Sinister efforts to minimise Japanese war crimes and portray the empire as a victim must be exposed

[David Guyatt]

[Peter Presland]

Another excellent Robert Fisk story.

I'm afraid I don't fully share your view of the quality of the Fisk article David.

The behaviour of the Japanese military was indeed repulsive in many of its oft and compulsively-retold excesses; but so were those of the Germans, the Soviets, the British and the US. It's called war and it seems to me that the gross moral debasement of many of its respective participants - especially, and without exception, their leaders - differs only in the culturally conditioned perceptions of its armchair critics (us) and those who try to manipulate them/us. There is unrelenting repetition of the meat of this article in the western MSM and it causes us to remain very selective in our moral outrage. The repetition is of those events that are most useful to the victors' narrative and history of the appalling carnage that was World War II.

WHY this continuing obsession with trying to convince the world that any one was somehow morally worse - or better - than any other I ask? And, as is so often the case these days, it's Orwell to the rescue with:

"Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past." -

The article is just another manifestation of the relentless Orwellian struggle to control the past with the still dominant necessity being to have World war II believed by the masses to be "The GOOD war". From his allusions to Germany and so-called 'Holocaust-denial', it seems that Fisk, for all his otherwise perceptive reporting on power and world affairs generally, is a thoroughly partisan foot-soldier in that struggle.

It is PRECISELY the Victors' history/narrative of WWII that continues, in very large part, to be the enabler of the west's subsequent and ongoing excesses. It is the sine-qua-non in fact.

Well "BOLLOCKS to all that" is what I say.

It seems to me that, unless and until we can get past the absurd fairy tale of the Nazis and the Japanese as the epitome of pure evil, there remains very little prospect of understanding where REAL power - and evil - in today's world really lies.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record on this, Guido Preparata is a good starting point. This from the concluding para of the preface to his 'Conjuring Hitler'

".... there is something far worse than Nazism, and that is the hubris of the Anglo-American fraternities, whose routine is to incite indigenous monsters to war, and steer the pandemonium to further their imperial aims."

In fact I've modified my sig with that quote - just so I don't forget about it myself