[lbo-talk] Resistance Re: Iraq war "clearer" to Americans than WW 2

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Tue Apr 8 09:56:19 PDT 2003


At 8:38 AM -0700 4/8/03, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>It is totally pointless to blame people for not taking up arms
>against a ruthless tyranny, or even for not resisting it peacefully.
>The White Rose (a Catholic resisatance group) passed out a handful
>of leaflets in Munich; a few weeks later the were all in the hands
>of the Gestapo. The only group that managed to last any length of
>time at all in Germany was the Red Orchestra, and that was because
>they were Communists with proper training, discipline, and
>organization. And even they were rolled up by '42. Most of them
>ended up on the guillotine. There is an excellent movie about The
>White Rose (that is the English title) by the guy who also did The
>Nasty Girl, a based-on-a-true-story film about a Munich girl who
>discovers her friends' and family's complicity with Nazism, and
>isn't, uh, welcomed for her efforts.
>
>When people do resist against these odds, it is heroic: The White
>Rose and the Red Orchestra (among others) have honored places in the
>halls of human dignity. But no one is obligated to be a hero. Now,
>there's a difference between not being a hero and turning the
>Goldblatts in to the SS, of course; for that, see Ophuls' scathing
>The Sorrow and the Pity (about French collaborationism).
>
>If you go to Berlin, check out the immensely moving Museum of the
>Resistance (Museum der Widerstand), in the former Wehrmacht High
>Command (OKW) offices near the Tiergarten; it is three or four
>floors of detailed and individualised exhibits about the many heroic
>Germans who resisted and mostly died. The courtyard is where the
>Nazis hanged von Stauffenberg and the nobler of the July
>conspirators; when I was there in the mid-90s, people had left
>wreaths on the site of the gallows, which is marked by a plaque.

I've always wished, though, that the history of Japan had contained a chapter such as this:

***** The contribution of Italian anti-Fascist partisans to the campaign in Italy in World War II has long been neglected. These patriots kept as many as seven German divisions out of the line. They also obtained the surrender of two full German divisions, which led directly to the collapse of the German forces in and around Genoa, Turin, and Milan.

These actions pinned down the German armies and led to their complete destruction. Throughout northern Italy, partisan brigades in the mountains and clandestine action groups in the cities liberated every major city before the arrival of combat units of Fifteenth Army Group, a mixture of American, British, French, and Commonwealth divisions, to which was added a smattering of Royalist Italians.

<http://www.cia.gov/csi/studies/spring98/OSS.html> *****

In contrast:

***** Janice Matsumura. More than a Momentary Nightmare: The Yokohama Incident and Wartime Japan. (Cornell East Asia Series, number 92.) Ithaca: Cornell University East Asia Program. 1998. Pp. vi, 172. Cloth $22.00, paper $14.00.

How vigorously did ordinary Japanese resist their government's policies at the height of World War II? And how effective were the Japanese state's techniques of controlling thought and expression on the home front? In both cases, the answer is less than one might expect, according to Janice Matsumura. Her well-researched, clearly written monograph addresses these questions by focusing on the arrest and eventual prosecution of several dozen journalists and policy researchers, starting in September 1942, for allegedly violating the revised Peace Preservation Law of 1941 or conspiring to revive the outlawed Japan Communist Party.

Matsumura argues persuasively that this episode, known since the war as the Yokohama Incident, was not a simple case of press censorship by an all-powerful thought police. Instead, the targets were not only journalists but also certain well-connected researchers who had recently renounced leftist positions and now professed to support the wartime imperial government. The researchers, some of whom were linked to the elite Showa Research Association that advised the first Konoe cabinet in 1937-1939, suffered especially harsh treatment, although two years later the police renewed the pressure on journalists by shutting down several hard-hitting monthlies and harassing major publishers....

<http://www.historycoop.org/cgi-bin/justtop.cgi?act=justtop&url=http://www.historycoop.org/journals/ahr/105.4/br_13.html> *****

Cf. Janice Matsumura: <http://www.sfu.ca/history/matsumura.htm>. -- Yoshie

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