Dishonest Abe

I remember chuckling, in an itchy trigger finger sort of way last month when the local paper ran a "what I'd like to see in the headlines in 2014" article.  Of course they couldn't resist printing some of the tamer veiled threats to Obama, but the one item that sticks in my mind was the wish by one witling that MSNBC would admit it was a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party.

Of course that idea, or meme if you prefer, was crafted by the Bizarro-World team at the RNC as a counter to the accusations against Fox News whose relationship to the Republican party is more easily documented than their lies.  The idea of the best defense being an offense is behind it and offensive it certainly is whether you hear it from  Lyin' Bill or Glenn Beck or Rush of the infected Rectum -- or from any of the flies that buzz around their cloud of stink.

But extreme Denialism: the practice of  fact inversion as a defense, isn't something America invented and it's certainly a documented technique as old as the Hieroglyphics it's documented in.  Losers declare victory, aggressors claim to be victims and traitors claim to be patriots.  So many of us buy it with a smile like cotton candy at the county fair.

When the Government of Japan does it, when the cronies of Prime Minister Abe pretend the atrocities in Asia never happened, that the US was the aggressor, the war criminal and they the liberator of Asian races: when Japan claims victimhood, they insult the millions and millions they slaughtered for sport.  They insult the Americans that died liberating hundreds of millions of victims of Japanese aggression.  German students  are told the truth about their country's history. Japanese students are not and even Americans seem to feel ashamed that we used force to counter acts that sickened the Nazis and aggression that threatened every bit of land wet by the Pacific ocean. How many millions more would have died had the war not ended and particularly if the Japanese had a few more months to complete their nuclear program?

According to friend of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe just appointed to the board of governors of NHK, Japan’s state broadcaster, not only did the infamously disgusting Rape of Nanjing never happen but it was the US who forced thousands into prostitution for the troops.  The Kamikaze pilots?  They were pacifists writes Naoki Hyakuta.  The United States and it's allies all used "Comfort Women" as rape victims during WWII said NHK chairman Katsuto Momii.  The ritual suicide of  a right wing extremist in 1993 shows that

 “His Majesty the Emperor has again become a living god.” 

writes another NHK Board member, Michiko Hasegawa.

And of course we ended it by using primitive nuclear weapons and that makes it all true.  I wish it were only the Right Wing Japanese Extremists  who believe the revisionism. The Right is fully engaged in revising all aspects of history and the opposition watches sports and apologizes to the "victims."

Meanwhile the Abe administration forces the rest of Asia, who well remember the war with Japan in detail, toward hostilities and I have to wonder how the rise of the right, that lust for power by any means will affect not only my country, but the world.