------------------------------------
It should be easy to see why I prefer the comparision with Imperial Japan rather than Nazi Germany. It is not that there is any substantive logical difference between the road these two countries took in comparision with the one the US is on today (and has been since before Bush, BTW). There is none, and the comparision with Nazi Germany is logically valid. But it is not simply that one can conveniently avoid the tactical cul-de-sac of argument "ad Hitlerium", but also that Imperial Japan's fascist rampage both unfolded over a longer period of time, and that the "fascist fringe" always, throughout the entire period, remained in immanant, "protofascistic" form, never taking the whole power into its own hands as in Italy and Germany, and never significantly disturbing the traditional institutional structure of the social order, left instead to function intact with the Emperor at the center, as it was designed to do by Ito Hirobumi in the 1880's, until the very end. One can finally add to this an eminentlly racist point: the vast majority of Imperial Japan's vivtims were neither European or Jewish, puncturing the attitude of "offense taken" at the suggestion that one could ever be as evil as the Nazis, or so evil as to slaughter "one's own".
The seemingly haphazard, unplanned and "accidental", even chaotic dynamic by which Imperial Japan's war drive unfolded over time, although characteristic of all fascist regimes, is also a better fit with today's American situation.
It would be much more difficult for the neocons to refute comparisions with Imperial Japan, even down to the detail of the "conspiracy nut" notion that fanatics in the Japanese Army dynamited the Manchurian Railway in 1932 that set off the whole sequence of military adventures in Asia. Yet even Japanese textbooks today admit that "the Manchurian Incident" was the work of Army fanatics itching for war with China.
That is one reason I am so interested in Japan as a way of see how the USA proceeds "forward", aside from the historical irony of the fact that the central financial institutions of the same country are today the chief bankroller of the Coalition of the Willing's war drive. As such, it renders the war drive possible in a very real, immediate way.
Embedded Fascism, anyone?