cadre responsible for the attacks of September 11th has no representation among any of the numerous groups and factions in combat with American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. Bush's narrative is essentially assimilating unrelated parties with disparate aims into a single, fictional "enemy" which, even in its most extreme and encompassing aggregate, is not even remotely as powerful as was imperial Japan.
This brings us handily into the next disjuncture - the scale of American response. If Bush views "the terrorists" in Iraq and Afghanistan to be a threat comparable to imperial Japan, why is there as of yet no draft? No nationwide conversion of industry to the war effort? No war bond drives? Why are we "shopping as usual"?
And what, then, of the motivations of the "enemy", and their initial attack? The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was aimed at a military target, not civilians. The Kamikaze tactics which Bush disingenuously refers to, used later in the Pacific War, were also not "terror attacks" on American civilians, but rather a desperate use of planes-as-weapons against military targets, embarked upon after Japan had literally run out of ammo and had no means of producing more. These are not mere quibbles of fact, they describe an "enemy" whose tactics reveal a mindset utterly unlike that of Al-Qaeda. This is the first of many inconvenient facts which render Bush's narrative suspect.
But there is a much greater disunity looming on the horizon. It can be found here: "Yet even the most optimistic among you probably would not have foreseen that the Japanese would transform themselves into one of America's strongest and most steadfast allies."
Right. Who could have imagined that a former ally of the United States and Great Britain, which has fought on the side of the Allies in WW1, and which had been a functioning democracy up to the late 1920s, could possibly become a western ally...um, again?
Let's pause for a moment. Does this last historical tidbit surprise you? It shouldn't. And yet, it seems that the vast majority of Americans are utterly unaware of the few essential facts of Japanese history which would belie Bush's narrative of the "transformation" of a tribal, superstitious society into a modern democracy. Specifically, Japan actually began taking voluntary steps towards democracy as early as the late-19th century. Before the ascendancy of Hirohito, Taisho-era Japan was home to numerous liberal, democratic movements and a functioning parliamentary government. Japan was able to become a democracy again after WW2 because, since the birth of its modern era following the Meiji Restoration of 1868, it had always wanted to be one. And not only had it wanted to be one, it had been one, and most living Japanese knew how democracy worked and what it meant. This is a little detail about the "transformation" of Japan by grace of America's help which seems to have been left out of mainstream America's amnesiac consciousness.
Japan's expansionist period began with the Meiji Restoration, and for the half-century that followed, its efforts were supported, both materially and ideologically, by western powers. During this period, the majority of Japan's naval fleet was constructed in British and French shipyards, with occasional contributions from the United States. Japan's ambitions in East Asia were, in fact, deemed beneficial for its Western allies, since they countered similar territorial ambitions by Germany, Russia, and China. This situation began to change in 1919 when Japan, then at a cultural apex of liberalism, tried to make use of its position as a permanent member in the League of Nations to propose a Racial Equality Clause to the League's charter. Unfortunately, this was not a time of progressivism in the United States, Britain, or Australia, all of whom rejected the clause, leading to its subsequent defeat. At this time, the U.S. had been barring Japanese immigrants for over a decade, and President Wilson feared repercussions at home - the clause, after all, could imply equality between whites and blacks. Likewise, Australian Prime Minister Billy Hughes feared for the future of his "White Australia."
The decade that followed was a complex one, and it is naturally impossible to make sweeping generalizations about the causes of the Pacific War. However, it is difficult to escape the recognition that a contributing factor was the Western attitude to Japan - it was no longer a useful subordinate in East Asia, but was proposing to stand among equals. It was the first non-white nation to do so - and this was deeply troubling to nations which openly professed an ideology of white supremacy.
Then, of course, there is the issue of the character of Japanese imperialism itself, of which the opportunity is never missed to remind us that it was brutal and barbaric in the extreme - in keeping, we are often meant to believe, with some bizarre and otherworldly defect in the Japanese character. Here, too, a little historical perspective can work wonders. Without soft-peddling the nature of imperialism and warfare, we can fairly and accurately point to a few revelatory facts in the historical record.
The fact is that when Japan began rapidly acquiring huge swaths of the Asian continent and the various Pacific Islands, it was not invading sovereign nations, but rather the long-held colonies Britain, France, The Netherlands, and (in the case of the Philippines) the United States. Even Korea had been a "protectorate" of China before Japan's occupation. And while the Western narrative of Japanese imperialism employs a well established litany of graphic atrocities (Nanjing, the Bataan Death March, etc.), all in keeping with the notion that no amount of outrage and disgust is enough when contemplating these horrors, a markedly different tone of cool humility is employed when describing exactly the same sort of atrocities which occurred over a period of centuries at the hands of Western colonialism in Asia and elsewhere. The "Nanjing Massacre," it seems, is to be explained by "barbarism", while untidy events at the hands of British rule like the trade in "coolie labor," or the tens of millions starved to death in India, are an example of why history is "complicated".
The fact is that the victors of World War 2 are sorely in need of an honest reckoning with their past, and that this reckoning has importance far beyond mere reflection and penitence. Without understanding that "enemies" do not arise out of nothingness, that they are, indeed, often former allies, we may come to understand that "we" are not as different from "they" as we like to think - as, in fact, our leaders demand that we believe when beating the drums of war. Such a reckoning might lead us to seek after the "lessons of history" at all times, especially in times of apparent peace. Instead, with our starkly-drawn narratives, in which history is conceived of as a series of unprovoked, unexpected crisis, we are taught to pay attention to the world outside only when there is a crisis - a crisis which is always unexpected, and which we assume to be unprovoked.
This misreading of history relative to WW2 extends far beyond the Pacific War, of course. It is surprising to me, for instance, that I occasionally meet fellow countrymen who are unaware that the Soviet Union, under Stalin, was an ally in WW2. Many more who are aware of this partnership in some academic sense manage to completely overlook the scale of Russian sacrifices in the war when compared to America's. This is not, in any way, to dismiss America's contribution, or to belittle its losses. But a sense of proportion is an extremely important thing for a nation that aims to be world-wide supercop in the present era.
America lost about 420,000 of its own in WW2, the great majority of them servicemen. The Soviets, on the other hand, lost nearly 11 million servicemen, and another 12 million citizens. This means nearly fifty dead Soviets for every one dead American. Nearly two-thirds of everyone who died as a result of WW2 was a Soviet, whereas American deaths count for less than 1% of all worldwide losses. The great majority of Soviet losses occurred in the Eastern front in its battle with Germany. Without the Soviet Union's relentless military onslaught - which dwarfed the combined efforts of the United Kingdom and United States - it is almost inconceivable that Germany's imperial ambitions could have been stopped.
And yet, tragically, this definitive and humbling historical truth remains more or less invisible in modern American narratives of unilateral nation-building and mass-produced democracy. Our leaders still exploit this fantastical picture of American influence in WW2, in which "we" did it largely by ourselves (and, oh, yeah, the British and a handful of reluctant European surrender-monkeys). Given the great unlikelihood that America or Britain would have accepted the massive compulsory conscription which made Stalin's successes possible, and the near-certainty of death that came with it, there is indeed something to be learned about the incompatibility of democracy with absolute military invincibility. To bring to the world a lasting peace, we as a nation must cease the cynical, immoral gamesmanship of Machiavellian power politics, assured of a ready and able default to brute force whenever one of our chess-pieces begins to move from square-to-square of its own accord.
The history that has been hidden from us has been hidden in plain view. It is not the absence of the true narrative, but rather the relentless repetition of the false one that has deceived us. If nothing else, the true history demonstrates the power of spin and propaganda. Japan, a former ally, once deemed inconvenient, become demonized on the home front with some of the most appallingly racist propaganda ever produced for any purpose. By these same methods, truly repressive regimes like Saudi Arabia can be turned into cozy neighbors. Likewise, mediocre crackpots such as Saddam Hussein can be "spun" from angel to demon with each passing decade, and relatively peaceful nations like Iran are portrayed as maniacal and warlike, as the needs and fortunes of American foreign policy change and evolve. We hide our complicity in creating the conditions that come back to haunt us. We continue to exploit a self-serving narrative of Western innocence and benevolence, in which barbarian hordes from faraway lands throw themselves against the walls of our world with malevolence and rancor, and we respond in kind by magically bettering them, by "liberating them." This, then is the alchemy of fictionalized history, the pixie-dust of national self-esteem and hubris. We seem to think it is our national burden to transform base water into blessed wine. We think we are Jesus.
