>It's sure encouraging to know that people at Berkeley read so
>carefully. Every time I encounter something like this I marvel that
>I didn't get tenure at a good school. The standards are obviously
>not high.
>
>The quoted passage occurred as part of a paragraph _defending_ the
>United States' defense against attack in the Pacific war. I
>_expressly_ said (twice, since Shane also missed it!) that the war
>was imperialist but justified by just war theory, and that a victory
>for democratic imperialism was preferable to a victory for
>quasi-fascist Japonese imperialism. I pointed out that virtually all
>socialists at the time of every stripe felt the same way, and most
>of military age signed up to fight.
Who is it who can't read? I wrote "you're wrong that "Pearl Harbor" made WW II in the Pacific anything but an imperialist slaughter on both sides. " in reply to your claim that the imperialist war was "justified by just war theory" and that you regarded US victory as "preferable." My point was that a deliberately provoked attack is no sort of justification and that the two imperialist rivals were *equally* engaged in slaughter. As to your claim that "virtually all" socialists supported the imperialist slaughter in the Pacific, I can assure you that *no* socialist in the tradition of the Third International (I exclude Stalinists, of course) supported the war against Japan whether or not they supported defense of the Stalinized "Soviet Union" against Hitler.
I might add that many bourgeois Asian nationalists, from the great Subhas Chandra Bose, to the Burmese Thakins, to the great Aguinaldo, to many Indonesians, and even to such a significant Chinese nationalist as Wang Chin-wei, supported Japanese imperialism against its Anglo-French- Netherlandic-American imperialist rivals.
Shane Mage
"Thunderbolt steers all things."
Herakleitos of Ephesos, fr. 64
>
>Now we will see who is the next PhD who can't read. jks
>
>Brad DeLong <delong at econ.Berkeley.EDU> wrote:
>
> >The war against Japan was an imperialist war plain and simple,
>>between two imperiali powers;
>
>
>China views it very differently. The near-genocide Japan perpetrated
>on China during WWII approached (but did not match) what the Nazis
>tried to do to the Russians. The Japanese fascist state was an
>extremely ugly thing. I am surprised that so many people avert their
>gaze from it.
>
>Brad DeLong
>
>
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