The Myopia of Anglo-American Rulers: How They Can’t Face Their Loss to the “Eurasian Miracle”

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Bruce Lerro
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The Myopia of Anglo-American Rulers: How They Can’t Face Their Loss to the “Eurasian Miracle”

International Relations (IR) theory fails to deliver on one of its key promises, specifically to produce positivist, value free analysis. What we encounter in the vast majority of international theory is the provincial or parochial normative purpose of defending and celebrating the ideal of the West in world politics. IR theory can no longer be represented as positivist, objective or value free.

—John M. Hobson

Orientation
In 1981, Eric Jones wrote a very powerful book called The European Miracle: Environments, Economies and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia. He was not alone in claiming there was something unique about Europe compared to the rest of the world. Though I doubt it was his intention, his work perhaps unintentionally supported a Eurocentric, paternalistic, racist orientation of a Wren theory which claimed to explain world politics. This is called International Relations Theory which claimed to be positivist, objective and value free. International relations theory is so deeply embedded in Western triumphalism that it has failed to notice that the West has been losing to China, Russia and Iran for the last 20 to 30 years. International relations theory barely understands that this has happened and it has no theory to explain it. What we are witnessing today is a “Eurasian Miracle.”

The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics, I point out a good reason for this is because of the Eurocentric nature of Neocon Realists, Neoliberal Globalists and Liberal Institutionalists theory. However, Hobson’s criticism of Eurocentrism does not stop there. He argues that even left-wing theories like constructionism and world-systems theory are guilty of Eurocentrism. Eurocentrism, not only because it takes different forms, but that some of these are even anti-imperialist. The conventional contrast of a Eurocentric or racist conception of imperialism from a constructivist and Marxist point of view is too simple and Eurocentrism is too deep.

What is Eurocentrism?
Hobson’s claim that there two steps in Eurocentric big-bang theory of world politics:

Europeans single-handedly created a European capitalist international state system through their pioneering and exceptional institutional genius.
They export their civilization to remake the world in their own image through globalization, imperialism or hegemony.
To add to this, Eurocentrism claims the Eastern and Southern part of the world had no independent status. There was no East or South big bang. In the West the various movements of the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation the scientific revolution, capitalism, the Enlightenment, the industrial revolution or socialism were purely Western. The East and South either helped out or they were left behind. With rare exceptions. Eastern and Southern parts of the world system never led Western development.

What is paternalism?
Historians of the modern West sought to explain social evolution. In doing so, they divided societies into three stages:

barbarism (horticultural and agricultural states) and
civilization—industrial capitalist societies

Supposedly Europeans hoped that all societies would want to become civilized. But when societies of the East and South did not aspire to this, they were labelled either savages or barbarians. However, some historians and anthropologist thought it was their duty (white man’s burden) for the savages and barbarians to see the light. This led to paternalism.

An example of well-intentioned paternalist Eurocentrism: Rawls
John Rawls believed that his liberal vision had genuinely universalist criteria and it did not offend cultural sensibilities of non-Western people. He was interested in culturally converting Eastern people rather than containing them as in Western liberal realism.

Yet there are five key Eurocentric dimensions of his theory:

All well-ordered hierarchical societies must exhibit a separation of church and state (this will not work for Muslims).
Imposition of free trade (free trade can only work with wealthy societies).
Governed by a liberal law of peoples (teaching Eastern women to have less babies won’t work if they are being blocked by the IMF and the World bank from industrializing.
Eastern states receive only conditional sovereignty because they are classified as despotic states and “failed” states are deemed uncivilized.
Developed societies have a duty to assist burdened societies (paternalism).

Hobson’s claims

Hobson’s explicit claims are first that International Relations Theory contains six myths:

the theoretical great traditions myth.

Hobson’s 2^nd claim is there are six types of imperialism which are laid out over 250 years. His third claim is that Western racism was not always triumphant but was based on fear of what would become of Europe if Easterners and Southerners of the world got the upper hand. Lastly, I close out with theories that are exceptions to the rule and are not Eurocentric or paternalistic and with a minimum of racism.

Hobson’s implicit claim is that without “the rest” there might be no West. The West was not an early, but a late development. This topic will be covered in my future article based on another of Hobson’s books, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization.

Six Eurocentric Myths of International Relations Theory
Hobson tells us the conscious or unconscious moral purpose of IR is to be a defender and promoter of Western Civilization. The key of disciplinary assumptions that are presently revered as self-evident truths really are largely Eurocentric myths. As stated above, these include the above myths.

The noble identity foundation myth: Whig and progress theory of history
International Relations Theory has embedded in a Whig an interpretation of its intellectual history. Whiggish means that the past is reorganized to make it seem that the present was the only possible passage that could have led to contemporary life. The Whig theory of history has the theory of progress embedded in it. The theory of progress claims that the later in time we go in social evolution the better societies get in material wealth, less labor, higher morality and happiness.

It is a now conventional assumption that the discipline of International Relations was born in 1919. Supposedly, it had a moral purpose to finding ways to solve the universal problem of war. This now conventional view was originally constructed by E.H. Carr in his classical text The Twenty Year’s Crisis(1946).

Contrary to this convention, IR theory did not appear all of a sudden after WW I out of the head of Zeus. It continued from its pre-1914 roots which were neither positive, objective nor value free. Rather they were paternalist, Eurocentric and intentionally or unintentionally racist. There are deep continuities that the 1919-1945 period of international theory has with the pre-1914 period of international theory. The Eurocentric racism and paternalism that underpinned it had been forged in the previous century. In addition, there is a continuum of imperialism that goes all the way back to the middle of the 18^th century. Thirdly, there was an explosion of anti-colonial resistance. What were colonists resisting – those noble Western powers that colonialized them. In this larger scheme of things, the end of World War I was not the only game in town. As positivists, what Neocon realists and liberal globalists ignore is that the noble identity myth can also be a ideological justification for Eurocentrism, capitalism, racism and imperialism. The four stages are of Hobsons history if International relations include:

1760-1914 Manifest Eurocentrism and scientific racism
1914-1945 Manifest Eurocentrism and scientific racism
1945-1989 Subliminal Eurocentrism
1989-2010 Manifest Eurocentrism

The positive myth of IR of theory of liberalism as emerging between the wars

This myth was that the between the wars IR theory was dominated by liberal globalists who searched for a new cooperative global order as a reaction to the Neocon realism of World War I. It was characterized as a harmonious and optimistic theory because it stands for peace. But as Hobson points out, interwar international theory was not monopolized by idealism or liberalism because it also exhibited a vibrant racism realist stream that emerged after 1889, especially in the world of geopolitical theorists, Ratzel, Mackinder, Mahan and others.

IR claims to be positivist with a value free epistemological base. This has been challenged by African-American Marxists Ralph Bunche, WEB Dubois and CLR James. They say that when viewed through a non-European lens, the vast majority of international theory produces a parochial or provincialanalysis of the West that can masquerade as if it were universal. Further, the imperialist aspect of interwar idealist theory has not been widely noticed among modern IR scholars. Realist and so-called Liberal Idealists were united by the concern to restore the mandate of Western civilizational hegemony in one guise of another.

The great debate myth and reconceptualizing the idea of the clash of IR theories

These debates include the controversy between realism and idealism in the interwar period between history and scientism in the 1960s and between positivists and post-positivists in the 1990s. The first two appear as if these were great qualitative struggles, but like with Republicans and Democrats in Mordor, all parties have far more in common than they have in differences. The struggle between positivists and post-positivists are real but it are presented in too stark a manner. There were post-positivists as far back as the 1960s and those political scientists who were more statistical and quantitative also go back to the 50s and 60s. In other words that debate did not begin in the 1990s as IR theorists claim but thirty years earlier. In spite of these differences, there is consensus of virtually all parties concerning the politics of defending and celebrating Western civilization in world politics. These theories supported the Western powers. Their differences were small compared to the paternalism, racism and imperialism that they all shared.

Sovereignty vs anarchy myth
The sovereignty vs anarchy myth claims that in International Relations Theory all states are sovereign. But because there is no world-state the relations between nation-states are characterized as anarchistic. In the first place, IR theory limits which nation-states are considered sovereign to European countries. Eastern and Southern states are not considered sovereign because they lack the proper Western European credentials such as voting systems, more than one party, and capitalism. The school of Realism operates with universalist analytical principles that supposedly apply to all states regardless of how 2^nd class some states are treated in practice. The problem for IR theorists is that the post the 1648 era there had been a proliferation of international imperial hierarchies, which were comprised of a series of single sovereign colonial powers, many of which were not nation-states. Its supposedly universal and ideologically unbiased principles of state-centrism sovereignty directly contradict its practice. For example, in 1878 the conference in Berlin divided Africa between European imperial powers. These sovereign states had colonies.

Furthermore if by anarchy they mean disorder, the relationship between sovereign states without a world state is by no means disorderly. There are shifting alliances between states rather than a Hobbesian war of all single states against each other. Secondly, to characterize this disorder as “anarchy” reveals either complete political bias or ignorance of anarchism as a respectable political tendency on the socialist left. Anarchism has involved thousands of people in many countries around the world since the late 1840s. It has had some success in the Paris Commune, the Russian and especially the Spanish revolutions. To characterize this as disorderly is an unforgivable omission from theorists who claim to be political scientists.

The globalization myth
The myth is that globalization has only recently (the last century) become an issue for international theorists. But to Hobson’s own surprise in his initial research, in many areas including some though not all realists, international theorists since 1760 have placed considerable emphasis on globalization. In his book The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization, Hobson points out that there were globalizing trade networks of, Africa, West Asia, India and China as far back as 500 CE.

The theoretical great traditions myth
IR theorists are no different than those who initiate artistic or spiritual movements in their search for origins. All political, artistic or spiritual movements seek to find their origins in the deep past rather than the recent past. In the IR traditional textbooks realism is claimed to go back to Thucydides in the ancient world and then forward to Hobbes and Machiavelli to culminate in Waltz, Gilpin and Mearsheimer via Carr and Morgenthau. But each of these theories are not air-tight. In fact IR theories mix with other theories within a given moment in time and each theory changes internally due to changes in history.

Defining Imperialism and Anti-imperialism International Theory
Hobson claims that the vast literature on imperialism and anti-imperialism generally lacks conceptual precision. Here Hobson confront two broad definitional approaches:

Narrow Eurocentric
Expansive postcolonial

Most of modern Eurocentric international theory embraces a narrow definition and allows for considerable wiggle room when confronted with a charge of imperialism. It sees Eurocentrism and imperialism as distinct. You can be Eurocentric and not imperialist and conversely imperialist without being Eurocentric. At the other extreme, by contrast, post-colonial theorists seek to completely shut down this wiggle room by assuming that being Eurocentric is inherently imperialist and imperialism is always Eurocentric.

In table 1 I have a divided a spectrum of imperialism throughout history into 6 types. The three types on the left accept that they are imperialists and don’t apologize for it. The theories on the right deny they are imperialists. The theories on the left are formal empires, while the theories on the right are informal liberal empires. The people in the last cell are the theorists of various types of imperialism. The cell above it include the nature and justification of their mission. The names of the theorists are not important for now, but some of the more famous ones might be familiar to you. The importance of this table are not the theorists but rather the systems of justification, none of which are value free, universal and objective.

Table 1 The Definitional Continuum of Imperialism, Past and Present

Definitional Consensus Most coercive definition Accept they are imperialists	Definitional Controversy Least coercive definition Deny they are imperialists
Formal Empire	Informal liberal empire

Tributary relations, political containment conquest of barbarism

National civilizing mission/cultural
conversion

Civilizing mission, via international government
protectorates

Anglo-Saxon hegemony

To protect, duty to prevent, duty to assist concept of democracies

Universalization

of Western civilization and global empire of liberal democratic peace

Gumplowicz, Ward, Mahan
Mackinder,
K. Pearson, Hitler, Von Treitschke, Kidd, Spykman
Haushofer

Cobden, Bright, Angell, Mill, Marx, Reinsch,
W.Wilson

Hobson, Buell, Woolf
Krasner, Fukuyama

Gilpin
Kindleberger Kagan, Brzezinski,
Cooper, Ignatieff

Slaughter, Ikenberry, Wheeler, Risse, Finnermore Rawls, Held
Nussbaum

Friedman, Wolf, Russet, Owen

Eurocentric Imperialism: Liberal and Marxism

In Table 2 below, one interesting but expected difference between liberalism and Marxism is that liberals see imperialism as benign. J. A. Hobson and John Stuart Mill see imperialism is benign at an international level, but Cobden, Bright and Angell see imperialism as benign at a national level. The fact that Marxists thinks imperialism as coerced rather than benign should not come as a surprise to anyone. Traditional International Relations Theory sees liberal internationalism and classical Marxism as the antithesis of imperialism. However, John Hobson’s main point is what Marxism and liberals have in common. They all agree that:

The East can be characterized as “barbaric oriental despotism”
The capitalist peripheral countries (Third world) are savage, anarchistic societies residing in a domestic state of nature
Western agency is always pioneering, learning nothing from the rest of the world
Eastern agency even at its best is conditional, always learning from the West

It is these four points that show how deep Eurocentrism of all Western theories, even Marxism. These are the type of deep assumptions, hundreds of years old the keep Western theorists of world politics that the BRICS world of the East is bypassing them.

Table 2Paternalistic, Eurocentric. Institutional Imperial Concepts of World Politics

Marxism	Left Liberal	Liberal
Marx	Mill and Hobson	Cobden, Bright, Angell
Coercednational civilizing mission	Benigninternational mission	Benign national mission
East as barbaric Oriental Despotism	East as barbaric Oriental Despotism	East as barbaric Oriental Despotism
South as savage—3^rd world anarchistic societies residing in a domestic state of nature	South as savage—3^rd world anarchistic societies residing in a domestic state of nature	South as savage—3^rd world anarchistic societies residing in a domestic state of nature
Pioneering Western agency	Pioneering Western agency	Pioneering Western agency
Conditional Eastern agency	Conditional Eastern agency	Conditional Eastern agency

Here are some further examples of Eurocentrism. In the 19^th century, even when IR theory was sensitive to interdependence, it wasn’t world interdependence. Rather it was interdependence among the civilized states of Europe. Outside of Europe there was no recognition of interdependence. Eastern societies only got recognition once they became colonies or only if these countries were at war with Europe. It is something like calling the ultimate baseball playoffs “the World Series” even when it only includes the United States.

At the same time, the Eurocentrists had no problem imagining war with the East if it was profitable. But when it came to the civilized states of Europe, war was seen as unprofitable. Also, as we shall see later, racist theories bemoaned Europeans fighting because this would result in the depletion of the white race. Colonial annexation was entirely appropriate when it came to Europe’s relation with the East. The East has conditional agency, such as Japan during World War II. However, the East cannot take the lead in historical development without being predator (as in the Yellow Peril).

As for the Global South, (Africa) for it to be a respectable civilized state, Western core countries took a page out of Calvinism and insisted that these “savage societies” have a duty to develop their land productivity (meaning agriculturally) and abandon their primitivism (hunting and gathering). Non-Western politics, whether they be monarchies without constitutions or the egalitarian political consensus societies of hunting and gathering, are not recognized as sovereign. It was representative bourgeois state politics that was the “civilized” norm. As late as 1993 Paul Johnson said most African states are not fit to govern themselves. Their continued existence and the violence of human degradation they bring are a threat to the stability and peace as well as an affront to our moral sense. As of today Zionist Israel has massacred over 200,000 Palestinians. Yet there is no call from the United Nations (controlled by the West) to intervene in this “failed state”.

European imperialists hide their protectionist policies. As Friedrich List remarked, once imperialists have attained their summit of greatness, they kick away the ladder by which they climbed up in order to deprive others of the means of climbing up afterwards behind them.

Both the US and Britain industrialized on the back of extremely protectionist regimes and only turned to free trade once they arrived at the top of the global economic hierarchy. Thus, the imposition of free trade on developing countries by Britain after 1846 and the US after 1945 prevents Third World states from using tariffs to protect the infant industries. The projection of “free trade” by Americans…constitute an economic containment strategy to keep the Third World down.

A Century of Marxist Eurocentrism
Karl Marx’s paternal Eurocentrism and the political necessity of the Western civilizing mission
Marx appears to have had little appreciation for the complexity of ancient Chinese and Indian civilizations. For him China and India were the home of “Oriental Despotism”. The East could only be emancipated from its backwardness by the British colonialists. India stands outside world history and China was understood as a rotting semi-civilization. Believe it or not, for Marx, opium wars were emancipatory for China. Without British intervention there would be no future emancipatory socialist revolution. Imperialism was an instrument for both political progress and a requirement of global primitive accumulation. Was the result of British colonization Chinese emancipation? No, it was a century of Chinese humiliation (1839-1949). The imperialist engagement with China did not lead to order but to massive social-dislocation. The various Chinese revolutions were in part stimulated by a reaction against the encounter with the West.

For Marx and Engels, the East could belatedly jump aboard the Western developmental plane as Hobson says as “The Oriental Express”. It could participate in the construction of world history. But they could never lead the train in a progressive direction. They only had conditional agency. The Western states on the other hand had hyper-sovereignty. Sadly, Hobson says there hasn’t been much effort to reconstruct Marx’s theory along non-Eurocentric lines in traditional Marxism.

Lenin has no theory of Eastern emancipation
According to Hobson, Lenin says the East is inherently incapable of self-development. Lenin discusses how the period of free competition within Europe was succeeded after 1873 with the rise of cartels which intensified after 1903 into full-fledged monopoly capital and finance capital. But the causes of the crisis lay in the West whether underconsumption (Hobson) or the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (Marx and Engels). There was no mention of resistance in the colonies. Lenin discussed the right of self-determination of nations, but those nations would never influence the West or provide leadership.

World-systems theory
Wallerstein
Immanuel Wallerstein was heavily criticized by Robert Brenner and other classical Marxists for overstating the interdependence of trade and hierarchy between societies and understating the class struggle within societies. But he maintains his traditional Marxian orientation in emphasizing the dynamics for the evolution of the world-system clearly in the Western part of the world. The West represents the civilized world, the core countries. The second division in the world is occupied by the regressive redistributive world empires in Asia. Division three of the world system is occupied by primitive reciprocal mini-systems found in North America, parts of Africa and Australasia (savage societies in the 19^th century parlance).

World-empires mainly in Asia saw their state structures weakened while their boundaries underwent a forced contraction and the surviving mini-systems of North American, Caribbean and Australia underwent wholesale destruction.

Arrighi and Chase-Dunn

Other world-systems theorists like Giovanni Arrighi and Christopher Chase Dunn suggested that the world-system didn’t consist of just a core and a periphery but consisted of a semi-periphery which may or may not be Western. They argued that when core Western countries experienced crisis and decline, it was the semi-periphery countries that provided a new resource which allowed them to become a new core.

Exceptions to the rule Gunder Frank, Abu-Lughod

To be fair, both a sympathizer and an arch-critic of World-Systems theory, Andre Gunder Frank accused Wallerstein of Eurocentrism in his writings culminating in hisbook Re-Orient: Global Economy in the Asian Age. The work of Janet Anu-Lughod Before European Hegemony was so very powerful in showing the advanced state of non-Western trade networks between 1250 and 1350 CE.

Exceptions to the Rule Outside of Marxism: James Watson

The Evolution of International Societymoves from the Italian city-state system and then proceeds with the emergence of sovereignly at the Westphalia conference by way of the Renaissance and the Reformation to arrive at the balance of power in 1713 at Utrecht. Yet he does talk about Eastern developments as reacting back on Europe as in a dialectical way. What the East contributed from the West included:

Industrialization, centerpiece of “British genius” was significantly enabled by Chinese innovations that stem back several millenniums.

Further, Watson analyzes in considerable detail many non-Western political formations prior to 1648.

Western Fear of Eastern and Southern Power

Most interesting is that many anti-imperialist racists argue against imperialism because it brings the white race in racially fatal conflict with the contaminating influences of non-white races. The impossibility of Eastern progressive development renders the Western civilizing mission all but futile.

Charles Henry Pearson: the decline of white supremacy and the barbaric rise of the yellow peril
National Life and Character, a Forecast. He argued that white racial supremacy was being superseded by very high levels of predatory Eastern agency. But in Pearson’s racist imagination it is the white West that has been fated to remain within its stationary limits while the yellow races are destined to expand and triumph over the higher whites. The barbaric threat also came from within as a result of the socialist states’ preference to prop up the unfit white working classes and from without via the Yellow Peril were all leading to deterioration.

James Blair and David Jordan

Jordan’s defensive social Darwinist racism was a pacifist’s eugenics. It had three components:

The white race cannot survive in the tropics.

It serves to affect a degeneration of the physical and intellectual energy of the Europeans. He gives an example of that as the Philippines lie in the heat of the torrid zone which he called natures asylum for degeneration. Benjamin Kidd argued though we in Europe have the greatest food-producing regions of the earth, we want to administer the tropic from a distance. The white races needed to wake up because the tropics will lure them to their death. Kidd wanted to absolve the West of its home-grown liberal imperial guilt syndrome. His key concern about colonizing the tropics was the degenerative impact that the climate would have on white imperialists.

The second anti-imperialist argument concerned the perils of immigration.

The Oriental is of the past. They have not progressed for centuries. The Easterner hates progress. He contends that the constitution of China is said to not have been changed for thousands of years. On the other hand, the West is progressive, energetic and intolerant of the very thing which is the East’s most marked characteristic, indolence. The two races should never amalgamate.

Anti-war because the fittest white people would get killed

Jordan argues that warfare selects the best or fittest elements of the civilized white race to go out and fight, but in so doing leads to a reduction in the numbers of the fittest element as they lose their lives in futile colonial wars. Meanwhile the infirm and cowardly and feckless stay home, away from the battlefield. Some defensive racists were against the war between white countries so they could preserve white unity.

To summarize the threat from the East:

Domestic white barbaric threat – unfit working class
Racist interbreeding threat – contamination
Tropical climatic threat
Threat of European wars depleting the white race

The crisis of Western self-doubting and deep anxiety was reflected in a host of books which included:

Spengler’s Decline of the West (European Institutionalist) (1919,1932)
Madison Grant’s the Passing of the White Race (1918)
Lothrop Stoddard The Rising Tide of Color Against White Supremacy (1920)
Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents (1930)

Stoddard

Eurocentrism and racism do not always deny non-white race’s agency. The climax of eugenics reflected not the moment of supreme white confidence but an acute sense of anxiety regardless of the future hegemony of the white race. For Stoddard, globalization is a real threat. The greatest threat to white racial existence lies

in colored immigration problem
a demographic explosion

The white races are under siege and disunited within their inner sanctum excavated by the Trojan horse of Western liberalism. Stoddard takes the notion of predatory Eastern agency beyond Mahan and Mackinder. He wants to call out the hubris of the white race. He is nervous and panicked about the Japanese victory over the white Russians in 1905. Further, rise of communism dealt a cruel blow to white racial unity. He is afraid of the white wars in which the best white stock would be lost on the battlefields. The white need to retreat from their imperial bases in Asia and leave the land to yellow and brown rule.

Madison Grant

Racialist Madison Grant

Grant claimed colonialism weakens the white races. The Nordic race is unable to survive south of the line of latitude on white Virginia because of the detrimental impact of the hot climate. Nordics must keep away from the native population for fear of racial contamination from the sun’s actinic rays. Grant says the rapid decline in the birthrate of native white Americans is gradually withdrawing from the scene, abandoning to these aliens the land which they once conquered and developed. The man of the old stock is being crowded out.

Patrick Moynihan
In Patrick Moynihan book Pandemonium, he explores a Malthusian logic in predicting the demographic doomsday scenario at the hands of the Eastern Hordes as does Paul Kennedy in his book Preparing for the 21^st Century. For them, the greatest challenge to world order in the coming century is the rising relative demographic gap between West and East. Western civilizations will have stable or declining populations and would be swamped by the East and the South. While Malthus in his day did not prevent a rising demographic to Europe from the East, by the late 19^th and early 20^thcenturies these became a staple of much of racist Western thought.

Huntington and Lind on demographics
In the work of Huntington and Lind a close parallel can be drawn between their work and the racist imperialist thinker Mahan. But an even closer link can be found with CH Pearson’s National Life and Character, a Forecast; Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy(1920); Clashing Tides of Color (1935). In Huntington’s book The Clash of Civilizations (1996). The roots of the barbaric threat that the Chinese and Muslims pose for the Western Civilization are located within a neo-Malthusian framework. It begins with the Eastern population explosion. This surplus population is problematic because it will seek to flood into the heartlands of the West.

For Huntington and Lind, non-Western societies were increasingly becoming the movers and shakers of their own history and of Western history. This meant in their ability to economically develop as well as resist imperialism. Lind writes that with the break-up of the Soviet “empire” the West’s great right flank will almost certainly be endangered as the Islamic republics will seek to join their Muslim brothers. Islam will be at the gates of Vienna as either immigrants or terrorists. Domestically multiculturalism in the West today is a “political virus” for it serves to boost the vitality of foreign cultures within the West.

Conclusion
The purpose of this article is to expose the theoretical blockages to the West’s understanding that they are being left beyond by the multipolar world of BRICS.

First, their Western International Relations Theory history has hardly been a positivist value free theory. It oozes Eurocentrism, paternalism, racism and imperialism. Secondly International Relations Theory only dimly perceives that these theories are not 100 years deep, starting after World War I, but have a 250 year history as Table 3 below shows. Thirdly, table 3 shows over 50 theorists over that 250 years, thus cementing a deep ideological commitment to “the rise of the West”. Those international theorists who have really understood that the East and the South are not merely passive recipients of the wisdom of the West but are themselves innovators. These theorists are isolated and could be counted on two hands.

Table 3 Eurocentrism, Paternalism and Racism in International Theory 1760-2010

1760-1914 Manifest Eurocentrism	Paternalism Cobden/ Bright, Angell, Hobson, Mill, Marx	Ant-paternalism Smith, Kant
Scientific racism	Offensive racism Ward, Reinsch, Kidd, Mahan, Mackinder and von Treitschke	Defensive Racism Spencer, Sumner, Blair, Jordan, CH Pearson, Ripley, Brinton
1914-1945 Manifest Eurocentrism	Paternalism Wolff, Zimmern, Murray, Angell	Anti-paternalism Subliminal Eurocentrism Laski/ Brailsford, Lenin, Bukharin
Scientific racism	Offensive Racism	Defensive racism
Wilson, Buell, Kjellen, Spykman, Haushofer, Hitler	Stoddard, Grant, E. Huntington
1945-1989 Subliminal Eurocentrism	Paternalism Gilpin, Keohane Walz, Bull, Watson	Anti-Paternalism Carr, Morgenthau
1989-2010 Manifest Eurocentrism	Paternalist Rawls, Held, Nussbaum, Fukuyama	Anti-paternalist World-system theory, Cox
Offensive Eurocentrism Kagan, Cooper, Ferguson	Defensive Eurocentrism SP Huntington, Lind

Below is the Conventional linear narrative of Liberal great tradition:

From 1760 to 1816 there is classical liberal internationalism of Smith, Kant and Ricardo.
From 1830 to 1913 classical liberal internationalism continues in the work of Cobden, Bright, JS Mill and Angell.
Between 1900 to 1945 the emphasis switches to interdependence theory of liberal institutionalism of Hobson, Wilson, Zimmerman and Murray.
Between 1989 and 2010 liberal cosmopolitanism is embodied in the theories of Fukuyama, Held and Rawls.

The Table 4 below shows Hobson’s very different breakdown of liberalism, calling it “paternalistic imperial liberalism”.

Table 4 Hobson’s history in international Liberalism

1830-1919	1860-1919	1900-1939	1914-1939	1960-1989	1989-2010	1989-2010
Liberal imperialism	Liberal Imperialists	International Imperialists	International Imperialists	Statist liberals	Liberal cosmopolitan	Realist liberals
Cobden, Bright Mill, Angell, Robertson	Dike, Seeley Ritchie Ireland, Bagehot	Wilson, Buell Jordon	Hobson Zimmerman Angell Murray	Bull, Watson, Keohane	Rawls, Fukuyama, Held Nussbaum	Ikenberry Slaughter Cooper Ignatieff
Manifest Paternalist Eurocentrism	Offensive Racism	Oppressive Racism	Manifest Paternalist Eurocentrism	Subliminal Paternalist Eurocentrism	Manifest Paternalist Eurocentrism	Manifest Paternalist Eurocentrism

Table 5 shows that history of realism has also been filled with political activity about as far from positivism as one can imagine.

Table 5 Hobson’s history of international realism

Racist realism	Racist cultural realism	Classical realism	Neorealism	Western realism	Western liberal realism	Cultural Realism
Mahan Mackinder von Treitischke Spykman Haushoter Hitler	CH Pearson Stoddard, Grant	Carr Morgenthau	Gilpin Kindleberger Kennedy Krasner	Kaplan Brzezinski Ferguson	Kagan, Krautammer Bootk	Huntington Lind
Explicit Imperialism	Anti-imperialism	Anti-imperialism	Implicit Neo-imperialism	Explicit Neo-imperialism	Explicit Neo-Imperialism	Explicit Anti-imperialism
Offensive racism	Defensive Racism	Subliminal Eurocentrism	Subliminal Paternalist Eurocentrism	Offensive Eurocentrism	Part- Paternalist Part offensive Eurocentrism	Defensive Eurocentrism
1889-1945	1889-1945	Post 1945	Post 1973.	Post 1989	Post 1989	Post 1989

Lastly Hobson charts the history of Marxism from 1840 to post 1989.

With classical Marxism of Marx and Engels between 1840-1895. Hobson calls it explicit imperialism which is paternalist Eurocentrism.
Between 1910 and the 1920s classical Marxism continues with the work of Lenin, Luxemburg, Hilferding and Bukharin which Hobson characterizes as anti-imperialist, but a subliminal anti-paternalist Eurocentrism.
Between 1967 and 1989 although World-Systems Theory differs from classical Marxism with its emphasis on conflicts between states more than class struggles within states, it shares the same combination of anti-imperialist, subliminal, anti-paternalist Eurocentrism of the Marxists of 1910-1920. The same is true for Robert Cox’s Gramscian hegemony theory.
In the post 1989 period we find in the work of Giovanni Arrighi and Christopher Chase-Dunn a continuation of anti-imperialist, anti-paternalist emphasis on Europe, but both are more willing to grant autonomy to non-Western countries. If Eastern or Southern countries occupy what both call the capitalist semi-periphery of the world system. Arrighi’s last book was called Adam Smith in Beijing, showing his interest in China as the new global hegemon
In the same period It is in the work of Andre Gunder Frank and Janet Abu-Lughod that we finally theories that challenge any Eurocentrism or paternalism. Gunder Frank has always contended that World Systems Theory is Eurocentric and claims, as Hobson argues in another book that Europe only surpassed China after 1800. His book Re-Orient claims, correctly I think that the new Asian Age is on the horizon.

ADDENDUM
Recommended related post

The decline of the West, the rise of the East and the South, and the internal dynamics of Western collapse discussed in this extraordinary video with Garland Nixon and Joti Brar.

IMPERIALISM: DECADENT AND DOOMED WITH JOTI BRAR - PEOPLE HAVE HAD ENOUGH - REVOLUTION IS IN THE AIR!

Garland Nixon
Streamed live on Oct 18, 2024

Lili News 029

In cynicism and power, the US propaganda machine easily surpasses Orwells Ministry of Truth.
Now the fight against anti-semitism is being weaponised as a new sanctimonious McCarthyism.
Unless opposed, neither justice nor our Constitutional right to Free Speech will survive this assault.

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The Gwangju Uprising and American Hypocrisy: One Reporter’s Quest for Truth and Justice in Korea

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How many Americans ever heard of the fairly recent "Korean Paris Commune"—suppressed with the full backing of Washington? If you haven't, credit the American media, the history assassins, for your ignorance.

The Gwangju Uprising and American Hypocrisy: One Reporter’s Quest for Truth and Justice in Korea

A personal story from a longtime Nation writer.

By Tim Shorrock • The Nation

First published on Jun 5, 2019

A mural displayed in Kwangju, South Korea, depicting the liberation of the city in May 1980, from Korean martial law troops who had seized control of the country. Photo courtesy of the May 18 Memorial Foundation. (Click image for best appreciation of photo.)

This is a very personal story that departs from the usual, admittedly sardonic style of journalism you usually see on this blog. Last month I had an experience that was both rare and precious, and also provides insight into contemporary South Korea, US foreign policy, and the power and weakness of the press. It deserves to be shared, and I thank you for reading.

Two weeks ago, on May 21, I stood in the main square of the old city of Gwangju, South Korea, to receive an honorary citizenship from its mayor, Yoon Jang-hyun, a highly respected and progressive politician. Facing me were about 3,000 people gathered for the city’s annual “citizens day,” which commemorates the city’s brief liberation in 1980 from two brigades of Korean Special Forces sent down to crush a student-led movement for democracy.

I was given the honor for exposing the previously hidden role of the United States in the 1980 coup and its involvement in the decisions by the Korean military to crush the rebellion. When my name came up at the May 21 ceremony, Mayor Yoon handed me a beautiful inlaid plaque expressing the city’s appreciation for my “noble endeavor” to “globalize the spirit of the May 18 Democratic Uprising.”

Accepting that award was a high point of my life that I will never forget, and the culmination of decades of reporting I’d done on Gwangju and the US-Korean strategic relationship. As you can see from this clip on YouTube, I was overwhelmed. I expressed my shame at America’s support for the generals over the Korean people and pledged my “solidarity forever” with the city.

My award was doubly significant because my stories had grown directly out of events that took place on the very square where I stood. There, in the shadow of Gwangju’s old Provincial Capital, the last voices of the city’s rebels had been stilled on May 27, 1980, by a Korean Army division dispatched from the DMZ marking the border with North Korea. They were sent with the approval of the US commander of the US-Korea Joint Command, Gen. John Wickham.

That decision, made at the highest levels of the US government, forever stained the relationship between the United States and the South. For the people of Gwangju, many of whom believed that the US military would side with the forces of democracy, it was a deep betrayal that they’ve never forgotten. And once the rest of Korea knew the truth about the rebellion and understood that the United States had helped throttle it, anti-American sentiment spread like wildfire.

* * *

The Special Forces “black berets” were dispatched to Gwangju by military strongman Chun Doo-hwan to enforce the martial law he had declared nationwide on the night of May 17, 1980. Over a two-day period, those troops used their M-16s and bayonets to kill and injure hundreds of people in Gwangju’s streets demanding an end to military rule and seeking the restoration of democracy.

The Gwangju Massacre, as it became known, is now commemorated every year by official government ceremonies. For South Korea, it marks a low point in its militaristic history. But the remembrances also honor those who took up arms to defend their nascent republic from the generals who had stolen democracy. That’s because the people of Gwangju did the unthinkable: They fought back.

With guns and weapons seized from local armories, a citizens’ army pushed the martial law forces out of town. As the Korean army threw a tight cordon around Gwangju, the people took it upon themselves to run their affairs.

Thousands of Gwangju citizens mass in the city square during the May 1980 uprising. Photo courtesy of the May 18 Memorial Foundation.

Virtually the entire city joined in, creating a self-governing community that many Koreans now compare to the Paris Commune of 1871. Women shared food and water with the fighters. Taxi and bus drivers shuttled rebels around the town and, on several occasions, used their vehicles as weapons against marauding soldiers. Nurses and doctors tended to the wounded. Citizens, young and old, flocked to local hospitals to donate blood (click here for a chronology of the uprising).

The mural above, displayed at the May 18 Memorial Foundation, provides a vivid record of that week. You can also get a sense of the depth of popular support for the uprising in this short film, which I recorded at the Gwangju city archives of the rebellion, which opened in May. The idea of the “Gwangju Commune” is so popular that the city also gave an honorary citizenship to George Katsiaficas, an American academic who has written two books about the impact of Gwangju on Asian social movements.

* * *

Gwangju was the first armed rebellion against South Korea’s military since the end of the Korean War in 1953. But it also shook the very foundations of the American Cold War power structure in East Asia. Gwangju’s challenge to an army that had first seized political power in 1961 created a deep crisis for the Carter administration, which was overwhelmed by the takeover of the US Embassy in Tehran in 1979 and desperately trying to prevent “another Iran” from further disturbing the status quo.

I was in Gwangju shortly after the uprising. And throughout the early 1980s, I reported on South Korea’s student- and worker-led democratic movement, and the US military role there, for the old New York Guardian, The Progressive, The Nation, and the San Francisco Chronicle. In 1985 I visited Gwangju again and met many of the participants in the uprising. That sparked a years-long quest to find the truth about the events.

In 1996, I wrote a series of articles for the Journal of Commerce and South Korea’s Sisa Journal that, for the first time, exposed how deeply the Carter administration was involved in the planning for the military coup of 1980. Based on a huge cache of declassified documents from the State Department and the Pentagon obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, my stories showed that the Carter administration had essentially given the green light to South Korea’s generals to use military force against the huge student and worker demonstrations that rocked the country in the spring of 1980 (years later, I also obtained several hundred CIA documents, showing how badly the agency had underestimated Korean opposition to the dictatorship).

When my Journal of Commerce articles were first published, they received virtually no coverage in the US press, despite the fact that Chun and another general responsible for the massacre were on trial at the time (the only major newspaper to report on them was The Washington Post). Chun was convicted and later pardoned by Kim Dae-jung, the dissident-turned-president he had tried to execute—see my interview with Kim about Gwangju here.

But my revelations were front-page news in South Korea for days and sparked several large demonstrations and sit-ins at the US Embassy in Seoul. In recent years, they’ve also captured the attention of the North Korean media, which have described my stories inaccurately and with its standard exaggerations and hyperbole.

Inside Gwangju itself, my stories had an electrifying effect. For years, its people had known that President Carter had agreed to release forces under the US-Korean joint command to put down their uprising. But until I obtained documents showing that Carter’s envoy in South Korea, William Gleysteen, had given advance approval to his plans to use military force against the students and workers swarming the streets in the spring of 1980, they had no idea of the depth of US complicity. The cables are now famously known in South Korea as the “Cherokee Documents” after the secret code name they were given at the time.

Korean martial law forces confront pro-democracy demonstrators in Gwangju, May 1980. Courtesy of The May 18 Memorial Foundation.

One of the Cherokee cables, dated May 8, 1980, showed that Gleysteen (seen in this video about my documents from South Korea’s MBC News) had told representatives of General Chun that the US government understood “the need to maintain law and order” and “would not obstruct development of military contingency plans” against what were massive but peaceful demonstrations. Others showed that, contrary to US denials, the Pentagon and the State Department were well aware that Korean Special Forces, trained to fight behind the lines in North Korea, were being deployed to Gwangju and other cities as planning for the May 18 coup proceeded.

In my view, the most damning document, obtained from the National Security Council, was the detailed minutes of a fateful White House meeting on May 22, 1980. During that meeting, which was led by Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke and National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter decided that the Gwangju uprising—despite the US knowledge that it had been sparked by the slaughter of unarmed civilian protesters—had to be crushed militarily. Five days after the meeting, South Korea’s crack 9th Army Division rolled into the city and killed the remaining rebels holed up in the provincial capital building.

* * *

During my visit to Gwangju, I learned how deeply my stories had affected the democratic movement. “Your stories completely changed our view,” Lee Jae-eui, one of the leaders of the uprising, told me one day as we walked through the cemetery where the victims of the uprising are buried.

Lee, who escaped from the city but was captured and jailed by the Korean military in the fall of 1980, is the co-author of the famous book Kwangju Diary: Beyond Death, Beyond the Darkness of the Age. This chronicle of the uprising circulated underground for years and became a bestseller before being published in South Korea after democracy was finally restored in 1987. “So many people were arrested for having that book,” he said.

The day I arrived in Gwangju, the May 18 Foundation sponsored a three-hour press conference, where I talked about the documents with participants in the uprising and academics who’d studied it. It was covered by major media organizations, including Hankyoreh, the only national newspaper not owned by a major business conglomerate, and MBC, the largest private television network in the country.

One of those attending, Song Hee-sung, was a leader of the women’s brigade during the uprising and is now a member of the South Cholla Provincial Assembly, her state’s legislative body. She was particularly interested in what my documents said about North Korea. That’s because right-wingers in the South are now trying to discredit the Gwangju uprising by saying it was actually led by 600 North Korean soldiers who infiltrated the city at the time.

My meeting with activists in Gwangju. Song Hee-sung, on the front-right, was a leader of the women’s brigade during the 1980 uprising (Credit: Tim Shorrock)

I responded that the documents stated quite clearly that the United States had observed no unusual troop movements by North Korea during the period leading up to and following the uprising. Similar observations were made at the time by US intelligence agencies. I explained that the Korean peninsula, then as now, is closely monitored by US electronic intelligence, including by U-2 spy planes and the National Security Agency, and that any military move by North Korea in 1980 would have been noted and widely publicized. The idea that 600 North Koreans were in Gwangju, I added, was ridiculous.

To my surprise, my comments were the headlines in the stories that appeared the next day (such as this story from UPI). For many reporters and editors, my analysis was a counterpoint to the interpretations of Gwangju by the South Korean right wing. Young Koreans, too, upset with the increasingly authoritarian tilt of President Park Geun-hye (the daughter of the longtime dictator Park Chung-hee), were drawn to the coverage. Later I was told that an interview with me in OhMyNews, a “citizen journalism” site with massive web traffic, had drawn over 4,000 “likes” on Facebook. Another story in Hankook Ilbo, a major daily, drew a similar audience.

Later, in Seoul, I met one of Lee’s co-author on the Diary, Dr. So Jun Seop, who is now a researcher at the National Assembly library. Dr. So, who was 22 during the uprising, spent five years underground before being arrested in 1985. “Until Gwangju, there was no anti-American movement in South Korea,” he told me. “But this incident ignited that sentiment. Before reading [the Diary], many students thought the United States was friendly. But they changed their mind after that.”

The fact that it was human-rights liberals like Holbrooke who managed US policy at the time intensified their anger—and mine as well. In a 1996 article in The Nation, I compared the late State Department official to Alden Pyle, the CIA do-gooder with the “wide campus gaze” who personified Cold War liberalism in Graham Greene’s great book about Vietnam, The Quiet American.

* * *

Gwanju's bloody repression took place on Jimmy Carter's watch, confirming that almost all US presidents are certifiable war criminals. (DonkeyHotey)

After my exuberant days in Gwangju, I traveled north to Seoul. I went there primarily to cover the women’s march across the DMZ organized by Gloria Steinem, the life-long feminist leader, and Christine Ahn, a Korean-American peace activist from Hawaii.

Upon my arrival at Seoul’s rail station, I was met by Cho Tae-guen, a senior aide to Park Won-suk, a member of the National Assembly (to my delight, Mr. Cho was holding a copy of my book Spies for Hire so I could identify him). He said his boss was interested in my articles on Gwangju and, in particular, a chapter I had written for a book about the uprising.

In 1999, an English version of Kwangju Diary was published by the University of California press, and included essays on the significance of Gwangju by myself and Bruce Cumings, the premiere US historian on the Korean War (and a longtime contributor to The Nation). My essay drew on the documents I’d obtained under FOIA, describing them as “the view from Washington.” Both the English and the Korean editions of the book are now out of print.

So Representative Park, a member of the Justice Party, decided to introduce a bill in the assembly to provide funds to publish a new edition; it has seven co-sponsors. On May 26, he invited me to a press conference at the National Assembly to announce the initiative and talk about the importance of getting the book back in print. That, too, was a very proud moment for me. Representative Park is a longtime democracy activist who previously helped run the People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy, a broad-based coalition based in Seoul.

I was also honored by the presence of Representative Kwon Eun-hee of the New Politics Alliance Party, South Korea’s most prominent whistleblower. In 2012, Ms. Kwon was a police officer in Seoul in charge of criminal investigations when she got a tip that the National Intelligence Service—the successor to the once-dreaded Korean CIA—was using social media to harass and terrorize citizens critical of the government. Kwon started an investigation that was eventually stifled by the chief of the police department. So she blew the whistle on the cover-up and went to the press. Her disclosures became a huge national story and rocked the government. But she was harassed and demoted and finally quit to run for office; today, she is called “the daughter of Gwangju” by her admirers.

Korean Army soldiers rounding up suspected insurgents after retaking Gwangju on May 27, 1980, with the approval of the US government. Courtesy of the May 18 Memorial Foundation.

Their joint statement focused on the necessity of awakening the public to the disclosures made in Kwangju Diary and its importance as a historical document.

Today, the Kwangju Democratization Movement is not only commemorated as a painful and tragic chapter of the country’s modern history, but also remembered as the watershed moment for its democracy. The Kwangju Democratization Movement went down as an inspiring moment for human freedom and dignity not only in Korea’s national history but also in the world’s.

We, undersigned, are National Assembly members who have learned a grave lesson from the Kwangju Democratization Movement and who would like to be tribunes for the people and democracy…. The Kwangju Diary is a true, vivid record of the Kwangju Democratization Movement. And its English version, first published in 1999, became the must-read for anyone to understand the Korean democracy movement as it brought home the meaning of the Kwangju Democratization Movement and the nation’s democratization on an international scale.

Yet, we only recently learned that Kwangju Diary has become out of print since 2005. It is disgraceful that the only historic English-language record documenting the Kwangju Democratization Movement has been out of print for almost a decade.

They went on to call on the central government and the city of Gwangju to take steps to ensure republication of the book, and promised to secure the “related institutions’ budget” to finance it. I followed with a statement that summarized my findings and explained my chagrin at the fact that my own country had helped destroy the Gwangju “Commune.”

This was a betrayal of the Korean people because the United States has always said publicly it’s here to defend South Korea against North Korea and to support democratic and human rights. But instead it made a decision to support the military security forces and to maintain what they said were US national security interests in Korea. And as an American citizen, I find this a very shameful thing.

Finally, I paid tribute to Representative Kwon as a whistleblower, and told her that in President Obama’s America whistleblowers are now an endangered species. She nodded in appreciation. Like my visit to Gwangju, the press conference was a great lesson in international solidarity.

* * *

My favorite part of the trip came at the end of the May 21 ceremony in Gwangju, when the crowd, joined by a well-known opera singer and a children’s choir, sang the city’s liberation anthem, “Marching for our Beloved.” Banned by the government during the 1980s, it has become the unofficial song of the South Korean democracy movement.

But in recent years, as the government and parts of society have moved to the right, the song has become controversial. Recently its chorus was banned because clips of it appeared in a North Korean movie about Gwangju. When the tune was played at this year’s official May 18 commemoration in Seoul, the government representatives sat stoically as the rest of the crowd stood in respect.

There was no such reluctance in Gwangju. Led by Mayor Yoon, the 3,000-person crowd loudly sang the anthem through every verse, their fists held high, as clips of the Gwangju citizens’ army filled the giant screen behind the stage. It was a beautiful moment that told me that revolutionary Gwangju is still alive, and the spirit of democracy and freedom more vibrant than ever.

My thanks to the editors and co-authors of Kwangju Diary, Kap Su Seol, Nick Mamatas, and Bruce Cumings.

Addendum
Conversation

American Values

@Americas_Crimes

Eyewitnesses saw hundreds of bodies dumped in several mass graves on the outskirts of the city. The death toll may not ever be known. Census figures reveal that almost 2,000 citizens of Gwangju disappeared during this time period.

May 20
Shorrock has continued his invaluable coverage of South Korea. In 2016, focusing on South Korea's government repression, he interviewed victims of the latest wave of violence against democratic protesters. Hifindings were published on The Nation (The South Korean Government Is Steadily Eroding Democratic Freedoms).

I interviewed Doraji Baek, daughter of Korean farmer fatally injured by ROK police violence. https://t.co/ipfU5WAODF pic.twitter.com/ctWbdRhDFG

— Tim Shorrock (@TimothyS) June 2, 2016

The spirit of democratic rebellion is alive and well in Gwanju.

The family of injured farmer Baek Nam gi is introduced to the crowd in Gwangju at a giant rally commemorating-the 1980 Gwangju uprising May 17 2016.-Doraji-Baek.

The battle against the Big Lie killing the world will not be won by you just reading this article. It will be won when you pass it on to at least 2 other people, requesting they do the same.

The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff we publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for our website, which will get you an email notification for everything we publish.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tim Shorrock is the author of Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing. He was raised in Japan and South Korea and has been covering the intersection of national security and capitalism since the late 1970s. Tim's important work can be found on his special blog DISPATCH KOREA, and also on The Nation magazine, among other venues.

THIS WORK IS LICENSED UNDER A Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

Be sure to get the most unique history of the Russo-American conflict now spanning almost a century! The book that every American should read.

Nuclear Armageddon or peace? That is the question.
And here’s the book that answers it.
CLICK HERE to buy The Russian Peace Threat.

The History between Japan and China

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DEFEAT CAPITALISM AND ITS DEADLY SPAWN, IMPERIALISM
ecological murder •

by Kim Petersen

Japan’s actions in a certain period of the past not only claimed numerous victims here in Japan but also left the peoples of neighboring Asia and elsewhere with scars that are painful even today. I am thus taking this opportunity to state my belief, based on my profound remorse for these acts of aggression, colonial rule, and the like that caused such unbearable suffering and sorrow for so many people, that Japan’s future path should be one of making every effort to build world peace in line with my no-war commitment. It is imperative for us Japanese to look squarely to our history with the peoples of neighboring Asia and elsewhere… [emphasis added]

Peace, Friendship, and Exchange Initiative”

When considering the state of affairs between two nation-states, understanding the history of the relationship is critical.

Japan’s current prime minister Fumio Kishida ought to consider Murayama’s advice to look squarely at Japan’s history with neighboring countries. However, before addressing Kishida’s recent demands of China, there are some pertinent questions to consider in the relationship between the two countries?

Has China ever invaded Japan? Sort of. It was back in the 13th century CE, and it was the Mongol Dynasty (aka the Yuan Dynasty) and its Mongolian Emperor, Kublai Khan — the grandson of Genghis Khan, that twice attempted to invade Japan, in 1274 and 1281. The weather gods, however, were aligned against the Mongol Empire as typhoons, known as the kamikaze (divine winds), scuppered both invasion attempts. China was an ally of the US in World War II, a fact that seems to hold negligible currency with the US, as it prefers its defeated enemy, Japan.

The Nanking massacre by the Japanese broke records for its depraved cruelty. These days, far from repentant, the international order for Japan is again not about reducing power asymmetry among nations.(TGP ai)

Nanking Massacre (unwrapped by Iris Chang in The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, 1997) and the cruel biological and chemical weapons experiments carried out on Chinese by Unit 731 in Harbin, China.

Japan is a society where people profusely apologize for the slightest indiscretion. But on a national level, it is another story. It seems an apology by the Japanese Diet, rather than cleansing the national consciousness, is considered to sully the national image.

Has Japan ever apologized for its war crimes? Murayama’s prolix non-apology speaks to the evasions of several Japanese politicians whereby Japan as a nation has abjectly failed to take the necessary first step toward atonement for past national crimes. Individual prime ministers have often expressed remorse, regret, sorrow — weasel words that evade saying sorry, which has seldom been meaningfully spoken. What does this mean in a country where apologizing on an individual level is deeply entrenched in the culture? Japan is a society where people profusely apologize for the slightest indiscretion. But on a national level, it is another story. It seems an apology by the Japanese Diet, rather than cleansing the national consciousness, is considered to sully the national image. Thus, the Diet has never officially apologized to the people and nations it victimized during WWII and before. Instead, the Japanese government evades any obligation to apologize.

There is, in fact, no serious will among collective Japanese politicians to apologize. This is clear on many levels. Japanese leaders, to the consternation of aggrieved nations, still visit the Yasukuni Shrine which houses the kami of Japanese war criminals. History is sanitized. Japanese students are taught a history that elides Japan’s crimes. Japan has even lobbied other governments to remove statues of a comfort woman erected in their jurisdiction — stark reminders of the crimes of the Japanese military.

And what has this historical revisionism wrought? There is pressure from the US — contrary to the pacifist American-drafted constitution imposed on Japan — to beef up Japan’s military and even gang up on a formerly victimized country, China.

Japan PM Fumio Kishida. Another errand boy for Washington, the latest in a long and shameful list. (AI Drawing by TGP)

enhancing Tokyo’s U.S. alliance in the face of growing challenges from Beijing.” Given the history, one wonders how it is that China is presented as a “growing challenge” to Japan?

According to Kishida, China is also a central challenge to the United States. This raises another pertinent question:

Have the US and Europe ever invaded China? Chinese remember how the US, Europeans, Russians, and Japanese effected the Century of Humiliation for China. Britain would impose the first of the unequal treaties on China following the First Opium War and assume control over Hong Kong. Other unequal treaties forced China to make concessions to the Portuguese, French, Germans, Russians, Americans, and Japanese. With this history in mind, why is it that China is presented as a threat by the victimizing countries? What are astute thinkers to conclude about the current propaganda targeting China by the western-allied bloc?

international order”? Why is the “international order” in grave danger, and for who is this a danger? Arguably, the “international order” as Kishida envisions it ought to be abandoned in favor of a world that is truly “free, open and stable.” Wouldn’t that be preferable to a world split between a so-called developed world and a developing world or, as it is more euphemistically framed, as between the West and the Global South.

defense build-up.

multipolarity. The international order for Japan, however, is not about reducing power asymmetry among nations.

situated throughout Japan, especially in Okinawa much to the chagrin of Okinawans.

rejects hegemonic status.

Kishida complains of China’s rejection of unipolarity. “China needs to make a strategic decision that it will abide by established international rules and that it cannot and will not change the international order in ways that are contrary to these rules.”

according to the Guardian) is odd considering that the US is the country that firebombed Tokyo and dropped nuclear bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Yet, one can deduce from Kishida’s words that Japan accepts being a vassal of the hegemon.

Nonetheless, the tides of history have begun to erode the “international order.” China, Russia, India, Turkey, Iran, and other countries are no longer willing to exist as second-class nation-states.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kim Petersen is an independent writer. He can be emailed at: kimohp@gmail.com.

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Japan And Other Social Evils: The Horrors Of Going To School In A High-IQ Society

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DEFEAT CAPITALISM AND ITS DEADLY SPAWN, IMPERIALISM
ecological murder •

Thorsten J. Pattberg for the Saker blog

MacArthur with Hirohito.

Our colonial subjects in Japan have the highest average IQ anywhere in the world—105. Here is why they are dumb and invest in American proficiency tests…

[Reader discretion advised: Stories from US-occupied Japan can cause you to go back to night school and ace the Japanese Language Proficiency Test. This is part 3 out of 4 of a series. For more Japan Horror, please indulge me.]

Part 3. Akuma No Juku Or: The Devil‘s Cram Schools.

The greatest compliment that can be made to East Asians is their ‘Asian values’. Asian values are filial piety, collectivism, and love for learning. These values are shared by all tofu cultures, including the Chinese, the Koreans, and the Japanese.

Filial piety means that younger generations respect their ancestors, parents, teachers, the elderly, and all authority, blindly so. Collectivism means they put the group before personal interests. Love for learning is part of Confucian ethics and means you must study hard.

Japan is shown to have an unusually high average intelligence quotient or IQ—about 105. The average IQ of the English, Germans, and Scandinavians is 100. French, Spanish, and Italians score a bit lower than that, around 98. Slavs are even less intelligent on average, just 95, trailed by Turks, Arabs, and South Asians. Last came the various African tribes, scoring as low as 70.

Now, as we can imagine, the Chinese, Korean, and Japanese authorities are rather proud that—Buddha bless—for once they came ahead of Westerners in anything competitive and measurable.

Knowing that the East-Asians on average are getting better grades in school, Japanese schools make any effort that remains so. They have nearly perfected the art of rote learning, constant repetition, and overwork. It is part of their Confucian legacy to study harder than anyone in their families had ever studied before, and to pass any test or exam thrown at them with distinction. Then, they hope that international auditors visiting Japan will take test samples and compare Japanese students’ test scores with those of lesser students in all five continents.

Now, country comparisons for IQ scores are not country comparisons for academic aptitude. The former belongs to psychologists, the latter belongs to educators. Their two findings, however, do correlate. The East Asians who test, on average, the highest IQ in the world are also the East Asians who score the highest test scores in academic aptitude tests. Since international audits and students’ performances are measured and compared, and certainly, since the United Nations (UN) and its Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) collect the data publicly and for all educators in the world to see, Japan and the two other Confucian countries score almost superhuman results and are in a league of their own. And since nobody doubts that test scores must somehow relate to inert intelligence, not for each individual of course but certainly for the group of scale, it follows that the most intelligent students in the world are probably the Japanese, the Koreans, and the Chinese.

No surprise then, that scoring high in test-scoring competitions became a Japanese national sport. And with all extreme sports, there is cheating and deception. And if test-taking is an extreme sport of the mind, then we must anticipate genius levels of cheating and deception. And oh boy, I just, I can’t. Don’t even know where to start…

Asian Education Versus Education in the West.

Maybe we start with a comparison of Asian values with Western values in education.

Asian values are opposed to Western values. The reason for this lies in epigenetics. Humans adjust to relationships. Humanity will always separate into [at least] two opposing groups. This has to do with our cognitive duality, the right and the left side of the brain hemispheres, the dialectical world, the binary nature of the universe, and so on. Western values are freedom, individualism, and the obsession with truth.

To oversimplify the contrast between Asian values and Western values: Western parents believe that their children’s genetics, their social class, and their innate self determine the school they will attend.

Easterners on the other hand believe that hard work and self-cultivation and serving one’s family and group interests determine the school they will attend.

This is striking in Western and Asian literature. In Western literature, goodness and genius are inborn. In Asian literature, goodness and genius are the results of practice and long training. That’s why in European societies to this day we worship the system of hereditary aristocracy, while in East-Asian societies we have an imperial meritocracy. The term “Confucian” is used to trace back the origin of meritocracy to Imperial China. Confucius was born over 2500 years ago. During and after his time, all state bureaucrats in Chinese society had to pass the Imperial examinations. The examinations were class- and color-blind.

If these two groups, the East Asians and the Europeans, meet in a shared classroom, they inevitably clash. They were selected for very different qualities. The East Asians will test-outperform their European competitors every time. The Europeans will be loud and act entitled, and they will be hectoring their skin and blood privileges.

These educational differences are insurmountable, especially at the idiomatic “top of the pyramid.” That is why Western universities such as Cambridge in England and Harvard in the United States need racial quotas against East Asians. A system of merit, based on the intelligence and academic aptitude test scores of the applicant, would crush any Western university. So anti-East-Asian quotas are a necessity. To limit their numbers. Without discriminatory anti-East-Asian university entry quotas, East-Asians would be the only students studying at Western top universities, and you better believe it.

The other end of the spectrum is also hilarious to observe: Western students at Tokyo University in Japan or Tsinghua University in China, for example, are selected based on their Western hereditary values and parental clout, e. g. the sons and daughters of Western money-nobility. This is the only way. If Japanese or Chinese universities were to have foreigners blindly sit the Entry Examination, together with local Japanese or Chinese candidates I mean, the foreign guests would all fail the exams, without exemption. They cannot compete against East Asians in test-taking. It is impossible.

So foreign students are exempted from intelligence assessments, and any exam or entry test requirements are waived. Westerners cannot compete with Asian test-takers, but also don’t have to: They are entering the fast-pass track of education, the extra line of Western privilege. Most Western students can’t speak Japanese or Chinese fluently but graduate anyway with doctoral degrees or whatnot. Nobody gives, right? They get a Japanese degree based on their inherent Western privilege, not their merit, and that is part of the paradigm of Western values just so explained.

Western Imperialism and Its Consequences.

The Western powers invaded Asia in the 17th Century and started the Age of Imperialism, Colonialism, and Orientalism. Japan widely shut itself off from the world and only reopened its ports, forcefully and at American gunpoint, to foreigners again in 1853. The Emperor and his local warlords, the shoguns, started their huge project of Westernization: Old Chinese traditions and sciences out, New Western traditions and sciences in.

But what about the Confucian tradition of class blindness and meritocracy? America, by the midst of the 20th Century, was as hierarchical and class-conscious as it gets, with oligarchs and founding fathers and ancient European nobility sending their children to private universities such as Princeton and Yale. No elite American university has entrance exams.

The result of American influence on Japan was a hybrid form of education, very common in colonial master-slave settings we know of from the British and French Empires a century earlier. For the ordinary Japanese masses, Japanese state schools and state-run higher education remained business as usual: Asian values such as respecting teachers and hard work for good grades, usually in the form of a full day’s 9-17 o’clock compulsory attendance, followed by extra-curricular activities round the clock. This educational model would bring forth the best rote learners and scholars of high scholastic merit, while the working class students were pulled along by constantly being challenged to the limits of what was pedagogically possible. In other words, the state saw no need to separate the social classes at school age. Naturally, for their “work” for the state, the state would foot the educational bill. State education is free of charge in Japan.

Japanese elites understandably collaborated with Americans and set up private schools for their liberated children, with American-style “capitalist” price tags that not even the upper middle class could comfortably afford. [They were forced to borrow loans from US-Japanese banks, but that is the salt for another story.]

A state is full of falsehoods. So it is recommended to judge state officials by their actions. The state officials in Japan do not attend state education. Take Abe Shinzo, the “longest-serving Prime Minister in Japanese history.” Mr. Abe is a descendant of a noble family line, so he went to Seikei. What is Seikei? In 1947, American occupiers, Japanese nobility, and the heirs of industrialists such as the Mitsubishi clan founded the private Seikei University, the private Seikei Elementary School, and the private Seikei Junior High School for the nobility. No entry examinations. They later arranged for Mr. Abe a year at a private university in California, USA. No entry examination either.

Another example, this time a woman: Princess Mako, daughter of Crown Prince Fumihito, and granddaughter of the Japanese Emperor. You wouldn‘t see her attending Japanese state education, ever. She first enrolled at the Emperor‘s private Gakushuin school for the nobility. Next, she went to a private Christian University in Tokyo. After that, she was sent abroad, incognito, to Edinburgh University in the United Kingdom. Edinburgh U has no entrance examinations.

Over 70 years forward now, the United States of America has occupied Japan and overseen its educational transformation. Japan turned into one of the most unequal, chimerical, and surreal education systems ever conceived by a sadistic part-local, part-foreign ownership class. In one paragraph, I would describe it as the mass farming of decent but autistic people engaged in senseless mass activities for maximal exhaustion, with an exploitative shogun ruling caste trying to emulate the Western heredity caste and ending Asian meritocracy.

The Japanese Hybrid-Education System.

In Japan, Korea, or China, no doubt those students who work the hardest and score the highest scores will have the opportunity to study at a top state school or university. [To simplify categories, we have summarized under ‘universities’: all institutions of Higher Learning, vocational colleges, and polytechnical schools.] In theory, of course. In practice, the rich and powerful, the elites in this country, employ lots of tricks and legal loopholes for their less talented, mediocre children to bypass the competition. The most American way to dodge mass education for the poor is by paying for a fast pass. Every society claims it has equal opportunities and free education for all, but they all lie in their customary ways of course. Each society has a fast pass system for the extremely rich and affluent, let alone the kings and queens, the landlords, and the financial aristocracy. It just doesn’t make sense for them to enroll their heirs in schools shared with servants.

America is the most influential education system in the world because it is also the global education system. The USA is a global Empire. Therefore, it has to partly educate its overseas subjects too.

It offers Japanese elites the option to send their children to American schools in Japan, and pay the Imperial fee, or even to send children abroad to Americanized schools, not just in North America but also in Britain, Canada, or Australia. So, for most upper-class Japanese families, the highest ideal of Japanese education is completing it in the West.

The shoguns have private schools where they pay tens of thousands of dollars for service grades, or they send their kids abroad later to attend college. America takes good care of its Japanese subjects at the other end of the Pacific. If Japanese elites are associated with their American occupiers through American education, they are sure to get extra salary bonuses and top jobs upon their return.

But those global Japanese are few. The great masses, almost 15 million pupils and students, must demonstrate their hard work and merit in the monolithic Japanese state school system that, to the outside world, resembles a matrix of human factories for producing excellent grades and fabulous test scores all across the broader range of math, social studies, and science.

Or so it appears to tourists and outside observers. Very few Western Expat families send their children to the Japanese state school system, for fear of being exposed to intimidating, non-Western educational standards such as advanced mathematics, usually ahead one or two years of comparable European standards. Also, the Japanese language has two separate alphabets for Japanese words and foreign loanwords, as well as thousands of Chinese characters, the latter of which are extremely difficult to memorize and even more difficult to retain over the years for European children.

On average, Japanese state schools have bigger class sizes than European ones, with 40 children being not uncommon [while in Europe, the average class size is about 24 children]. This seems to be no problem in East Asia in general, where children are far less aggressive and disrespectful than they are in the West. In addition to the curriculum, there are various social activities, sports festivals, art festivals, gardening, and clubs. Primary schools are usually not grade-intensive, because more focus in the six years of primary education is on gaining social skills, working in the collective, healthy nutrition, and physical education. The children eat in school and overall spend a full working day or eight hours in safe state care. In comparison, German schools usually top 5 hours a day, American schools usually sell hamburgers and sugar drinks, and so on.

Although it hardly occurs to Japanese families who praise their children’s unique individual talents, say in planting a flower pot or winning in the white team at the annual sports festival, all the country’s schools are doing the same. It truly is collectivism. Or centralism, if we consider that the state’s leading education planners live in Tokyo.

Still, what the Japanese pay for their children in these Western schools is the association with Western privilege. In Western schools for the privileged Expats, the Japanese children learn not Asian collectivism but Western individualism. They learn that they are inherently talented and naturally beautiful, and that hard work and good grades lead to bad things such as uncreativeness and blind obedience, which are hostile Asian values and need to be avoided.

But those foreign Expat children are few in numbers, even in the 30-million metropolis Tokyo. A slightly bigger number of foreigners in Japan are not well-to-do Expats but cock-hardened immigrants. Maybe they once started as Expats, expired their contracts, but decided to stay in the Far East anyway. They have settled in Japan with families, married a Japanese spouse, or were exchange students here and never returned to their homelands. It happens, and mostly to other Asians: Indians and Chinese, Filipinos and Koreans, Thais and Singaporeans, and Vietnamese. American immigrants are quite a few in Japan, because of the hundreds of thousands of US soldiers and contract workers, teachers, fugitives, and retired sexpats, all living here long-term. European immigrants are fewer than a couple of ten thousand.

In general, fellow East Asians have little problem adjusting to Japanese education. On the contrary, just as in America, in Japan, too, foreign immigrants are a treasured minority group that gets over-proportional opportunities from government and school authorities, is quickly assimilated through Japanese language training, and, as a general rule, shares the same pan-East-Asian Confucian set of values.

Things are different for Western immigrants. Since they don’t have the money for the ridiculously expensive Foreign Expats schools, they must enlist their children at compulsory Japanese state schools. The first thing they learn about free education in Japan is that it is not free. The “free” is just a slogan. Same in Continental Europe our Scandinavian countries, all run by socialist regimes: They still must charge little fees on education but rather call it free than cheap.

Student fees exist in Japan but are very low, about 10% of the average worker’s monthly salary. A private school would be 100% of the average worker‘s salary, so mostly unattainable for most Japanese families. Free State Schools at first sound like a too-good-to-be-true “welfare” package for Western parents. They heard and learned that Japanese students on average outperform Western students, according to the United Nations OECD annual global comparison study, so what could possibly be better than a “free” education in high-achieving Japan, right?

A [Hidden] System Within The System.

In addition to the 40-hour school week, pupils in Middle School go to school for 5 hours every other Saturday, and they have 1-2 hours of homework each day, and additional homework for semester breaks. This, the UN and the OECD do not report.

With so much competition based on merit and hard work, how does the leisure class of Japan, the High Class and the Upper Middle Class, the doctors, politicians, managers, and notable families, distinguish themselves in a system that, on the surface of it, pretends to be a Confucian “class-blind” meritocracy?

The answer is shocking. The Japanese higher classes have built around the fake meritocracy compulsory school system a parallel system of elitist prep- and cram schools—the notorious Akuma No Juku, the Cram Schools of Hell.

Each level of education comes with inbuilt [or absent] levers of prestige. There are only a few top state schools and universities, a lot of average schools and universities, and quite a few abysmal schools and universities. Yes, the state must not discriminate against access to the top schools in the country based on heredity and class. But the teachers and parents do, they do and do! So they conspire to cheat the system that wants to be cheated and conspire to get their children ahead of those who believe in a meritocracy where in reality there is none.

There is no centralized or regulated School or University Entry Examination left in Japan. The state has completely withdrawn from regulating. Each private school, international school, college, or university makes up its own rules, creates its own Entry Examinations, and sets up a money-juku. Homeschooling is illegal in Japan, except with an accredited private juku.

How to pass any of those arbitrary private School and University Entrance Exams? Well, this is not taught in a state school. It is exclusively taught in private cram schools outside the sham state school system.

The privatized juku-system is complex. The children of the better-situated families attend jukus after the sun is down, and spend another 2-3 hours “extra” lessons, usually studying until 9 pm. The toll on the students’ mental health is enormous. If only they were born into the private-school leisure class. But they were not, they were born into the state-school toil and labor class instead. So privatized night class at money-juku is the only thing that separates them from the truly poor and handicapped. The juku fees easily supersede the entire daytime state school costs. A prestigious juku, one that almost guarantees a future top state university place, charges anything from $100 to $300 a day.

Before we explain the juku system and what it does to the fictional “meritocracy” in Japan, we should, one more time, draw a holistic comparison and contrast between Confucian education and Western education.

In Confucian, or shall we say in East Asian education systems, the educational goal is set forwards, not backward. The goal is to pass the next entry exam, not to exam the past.

For example: In European countries, school is the accumulation of school experiences with constant challenges, trial and error, ups and downs, self-discovery and self-study. With proof of countless instances of interesting if not unique experiences, documents, certificates, medals, and personal recommendations, pupils advance to the next stage mostly based on their character and intellectual curiosity. Grades are important but secondary. Educators in the West are looking backward, into the family history and past performances of the candidate.

But not in Japan. School life is pointless. Middle and High Schools and Universities don‘t care about content, character development, and unique experiences. They look forward to the next exam. They present each wave of applicants with a 3-day Entrance Examination.

And this is how Japan Education dumps the underclasses, and all its pretense of a true meritocracy: The underclasses have no way of passing those Exams. Because their trusted state schools didn’t teach them. They were eliminated, usually at age 12, the moment they attended a sham state school without a privatized adjacent juku.

A juku or cram class exclusively prepares for those Entrance examinations. It has all past exam papers. The professor‘s daughter and the director‘s son are also here. It is impossible to pass a top school’s or top university’s Entry exam without preparing for it in the juku.

That is because the jukus are a side hustle run by the same elites who create the Entry Exams. You have read that correctly. The educators at Waseda University or Keio University are the same educators who run Waseda or Keio juku Programs. There are “Super Science” jukus or “Summer Prep Course” jukus. Every top University and every top High School in the country is also co-running a network of juku cram schools, and it is not shocking at all to Japanese families that the same state-employed “head teacher” at their local Yamato “Peace” Middle School teaches useless rubbish during day time and charges extraordinary private fees when teaching the exam papers to the elites at night. Yes, the most excellent teachers of the state schools also teach private juku courses at night. They have to if they want to help their favorite students. Only in the juku class.

This is legal in Japan. Everyone with a functional brain knows it. In the 70s and 80s, even the three top state universities, Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka Universities, had “outsourced” their entrance examination papers. If you are not in one of those affiliated jukus, you can’t go to that university.

This clearly is not what the Lord intended. It is discrimination, if not deceit. If enough foreigners attended the sham state school system, they would surely shout an alarm. But there are few to no foreign students in Japan’s state schools, so the two-tier secret class system remains in place. While in Europe the elites and the underclasses attend separate schools and never interact with each other at all, in Japan they do attend the same schools and “socialize,” albeit in a very dark, inhumane, and nasty context. Bullying is rife in Japanese schools for that reason: The juku teachers and juku elites conspire against the have-nots and future welfare caste. And although all 47 Japanese prefectures enforce school uniforms for Junior High Schools (95%) and Senior High Schools (80%) to make all students look equal, there are in effect two separate groups in every school, the juku-caste and the rest.

Since Japan is under US occupation and constitutes perhaps the most valuable Western ally in the Pacific, the corrupt education system is never reported on in the Western press or discussed in Western global think tanks. On the other hand, the other great Confucian values educational system in mainland China, which is far less privatized and unequal than the one in Japan, is frequently reported on for its cruelty and, literately, its child abuse.

In China, where meritocracy is the gold standard, there also exists a vast black market for unauthorized cram schools, private tutors, fake exam takers, and even visa agencies who operate as student traffickers to America. Every educator and psychiatrist in the world knows by now that East Asians have the hardest student life in the world. Name one Western nation where the authorities have to crack down on people because they study too much!

Japan is different from China in that China retains meritocracy and cracks down on unauthorized “private” after-school cram schools, while in US-occupied Japan “meritocracy” itself was completely subverted. Unauthorized “private” cram schools became the gatekeepers to educational success in Japan. Hence the notion that Japanese education is a hybrid form between Confucian tradition and Western imperialism.

No Juku, No Future.

Millions handed their children to state school sector and hoped that somehow the state was a promoter and that they could proceed, through hard labor, to top schools and get top jobs. This is but saying that everything can come from rice but rice. The millions must stay the millions—that, all educators understand.

Here in Japan, in the nineteen thousand state Elementary Schools and ten thousand state Junior High Schools, everyone wins medals and prizes. Everyone gets good grades. Everyone is working so hard. So when the United Nations OECD people come to Tokyo and visit selected model Junior High Schools, what they see are hard-working students who spent far more time than their European peers in school and over their homework. So, the intentional committee takes sample tests in those Japanese state schools and compares them later with sample tests from foreign state schools all over the world. And the result is known to the world by now: the average Japanese Middle School student seems way smarter than his or her European peers.

What the OECD committee didn’t know was that they were not testing the average Japanese Middle School students but the professional test-taking, exam-racing kids from the juku.

“Just school will no do.” The Akuma No Juku or The Devil‘s Cram Schools make the Japanese one of the best test-scoring people on our planet, this much needs to be acknowledged. School life and experience, however, became meaningless.

Like the other East-Asian “Confucian” societies with their emphasis on exam-taking and hard study, the Japanese, just so, don‘t waste their time going deep into the material or think too much about what they just memorized, because such idiocy is not rewarded. What is rewarded in this insane system is this: Test scores are higher than everyone else.

End.

Full list of all 4 parts in this series:

Part 1. The Hikikomori Or Socially Dead.

Part 2. The X-Kyaku Or Deformed Underclass.

Part 3. Akuma No Juku Or: The Devil‘s Cram Schools.

Part 4. Kodomo No Yūkai Or: The Children-Abductors.

The author is a German writer and cultural critic.

Further Reading: Japan made the terrible mistake of aligning itself with the woke West and is now self-destroying. Read previous presentations about this nation‘s horrible decline:

Brutal. The Truth About Japan. From Tokyo University.

https://thesaker.is/brutal-the-truth-about-japan-from-tokyo-university/

WOKE in Tokyo. The US Nukes Cool Japan Out Of Its Existence.

https://thesaker.is/woke-in-tokyo-the-us-nukes-cool-japan-out-of-its-existence/

Worried about WW3 and transmitting coronavirus, Japanese bought 20 million house pets.

https://thesaker.is/worried-about-ww3-and-transmitting-coronavirus-japanese-bought-20-million-house-pets/

German Chancellor Scholz Attended Girls’ Day in Berlin, Accidentally Flew For NATO To Japan Next.

https://thesaker.is/german-chancellor-scholz-attended-girls-day-in-berlin-accidentally-flew-for-nato-to-japan-next/

STOP IT, JAPAN: Mass Formation Psychosis.

https://thesaker.is/stop-it-japan-mass-formation-psychosis/

Top Guns, Kishida, and US Biden: Showdown With Russia and China.

https://thesaker.is/top-guns-kishida-and-us-biden-showdown-with-russia-and-china/

The Path To Japan’s Childlessness As Conceived By Its Satanic US Occupiers.

https://thesaker.is/the-path-to-japans-childlessness-as-conceived-by-its-satanic-us-occupiers/

ABOUT THE AUTHOR / SOURCE

Thorsten J. Pattberg is a German philologist and cultural critic from Peking University. He is the author of the East-West Dichotomy.

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How The “First Island Chain” Members Became U.S. Client States

Please make sure these dispatches reach as many readers as possible. Share with kin, friends and workmates and ask them to do likewise.

Gary Olson

US aircraft maneuvering at Kadena AFB in Japan, in Okinawa. Kadena is the largest US Air Force base in the Pacific region, described by US propagandists as "the hub of airpower in the Pacific."

Many observers believe the future will be written in the Sino-Pacific region and, in particular, the means by which the United States responds to the rise of China as a global economic and political power. That’s clearly the the message in President Biden’s national security policy which states that “China…is the only competitor potentially capable of combining economic, diplomatic, military and technological power to mount a sustained challenge to a stable and open international order.” [1]

What follows are thumbnail sketches of U.S. foreign policy in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines in the immediate post World War II period and what that might portend for the U.S. - China geopolitical rivalry. In each case, over a relatively brief period, land tenure changes were either carried out or promised in order to prevent rural grievances from spreading to radical demands for wholesale redistribution of wealth and political power. I’m suggesting that the methods by which the rural sector was brought into the political systems in the “First Island Chain” went a considerable distance in determining the future direction of the political systems in these four countries off the mainland of China. [2] Now the question is what might these regional allies do in the future?

The Politics of Land Reform

Back in 1968, American political scientist and U.S. foreign policy advisor Samual Huntington argued that, “He who controls the countryside controls the country”, and further, if the countryside is in opposition to the government and the system, both are “in danger of overthrow.” [3] Going further, Huntington asserted that because peasants are primarily concerned with their immediate material and economic needs, certain controlled reforms may be used as a substitute for revolution. He hypothesized that the likelihood of a revolution is negligible if land ownership is seen as equitable. By administering a private property inoculation, the peasant will be immunized against various leftist strains of revolutionary fever. Certain forms of land tenure change will encourage possessiveness and individual betterment through the existing system. In short, the rural sector will become a conservative force in politics.

Pyotr Stolypin, a devious strategist for rural pacification.

Examples of manipulative land tenure policy can be traced back to Ancient Greece in 584 B.C. and Rome in 133 B.C and up to the program attempted by Peter (Pyotr) Stolypin prior to the Russian Revolution. Russian peasants had revolted against the tsar in 1902 and on a larger scale in 1905 when a thousand manorial houses were torched by the peasantry. Attacks against the nobility occurred in 47 provinces as peasants sought to obtain land. Stolypin, one of the tsar’s ministers, was charged with forming a counter-revolutionary strategy in the form of a land reform bill introduced in 1906 and 1911. He reasoned that the answer was “individual ownership of land is the pledge of order because the small proprietor is in himself that nucleus on which is based a stable order in the state… an independent, wealthy settler would arise, a firm representative of the land. Such a type has already grown up in the western provinces and he is particularly desirable now." [4]

To accomplish this, Stolypin proposed the dissolution of the mir, the basic peasant commune, in order to create a new kulak class of prosperous peasants. In 1910, he predicted that if given a decade to carry out his program of “wagering on the strong,” Russia would be “unrecognizable.”

Social tensions would be reduced…A new stratum of small land-owners
will be stabilized and it will disrupt the traditional collective cohesion of
the rural world. The most intelligent members of this world
will be encouraged to improve themselves. In a word, a protective ring
of individualist small proprietors will be encouraged who have nothing in
common with the landless mass and will keep them at bay.[4]

Lenin was, in fact, alarmed by Stolypin's political calculations, fearing that if they succeeded, the peasantry would be eliminated as a base of support because they could become capitalistic. For Lenin, the sole question was whether change in the rural order would be realized by the landlord class, the tsar and Stolypin or by the peasant masses led by the proletariat. Referring to the Stolypin reforms, Lenin said, “I do not expect to live to see the revolution.” [5]

Stolypin (L) in Kiev on September 1, 1911 (6 hours before his assassination)

Owing to a number of factors, not the least of which were Stolypin’s assassination and rapidly spiraling social chaos, the reform failed to prevent revolution in Russia. Who knows? Had Stolypin’s reforms created a class of conservative proprietors would the Russian revolution have occurred?

Bearing the foregoing in mind, during a relatively short period following World War II, the United States was in a position to exercise broad control of land tenure change in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines. In the cases to follow, bourgeois reforms or ones promised by U.S. authorities had the effect of forming and then furthering socioeconomic conditions favoring elites loyal to the United States and the creation of thoroughly servile client states.

Land Reform in Japan

Land reform in Japan after World War II inured Japanese peasants
to the appeals of socialism and made them the strongest and most
loyal supporters of conservative parties.
— Samuel P. Huntington

Keeping the Americans Happy Has Been the Ultimate policy
Goal Throughout the Postwar Era
— Saul Jihad Takahasi [6]

The late Shinzo Abe, former Prime Minister of Japan, was Washington’s choice to head the government. A neoliberal, ultra-rightest, Abe opposed any softening of relations with China. He was part of the political dynasty that made Japan a vassal of the United States under the Liberal Party that ruled Japan for all but four years since the end of World War II. [ 7] Like all his Liberal Party predecessors, fealty to the US was Abe’s single, most characteristic quality while in office. [8] Tellingly, in late July, 2022, Japan released its annual defense White Paper in which Tokyo announced its intent to drastically ramp up defense spending “within the next five years” in response to escalating “security concerns,” IOW, China. Also, for the first time, the White Paper mentioned Taiwan.

With the occupation of Japan following WWII, U.S. General Douglas MacArthur, possessed virtually dictatorial power over the country’s future even to the point of writing the country’s new ruling document known informally as ‘MacArthur’s Constitution.” Much has been written about this period, including all the patronizing political tutelage involved in setting up an American-style, procedural democracy. However, this was in service to two other objectives: Preventing Japan from “going communist” and cementing the country into an alliance against the Soviet Union. Toward that end, after compelling Japan to turn over their bases to American military forces after the war, MacArthur went on to create the National Police Force, which later morphed into the Japanese Ground Self Defense Forces (JGSDF).

Prior to the war, peasants made up over 50 percent of the population and they existed on less than an acre of land and paid half their rent in crops to landlords living in faraway urban areas. Fully aware of this situation, Washington had decided that protection of U.S. interests in the Pacific required fundamental changes in the rural tenancy system. This thinking culminated in a directive from General MacArthur that ordered the Imperial Japanese Government to “take measures to insure that those who till the soil shall have a more equal opportunity to enjoy the fruits of their labor.” Land reform specialists on MacArthur’s Tokyo staff believed that Japanese Communists were pressing for land reform and they strongly urged that if the Americans could carry one out it would undermine them. Wolf Ladejinsky, an Asia specialist and land reform expert, argued by analogy that “…some of us were familiar with the role of the peasantry in insuring the victory of Soviet communism and were much concerned with the role of Japanese Communism in Japan.” After considerable obfuscation and delay, a proposal passed the Diet on October 21, 1946 and within a few years, 90 percent of all tenanted land was transferred into owner-operated land.

American de facto Proconsul MacArthur with emperor Hirohito. The general played a similar imperialist, anti-labor role in the United States.

In the urban centers, the Sabetsu, the radical trade union movement, had organized over 100 strikes since its founding in 1946 and had planned a general strike for February 1, 1947 in which 4.4 million workers were expected to participate. Gen. MacArthur blocked the strike saying “I will not permit use of so deadly a social weapon…” Union officials were purged in the Red Purge of 1950 and labor activists were fired from their jobs. The Sabetsu was emasculated as membership dropped to 13,000.

In the rural sector, one million landlords were dispossessed of their estates but instead of being expropriated, they were compensated for their land. MacArthur and his inner circle believed they were erecting a formidable barrier against leftist influence in rural areas, that had, in Ladejinsky’s words, “cut the political ground from underneath the feet of the communists in the Japanese countryside…” The reforms would sustain Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) conservative governments in Japan, without interruption, well into the 1970’s. In effect, an urban elite and their political apparatus replaced the former landlord class under this tightly controlled, “change from above” operation. Indeed, Yamaguchi Takehide, the leader of the farmers’ union, observed that upon hearing the news about the land reform, “I thought ‘damn,’ if they had not done that we should have a revolutionary government in Tokyo in a few years.” The effect of the land reform was to freeze existing egalitarian and democratizing tendencies in Japanese society in terms of additional rural influence. The political system was doctored to give the now conservative rural areas more influence than in urban electoral districts. In short, a capitalist economy was bolstered as was a political system friendly to U.S. interests in Asia.

In 1951, John Foster Dulles was to ask “Do we get the right to station as many troops as we want and for as long as we want? That is the question.” As Gavan McCormack notes, “The answer then and the answer now, was yes.” [9] Under the Treaty of San Francisco of 1951, national sovereignty was bestowed upon Japan but Okinawa was formally ceded to the US, becoming, in effect a military colony, “The Keystone of the Pacific.” In 1972, Okinawa reverted back to Japan but again, a large US military presence was allowed to remain.

Japan’s ruling elites have faithfully facilitated all the Pentagon’s efforts to surround and constrain China, and Tokyo has been fully incorporated into Washington’s effort to maintain global hegemony. A trade-off occurred by which “Japan became rich by swallowing its pride, forgetting about national glory and even national identity and prestige during the decades of the Cold War, concentrating on producing goods of high quality, cheaply, for world markets. It surrendered control over defense and foreign policy to the US in return for the right to protect its nascent industries, and for the privileged access to technology, capital, and markets within the ‘Free World.’”[10]

One brief exception to LDP rule occurred in September, 2009, when a new, reform political party, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) came to power after almost five decades of LDP one-party democracy. One of the DPJ’s first acts was an attempt to establish better relations with China and, for the first time, put Japanese long term interests ahead of U.S. interests. Then Vice-President of China, Xi Jinping even visited Tokyo in January, 2010. However, as Dutch journalist and Japan expert Karel van Wolfren observed, Washington was beginning to pivot toward Asia and needed an “obedient outpost” close to the Chinese mainland and Japan’s behavior was seen as threatening. Powerful elements in the Defense and Foreign Affairs Departments conspired against the new Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama while the media disparaged and even ridiculed him. Hatoyama’s popularity spiraled downward after he received unrelating pressure from the United States —and his own Foreign Ministry — and broke his popular campaign promise to close an American Airbase on Okinawa. For his “misconduct,” Yukio Hatoyama was forced to step down on June 2, 2010. In the next election, the DPJ was trounced and the LDP returned to power. That demarcated the end of more amicable relations with China.

Of the 800+ U.S. military bases around the globe, none are as vital as those in Japan. At present there are some 56,000 U.S. military personnel in Japan, the most in any country outside the United States and all four branches are represented. There are 39 U.S. military installations on the island and Kadena Air Base on Okinawa is the largest US Air Force base in the Pacific region. Japan assumes 75 percent of the US basing costs under the euphemistic phrase “Host Nation Support,” omai-yuri, meaning kindness or compassion and also “sympathy budget.”

Can we expect an upturn in terms of U.S. military presence in Japan? The answer is “yes” and it will likely involve some or all of the following: air and missile defense ; ground-based, long-range fires with a range of 500 to 5,000 km.; moving naval combatants to Japan from existing bases in Guam, Hawaii and California; joint commands with the Japanese. [11]

As early as the mid-1990’s, Washington was giving thought to a U.S.-led “mini-NATO” in Asia with Japan being a key player in an anti-China alliance. Obviously, closer Sino-Japan relations “would deal a death blow to US political and military influence in Asia.” [12] Recently, confirming its client state status, Japan hinted that it would be eager to participate in NATO’s expansion to the Asia-Pacific region and the country attended a NATO summit meeting in Madrid, Spain in 2022. The aforementioned Zbigniew Brzezinski once divided the world into three types of nations: vassal, tributary and barbarian. Japan, Washington’s vassal in East Asia, “would be expedient to keep the ‘barbarians under control.” [13]

American Military Government in South Korea

United States policy prohibits official recognition or utilization for political
purposes of any so-called Korean provisional government or other political
organization by United States
— Supreme Command Allied Powers, Summation, No 1.

South Korea is a client state with limited sovereignty, created by the
United States to serve its interests.
Tim Beal [14]

In Korea, American Military Government (AMG) disembarked on September 8, 1945, to discover a de facto government in charge of the southern half of the bisected peninsula and had AMG’s appearance been delayed at all, they might well have confronted a virtual fait accompli. As it was, representatives of the Korean People’s Republic (KPR) greeted the American arrival at Inchon. Under the aegis of established, left-leaning local People’s Committees having their roots in decades of resistance to the Japanese, drastic steps were being taken against one of the most vicious tenancy systems in Asia. For a short one month, “inter occupation” period, People’s Committee’s acting on behalf of the umbrella KPR, began imprisoning landlords to wide approval from the tenants. The social vision of the organized left sought, through genuine land reform, to reapportion political, economic and social benefits in Korea.

Because the bulk of the popular, well-organized, underground was left-leaning, U.S. officials were convinced that if the North was lost to the Russians, every effort must be undertaken to salvage a portion of the country. In September, 1945, President Truman ordered all Korean efforts at establishing any self-government to cease. Even the defeated Japanese were considered more trustworthy than indigenous nationalists by the Americans and General MacArthur wired the surrendering Japanese commander in Korea to maintain order until the Americans could take control. The KPR was immensely popular but on December 12, General John Hodge outlawed it, and the future course of Korean politics was sealed. The English speaking representatives of the wealthy class immediately came forward and received favorable treatment from the Americans.

US-supported Chun Dooh-wan exceeded other Korean military dictators in sheer viciousness, and the country has not entirely forgotten his crimes.

From 1945 to 1949, the U.S. exercised full control and even enforced Japanese laws then in place. The U.S. planted a puppet military dictatorship under western-educated Syngman Rhee, who enjoyed no popular support whatsoever and proceeded to carry out widespread massacres of suspected leftists. William Blum, in his exceeding valuable book, “Killing Hope,” sums up Rhee’s regime as “… one in which landlords, collaborators, the wealthy, and other conservative elements readily found a home.” [14] Rhee further established South Korea as Washington’s semi-colony. Rhee was followed by Park Chung-hee, who, under martial law, continued Rhee’s repressive policies. When Park was assassinated in 1979, another strongman, General Chun Dooh-wan took in a military coup in May, 1980. He promptly set up a concentration camp for “purificatory education” and under his brutal rule, thousands of anti-government activists were murdered by the military and police. Chun remained in power until 1988. Suffice it to say that Washington supported the actions of its neo-colonial ally. Most important, during this period Seoul did not have to contend with rural unrest, confirming Huntington’s contention that “if the countryside supports the government, the system is secure against revolution…if the countryside is in opposition, both system and government are in danger of overthrow…He who controls the countryside controls the country.”

In 1945, most farmers owned no land and when North Korea carried out a massive land reform, AMG feared its effects in the South. It became demonstrably clear to AMG that the Korean Interim Legislative Assembly (KILA) created by the Americans in October 1946, was still not going to enact any land reforms. AMG dissolved the KILA in January 1947 and proceeded with a land sale of former Japanese holdings in 1948. Aware that widespread instability was on the horizon and a situation then underway on the Chinese mainland might ensue, anti-communist arguments clinched the decision for AMG.

One difference from the Japanese case is that in Korea there had been much less pre-occupation planning and decisions initially evolved out of the situation on the ground. It’s striking that with only general directives coming from Washington, AMG officials on the ground employed tactics consistent with other cases: popular demands for land redistribution were suppressed until it could be managed from above and bled of its radical potential. Even then, only when massive political chaos detrimental to perceived U.S. interests appeared imminent did AMG (with Washington falling in line) take the initiative.

Finally, the U.S. could not risk eliminating the landlord class through confiscation (again, think the CCP on the mainland) or low rates of compensation for their property. There was never any doubt that the landed oligarchy would perform all the economic and political functions at the national level and become a “safe” ally in terms of U.S. interest in the Pacific. Paul G. Hoffman, Chief of the Korean Branch of the Economic Cooperation Administration reported in 1949 that “The land reform in Korea did more, probably, to fortify the democratic forces than any single move that was made by the American Military Government.” It should be added that in addition to distributing confiscated former Japanese land, AMG sold off “homes, businesses, industrial raw materials, and other valuable resources” and these valuable assets were purchased “by collaborators who had grown rich under the Japanese and other profiteers.” [ 16]

Looked at another way, the methods employed by the U.S. insured that in ensuring decades of urban unrest and instability, the government — a right-wing police state — was not forced to contend with rural dissidence. Conservative land reform eliminated the issue upon which the left could obtain rural support. Calculated palliatives — really, social bribes —worked. And there is every reason to believe this would not have occurred had it not been externally induced.

According to The New York Times (August 3, 2022), a record high 80 percent of the South Korean population hold negative views of China, even replacing Japan, the country’s former colonial rulers. In polling, the public favors the U.S. over China by a six to one margin and over 58 percent consider China “close to evil.” At the same time, South Korea’s trade with China is as big as its trade with Japan, the United States and the EU.

Camp Humphreys in South Korea is the largest U.S. overseas installation in the world. And as in Japan, the South Korean government picks up the tab for maintaining the base. The U.S. occupies 65,000 acres of Korean land on 96 bases and has 28,000 troops stationed in South Korea. President Yoon Suk-Yoel was the first South Korean leader to attend a NATO summit meeting, this time in Madrid, Spain.

The U.S. and Taiwan

“I am convinced that China could have been saved from Communism.”
— US. official Paul Hoffman on Chiang Kai-Shek’s missed golden opportunity
to enact land reform on mainland China.

In terms of the overall and seemingly endless pursuit of full
spectrum dominance by Washington, the separation of
Taiwan from the mainland certainly exists as a part of
contingencies to achieve that end.
— Ron Jacobs [17]

In the 1940s, China was in the throes of a massive social revolution. In the latter phases, Mao excluded “peaceful land reform” and between 800,000 and 3 million “rural class enemies” were purged, most by the tenants they’d been exploiting. The remainder fled to Taiwan but before doing so, many collaborated with the Kuomintang in a failed effort at regaining their land.

The late William Blum, a former U.S. State Department official and later a fierce critic of U.S. imperialism, noted that the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, forerunner to the CIA) knew that the corrupt, decadent Chiang Kai-shek regime on the mainland had more interest in fighting the Communists than the Japanese. Further, his circle was “full of officers who had collaborated with the Japanese and even served in their puppet government.” No matter. The Generalissimo was first and foremost an anti-communist. By 1949, the U.S. had given $1 billion worth of military aid —and $2 billion in cash —to the Nationalists. [18] On March 14, 1949, the CIA was already urging that support for Taiwan could “enhance the will to fight communism in Japan, in Korea, in the Philippines and throughout the Far East.” [19] In 1950, General MacArthur was referring to Taiwan as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier and submarine tender.”

U.S. advisers had become involved in land reform on the mainland. President Truman had actually told Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek to initiate changes in agriculture and the Sino-American Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction (JCRR) came into being in Nanking in October 1948. Composed of two Americans and three Chinese, all five members were convinced that without immediate land tenure changes, the position of the Nationalists was precarious.

A few pilot programs in rent reduction were attempted in two provinces and it’s believed that Chiang was even willing to endanger his landlord base by extending these efforts. However, this change of heart came far too late. It’s impossible to know if this might have worked and it begs questions about the enormous rural support for the Chinese Communists. It does, however, highlight the instrumental value of carefully circumscribed land tenure changes ascribed by U.S. officials. Even as late as 1964, the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) concluded that land reform could have stolen the Communist thunder in the 1940s because their victory was “largely rooted in the despair of the Chinese peasantry.” In any event, after fleeing to Taiwan, neither Chiang nor the U.S. government was willing to once again risk losing the rural population.

Here it’s important to note that nothing approaching an area-wide government existed in Taiwan. After the 1895 Treaty of Shimonoseki ended the first Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895), the island was ceded by China to Japan “in perpetuity,” and not until 1945 was it retroceded to China. During that long period, the Japanese Colonial Administration viewed the island as a source of agricultural exports. Many local Taiwanese landlords collaborated with the Japanese in governing large segments of the countryside.

At least two-thirds of the peasantry were farm laborers or tenants with some of the latter paying 70 percent of their harvest in rent. Taiwanese who resisted were killed by the thousands and Taiwanese men were encouraged to join the Imperial Japanese army. Two hundred thousand volunteered or were conscripted. In addition, some two thousand Taiwanese women, mostly indigenous and Han Chinese, were coerced into sexual slavery for the Japanese military. It should be noted that the imperialist Japanese considered the Taiwanese indigenous people “wild savages” to be eradicated if they resisted assimilation.

Given this history, the first advance units of the fleeing Nationalist Army arriving in Taiwan were welcomed as liberators from the hated Japanese colonists. Had the native population been given the opportunity, it’s not unreasonable to assume they would have opted for Chinese rule. However, this enthusiasm was quickly dampened as the mainlanders treated them more like occupied people than sisters and brothers. U.S officials rightly feared a native uprising and in fact, a massive demonstration occurred on February 27, 1947. That same evening, 50,000 troops, an advance unit from the Nationalist Army, arrived from the mainland, and over a month-long period, 28,000 Taiwanese activists were executed. The fascist Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang (Nationalist Party) moved to the island on December 6, 1949. He imposed martial law and 2 million supporters crossed the strait, including politicians, business owners and other members of the military. A one-party state was embraced by the United States even as it carried out the “White Terror” during which 140,000 Taiwanese were imprisoned and 4,000 intellectuals and anyone suspected of leftist sympathies were summarily executed. Blum aptly sums up this era thusly: “…the situation was not that Taiwan belonged to China, but that Taiwan was (italics) China. And so it was called” [20]

After the Korean War, still wary of peasant unrest, the JCRR simultaneously began to take measures in the countryside but these were in stark contrast to those on the mainland. For example, large private owners were forced to sell their land to the government for redistribution and by 1959, 85.6 percent of native farmers became owner-cultivators. U.S. advisers were deeply involved and Washington’s financial aid was substantial. Rather than meeting the terminal fate of their mainland counterparts, the divested landlords were compensated with stock in the government’s four largest corporations, making it a capital transfer, not the redistribution of wealth, power and influence that happened under the CCP on the mainland.

In the process, the KMT claimed credit, the peasants were co-opted and neutralized as a force for radical social change and Washington gained another ally against the “Communist aggressor,” not unlike what happened in Japan and Korea. The KMT governed Taiwan under martial law from 1949 to 1987 and over this time native Taiwanese suffered blatant discrimination. The island’s first presidential election was not held until 1996. Taiwan became another cornerstone in Washington’s geo-strategic efforts, the first-island chain” around China’s periphery.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s recent stop in Taipei which crossed China’s red line, was a calculated act aimed at provoking China into some kind of aggressive response which, in turn, would be used as evidence of “China’s growing security threat.” By 2026, Taiwan’s fleet of F-16s is supposed to top 200 but the Pentagon has been urging Taipei to purchase mobile artillery, naval mines, mobile cruise missiles and small fast-attack craft, all of which President Tsai has supported. This enhanced “porcupine” strategy won’t be cheap and Taiwan’s paltry $17 billion defense budget will surely be increased. It should be noted that because only 17 small countries recognize Taiwan, its military isn’t able to participate in multinational military exercises.

The wild card for the future involves advances in microchip technology in Taiwan as exemplified by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) which accounts for more than 90% of the global output of the chips that power almost all the advanced military and civilian technologies in the world. It is the indispensable constituent in the global supply chain and incorporating TSMC within a reunified Chinese economy would be a decisive, even incontrovertible advance.

The United States is concerned that Beijing, by some yet-to-be clarified means, will gain control of the island’s semiconductor capacity, leaving the U.S. economically and militarily vulnerable. How this will play out in terms of Washington’s geo-strategic calculus is unknown. However, many analysts lend insufficient weight to the assertion that “He who controls the chips controls the world.” Finally, China remains Taiwan’s biggest trading partner. China is receiving 37% of Taiwan’s exports, some $16 billion in July, 2022, far more than the next largest trading partner. Taiwan’s imports continue to rise and 19.7 % come from China, a percentage also on the rise. [21] Thus, even given U.S. pressure and Taiwan’s seeming lack of agency, it can’t be ruled out that geopolitical realities will incline the Taipei regime to negotiate a change of status with Beijing and arrive at a mutually acceptable agreement.

Promises of Land Reform As Counter-Insurgency in the Philippines

Only if U.S. security were threatened would we assist in realizing land reform in the
Philippines. It would be difficult but we could pull it off. If the Huks had
been perceived as more of a threat, would we have done what we did in
Japan, Korea and Taiwan.
— Author Interview with official at the U.S. Agency for International Development

[A]n underlying geopolitical logic has pressed the United States to secure
access to Philippine bases. — Alfred McCoy [22]

During the three-year Japanese occupation of the Philippines, many within the Filipino elite class collaborated with the colonial regime and thus lived relatively comfortably while most people existed in constant fear of imprisonment, torture and summary executions. Left-wing elements, loosely affiliated with the Communist Party called the Huks, a word formed from shortening the Hukbong Bayan Laban sa Hapan (People’s Army Against Japan) in Tagalog, represented a challenge. The Huks' fierce opposition to the Japanese, including relentless pressure and ambushes, also stressed social services and anti-landlordism — their major rallying cry was “Land for the Landless — they emerged from the war as popular heroes to the tenant farmer. As the once dominant landlords fled to the cities, the Huks held local elections, confiscated crops and land for redistribution and apprehended and punished any landlord collaborators they could find. An agrarian situation that had been static for centuries began to change.

Even though the Huks had often fought side by side with the Americans against a common enemy, the full-scale arrival of U.S. military forces in 1944-45 marked the immediate suppression of the guerrillas. Huk squadrons were ordered disbanded, several leaders were imprisoned and many guerrillas melted back into the jungle. Concurrently, the U.S. began training some 50,000 soldiers for what it called “maintenance of internal order.” Going even further, General MacArthur summarily pardoned the Filipino oligarchy which had collaborated with the Japanese and restored them to power. In 1947, Clark Air Field and Subic Bay become the largest U.S. bases in the world, and in 1948, none other than famed global strategist George Kennan, declared that the Philippines is a “must keep” area and that the Manila regime cannot be allowed to “fall into hands hostile to us.” [23]

Given this situation, it’s hardly surprising that the peasantry, victimized by rural conditions, flocked to join the rebels and by 1950 the Huks had a solid base of 100,000, were openly attacking near Manila and changed their name to the People’s Liberation Army. In response, the U.S. launched a massive counterinsurgency campaign against the Huks which involved the CIA advising the Filipino military and hand-picking National Defense leaders. This experiment in new warfighting was the brainchild of U.S. Lt. Col. Edward Lansdale who arrived in the country in 1950. Lansdale was a CIA clandestine operative who even contrived to get Ramon Magsasay elected president in 1953. By late 1953, the Huk rebellion had been brought under control and decades later, a study done for the U.S. Army, concluded that Huks’ primary appeal was “peasant grievances, not Leninist designs.” [24] In 1957, the Philippine government outlawed both the Huks and the Communist Party.

After averting the immediate threat, some U.S. advisors urged to juxtapose a land reform program with the military front because the rural population remained open to bid and the program that had worked in Japan held promise. The Filipino elite refused to even consider the proposal and its chief architect, Robert Hardie, was forced to resign. Why? The military counterinsurgency had worked, so the political rationale for land reform vanished.

The risks were now too high in terms of endangering the sugar barons, Washington’s most reliable agents in the country. In the mid-1960s, with 70 percent of the rural population continuing to be victimized as poor sharecroppers, rural guerrilla warfare returned in the form of at least three new organizations springing up on the left. In 1972, President Ferdinand Marcos (father of the current president) ruled the country under martial law and his security forces were led by General Fidel Ramos, a West Point-trained veteran of the Korean and Vietnam wars who was one of the “Rolex 12” who received watches from the president. Ramos assisted Marcos (his second cousin) in implementing martial law, a period in which 70,000 were imprisoned, human rights abuses rampant and thousands were victims of extrajudicial disappearances and killings. (At Washington’s “request,” Marcos also dispatched 2,000 Filipino soldiers to Vietnam).

Ramos also attempted to win over the peasants with land reform promises that had temporarily worked against the Huks after the 1950 uprising. However, because the NPA failed to reach another Huk “threshold threat,” the U.S. did not exert leverage on the Filipino oligarchy to undertake any changes in the countryside or even provide funding for a pilot project. Instead, Washington lavished billions on the Marcos kleptocracy because, in journalist Stephen Kinzer’s apt phrasing, “Clark Air Base and Subic Bay Naval Station had become foundations of American military power in Asia, and the United States was willing to do anything to hold on to them.” [25] Ramos later went on to become president from 1992-1998. The communist New People’s Army (NPA) labeled a “terrorist organization” by the United States, still claims a presence in 73 of the country’s 81 provinces but its fighting force only numbers some 3,000.

In sum, Washington created a sophisticated “mafia state,” run by Filipino elites whose express purpose was to minimize the threat of radical nationalism. [26] Today, the Philippines, one of the “first island chains,” remains Washington’s neo-colonial satellite. Poverty remains widespread in the countryside and the new president, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos, Jr. has ritualistically invoked his father’s legacy in claiming to prioritize rural development. He’s also promised to bring back “the good old days” and return the country to its “past glory.” Marcos's predecessor, Rodrigo Duterte of the infamous Davao Death Squads, had renewed an agreement with Washington to allow U.S. ships and forces to operate in the Philippines and there is no sign that Marcos, Jr, will change the military’s strongly pro-U.S. posture. In the recent tension with China over Taiwan, the aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan and support ships were stationed near Manila. Sara Duterte, Bongbong’s running mate and the ex-president’s daughter has expressed her desire to serve as the new Defense Secretary. And in April, 2022, some 5000 U.S. and 3,800 Philippines troops participated in joint military exercises which included the first-ever deployment of a U.S. Army Patriot air-defense system. Emblematic of the Marcos/Duterte regime’s continuation of previous repression was the arrest of activist, author and academic Walden Bello on August 8, 2002 on libel charges. [27]

Conclusion:

Alfred McCoy, unquestionably one of the preeminent historians of our time, has suggested that “military bases are the bellwether of empires, both expansion and eclipse…iconic markers for both geopolitical dominion and imperial transition.” [28] All four preceding cases confirm the achievement of US. imperial domination in the past but in the future they might signify the diminution and “eclipse” of the American capitalist empire. These cases also confirm Eric Hobsbawm’s assertion that capitalist forms set, only allowed for participation in politics by ordinary citizens “within such limits as would guarantee the bourgeois order and avoid the rush of its overthrow.” Here again, that’s been true in the four bourgeois capitalist democracies but when the economic and political costs begin accumulating, is it a given that the Four Island members will remain Washington’s client states?

That is, one or more of the comprador regimes may find reasons to placate China and not risk their futures by getting in the middle of the coming U.S. - China conflict. And would that be the ominous tipping point for U.S. imperialism? Finally, the historical record strongly suggests that the well-being of ordinary citizens in these nations has never been the primary motive of U.S. policy, rather they’ve served as pawns on behalf of maintaining the American empire. Might forces similar to those which compelled the United States to impose its will in the past reappear and this time, open up new avenues for radical change, not only in East Asia but in the United States? Piercing the patina of propaganda under which all the preceding has taken place is a critically important first step.
___________________________________________

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gary Olson is Emeritus Professor of Political Science, Moravian College, Bethlehem, PA. Contact: garyleeolson416@gmaoil.com (Special thanks to Kathleen Kelly, my in-house editor)

Refs.
[1] President Joseph Biden, Interim Security Strategic Guidance, March 2021, p.8.

[2] For an in-depth treatment from which these four case studies draw upon, see, Gary L. Olson, U.S. Foreign Policy and the Third World Peasant: Land Reform in Asia and Latin America (New York: Praeger Publishing, 1974). Unless otherwise noted, quotes are from this longer study.

[3] Samuel Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968), p.292.

[4] Lionel Kochan, Russia in the Revolution 1900-1918. (New York: New American Library, 1966, Pp.124-125.

[5] Quoted in David Chaplin, “Peru’s Postponed Revolution,” World Politics, 20 (April 1966).

[6] Saul Jihad Takahashi, “Ukraine: The Lessons Japanese Policy-holders Won’t Learn,” Politics Today, 3/22/ 2022. https://politicstoday.org/ukraine-war-Japanese-foreign-policy-UnitedStates/

[7] K.J. Noh interview with Danny Haiphong, ”Shinto Abe was a Fascist Puppet of the U.S.’s War on China,” The Left Lens, https://patron.com/dannyhaiphong

[8] Gavan McCormack, “Japan’s Foreign Policy Is Under Siege From Right-Wing Militarism,” Jacobin, 05.3.2022.

[9] Gavan McCormack, Client State: Japan in the American Embrace (London: Verso, 2007), p.1.

[10] The definitive study is McCormack, ibid.

[11] Wallace C. Gregson, Jr. and Jeffrey W. Hornung, “The United States Considers Reinforcing Its ‘Pacific Sanctuary,’” warontherocks.com/2021/04/the-united-states-considers-its-pacific-sanctuary/

[12] Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard, pp.40, 63 as cited by McCormack, op.cit.p.56.

[13] Zalmay Khalilzad et al, The United States and Asia:Toward a New US Strategy and Force Posture, Rand Corporation, 2001 as cited by Gavin McCormack, “Remilitarizing Japan,” New Left Review, 29 September 2004.

[14] Tim Beal, “In the Line of Fire: The Korean Peninsula in U.S. - China Strategy,” Monthly Review, July 01, 2021.

[15] William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II (Monroe, ME: Common Courage, 1986, Rev.) p. 50.

[16] William Croft, a member of the U.S. Military Government in Korea, cited by Blum, op.cit., p.50.

[17] Ron Jacobs, “Nancy Does Taiwan While General Flynn Cleans His Guns,” Counterpunch, August 8, 2022.

[18]For the extensive CIA assistance provided to the Nationalists into the 1950s, see, Blum, op.cit., Pp. 21–25.

[19] Bruce Elleman, Taiwan’s Offshore Islands: Pathway or Barricade? (Newport, Rhode Island: Naval War College Press, 2019), p.15.

[20] Blum, op. cit. 23.

[21] https://www.yahoo.com/video/taiwan-calls-china-bluff-says-194613204.html

[22] Alfred McCoy, “Circles of Steel, Castles of Vanity: The Geopolitics of Military Bases on the South China Sea,” Journal of Asian Studies, 75,4 (November 2016), p.993.

[23] ibid.

[24] U.S. Army, Major General William Arnold in testimony before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, released 1977, as found in Blum, op.cit.40.

[25] Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow (New York: Henry Holt, 2006), p.96.

[26] Alfred McCoy, Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines and the Rise of the Surveillance State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009).

[27] Https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/08/09/global-allies-stand-Walden-bello-social-justice-champion-post-bail-philipines

[28] McCoy, "Circles of Steel…” op.cit.p. 978.

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The Myopia of Anglo-American Rulers: How They Can’t Face Their Loss to the “Eurasian Miracle”

Bruce Lerro SOCIALIST PLANNING BEYOND CAPITALISM

The Myopia of Anglo-American Rulers: How They Can’t Face Their Loss to the “Eurasian Miracle”

Hobson’s claims

Arrighi and Chase-Dunn

Stoddard

Madison Grant

ADDENDUM Recommended related post

The decline of the West, the rise of the East and the South, and the internal dynamics of Western collapse discussed in this extraordinary video with Garland Nixon and Joti Brar.

IMPERIALISM: DECADENT AND DOOMED WITH JOTI BRAR - PEOPLE HAVE HAD ENOUGH - REVOLUTION IS IN THE AIR!

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The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post.

The Gwangju Uprising and American Hypocrisy: One Reporter’s Quest for Truth and Justice in Korea

How many Americans ever heard of the fairly recent "Korean Paris Commune"—suppressed with the full backing of Washington? If you haven't, credit the American media, the history assassins, for your ignorance.

The Gwangju Uprising and American Hypocrisy: One Reporter’s Quest for Truth and Justice in Korea

A personal story from a longtime Nation writer.

By Tim Shorrock • The Nation

First published on Jun 5, 2019

Addendum Conversation

The spirit of democratic rebellion is alive and well in Gwanju.

The battle against the Big Lie killing the world will not be won by you just reading this article. It will be won when you pass it on to at least 2 other people, requesting they do the same.

The History between Japan and China

DEFEAT CAPITALISM AND ITS DEADLY SPAWN, IMPERIALISM ecological murder • by Kim Petersen

by Kim Petersen

Japan is a society where people profusely apologize for the slightest indiscretion. But on a national level, it is another story. It seems an apology by the Japanese Diet, rather than cleansing the national consciousness, is considered to sully the national image.

NOTE: ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

Read it in your language • Lealo en su idioma • Lisez-le dans votre langue • Lies es in Deiner Sprache • Прочитайте это на вашем языке • 用你的语言阅读

Japan And Other Social Evils: The Horrors Of Going To School In A High-IQ Society

DEFEAT CAPITALISM AND ITS DEADLY SPAWN, IMPERIALISM ecological murder • Thorsten J. Pattberg for the Saker blog

Thorsten J. Pattberg for the Saker blog

NOTE: ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

Read it in your language • Lealo en su idioma • Lisez-le dans votre langue • Lies es in Deiner Sprache • Прочитайте это на вашем языке • 用你的语言阅读

How The “First Island Chain” Members Became U.S. Client States

Gary Olson

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Bruce Lerro
SOCIALIST PLANNING BEYOND CAPITALISM

ADDENDUM
Recommended related post

Addendum
Conversation

DEFEAT CAPITALISM AND ITS DEADLY SPAWN, IMPERIALISM
ecological murder •

by Kim Petersen

DEFEAT CAPITALISM AND ITS DEADLY SPAWN, IMPERIALISM
ecological murder •

Thorsten J. Pattberg for the Saker blog

Keep truth and free speech alive by supporting this site.
Donate using the button below, or by scanning our QR code.