Comfort Women for American GIs

One of the top stories on Yahoo's main page right now is about the system of "comfort women" Japan implemented to service American occupation troops after the Japanese surrender in 1945. The AP story is presented in such a way as to imply that this is something like a new discovery:

Japan's abhorrent practice of enslaving women to provide sex for its troops in World War II has a little-known sequel...

[...]

An Associated Press review of historical documents and records shows American authorities permitted the official brothel system to operate despite internal reports that women were being coerced into prostitution.

As so often is the case, in reality this is hardly some kind of new revelation. Here is a short excerpt from this book, by Saburo Ienaga (家永 三郎), published in Japanese in 1968, and in English translation in 1979:

Surrender avoided the mass violence and slaughter of an invasion; American forces landed and occupied Japan peacefully. The violence came later, however, in the assaults, robberies, and general mayhem committed by American troops against civilians. The Higashikuni cabinet succeeded the Suzuki cabinet on August 17 as a caretaker administration to carry out the surrender. The following day, Tanaka Naraichi, director of the police bureau, Ministry of Home Affairs, ordered all police chiefs to “establish sexual comfort facilities” for the occupation army. Brothel operators were summoned to the Metropolitan Police Bureau in Tokyo and provided with ¥100 million in government funds. A special comfort association, known in English as the Recreation and Amusement Association (RAA), was established. Announcements appealed for “employees”: “Women of the New Japan. Comfort stations for the occupation forces are being established as one of the national emergency measures for the postwar period. Your positive cooperation is requested.” Japanese women were offered up as human sacrifices to the American GIs. The objective was to propitiate the victors with sex and save the “good women” from unwonted advances. In this way, the government of Japan “positively cooperated" with the Occupation. The authorities had thought nothing of violating human rights during the war; they lost the war but not that attitude. The only difference was that now they were pimping for the occupation army. War or peace, women were victimized by the state.

Not content with official pleasure quarters, U.S. soldiers frequently accosted Japanese women on the street or sexually assaulted them. Lives ruined, many committed suicide or became common street prostitutes. The truism that women suffer most in war carried over to the postwar years. Japanese women shared the same fate that befell foreign women in the areas occupied by the imperial military forces. Mixed-blood children abandoned by their Japanese mothers and GI fathers were another legacy of the war. The obverse was the many mixed-blood children in the occupied areas fathered by Japanese military men. In the Philippines, where fierce hatred of Japan persisted long after the war, mixed-blood children were desperate outcasts.

U.S. troops committed the other crimes that marked the Japanese army’s reign, including robbery and murder. Victims rarely recovered their property or received any compensation. Families of murder victims got little satisfaction from occupation authorities. Among the miscarriages of justice in the aftermath of the war was the treatment by Allied courts of the B and C class war criminals. The executed prisoners included many who had no chance to defend themselves properly and many cases of mistaken identity where the wrong man was put to death. The executions were more expedient revenge than careful justice.

Here in our house, we're striving for a measured understanding of contemporary history. As Abraham Lincoln said at the beginning of his famous "House Divided" speech:

If we could first know where we are and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do and how to do it.

That, in turn, requires a requires a measured understanding of the history that's slipped or slipping over our horizon. Many Americans have this idea that the last few years represent some kind of basic break with traditional American values and practices. It seems to us that that narrative doesn't hold up very well to historiographically informed scrutiny.

French Exceptionalism

A poll recently conducted by an American university sent shock waves through the Finance Ministry in Paris. Researchers found that only just over a third of French people think a free market economy is the best system to develop the country.

By way of contrast, the survey found that a majority of citizens in 19 other countries were in favour of the free market, including 65% of Germans, 59 % of Italians, 66% of the British and 74 % of the Chinese. Even the Russians, many of whom have suffered in a painful transition to a market economy, were more favourable at 43%.

On one of the other hands:

It is worth remembering though that French labour productivity is still the highest in Europe and France has more foreign direct investment than anywhere in Europe except the UK.

The rest is here. More on that study, here.

Identity Politics

"Identity politics: That's what we had in Germany between 1933 and 1945."

One of Richard Wolin's German friends had that to say in reference to America's culture wars. It's quoted in a piece about Foucault the neohumanist. Kanan Makiya seems to have a similar view of identity politics. That, he says, is precisely what they have in Iraq right now:

Once the Pandora's Box of Saddam's regime was lifted the furies came rushing out. That was natural. But when people have been oppressed on the basis of their identity (for their Kurdishness, for their Shiiteness) and then have a chance to discover and express those identities for the first time in many years, these identities become powerful political forces. My fear is that no-one is speaking for the country as a whole across confessional and ethnic identities. Identity politics becomes too powerful at the expense of democratic politics. We need somebody to speak for Iraq as a whole, for the federal union. We need leaders for whom the victimhood of his or her sect or ethnic group is not the be-all and end-all of politics. I repeat, the competition over victimhood – 'we suffered, you suffered, I suffered, I suffered more than you so I should get more' – is a natural organic outgrowth of Saddam's tyranny. The politics of victimhood is one of the diseases that tyrannies leave behind within terrorised populations. And everybody truly is a victim in Iraq. Moreover, everybody feels themselves a victim. But forging a politics out of being a victim, subsuming yourself in that condition of victimhood, is a debilitating thing. It's not a good thing to be a victim. It's a terrible thing. It's not a quality but a condition. Victimhood is something you have to overcome rather than something you should wave as a flag, or carry as a banner. A great deal of politics, not only in Iraq but the Middle East as a whole, and across the left for that matter, is about elevating victimhood. This is a legacy we have to overcome.

He goes on to say that the Palestinians "have done this to excess, to the point of self-destruction, so many times," and then cites Nelson Mandela as an example of a figure who has demonstrated that it is possible to rise above that level.

Then again, for aficionados of the politics of mediocrity, there's always the kinder, gentler, softer model of identity politics as a prison/haven, "at once confining and empowering."

Let freedom ring in the safe sanctuary of the jailhouse? Rock on.

Barack Obama vs. Reality

Barack Obama, in 2007:

For the last six years the position of leader of the free world has remained open.

Jacques Chirac, in 1995:

The position of leader of the free world is vacant.

(Prompted by this post, at Harry's Place.)

Further thoughts pertaining to Mr. Obama's unfortunate deficiency here, from Hans Magnus Enzenzsberger's 1997 essay entitled "My Fifty-year Effort to Discover America," which can also be found in Zig Zag:

On the face of it, American culture held its sway. Every single fad or fashion originating in California, Texas, or New York was devoutly aped in Germany. Our media, our advertising, our management continued to speak their rather barbarous brand of airport English, much of it quite incomprehensible to the population at large. On a deeper level, however, one could sense a widening gap between Europe and the USA, a slow but inexorable displacement not visible to the naked eye, rather like the shift of tectonic plates in geological time.

The first symptoms made themselves felt in foreign policy. The American people and their representatives began to get fed up with the endless squabbles of the outside world, not only in Asia and Africa, but also in Europe. Why couldn’t the French and the British, The Italians and Germans take care of the Yugoslavian maze? It was, after all, their own backyard. The United States had very obvious and pressing problems of their own. Why should they send their boys to all sorts of foreign places with unpronounceable names which the average citizen could not even find on their map? To be the only world power was not fun, and to police the entire globe was a nuisance. Let the bastards out there sort out their own mess! Let them fend for themselves! Let us get back to our own agenda and worry about our black people, our immigrants, our poor, our health and education system. I must say that I cannot blame the American people for coming to such conclusions.

Nor were these sentiments purely a matter of foreign policy. I found that Americans had lost much of their interest in the outside world. Unless something very juicy happened, the networks could not be bothered with news from abroad. Foreign languages, never a strong side of American education, were on their way out.

Publishers lost interest in translation. Out of thirty best-sellers listed by the New York Times, twenty-nine are written by Americans, and the only odd man out is British. This is a record of ignorance not matched by any other nation.

Appearances to the contrary, the continental shift is to some extent reciprocal. It is true that American films, American music, and American technology continue to flood the world market. But at the same time, people overseas begin to revert to their own preoccupations. The old lure of America is not what it used to be. There is something jaded about the tourist or businessman who catches the transatlantic plane with a night out, a deal or a shopping spree in mind. It is as if we had seen it all on television. This noncommittal air on both sides, a familiarity bordering on indifference, is not, of course, specific to German-American relations. It has to be seen in a wider context, as a developing rift between America and the outside world…

There's also this tidbit, from the hit-and-missy Bruce Bawer:

Another illuminating statistic: contrary to the notion that anti-Americanism is a reflection of opposition to Republican presidents and U.S.-led wars, French sympathy for the U.S. stood at 54% in 1988, during the Reagan administration, but dropped to 35% by 1996, when Clinton was in office. Why the decline? Simple: in 1988 the U.S. was a protector; in 1996, after the Berlin Wall fell, it was a resented “hyperpower” (to employ French politician Hubert Védrine’s gratuitous term).

Our question: why can't there be just one political figure in America, just one, who's got an adequate grasp of the political world as a whole and articulates it in clear public view?

"This is different"?

Discussing the public response to NBC's airing of the Cho video, Howard Kurtz had this to say:

In all the years I've been chronicling the media, I have rarely seen the tidal wave of resentment that has washed over television organizations that showed the now-infamous Cho video. In the minds of many Americans, this was a horribly offensive act, and no amount of explanation about the obligations of journalism is going to change that view.

There are certainly people who get mad when television airs those periodic Osama bin Laden tapes. There are those who think even a tough interview with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is giving "the enemy" a platform, or that Dan Rather shouldn't have sat down with Saddam on the eve of the Iraq war. But this is different. This is a lunatic who methodically planned mass murder and wanted to live in infamy.

Is Kurtz really implying in all seriousness that Saddam Hussein--the subject of a 1991 essay by Hans Magnus Enzensberger entitled, with very good reason, "Hitler Walks Again" (in English translation, it's in Zig Zag)--was not actually "a lunatic who methodically planned mass murder and wanted to live in infamy"? What a bizarre notion.

Wolfe Eyes

One of my favorite sights in New York is that of a 14- or-15-year-old boy who has just descended from his family's $10 or $12 million apartment and is emerging onto the sidewalks of Park Avenue dressed Hip-Hop head to crotch, walking through a brass-filigreed door held open by a doorman in a uniform that looks like an Austrian army colonel's from 1870.

That's from Tom Wolfe's 2006 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities. We like this image's absurd juxtapositions. We also find it worthwhile to excerpt a couple of other bits from the lecture. Here's his observation on one of the more striking cultural U-turns taken in the last generation:

The attitude young women have toward their own sexual activity, as well as the impression others have of it, has turned 180 degrees in one generation. There was a time when the worst . . . slut . . . for want of a better term . . . maintained a virginal and chaste façade. Today, the most virginal and chaste undergraduate wants to create a façade of sexual experience. One night I was in a college lounge sitting on a sofa that was backed up against a narrow table. Another sofa was backed up likewise on the other side. All at once a voice from the sofa behind me, a boy's voice was saying, "What are you talking about? How could I? We've known each other since before Choate! It would be like incest!" And then I heard the girl say, "Please. Come on. I can't stand the thought of having to do it with somebody I hardly know and can't trust." It turned out that she was beseeching him, her old Platonic friend of years' standing, to please relieve her of her virginity, deflower her. That way she could honestly maintain the proper social stance as an experienced young woman in college.

And then there's his exegesis of John 1:1:

Until there was speech, the human beast could have no religion, and consequently no God. In the beginning was the Word. Speech gave the beast its first ability to ask questions, and undoubtedly one of the first expressed his sudden but insatiable anxiety as to how he got here and what this agonizing struggle called life is all about. To this day, the beast needs, can't live without, some explanation as the basis of whatever status he may think he possesses. For that reason, extraordinary individuals have been able to change history with their words alone, without the assistance of followers, money, or politicians. Their names are Jesus, John Calvin, Mohammed, Marx, Freud--and Darwin. And this, rather than any theory, is what makes Darwin the monumental figure that he is. The human beast does not require that the explanation offer hope. He will believe whatever is convincing.

Preach it, brother.

And Joschka Fischer too

Joschka Fischer's also grooving on the motions of this contemporary mood when, in Tehran, he puts it just so:

From the perspective of the West, the stakes in the nuclear dispute with Iran are very high. A rejection of the current offer will lead to an escalation of the conflict, as the decision in July 2006 of the UN Security Council clearly demonstrates. There is a unified position, held not only by Europe and the United States, but also within the Security Council and by the international community, that the risk of a breakthrough to nuclear weapons by Iran is unacceptable. We had a bitter split within the international community about the question of whether to wage war against Iraq. But Iran’s nuclear ambitions have unified the international community completely.

Let me explain to you our strategic analysis of a possible military nuclearization of Iran. In our assessment, your regional neighbors will not sit on the sidelines and applaud this step, but will also go nuclear. An anti-hegemonial coalition would be the immediate result. But then there would be a nuclear arms race throughout the Middle East, including Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. This would be a nightmare in this very unstable and dangerous region, and I seriously doubt that such an additional destabilization of the region would be in the well-considered security interests of the Islamic Republic of Iran. And the very negative consequences of a nuclear arms race in the Middle East on the level of terrorist and asymmetric threats should also not be underestimated. An openly declared nuclear arms race would therefore change the symmetric and asymmetric balance of power completely, and some of the regional powers, not only Israel, would see such a development as an existential threat.

From a European perspective, such a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, geopolitically speaking our neighbor region, would change our strategic security posture dramatically and force us into a new policy of effective deterrence.

The interests of the other major global players—Russia, China, and India—shouldn’t be misinterpreted. The vital interests of these powers would also be undermined by such a development. Allow me to predict that even in the event of a possible crisis between the Security Council and Iran, the unity of the council would survive.

And allow me to bring another aspect of a possible crisis between Iran and the Security Council to your attention. If there were to be a confrontation between the Security Council and Iran—and may God help us to prevent this from happening—the very future of the multilateral system and of the UN would be at stake. If the Security Council would not be able to solve this conflict, it would have a very negative effect on the whole international institutional framework and indeed threaten the functionality of the multilateral system. I cannot believe that the G77 and even the members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference would accept such a development, because it would infringe upon their basic interests.

We are at a crossroad, and the leadership of Iran must take a decision, perhaps one of historic proportions. Cooperation or confrontation are the alternatives, and, please, don’t blame the messenger for the message.

Again, the garden of forking paths. Again?

More gloom-doominess

Jason Burke's recent piece in The Observer, all dolled up with apocalyptic titling, offers yet another batch of tasty snacks for the dispositional gloom-doomer. Among other juicy bits, the investigation informs us that:

Major co-ordinated attacks on the critical infrastructure of Western nations, such as the Channel Tunnel or passenger jets, are 'within the capability and ambition' of militants close to the al-Qaeda leadership and acting independently and are being actively planned.

Burke adds that:

All [sources consulted] thought the struggle against Islamic terrorism was growing and would last 'many decades'.

Ah, the bright angelic wings of our shiny new millennium, not to mention "the ooze of oil / Crushed."