Tuesday, August 09, 2005

Vermin and Souvenirs: How to Justify a Nuclear Attack

By Mickey Z.

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Posted 08/09 | Add a Comment

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  1. Great article by Mickey Z, as usual. But I am wondering whether and why the idea that Japan needed to change its national psychology was racist. Like Germany and the USA, Japan had a national ideology that was explicitly imperialistic, jingoistic, and racist. Only a Eurocentric concept of race (where the world is divided into “white” and other) prevents us from seeing Japanese notions of racial superiority over, e.g. Koreans, for what they were: a dangerously racist element of the national psychology. That national psychology needed to be changed.

    Obviously, the atom bomb was not the way to do it. But the fact that the US or Europe has done something wrong to a group of people does not abvolve those people of their own sins. Our failure to see that is what has kept the US and European left from naming and acting upon the ongoing racist genocide in Sudan. We justly condemn anti-Arab anti-Semitism. But then we are so afraid of somehow conspiring with that that we turn our backs on the indigenous Africans who have been displaced and enslaved by explicitly racist nomadic Arabs for more centuries that Europeans have exploited Africans. We forget that it was from the Arabs that Europeans learned to call themselves “white” in relation to Sub-Saharan Africans just as we forget the racist ideologies and activities of Japan against Korean and Chinese people.


    It is absolutely vital that we expose the lies that have led to wars. At the same time, we must not flinch from uncomfortable truths ourselves.

    Posted by rentstrike from USA  on  08/10  at  05:43 PM

  2. “The Japanese… were commonly referred to and depicted as subhuman: insects, monkeys, apes, rodents, or simply barbarians that must be wiped out or exterminated.”

    These are the exact same lines we routinely hear from the Arabs and other Muslims today:  the Jews are the sons of monkeys and pigs and must be destroyed.  Not the Israelis—the Jews.  All Jews everywhere.  And yet this doesn’t seem to bother you, one of their biggest supporters and apologists. 

    So you’d rather talk about alleged racism by our great grandfathers than talk about ACTUAL, virulent racism today, because you support the racists’ cause.  The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Mein Kamp are still best sellers in Egypt and among Palestinians.  The Saudi newspapers publish odes to Adolph Hitler.  This apparently doesn’t bother you.

    Wouldn’t it be nice for leftist / progressive beliefs to go mainstream someday?  But it’s not going to happen soon.  Americans are not fools, and they know a hypocrite when they see one.  If you only care about American racism, but you don’t care about the much more open, virulent Arab racism, then you can’t claim that racism bothers you.  You come across as a mindless America basher, and Americans have absolutely no interest in hearing that. 

    You’re knowledgeable.  You write very well.  But your ideas and publications will NEVER gain a wider audience until you develop a more consistent morality in your work.  Do that and you’ll go far.

    I wish you the best of luck.

    Posted by Aaron from Ohio  on  08/19  at  07:46 AM

  3. Nice review of anti-Japanese racism in the Pacific War, which reached shocking levels of crudity, not all that different from what was seen in Vietnam a generation later.

    I don’t think Mickey Z’s morality is inconsistent and certainly don’t agree that he should spend his time doing the work of the Jewish supremacy movement in the Middle East.  Given what’s going on in Palestine and Iraq, it’s a miracle that every Arab on the planet isn’t a frothing racist. 

    As for Mickey Z’s ideas going mainstream, they already ARE mainstream to a great extent.  John Dower’s book, used in this article, was endorsed by the New Republic, Foreign Affairs, Newsweek, and the Boston Globe.  It was an American Book Award finalist and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award.

    Posted by Michael from San Francisco  on  10/03  at  07:07 PM
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