Guest post: The scars have not healed
Originally a comment by Mike Haubrich on Detrimental clothes.
It sounds like the scars of Japanese occupation have not healed for members of the older generations. It was a brutal occupation targeting the civilian population with rape and murder. Here’s an article aobut it, and the disastrous role that Chiang Kai-Shek played in losing the second Sino-Japanese war of the 20th century.
During the eight years of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45), China suffered continual crushing and humiliating defeats at the hands of Japan and was subject to a devastating, brutal occupation of much of the nation. Japanese behaviour in the conflict was the principal factor which distinguished the occupation from other wars of recent memory. Not since medieval times had such barbarity and brutality been witnessed. Most significantly, it was the deliberate targeting of the civilian population for murder, rape and terror which made this episode so different and so shocking. The Nazis would repeat this in Eastern Europe and Russia, but the Japanese preceded them by several years.[1]
Japanese attitudes towards China governed Japanese behaviour towards the Chinese. Belief in their own racial and cultural superiority and the influence of the Bushido code of conduct allowed the invaders to justify their treatment of Chinese people. Iris Chang has written that, “Teachers [in the 1930s] instilled in boys hatred and contempt for the Chinese people, preparing them psychologically for a future invasion of the Chinese mainland.”[2] Japan had already fought and defeated China in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-95), annexed her colony of Korea and the island of Formosa, taken over the German concession ports at the end of the First World War, and in 1931 occupied the vast northern region of Manchuria which became an imperial possession with a puppet Chinese emperor.[3] Repeatedly, China proved incapable of resisting Japanese aggression.
Even though many of the survivors of that era have died, their children likely know of their parents’ pain and it would be as painful as the Shoah is for the Jews and Romany, so I can understand why they would not want to see Japanese clothes and culture.
But it’s hard to justify laws on it, any sort of control over how people express themselves can be well-meaning but dangerous. However, the current regime in China, whatever they are, don’t seem to care much for freedom of their people.
The other day someone shared a post with the number of people killed under socialist regimes, and the idiot included those under Hitler because they still think that the NAZIs were socialist, and the numbers are truly horrific. I am not a communist, I am not a socialist, and I don’t want a government like what destroyed the economy of Venezuela. But, that being said, students of history recognize that communist revolutions do not spring from a vacuum. They are a response to, as in China’s case, centuries of imperialist oppression. The British and the Japanese ruled China for their resources and had naked contempt for the Chinese as backwards people despite centuries of self-rule on their own and even that was imperialist. The Soviet Union’s inequalities under imperialist rule, and indeed many of the communist revolutions in the 20th century sprung from inequalities between the ruling class and the working class.
The Democrats of the New Deal during the depression recognized this and FDR’s impetus for social support programs (for white people) was in large part the fear that there would be an uprising in the US of communists who would exploit the working class (as the capitalists had been doing.) FDR was taking the wind out of the sails of the socialists, he was not conceding to them. While capitalism and free enterprise more closely align with the natural tendencies of people to thrive and compete for resources, there is a need to curb the excessive swings that come with boom and bust economies. I mean, we don’t want millions of people starving and homeless during the down cycles, because then there will be no one to put to work in the industrial machine during the boom periods.
But, more importantly, the idea that only communist regimes are responsible for millions of human deaths during their respective reigns displays an ignorance of history. England is responsible for millions of deaths in India during the Bengal Famine. The United States’ Monroe Doctrine and overall attitude towards the indigenous people is responsible for millions of deaths due to attempted genocide and we still have trouble accepting responsilbilty for treating humans as fuckable livestock up to the Emancipation Proclamation which was responsible for millions of deaths. The labor that we got for free for 250 years is as responsible for our nation’s wealth as anything else that capitalism wrought. The way that we are taught history does not capture the idea that we are where we are because of the exploitation of labor and our own imperialism.
So, it’s easy to get the idea that commies are the true bad guys, because we don’t recognize our own economic system’s inadequecies in breaking the barriers between classes and income mobility. Of course, it’s not just the US, Great Britain, and Japan who have become wealthy from slavery and imperialism. I could go through the long list of countries such as Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, and yes even historical empires on other continents.
Like I said, I’m not pro-communist, but I make my argument so that people have a greater understanding of the conditions that lead to communist revolutions. And Chiang Kai-Shek’s blindness to the ways in which he could have worked with Mao to defeat the Japanese as a nationalist front were what enabled the Communists to win the hearts and minds of the Chinese people. And the Chinese have suffered more for it, even though the CCP has embraced capitalist economic principles they have not let go of the power structure that led them during their communist era. (They seem to be communist in name only, but remain solidly authoritarian.)