[lbo-talk] historian objects to being used by Bush

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On 8/24/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> <http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0807/5499.html>
>
> Historian: Bush use of quote 'perverse'
> By: Avi Zenilman
> Aug 23, 2007 04:55 PM EST
<snip>
> A historian quoted by President Bush to help argue that critics of
> the administration's Iraq policy echo those who questioned the U.S.
> effort to bring democracy to Japan after World War II angrily
> distanced himself from the president's remarks Thursday.
>
> "They [war supporters] keep on doing this," said MIT professor John
> Dower. "They keep on hitting it and hitting it and hitting it and
> it's always more and more implausible, strange and in a fantasy
> world. They're desperately groping for a historical analogy, and
> their uses of history are really perverse."
>
> In a speech on Wednesday, Bush quoted "one historian" as suggesting
> that foreign policy experts – and, by implication, critics of Bush's
> approach to Iraq – aren't always right. "An interesting observation,
> one historian put it, 'Had these erstwhile experts' — he was talking
> about people criticizing the efforts to help Japan realize the
> blessings of a free society — he said, 'Had these erstwhile experts
> had their way, the very notion of inducing a democratic revolution
> would have died of ridicule at an early stage.' "
>
> A search of Google books revealed that the "one historian" is Dower.
> The quote is from his book, "Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of
> World War II," which won the National Book Award and the Bancroft
> Prize, among other awards, in 1999.
>
> Dower was decidedly unhappy with his 15 minutes of fame. "I have
> always said as a historian that the use of Japan [in arguing for the
> likelihood of successfully bringing democracy to Iraq] is a misuse of
> history," he said when notified of the Bush quote.
>
> He immediately directed me to a November 2002 New York Times op-ed
> where he outlined 10 reasons why "most of the factors that
> contributed to the success of nation-building in occupied Japan would
> be absent in an Iraq militarily defeated by the United States."
>
> In March 2003, Dower wrote an essay for Boston Review, entitled "A
> Warning From History: Don't Expect Democracy in Iraq."
>
> And what about the specific quote Bush used – that experts on Japan
> were wrong about the country's capability for democracy?
>
> "Whoever pulled that quote out for him [Bush] is very clever," Dower
> said, acknowledging that "if you listen to the experts prior to the
> invasion of Japan, they all said that Japan can't become democratic."
>
> But there are major differences, Dower said. "I'm not being
> misquoted, but I'm being misrepresented."
>
> "In the case of Iraq," Dower said, "the administration went in there
> without any of the kind of preparation, thoughtfulness, understanding
> of the country they were going into that did exist when we went into
> Japan. Even if the so-called experts said we couldn't do it, there
> were years of mid-level planning and discussions before they went in.
> They were prepared. They laid out a very clear agenda at an early date."
>
> White House spokesman Tony Fratto said that Bush used Dower's quote
> "to in no way endorse his view of Iraq, only his view of Japan."
>
> Added Fratto: "While professor Dower may disagree with the
> applicability of the quote, the president in no way endorses his view
> of Iraq."

Why does George W. Bush get away with using occupied Japan as the
mythical ideal for occupied Iraq?  That is in part the fault of John
W. Dower himself and in part the fault of Japanese leftists* in
particular and the people of Japan in general, for both have accepted
the legitimacy of liberal imperialist occupation.

Dower says, in one of his op-eds mentioned in Avi Zenilman's article,
that "By almost all standards, the occupation of defeated Japan was a
remarkable success. A repressive and militaristic society emerged from
occupation to become a viable democracy. Naysayers who declared the
Japanese people to be culturally incapable of self-government were
proved impressively wrong" ("Lessons from Japan about War's
Aftermath," New York Times, 27 October 2002).

Today, Japan is a country whose people enjoy national wealth that is
unattainable anywhere in the Middle East (or the rest of the global
South for that matter), which has bought relative class peace and the
level of personal freedom (not to be confused with political freedom)
unimaginable in poorer nations.  But that is a result of the post-war
bargain (as well as the peculiar history of Japan which made it a
nation much earlier than all other non-Western countries, allowing it
to become a major capitalist power unlike them): the people of Japan
renounce self-government, i.e. democracy, and in return Washington
allows Japan's ruling class to re-develop their industrial base by
using America as their market and the rest of Asia as their
subcontractors.  The key test of the bargain came in 1947, when
Japanese workers threatened it, but the bargain has held, to this
day.**

No, Japan is not a democracy.  The people of Japan lacked republican
virtue, and they still do, and no democracy can be built by people who
trade republican citizenship -- which entails duties as well as rights
of self-government, of which the most foundational is the duty and
right to establish a free state independent of foreign powers -- for
negative freedoms of political liberalism.

Dower, like most people, conflate political liberalism with democracy.

 Democracy, however, is fundamentally at odds with political
liberalism whose vocation is to check it in the interest of a rich
few, so he sees democracy when he sees negative freedoms in Japan.

Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela lack many of the negative freedoms of the
sort available in Japan as well as in all other first-class members of
the US-led multinational empire.  However, they are, unlike Japan,
unquestionably republics, and more democratic than Japan because of
that.

* Japan's post-war leftists defend the occupier's constitution of
Japan more passionately than Washington, and in their consent to
hegemony of the ruling class they are just like leftists who made
tenko, the only difference being the nature of hegemony -- Japanese
imperialism before the end of World War 2 and American imperialism
after it -- to which they have consented.

** Paul Burkett and Martin Hart-Landsberg, "Progressive Capitalism,
Crisis, and Class Struggle: Lessons from Japan's Production Control
and Democracy Movements, 1945-47," Capital and Class, Issue 79 (Spring
2003), <http://www.lclark.edu/~marty/progressivecapitalism.pdf> and
<http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3780/is_200304/ai_n9223659/print>.
-- 
Yoshie