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What Does Hiroshima Have To Do With Donald Trump?

By Mickey Z.

02 April, 2016
World News Trust

ISIS, says Donald J. Trump, “is probably why I’m No. 1 in the polls.”

His formula is frighteningly simple and frighteningly… well, frightening. “They're chopping off our heads in the Middle East,” Trump ominously reminds us. “They want to kill us. They want to kill our country. They want to knock out our cities.” So, when faced with such an enemy, would the Republican frontrunner consider the nuclear option? “I don't rule out anything,” he promised.

Meanwhile, a March 24-26, 2016, poll found that 50 percent of respondents (registered voters of both parties) supported Trump’s proposal to temporarily ban Muslims from entering the United States.

We can continue laughing and mocking and meme-ing. Or we could recognize this pattern for what it us. Or we could ask the Japanese for a (recent) history lesson.

Racism, not “purely coincidental”

Because Japan chose to invade several colonial outposts of the West, the war in the Pacific laid bare the inherent racism of the colonial structure. During the Good (sic) War, in the United States (and even in Britain), the Japanese were more hated than the Germans.

Such white supremacy was exploited and escalated through a variety of Allied propaganda methods. Spurred on by a growing Chinese lobby and vocal U.S. trade protectionists wary of inexpensive Japanese goods, the campaign would eventually help cajole the American public into a pro-war, anti-Japan position.

"Periodicals that regularly featured accounts of Japanese atrocities," says author John Dower, "gave negligible coverage to the genocide of the Jews, and the Holocaust was not even mentioned in the "Why We Fight" (film) series Frank Capra directed for the U.S. Army."

The Japanese people were commonly referred to and depicted as subhuman: insects, monkeys, apes, rodents, or simply barbarians that must be wiped out or exterminated. The American Legion Magazine's cartoon of monkeys in a zoo who had posted a sign reading, "Any similarity between us and the Japs is purely coincidental" was typical.

Then came Pearl Harbor.

“Apes in khaki”

As I’ve documented, the events of Dec. 7, 1941, were roughly two decades in the making. In 1922, the United States and Britain imposed upon Japan an agreement that the Japanese navy would not be allowed more than 60 percent of the capital ship tonnage of the other two powers. That same year, the U.S. Supreme Court declared Japanese immigrants ineligible for American citizenship, and one year later the Supreme Court upheld a California and Washington ruling denying Japanese the right to own property.

The year 1924 saw the passage of the Exclusion Act -- which virtually banned all Asian immigration. (Sound familiar?)

On the economic front, when Japan textiles began out-producing Lancashire mills, the British Empire (including India, Australia, Burma, etc.) raised the tariff on Japanese exports 25 percent. Within a few years, the Dutch followed suit in Indonesia and the West Indies, with the United States (in Cuba and the Philippines) not far behind. Such moves, combined with Japan’s expanding colonial designs, brought the U.S. and Japan ever closer to conflict.

When France fell to Germany in 1940, the Japanese moved quickly to take military control of French colonies in Indochina (the primary U.S. source for tin and rubber). On July 21, 1941, Japan signed a preliminary agreement with the Nazi-sympathizing Vichy government leading to Japanese occupation of airfields and naval bases in Indochina.

Almost immediately, the United States, Britain, and the Netherlands instituted a total embargo on oil and scrap metal to Japan -- tantamount to a declaration of war. This was followed soon after by the United States and UK freezing all Japanese assets in their respective countries. Radhabinod Pal, one of the judges in the post-war Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, later argued that the United States had clearly provoked the war with Japan, calling the embargoes a “clear and potent threat to Japan’s very existence.”

Since the attack wasn’t a total surprise, you may be wondering how the Americans still managed to get caught with their pants down on Dec. 7. Again, I urge you to not underestimate the collective power of capitalism, white supremacy, and arrogance.

Racists within the U.S. military and government never imagined that Japan could orchestrate such a successful offensive. Few Westerners took the Japanese seriously, with journalists regularly referring to them as “apes in khaki” during the early months of their conquest of Southeast Asia.

“Many Americans, including Roosevelt, dismissed the Japanese as combat pilots because they were all presumed to be ‘near-sighted,’” historian Kenneth C. Davis writes. “There was also a sense that any attack on Pearl Harbor would be easily repulsed.”

As history (should) teach us, such dehumanization is almost always followed by repression.

“We have ceased to be human beings”

I’ve also already written plenty on this topic, so here’s a brief summary: On Feb. 19, 1942, the sainted Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 giving the army the unrestricted power to arrest -- without warrants or indictments or hearings -- every Japanese-American on a 150-mile strip along the West Coast (roughly 110,000 men, women, and children) and transport them to internment camps in Colorado, Utah, Arkansas, and other interior states to be kept under prison conditions.

In the words of Japanese-American Hatsuye Egami, a former prisoner of an American internment camp: "Since yesterday, we Japanese have ceased to be human beings. We are numbers. We are no longer Egamis, but the number 23324. A tag with that number is on every trunk, suitcase, and bag. Tags, also, on our breasts."

Japanese-Americans remained in custody for longer than three years and, thanks to an unending wave of anti-Japan propaganda, what little public debate existed was hardly reasoned. In 1942, a Los Angeles Times writer defended the forced relocations by explaining to his readers that "a viper is nonetheless a viper wherever the egg is hatched: so a Japanese-American, born of Japanese parents, grows up to be a Japanese, not an American."

As history (should) teach us, such repression is almost always followed by atrocities.

“We are not dealing with humans as we know them”

A U.S. Army poll in 1943 found that roughly half of all GIs believed it would be necessary to kill every Japanese on earth before peace could be achieved. Their superiors in Washington appeared to agree. By December 1943, there were more troops and equipment in the Pacific than in Europe and it has been estimated that 1,589 artillery rounds were fired to kill each Japanese soldier.

American feelings for the Japanese did not soften after the war, as a December 1945 Fortune poll revealed. Nearly 23 percent of those questioned wished the United States could have dropped "many more (atomic bombs) before the Japanese had a chance to surrender."

This virulent brand of genocidal hatred was the end result of a massive public relations effort to demonize the enemy in the Pacific and thereby justify anything in the name of victory. An illustrative example could be found in the New York Times when the newspaper of record ran an ad that showed a flamethrower being used to kill Japanese, bearing the headline: "Clearing Out a Rats' Nest."

With generals like the Australian Sir Thomas Blamey informing his troops that, "Beneath the thin veneer of a few generations of civilization, (the Japanese) is a subhuman beast," the feeding frenzy of ignorance and race antagonism culminated in the Allied forces acting our their predetermined role in a self-fulfilling prophecy. If a subhuman will fight to the death like an animal, those fighting on the side of good were simply left with no alternative but to slaughter them unmercifully. Since Japanese soldiers were under pressure not to surrender and were often killed Allied soldiers when they did, this became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

General Blamey later told the New York Times: "Fighting Japs is not like fighting normal human beings. The Jap is a little barbarian. We are not dealing with humans as we know them. We are dealing with something primitive. Our troops have the right view of the Japs. They regard them as vermin."

This dissertation was quoted by the Times on the front page.

Eugene B. Sledge, author of With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa, wrote of his comrades "harvesting gold teeth" from the enemy dead. In Okinawa, Sledge witnessed, "the most repulsive thing I ever saw an American do in the war" -- when a Marine officer stood over a Japanese corpse and urinated into its mouth.

There was no shortage of horror stories about Japanese atrocities to fuel such animosity and a large part of them were true. Of the 235,473 U.S. and U.K. prisoners reported captured by Germany and Italy combined, only 4 percent (9,348) died while an astonishing 27 percent of Japan's Anglo-American POWs (35,756 of 132,134) did not survive. Indeed, with the Rape of Nanking, the Bataan Death March, and incidents such as when Marines on Guadalcanal were ambushed by Japanese soldiers pretending to surrender, the litany of Japanese war crimes did not need much embellishment to stir up Allied fury.

The ensuing behavior of the men fighting the Japanese in the Pacific (and those rooting for them back home) was merely the anticipated outcome of a deadly campaign of manipulation and propaganda against an enemy which often played right into those fears. The results, however predictable, are no less appalling.

"In April 1943," Dower reports, "the Baltimore Sun ran a story about a local mother who had petitioned authorities to permit her son to mail her an ear he had cut off a Japanese soldier in the South Pacific. She wished to nail it to her front door for all to see."

In a 1943 issue of Leatherneck, the Marine monthly, a photo of Japanese corpses was run above the caption: "GOOD JAPS are dead Japs." The March 15, 1943 issue of Time followed suit by reporting without criticism about a "low-flying fighter turning lifeboats towed by motor barges and packed with Jap survivors, into bloody sieves."

Perhaps Edgar L. Jones, a former war correspondent in the Pacific, put it best when he asked in the February 1946 Atlantic Monthly, "What kind of war do civilians suppose we fought anyway? We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians, finished off the enemy wounded, tossed the dying into a hole with the dead, and in the Pacific boiled flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts, or carved their bones into letter openers."

“Fortunately, we were on the winning side”

The "official" word was equally as repugnant: Elliot Roosevelt, the president's son and confidant, told Henry Wallace in 1945 that America should bomb Japan "until we have destroyed about half the Japanese civilian population." Paul V. McNutt, chairman of the War Manpower Commission, went a little further when he advocated to a public audience in April 1945 the "extermination of the Japanese in toto." Secretary of War Henry Stimson concurred, stating that, "to get on with Japan, one had to treat her rough, unlike other countries."

That these sentiments were often translated into action is borne out in the reality that the U.S. bombers killed four to five times as many civilians in the last five months of the Pacific war than in three years of Allied bombing in Europe combined.

For example: On the night of March 9-10, 1945, General Curtis LeMay, head of the 21st U.S. Bomber Command, brought an all-American brand of hell into the Pacific theater of the Good (sic) War as his bombardiers laid siege on Tokyo. This was only the first strike in a firebombing campaign that dropped 250 tons of bombs per square mile, destroying 40 percent of the surface area in 66 death-list cities (including Hiroshima and Nagasaki).

By design, the Tokyo attack area was 87.4 percent residential and it is believed that more people died from fire in a six-hour time period than ever before in the history of mankind. The U.S. bombing campaign took an estimated 672,000 lives, mostly civilians.

When asked about his role in the 1945 Tokyo firebombing, LeMay remarked: “I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal. Fortunately, we were on the winning side.”

Finally, then there was the plain speaking man who gave the order to nuke Japanese civilians in two cities: "We have used (the bomb) against those who have abandoned all pretense of obeying international laws of warfare." Thus did Harry Truman justify his decision to annihilate a people he deemed "savages, ruthless, merciless, and fanatic."

Truman’s language in 1945 fed off a deep-seated racism in America and directly led to the use of atomic bombs on civilians. Juxtapose this with Trump’s rhetoric in 2016 and toss in his public warning that he’ll not rule out using nuclear weapons. With all this mind, please allow me to borrow from another recent warning of mine:

The media-fueled rise of Trumpism has re-emboldened racists and white supremacists all across God’s Country™. To view this phenomenon as some form of low brow entertainment spectacle is to expose one’s lack of historical context. For some Americans to flippantly talk of moving to Canada is a betrayal to all those without the resources to leave or fight back or earn justice. To trot out the classic “it can’t happen here” is to ignore that it’s already happened here many times and, in some cases, never stopped happening.

Postscript: I say “Trumpism” because this mindset transcends any one man or one party. However, since Trump himself is precisely the kind of charismatic demagogue who can effectively mainstream and normalize such an agenda, I’ll end with this warning: Ignore him at your own peril.

Mickey Z. can be found here.




 



 

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