Three generations after World War II, we can still see the anti-Japanese propaganda working on the periphery of American discourse. Although marginal, it shows the lingering effects of wartime hatred.
The bigotry can be seen on the right, where some have disgustingly cheered on the tragedy in Japan as somehow being payback for Pearl Harbor. God, you see, is an American warmonger. And let’s ignore the fact that the US “got even” for that attack on a military base a couple of hundred times over — by massacring hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians in the destruction of dozens of cities by firebomb and nuclear murder — the payback that America deserves when she is dissed is unrelenting.
We can also see the slimy hatred on the gruesome environmentalist left, all over whaling and Japanese fishing practices. So some greens have looked at the mass catastrophe as Gaia’s revenge. There has long been a bigotry brewing on the American left against the Japanese for their hunting of whales. These environmentalists seem more concerned with this than the US hunting of Iraqis, Afghans and Pakistanis — these prey are too high on the food chain to be too much a concern.
But who doubts that, despite the US being the world’s chief international aggressor, if a natural disaster struck America as hard as Japan has been hit, most of the world’s people would, in all their civilized charity and humanitarianism, look upon the tragedy as lamentable, rather than as an excuse to condemn America? Remember when the streets of Tehran were filled with candlelight vigils after 9/11, despite the 1953 coup? Who doubts that the Vietnamese, for example, who endured a thousand times as many deaths, mostly civilian, under the US killing spree in the 1960s and 1970s, than the US suffered at Pearl Harbor, would look upon a natural-nuclear calamity in America as a sad event, rather than as an excuse to mock the suffering?
The majority of Americans are, to be sure, responding to Japan in a civil and thoughtful way. But the hypocritical cruelty with which an imperial people can look upon a suffering country and laugh, or attribute it to Mother Nature’s karma or God’s American patriotism, is beyond sickening.-Anti-Japanese Hate
I've no doubt that many "conservatives" reading the above will dismiss it as just another example of left-wing anti-America hate by some kind of a traitor. I can't imagine having any hate for events that happened so long ago, even though the Japanese Empire at the time of WW2 was vicious and extremely cruel.
Yes they were cruel during the war. But times have changed, plus I have Japanese friends who are fantastic, a very generous culture.
ReplyDelete