This article was submitted to Amerikaner.org by Grant Norman. If you would like to submit your own content, please email amerikanercontributions@proton.me
The further that we get away from World War II, the more that it seems to have become central to the spirit of the age. The resurrection of “fascists” and “anti-fascists” a hundred years after each ideology was first conceived seems bizarre to the average person in the West, but as the current world order loses the legitimacy conferred by successful wars, a thriving economic situation, and common identification with rulers, the regime on the Potomac has leaned more and more on World War II as the justification for its continued rule and power.
The story of World War II, however, does pose some conceptual hurdles for today’s party ideologues.
While Germany is still viewed as a uniquely evil force, with Adolf Hitler serving as the Satan for our secular age’s new religion, the effort to tear down the heritage and history of the United States and Great Britain has complicated the once clear-cut fight between good and evil. Furthermore, the continued Russian glorification of the Soviet Union and the campaign to mobilize the West against Russia has added a further level of discomfort behind the simplistic memes hailing the soldiers storming the beaches of Normandy on D-Day as “anti-fascists”.
What is to be done?
A possibility that I foresee is that the narrative around World War II will undergo a dramatic shift, creating a competing narrative to the current story – memetic aikido to get some oomph behind the push against another foe of the regime, China . Read the following thought experiment and see if it meshes with the beliefs and practices of our rulers more or less closely than the current view of the Second World War.
“What if Japan was the good guy in World War II? I don’t mean that as if the Allies weren’t justified in crushing the racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic Nazis in Germany! I mean, everyone knows that the U.S., Britain, and especially the Soviet Union were the good guys there. But, in the Pacific theater, don’t you think it’s weird that all of the white countries ganged up on the one non-white country? Especially since Japan is actually, you know, in Asia compared to who they were fighting. Last time that I checked, Britain, America, France, and the Netherlands aren’t in Asia. They were all colonizers, oppressing the Asian-Pacific peoples. This isn’t like Germany stomping on Poland and exterminating every Jew that the Nazis could get their hands on, I mean, the people in the countries Japan was “invading” were being exploited, even starved to death, by their colonial overlords!”
“In fact, what Japan did in almost every case was to help support national liberation movements and support governments dedicated to the independence of India, Myanmar (Burma), and Indonesia. Because of the war, it obviously didn’t go so well, and the Japanese were rougher than they should have been, but their ambitions were purer than the Nazi New Order, the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, or the British, French, and Americans trying to prop up the existing white supremacist colonial system. In fact, some of these independence leaders that Japan worked with still have positive reputations in their home countries, like Subhas Chandra Bose in India!”
“It’s hard to say that India shouldn’t have sided with Japan when Winston Churchill’s government was starving millions of people there to death because of the color of their skin! Oh sure, China didn’t like what Japan was doing, but look who was in charge! A fascist warmonger, kind of like China’s rulers today!”
See what I mean? It’s not too far of a stretch for the average media consumer to be persuaded that Japan was the good guy in the Pacific during World War II. So much energy has been poured into exposing alleged German crimes that knowledge about any other countries sinister activities during that conflict seems like very specialized knowledge.
The Western narrative of the demonic White and the saintly non-White is so imbued in the public consciousness that it would be child’s play to negate information about the human experiments of Japan’s Unit 731 by comparing them with the U.S.’s employment of Agent Orange in Vietnam. People are more conditioned to be offended by the latter than the former.
A large appeal of this narrative is that it could help to mobilize the more liberal-leaning masses for a conflict with China. The right-wing is already bought in on fighting Communism and happy to be given a small scrap of acceptable racism such as which accompanied the initial years of the War on Terror, but the left has proven a harder nut to crack. No one cares about Tibet anymore, and the horror stories about Uyghur death camps have landed more strongly with Republican voters than Democrats.
The challenge of convincing White liberals to hate a non-White enemy is a challenge of which the Zionists are well-aware. Making White men the protagonists in the imagined conflict with China is a non-starter, but that is where Japan’s enormous cultural capital could be employed to the ends of Washington hawks. With the right incentives and advertising, an Astro-turfed anime series about homosexual Japanese soldiers, sailors, or pilots fighting valiantly for Nippon and each other in World War II, like an overtly homoerotic Mobile Suit Gundam Wing, could provide the moral cover for liberals to rethink their initial views on that war.
It isn’t hard to reprogram these people, as the past ten years have shown, the CIA and FBI can be rehabilitated and the working class demonized if the powers that be wish it so. Issues like the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the employment of Korean “comfort women” would provide additional barriers to mainstream acceptance of this revised view, both could be finessed with some authoritative “fact-checking” by experts who would highlight that the economic warfare waged against Japan by America’s plutocratic big business reactionary imperialist capitalists all-but-forced Japan into an attack, and that the U.S.’s own crimes against the Japanese by placing them in internment camps outweighs the horrors of being liberated from repressive patriarchal Korean society to become a sex-positive liberated woman.
I believe that this approach has no chance of becoming the mainstream view, but as the United States has continued to fracture into mutually-hostile tribes, different narratives have to be employed in order to gin up the same support for war that a grand universal narrative could accomplish during the World Wars. If some of these talking points to justify siding with Japan sound familiar, then that is another benefit of this approach, as younger, more skeptical right-wingers who are not bought into the illusion of American patriotism that they have been sold still tend to overwhelmingly like anime.
Be honest, how many young men in America today, right or left, would go to die in the South China Sea if a pretty Japanese girl told them that she would be their waifu?