Essay

Bearing history

By Douglas Lummis

History is a horror story. It is a story of crime, cruelty and the betrayal of people's hopes and dreams. Don't get me wrong, I understand that it contains wonderful stories of bravery, generosity and idealism. But it also contains stories so horrifying that it is unbearable to think about them. The slave trade, colonialism, the Holocaust, the fire bombings of Japanese and German cities, the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — whatever country you live in there is probably some story in your country's history that you would rather not think about.

Well, there is a way to avoid worrying about such things. All you have to do is say that these events never happened. We can learn this useful technique from the German rightists who say the Holocaust never happened. Or from the Japanese Liberal Democratic Party members who say that the Rape of Nanking never happened, and that the Japanese Imperial Army played no role in setting up the sex slave system or in massacring Okinawan civilians during World War II.

I wrote the above on the evening of June 30, and went to bed. I had planned to follow it with a satire saying, if it is OK to erase events from history, then why don't we erase the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Certainly many people, myself included, would feel better if we could believe that those bombings never happened.

Then I woke up the following morning and learned from the newspaper that Japan's Defense Minister Fumio Kyuma has made my satire obsolete. He has stunned the nation by announcing that the bombings were — how do you translate that vague expression "sho ga nai" — I guess "unavoidable" is closest. Wow! With politicians like that, who needs satire?

Kyuma probably would have preferred it if he could have said the bombings never happened.After all, the Rape of Nanking never happened, according to him and his colleagues. I guess the trouble with the atomic bombings is there are just too many witnesses. So they happened, but they were "unavoidable." Don't worry about it; it was all for the best.

This fellow is the head of something called the Defense Ministry. Now he has given us a glimpse of what he means by "defense." Depending on the situation, "defense" can mean slaughtering a couple of hundred thousand citizens. Tough luck for you folks who happened to be living there at the time, but what the hell, war is hard on everybody. (Maybe "what the hell" would be a good translation into American English of "sho ga nai.")

Kyuma says that there was no other way to persuade Japan's right-wing militarists to surrender in time to prevent the Soviet occupation of Hokkaido. The country would have been divided, he says, forgetting to mention that, in the event, it was divided (remember Okinawa?). But this is interesting: The only way to control Japan's right-wing militarists is to have the Americans come in and bomb them into submission? Are today's right-wing militarists going to swallow that?

Shukan ST: July 13, 2007

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