Professors Barack Obama, Newt Gingrich, and Woodrow Wilson

This week Newton Gingrich has become the Republican Party Presidential primary candidate best positioned to beat front-runner Mitt Romney. Before he was a politician Newt was a History Professor. President Obama was a Law Professor before he became a politician. When you look at the history of American Presidents, college professor is not a very common occupation. The other exception was Woodrow Wilson, who was a professor of Political Economy at Princeton.

While Newt has not been, and may not be President, he did hold what I believe should be a more important office, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives (from 1995 to 1999).

There is a saying that if you can't do, teach, but teaching is an important human activity. College professors also usually do some research and writing. How good is that as preparation to be President of the United States of America?

Woodrow Wilson served as President of the United States from 1913 until the beginning of 1921. Before that he served as governor of New Jersey from 1911. He is typically portrayed as a progressive President who also showed his spine by siding with the British Empire and the French Empire against Germany in World War I.

While Wilson did support some needed reforms like women's right to vote, on the whole he was a romantic reactionary. Most notably, he was a racist. When he ran for President in 1912, as a Democrat he could depend on the "Solid" racist, south, where Negroes (a respectful term then) were not allowed to vote. He made campaign promises to Negro voters in northern states, gaining many of their votes. Then he presided over segregation of the federal government, even instructing Post Offices to set up racially segregated windows to serve customers. He also fired most black federal employees and appointed white southerners in the places.

In other words, although Wilson was able to break with the past on some issues, his mind was not unusually far ranging. He lectured the nation and Congress, but all too often his lectures had no basis in human experience. I would argue that Wilson was a disaster, and that disaster echoed through the 20th century, adversely affecting not just Americans, but people around the globe.

For instance Woodrow Wilson thought no one should drink alcohol. Is that progressive or conservative? He refused to serve it at the White House, and on January 16, 1919, the Eighteenth Amendment was ratified, making "intoxicating liquors" illegal throughout the United States. Certainly consumption of alcohol has some bad effects. But Prohibition did not stop the flow of alcohol. Instead it created black markets and attendant crime and political corruption. Just like Barack Obama's attacks on medical marijuana clinics are doing today.

Imperialism was a big issue in the 1912 elections. The United States had become an imperialist system in the late 1800's. Both Democratic Party farmers (the nation was not yet mainly urban) and reformers were against imperialism, and candidate Wilson said anti-imperialistic things, just as Barack Obama would hint he was an anti-war, anti-defense spending candidate in 2008. But Wilson invaded more nations that any other President, not even counting World War I. He invaded Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Cuba, and Mexico. For good measure he bought the Virgin Islands. In the super-hypocrisy department he signed the Jones Act in 1916, which promised independence to the Philippines. The Philippines did not get independence until the Japanese granted it to them during World War II.

For Wilson the idea was more important than the deed. Because he thought the South should have won the Civil War, he supported the idea of what we would now call national autonomy. Back then it was called national self-determination. But, after World War I, when the Japanese asked that Asia be de-colonized, Wilson vetoed that idea. Self-determination, he made clear, was for white people, not subhumans, which is how he regarded non-white ethnic groups. This insult to the Japanese and the people of Asia would result in the disintegration of China, a number of colonial wars, World War II, and then more colonial wars, ending only when the British Empire, a bastion of autocratic governance unparalleled in history, ceded Hong Kong back to the nation of China.

Barack Obama, too, is better at speaking than at getting things done. That is probably a good thing, considering the blow back the U.S. is getting from his attempts to boss around Islamic people. If Barack does not get a second term, at least his acts are unlikely to cause as much damage in the 21st century as President Wilson did in the 20th.

Which brings us to Newt Gingrich. If you compare Newt to Wilson or Obama, he is clearly the more competent guy. Even though I disagree with his policies, his strategy and tactics in the 1990's were brilliant.

The problem with Newt is not that he does not know history. I grant him a knowledge of history. His problem is that his mind filters out all the facts that do not match his pre-determined conclusions about how America and the world should be governed.

He has not even learned the lesson of the Great Depression, and a whole string of forgotten depressions earlier in U.S. and world history: capitalism destroys itself, left unchecked. Another lesson: too much concentration of wealth leads to poorly performing national economies. Another lesson: empires that spend too much on their militaries suffer economic collapse.

I am forced to conclude that electing former professors to be President is not, in general, a good idea. There could be exceptions, of course, but neither Mr. Gingrich nor President Obama is one of them.

Japanese Americans, Hawaii, and Democracy

The formerly independent nation of Hawaii is somewhat peripheral to my project of writing The U.S. War Against Asia. Geographically Hawaii is neither Asian nor American. Most Americans would not connect it to our wars against Asian nations if it were not for the Battle of Pearl Harbor in 1941. Hawaii also illustrates many of the issues in the War, and U.S. behavior in Hawaii prior to its annexation was closely watched by Asian nations. As I wrote in Theodore Roosevelt, Hawaii and Japan, by 1900, the ethnic Japanese population of Hawaii was 40%. Ethnic Europeans (mainly Americans) constituted only about 20% of the population. Hawaii was seized by United States citizens in 1893, but was not officially annexed by the United States until 1898, during the Spanish-American war.

I have been meaning to read some detailed history of Hawaii to clarify this issue, but in the meantime I picked up a general history of the northern Pacific Ocean, Walter A. McDougall's Let the Sea Make a Noise, which covers quite a bit of Hawaiian history. Having said that in 1882 Hawaiian plantation owners petitioned Japan to allow emigration to Hawaii because the Japanese were the best workers, on page 391 McDougall begins covering the events leading directly to annexation. Annexation was all about preventing democracy, not creating it.

American planters (mostly sons of missionaries) had already established that only white people and people who had a minimum amount of property (mostly the few native Hawaiians who had not sold out to whites) could vote in their banana Republic. In the United States at that time the Democratic Party was both openly racist and, for the most part, against imperialist adventures. In addition the party represented sugar plantation owners in Louisiana and Florida who did not want Hawaiian sugar to be inside U.S. tariff walls. So while Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, was President, the annexation of Hawaii was delayed. William McKinley, a Republican president elected in 1896, was willing to annex, but Japan stood in the way.

In 1897 the Japanese government sought to protect the independence of Hawaii after the (still independent, but wanting to be annexed white elitist) ruling junta barred Japanese immigration. Japanese Consul Shimamura protested, so Secretary of the Navy John Davis Long sent a cruiser, the Philadelphia, to Hawaii. Again in April Hawaii's President Sanford Dole (yes, like the pineapple company) formally requested annexation by the U.S. The Japanese countered by sending their own cruiser, Naniwa. How about a little democracy fellas? "If the Republic of Hawaii were forced to grant Japanese residents the vote, the Japanese would take over! McKinley now overcame his doubts and ordered the State Department to draft an annexation treaty." [page 392]

"In December 1897 the Meiji cabinet blinked, declared itself satisfied with a small indemnity, and ordered the Naniwa home."

I'll also note that the annexation of Hawaii broke previously signed treaties with the sovereign nation of Hawaii guaranteeing its eternal independence.

It is an old game. The easiest way to win at democracy is to allow only your own side to vote. The U.S. still plays that game, more recently for instance in unoccupied Palestine and in Algeria. When political parties the U.S. does not like, for instance Hamas, win elections, the U.S. simply installs someone else and teaches them how to run crooked elections. Just like in California now, where the publicized debates between Meg Whitman and Jerry Brown have shown they are just two faces of the same incompetent regime. Third party candidates like Laura Wells are simply not allowed to join in public debates.

Democracy, even when truly democratic, is no guarantee of good governance. But the minimal ingredients for democracy are: allowing everyone to vote, and allowing all candidates fair access to the voters.

Karzai, Obama, and Opium

Lately I keep reading the history of opium from different sources. A lot of this has to do with the Opium Wars (18th century, Britain v. China, with America supporting and benefitting from Britain's victory) which comes up in research for my work-in-progress, The U.S. War Against Asia. This morning, in prepping for the day, I was reading the section on opium in A History of Hong Kong by Frank Welsh. Opium is the world oldest historically known medicine; it actually works (unlike some marginally effective products peddled by pharmaceutical corporations); it and its effective derivatives are illegal without a prescription in the U.S.; prescriptions are hard to come by, as doctors are closely monitored by regulatory agencies.

Hamid Karzai, President of Afghanistan, apparently threatened to join the Taliban. He said it in private, apparently, but surprise, the news leaked out. This sent the Obama administration, and its nut-cracking Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, into a panick. On the one hand they think Karzai is just trying to get a better deal from the U.S. On the other hand it is bad for U.S. propaganda, and giving him a better deal would mean having less control over a puppet they want more control over, not less.

I think Hamid Karzai is smarter than you think. He knows that the U.S. has a long history of assassinating or otherwise replacing puppets who seek too much autonomy (see history of Vietnam). He knows he can, with luck, dodge Taliban assassins, or CIA assassins, but almost certainly not both at the same time.

So there is only one reason Karzai would be thinking of joining the Taliban: he knows they are winning the war.

The fact that the Taliban is winning the war is quite remarkable. It is not due to their expertise on the battlefield. According to numerous sources, most of the Taliban can't hit a target at any appreciable distance. Most of them need, but don't own, corrective lenses, a result of the poverty and backwardness of the nation. Using their most commonly available weapon, the Kalashnikov automatic rifle (AK-47), they are unable to precisely line up the two sighting marks with their targets, which requires being able to focus at three distinct distances at once. Kalashnikovs were designed to be reliable, but in achieving that goal they have a lot of play in them. They were designed to spray bullets at close range, not hit targets hundreds of yards away.

So why are the Taliban winning the war? Because the U.S. and its scuzbag allies are foreign invaders! No one likes them, really, not even Karzai and his clan. If the Taliban had folded early on, then Karzai would be just another third world despot hated by his own people. Instead, he is a third world despot shot at by his own people.

The U.S. military used to worry that someone would equip the Taliban with weapons like surface-to-air missiles that would blunt U.S. air power and thus make U.S. ground gunmen far less effective. Apparently now they have to seal the border to prevent eye glasses from getting through. Expect Obama and the Gang to announce soon that Iran is building secret underground factories to manufacture enough glasses for the Taliban to shoot straight. International sanctions will be needed.

Back when Barack Obama was just another sleezy politician lying to people to try to get elected President, I wrote (See Barack Obama: Will He Dick Nixon Us?, July 8, 2008): "The most likely scenario at this point is that Barack Obama will become President. I am capable of hope; I hope he is a good President. But I won't be surprised if he just muddles through like most of our past Presidents. I won't even be surprised if he expands the war and is a failure on domestic issues."

Obama expanded the war, not only in Afghanistan but to Somalia; it has been a mixed bag on domestic issues. The Republicans of course, and the Tea Party folk (many of whom are not to keen on the Republican Party), are Obama's Taliban. Obama loves power as much as any American politician. If he thinks the Tea Party movement is going to sweep the field, don't be surprised if he has a secret meeting with his most trusted advisors and says, "Maybe I should join this Tea Party thing and become its leader." And don't be surprised if word leaks out.

As to opium, we should make it legal to grow opium poppies in the U.S., and make opium (but not morphine or other strong derivatives) an over-the-counter, legal product. That would do more to cut U.S. medical bills than any Obamaesque top-down bureaucratic scheme. The world's oldest effective medicine should not need a prescription.

Okinawa, Commodore Perry, and the Lew Chew Raid

The ramifications of the U.S. War Against Asia are ever present, and of course the U.S. could resume the war at any time. In fact, Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq are in Asia, although my work-in-progress is devoted to wars in East Asia.

The United States occupied Japan after World War II and still has bases on the island of Okinawa. Apparently there is a Marine Corps base and a Marine Corps air station. The new Japanese government would like the U.S. to remove its bases, but for now is asking that the air base be smaller. Barack Obama would like to keep the bases, hoping for a change back to a more U.S. sycophantic government. [See, for instance, Japan Offers New Plan in Okinawa Dispute, nytimes.com]

Recently I read Commodore Perry and the Opening of Japan, and much of the book is about the adventures prior to actually ordering Japan at gunpoint to give the U.S. bases there. A big section of the book is on the visit, or raid, to Lew Chew island. It turns out Lew Chew and Okinawa are one and the same. American's don't know about the Lew Chew incident, but I am sure Japanese historians and well-educated Japanese in general do.

Matthew Perry and crew had first sailed around Africa to China. They stopped at Okinawa on their way to Japan. They came originally in four large (for the time) vessels [Susquehanna, Mississippi, Supply, and Caprice], all heavily armed, two run by steam power, two by sail alone.

Okinawa was a possession of Japan. Perhaps it could be said to be naturally part of the Japanese islands geographically, and that the central government of Japan had extended its sway there around 1609, though actually a clan from the island of Kyushu did the sway extension.

We can only try to imagine the thoughts of the Japanese upon seeing the great war ships in their harbor in 1853. They sent out a couple of officials to greet the Americans. Commodore Perry refused to see them. He did see a missionary, Bettelheim, and got intelligence about the island from him. The next day the Japanese brought gifts of food, but were again declined. Two of Perry's officers were sent ashore (with interpreter) to talk to the mayor of Napha (Naha), the harbor town. When the regent of Lew Chew came to Perry's ship, he at last was received.

What followed was a preliminary to the tactics Perry used in Japan. He would ask the Lew Chew officials for permission to do something. They would say no and explain why. "There was evident opposition on the part of the authorities, at first, to visits on shore from the ships." Perry would say it would be done anyway, and then do it. The Okinawans were afraid of the obvious military power of Perry, so they did not oppose his visit, more of an invasion, with force. Perry did not conduct the usual U.S. raid on Asia, complete with killing people. He had the island surveyed and insisted on meetings with officials, and a house to stay in, and the construction of a building to be used to store coal for future U.S. steamship visits. Just in case, he had the American flag planted on a mountaintop, the traditional symbol of conquest. He planned a fuller conquest of Okinawa if the Japanese government failed to grant the U.S. the right to set up bases in Japan proper.

One amusing aspect of the book, which probably reflects the attitudes of both the author, Francis L. Hawks, as well as Perry and his crew, is that they suggested that Lew Chew was badly governed. The peasants seemed poor and mistreated. How much better off they would be if they were part of the United States. Of course, good government in the 1850's in the United States included a slave work force who were far worse off than the Lew Chew peasants. Perhaps Perry was already thinking of putting the Asians into reservations and populating the island with white Americans.

Commodore Perry, Japan, and Hypocrisy

Reading in detail about Commodore Perry's mission to Japan in 1853 and 1854, I could not help but be struck by the astonishing level of hypocrisy in the account. Perhaps this is because Commodore Perry and the Opening of Japan was written by a minister, Francis L. Hawks, but more likely it simply and accurately reflects ruling class Amerian attitudes of that day.

The United States already had an extensive trade with China, and its whaling ships regularly operated in the seas around Japan. The U.S. had first been extended to the Pacific Ocean in the aftermath of the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. You'll recall that Napoleon Bonaparte claimed France owned extensive lands that were in fact the sovereign tribal lands of native American Indians. He sold this dubious title to the United States, led by slaver President Thomas Jefferson, for $15,000,000. The Oregon area was disputed by Spain, Russia, and Great Britain, but by1818 the U.S. had the upper hand and in 1846 the current border was settled by treaty, again without input from the Indians.

The war of aggression against Mexico starting in 1846 was largely designed by U.S. expansionists to get California and the port of San Francisco. American colonists moved rapidly into California, where their new government raised taxes on land just long enough to force most Mexican landholders to sell their holding.

Racism against the Asiatic peoples known as American Indians of course carried over to Euro-American attitudes towards Asians in China and Japan. But another matter that looms behind the Perry expedition is slavery. In the 1850s the U.S. nation practiced slavery, although slavery had been banned in the British Empire.

So if you believe the constant protestations by Perry and his gang that his expedition was about extending the "friendship" of the United States to the nation of Japan, you are naive.

The Japanese were not naive. They had already had considerable experience with the Christian and European meanings of friendship. They had closed off Japan to almost all intercourse with Europeans since the 1600s, in self-defense. Even their traditional trading partner, China, was allowed to trade only at the port of Nagasaki. The one European power the Japanese traded with was the Netherlands. But the Japanese government used the Dutch (also confined to Nagasaki) not so much for physical trade as to keep up on world events. When Perry came knocking at their door they knew about the United States, and they knew about the history of Europeans colonizing Asia. They also knew about many of the inventions of the West, like steam engines, although they had prohibited their actual importation. They had translators that read or spoke Dutch, Chinese, English, and probably other foreign languages. They knew the U.S. had successfully rebelled against Great Britain, and that Franklin Pierce was its President.

And they knew about the First Opium War. The government of China had made opium illegal for the obvious reasons. British (and also some American traders) had insisted on their right to profit from selling opium into China, and the British government defeated the Chinese in 1842, just ten years before the Perry expedition. In the aftermath of the Opium War the U.S. signed a rather one-sided treaty with China, one of the Unequal Treaties, the Treaty of Wanxia of 1844.

While protesting friendship on his mission to Japan (commanding a battle fleet capable of flattening Tokyo), Perry presents the U.S. treaty with China as a model of the sort of treaty the U.S. wants with China.

Even the summaries of the treaty sparring in the book can be tedious, but both sides knew what was really going on. The Japanese certainly knew about the imposition of the Unequal Treaties on China after the Opium War, and certainly had a copy of the treaty. Matthew Perry pretended the Japanese did not know, but he knew they knew. He kept threatening to send for more ships (with more cannon, and soldiers) if the Japanese would not make a treaty. The Japanese said they understood the need of the U.S. to take on coal (the petroleum of that era), water and food, and wanted to allow it at Nagasaki. Perry, representing American merchants and industrialists, wanted free trade, the right to trade anything anywhere. Politely, no one mentioned opium.

The Japanese were not in a position to defend themselves and their way of life, and knew it. They signed the Treaty of Kanagawa with the U.S., and soon signed similar treaties with the European powers. Within a decade the rulers of Japan had decided that to defend themselves they needed to rapidly modernize, at whatever cost to their traditional ways.

In the 1850's Japan looked to some Americans like the next California, a place that could be grabbed, where the native peoples could be put on reservations and left to die.

By 1900 the Japanese were ready to withstand an attack from the imperialist powers. They expanded their vision. They would eventually free all of Asia from colonial slavery to Germany, France, Russia, Britain, the U.S. and the Netherlands.

And that really angered the U.S. ruling class and its global allies.

Remembering Pearl Harbor

When I was a child in the 1960's remembering Pearl Harbor was a big deal. Things were simpler then, in my child's mind, which simply reflected what I heard from my parents, teachers, and television.

The attack on the U.S. Navy's base at Pearl Harbor (which included attacks on nearby military airfields and naval base) on December 7, 1941 was a clear demonstration of the essentially good nature of the United States of America, and the essentially evil nature of our World War II enemies, the Japanese and the Nazis. Having a German last name for our family, we did not like to lump in American Germans with those terrible Nazi Germans.

Over the years, gradually, I learned more about World War II and the events leading up to it, about Japanese, German, and in particular American history. A simplistic black and white picture turned into complex gray shapes and eventually into the colors of reality. In effect I was learning from other people's memories, or remembering events that occurred before I was born that had a big impact on my life in particular. My father was in the Marine Corp that infamous day, and later participated in the battle of Guadalcanal, where he caught malaria. My mother joined the women Marines a couple of years later and met my father when they were both stationed in Hawaii during the war.

Now I am doing research for my history of the U.S. War Against Asia, and I can remember a great deal that Americans are supposed to conveniently forget.

Did President Franklin Roosevelt know that the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor, and sacrifice American lives there in order to goad the nation into a war frenzy, much as President Bush was accused of doing with the World Trade Center attacks? No, but the reality was worse. The United States had informally declared war, as had the Japanese. Recall that the U.S. itself often goes to war without a formal declaration of war, as for instance in Vietnam and in its many attacks on Native American nations. In fact General MacArthur was given permission to attack the Japanese in Formosa (now Taiwan) well before Pearl Harbor. Every U.S. commander in the Pacific knew an attack from the Japanese was very likely. No, it was just plain military incompetence that allowed the attack to be a surprise. The Japanese attack fleet expected the U.S. navy to detect their presence before the attack. They were surprised that their attack was as surprising and successful as it turned out to be.

More important, I think it is fair to say that the United States, or President Roosevelt, forced Japan into the war. William Manchester, who in American Caesar shows little sympathy with the Japanese, relates "Ever since Roosevelt had goaded the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor, the war-making powers of Congress had been atrophying." [page 556] The Japanese puppets in China were fighting the U.S. puppet in China, and the imperialist powers [France, Great Britain, Holland and the U.S.] were crippling the Japanese economy with an embargo. The Japanese had allied with the Axis powers only because they had no where else to go. Neither Italy nor Germany had colonies in Asia. In fact the record shows that Japanese repeatedly offered to break their alliance with the Axis if only the U.S. and Great Britain would allow them access to oil and other natural resources that the islands of Japan lacked.

The whole affair was tinged with racism. Recall that Franklin D. Roosevelt was the leader of the racist Democratic Party that kept African-Americans in virtual slavery in much of the United States during this era. Even in the 1960's I was taught that all non-white people, including the Japanese, were inferior while living in the almost 100% Democrat city of Jacksonville, Florida. Most American leaders felt that Japan should have been colonized by white people like every other Asian nation. The fact that Japan had developed its economy and military to the point where it could resist colonization in itself was a threat to American, British, French and Dutch colonies and spheres of influence in Asia. These colonial powers were not against military intervention in China or the rest of Asia; they were only against Japanese intervention. Remember that the U.S. still held the Philippines as a slave colony and military outpost, ground under the heel of General MacArthur. The Japanese liberated the Philippines and allowed the Philippines to declare independence soon after Pearl Harbor.

Why did the U.S. not gone to war with Germany before Pearl Harbor? There had been plenty of excuses. Partly by staying neutral the U.S. was able to more rapidly shift to producing the armaments that would eventually allow it to win the war. But I think Roosevelt and other racist and anti-communist Americans were ambivalent about Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, who killed over ten million communists during the war.

Another coloring factor is the contradiction to the pretensions that America was a peaceful nation that would never have attacked the Japanese. The fleet at Pearl Harbor was there specifically to attack the Japanese. Another huge invasion fleet had sailed from the West Coast towards the Philippines before Pearl Harbor. The United States had ten times the industrial capacity of Japan, and the Japanese knew that Roosevelt planned to cripple them as a nation. They expected to lose a war with America. Top military leaders in Japan believed they were very likely to lose a war with America. But they believed (with good evidence) that to the extent they had any chance to defend Japan, they had to take the initiative. The record shows they were quite surprised at how incompetent the U.S. Army, Navy, and Marines were at the beginning of the war.

Later the myth was created that the Japanese (recall they were viewed as an inferior people) were incompetent soldiers who only achieved success by duplicity. But as far as I can tell, while they had their share of incompetent officers, and any office can make a bad guess and have an apparently incompetent moment, the Japanese were at least as good in general as the U.S. when it came to strategy, tactics, and execution. They lost the war because of the overwhelming industrial capacity of the U.S. Every time they sank a U.S. war ship, we built three more. But they were not able to replace their own losses. And because the leader of the Democratic Party, President Harry Truman, was willing to commit horrendous war crimes, most notably the atomic demolition of the civilian cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Imagine how you would feel about an argument about war crimes if the Japanese had nuked Oakland or San Francisco and argued that the large number of civilian casualties were justified by the effect on local military bases, and by saving the lives of the Japanese soldiers who would have been needed to invade the U.S.

In contrast (and also in contrast to Japanese war crimes in China and elsewhere), the battle of Pearl Harbor had few if any civilian casualties caused by the Japanese. The Japanese carefully targetted U.S. war material and military personnel.

Looking forward, you can see why most people believe that China will eventually surpass the United States as a military power, just as in the 20th century the U.S. surpassed Great Britain. Our government has spent so much money on the military that it has crippled the economy, while China has been basically at peace with the world since the imperial powers and their puppet Chiang Kai-shek were tossed out in the late 1940s.

More: Wikipedia on the Battle of Pearl Harbor

Vietnam and America Go to War, 1954-1968

This is just to let you know that I posted another draft chapter of my book The U.S. War Against Asia. This is the second chapter on Vietnam. Here are the links:

Vietnam and the West Until 1954

Vietnam and the U.S., 1954 to 1968

Korea, Barack Obama, and Theodore Roosevelt

Korea, historically, has benefited and suffered from being located between two major civilizations, China and Japan. These last couple of days Korea, or at least the northern Kingdom (let's call it what it is), the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, has been in the news because it detonated a nuclear device. President Barack Obama made vague threats to do something about this terrible evil.

In North Korea they probably are concerned, because they know Barack Obama's party, the Democratic Party, is the only political party in the world to ever actually use a nuclear device in a war. Not only that, but there was a conscious decision by former President Harry Truman to use the first atomic bombs against civilian targets with only symbolic military significance.

To the extent that Americans have historical memories of Korea at all, they start after World War II, when we invaded southern Korea, thus taking it from the Japanese empire and adding it to our own. In 1948 the North Korean government almost succeeded in freeing South Korea, but the United States invaded again and captured almost all of Korea, for a few days. Then the Chinese caught General MacArthur napping, and drove the U.S. troops back to about the midpoint of the Peninsula. There an uneasy armistice emerged that has left Korea divided in half to this day.

American interest in Korea long predates Harry Truman. It was seen as another part of Asia ripe for trade, exploitation, and perhaps even conquest at about the same time long-sighted, greedy Americans began coveting Japan and China. By 1900, when Theodore Roosevelt was elected Vice-President (he became President when Saint Czolgosz took out the war criminal William McKinley), some business men based in the United States had large businesses in Korea. Notable among them were Collbran and Bostwick, which also operated in China, and Leigh Hunt in mining, who was a sometimes guest Theodore Roosevelt at the White House. In 1900 Russia and Japan were struggling for control of Korea, but the British and Germans were also interested in its commercial exploitation.

Roosevelt decided that Russia was the greater threat to the overall interests of the United States. He encouraged Japan to fight with Russia over Manchuria, resulting in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, which Japan won. Recall that the U.S. was still in the genocide business in the Philippines at that time. In order to keep Russia out of North China, secure Japan as a regional ally, and secure the Philippines, Theodore Roosevelt gave his permission to the Japanese to take over Korea [See Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of America to World Power by Howard K. Beale p. 279].

Attitudes of the U.S. ruling class towards Japan changed as Japan became a more powerful economic and military competitor. At the end of World War II the U.S. thought it would gobble up the Japanese empire, but it was not so easy. Nationalist sentiment in Asia resulted in a long transition from colonial states to independent states.

What actually happened between 1880 and 1950 has been obscured by the economic separation of the two Koreas since then. South Korea was built up as an economic powerhouse by Japan (then a U.S. underling) and the United States. North Korea's promise was stifled by an increasingly rigid ruling class that put most of the country's resources into its defense budget.

The common appraisal of the North Korean nuclear development program is that both its first and second nuclear explosions were substandard even compared to the primitive U.S. explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It sounds like making a nuclear bomb is simple: just get enough fissionable material together for a few microseconds. But in fact the teams that developed the original atomic bombs for the U.S. had to confront multiple technological problems in diverse areas such as electronics, metallurgy, conventional explosives, as well as atomic physics. They included the world's best scientists of that era. But sooner or later, if they keep at it, the Koreans will have an atomic bomb. The problem with having an atomic bomb is that if you use it, you no longer have it as a deterrent. I don't see how a nation with North Korea's resources could ever mass manufacture atomic weapons.

What should President Obama do? Instead of enlarging upon the over 100 year history of the U.S. threatening and betraying Korea, he should say:

"On behalf of the Democratic Party I sincerely apologize for our long history of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including our use of atomic weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and our invasion of Korea after World War II. I welcome northern Korea into the community of nations. I am pulling all U.S. troops out of Korea and promise that the U.S. will allow Korea to follow its own destiny. I hope that Korea will refrain from continued development of nuclear weapons, but in any case I am ordering an immediate major reduction of the U.S. arsenal. If Russia, China and other nuclear powers follow this path, we can eliminate nuclear weapons from the global arsenal by 2010."

The chances of that happening?

Can we serve Democratic Party brand militarist swill and say it is a Change from Republican Party brand militarist swill?

Yes We Can!

China, Satellites, and Puppets

Congress and the Obama administration are considering loosening restrictions on the sale of satellite technology to foreign nations. The United States once led the world in building and launching satellites, but decided that selling them or their technologies to certain nations, particularly China, constituted a security risk. So most satellite technology was declared to be defense related, requiring difficult to obtain export licenses. The conservatives (mostly Republicans) who pushed this policy should have read their free market Bible. The result was that nations like China, India, and Brazil had to develop their own satellite industries. They did such a good job that even American corporations now use their services. The satellite industry in the United States went into free fall, with only military and NASA satellites being built here anymore, for the most part.

Back during the Cold War the allies of the USSR were called satellites. American allies were not called ruthless fascist dictators (at least not by the mainstream U.S. press); they were not U.S. satellites; they were free and independent allies. Until our puppet dictators decided they were strong enough to maybe do what they liked, instead of what the U.S. liked. Then the CIA would have to engineer a coup to install a new puppet. This sometimes back-fired, resulting in the rise to power of certain communist or socialist regimes in nations like Cuba and Vietnam. More lately, Iran has refused to kowtow to the U.S. for a couple of decades. Saddam Hussein briefly survived as a former U.S. puppet of Iraq, despite the CIA's best efforts. The Marines had to be sent in to put a pro-U.S. regime there and in Afghanistan.

One reason I have been thinking a lot about puppets lately is my ongoing research for my history, The U.S. War Against Asia. I recently read a tome, China, Japan, and the Powers published in 1952, making notes of events where the U.S. used its military, or the threat of it, against China and Japan (See my China and U.S. history notes). I am sure that you will recall that from roughly the end of World War I until the final consolidation of power by Communist Party of China around 1948, there were three main spheres of influence in China. Plus a bunch of war lords running around, grabbing what they could, in constantly shifting alliance.

Both the Communists and the Kuomintang (usually called the Nationalists) agreed that the leaders of the Manchurian and Chinese governments allied with the Japanese (Pu-Yi and Wang Ching-wei) were Japanese puppets. The Communists and the Chinese nationalists allied with Japan both agreed that Chiang Kai-shek was a puppet of the United States. On the other hand both Chiang and his former number-two, Wang Ching-wei, if they could agree on nothing else, could agree that Mao Zedong (or Mao Tse-tung) was a puppet of Joseph Stalin.

Suppose you wanted to pretend that there is such a thing as political science, a methodology for being objective about politics. A scale could be constructed, say with 0 being the score of a completely independent national government, and 10 being the score for a completely puppet government. Where might Chiang, Wang, and Mao fall on that scale?

I think all three men were nationalists who had, as an ultimate goal, the complete freedom and independence of China. Each chose a strategy to reach that goal that involved some dependence on foreign allies. There are things to be said in favor of, and against, the United States, Japan, and Soviet Russia as allies for Chinese nationalists during this period.

In the end it was the Communist Party's armies that liberated Japan from 200 years of foreign dominance. But it was the Japanese military that kicked the Europeans and Americans out of Asia for long enough to enable this phenomena. If Japan had backed down when President Franklin Roosevelt, through Secretary of State Cordell Hull, declared war (unofficially) on Japan, it is easy to imagine what would have happened. Chiang's troops would have reoccupied most of China. America's Open Door policy - we want to rape and pillage, so don't even think of closing your door, much less locking it - would have kept the Chinese in economic slavery as long as the U.S. could control key members of the government. Chiang would have become, for all practical purposes, the new Emperor.

You can argue that such a scenario would have been better than the actual Communist triumph in China. You could argue that capitalism in China would have meant a strong China at an earlier date than we saw in reality. But is that not what chauvinistic Democratic Party and Republican Party politicians hate, a strong China?

I do not think the U.S. war against Asia is over. But I think the tide has turned, for the moment, against the U.S. Perhaps the day will come when the Chinese have to ban exports of their high technology to the U.S., for fear that the U.S. military will use those weapons against the peace-loving nations of the world.

Obama's Asian War

I recently posted my Japan notes on the book China, Japan, and the Powers. I chose my notes to support the thesis that the United States of America started a war against Asia and Asians in the 1850s that had gone on intermittently and continues to this day. [See also Asian War]

President Barack Obama's planned escalation of the war against Afghanistan makes sense as part of this long-established historic pattern.

The simplistic analysis applied to the President's decision is that the U.S. military pushed for a major buildup in Afghanistan, but the Vice President said Democrats in Congress would not like that. Somehow only escalating troop levels a little (if 7000 soldiers rampaging about someone else's countryside can be called a little) is deemed a compromise. Taking 7000 troops out could have been a compromise too. The fact is the basic decision was to expand the use of force to obtain U.S. policy objectives in the region. Leaving an open door to further escalation if the Afghan people continue to resist.

In my Japan notes I run against the grain of the book itself. Like almost all America-centric history texts, Powers implied that Japan was, until the end of World War II, an aggressor nation and the U.S. was just playing defense. Because we are the Good Guys.

But you can't write a detailed book about America's history with Asia without mentioning a few things that tend to run against the standard theory. And if you can sit down and analyze the data, and take into account that it is biased to begin with, you can see history in a whole new light. You can see Japan as a country that did not want to be preyed upon by the U.S. and the European imperialists the way they saw the rest of Asia preyed upon. They did not want to become part of the British, Spanish, French, Dutch, Russian, or American empires. They took logical steps to prevent that. I don't condone their over-the-top militarism, but it does not compare to U.S. militarism. Going into World War II the U.S. had a bigger Navy than Japan. They had troops in China. We called that aggression, even though they had puppets invite them to wage war there. We had our puppet in China, so our military support for his militarist regime (his title was Generalissimo) was not qualitatively different.

Japan lost World War II, but they liberated Asia, or most of it, in the process. I doubt the Communist Party could have liberated China if Japan had not tossed out the Europeans and defeated the American puppet Chiang Kai-shek during the war. The people in Indonesia, then called the Dutch East Indies, refused to allow the Dutch to re-establish a colony. Gandhi may have been a pacifist, but it was the Japanese violence freaks who largely made British occupation of India untenable.

The U.S. War Against Asia has paused at times, but never halted. Most famously we tried to stop the nationalist movement of Vietnam from establishing a free and independent nation. Whenever possible we (our ruling class and its government, and whoever goes along with them) have tried to make the leaders of Asian nations into puppets.

And so when a socialist regime was set up in Afghanistan back around 1978, U.S. strategists took note. We were not pleased that the socialists were modernizers, not Islamists. They were clients of the U.S.S.R., a rival empire. And so our CIA armed the Islamists and embroiled Afghanistan in a civil war. When the Russians left in 1989, war lords and clan-based local governments took over most of the country. [See History of Afghanistan for details]

A man very different from Barack Obama decided to do something for his country. He did not have two parents with graduate school educations; he did not go to the finest private colleges in the world. His family was very poor. He fought against the Soviets, losing an eye in the process, and he studied in religious schools (Madrasahs). His only goal was to bring peace and justice to Afghanistan. Mullah Omar, as he became known, gathered a small group of other students of justice (Taliban). His first known act with this group, at that time numbering 30 soldiers (with only 16 rifles between them) was to rescue two girls who had been kidnapped and raped by local war lords. As their reputation for just governance grew, so did the Taliban. By 1996 the Taliban were in effective control of Afghanistan. Which was fine with the CIA and the few other U.S. policy makers who paid attention to such things. The Taliban were not communists, did not like the Iranians (they were in a different branch of Islam), and were not likely to ally with the Chinese. They brought peace to a land that had been at war for 20 years.

It is hard to imagine Barack Obama risking his own life, or even his political career, to save anyone else. But he is perfectly willing to kill Students in Afghanistan if that furthers the interests of the U.S. ruling class that he so happily serves (tea with your billions of federal aid? Perhaps some marmalade with your crumpets, fellows?).

Perhaps some day Americans will stop trying to rule the world. But apparently not under the administration of Barack Obama.

Can we produce millions of rounds of ammunition to kill people in Afghanistan, even when we seem to be unable to build houses or automobiles or schools in America any more?

Yes, We Can!

Barack Obama and Woodrow Wilson

Barack Obama was not the favorite Democratic Party primary candidate of the hard-core peace advocates within the Democratic Party (and duly noting that most serious peace activists are outside the Democratic Party). Hillary Clinton, who looks to be the next Secretary of State, had voted for the illegal invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan back before Barack made it to the United States Senate. She was the presumed winner, and so kept a moderate stance on continuing the wars in order to be ready to go up against the Republican nominee. Barack kept saying "hope" and "change," and pointed to his not voting for beginning the wars (he did vote regularly to continue funding them). When he became the nominee, he not only assumed the Clinton "moderate" position but promised to send more U.S. troops to Afghanistan to make sure, by slaughtering even more Afghanis on their own soil, that our puppet government in Kabul would hold onto power.

But, so far, he can't claim to be as bad as Woodrow Wilson. President Wilson is one of the Presidents we are usually told was a "great" President. During his presidency the U.S. joined the great imperialist powers France and Great Britain in defeating Germany in World War I. We are told this was a victory for Democracy, even though Great Britain was demonstrably less of a democracy than Germany at that time.

U.S. historians, even those who might better be called propagandists, do not fail to mention that in the 1916 campaign Wilson sought re-election on the basis of having "kept us out of war," but then pushed our nation into the war (See Woodrow Wilson and the Lusitania [December 4, 2006]). In contrast the U.S. government is already slaughtering the innocents of Afghanistan, and note Barack Obama never promised to get us out of Afghanistan.

But there are lesser known aspects of Woodrow Wilson that will be interesting to compare with Barack Obama, the first non-white to be elected President of the United States. Notably, Wilson was a racist. A tried and true racist. Not a gun-toting, Ku Klux Klan racist, but very clear on the idea that Europeans were a superior people and that non-Europeans did not deserve full citizenship status under law. For instance, "The federal government showed little or no interest in civil rights, and indeed, Woodrow Wilson, a Southerner by birth, was only too eager to promote segregation in Washington, D.C." [p. 525, Lawrence M. Friedman's A History of American Law, Third Edition]

Moreover, Wilson's alleged love of peace is usually "proven" by his promotion of the League of Nations. While Wilson was too busy in Europe to devote America's energies to the War Against Asia, he did manage to remind the Japanese (and all Asians) that the Europeans did not consider them to be fully human. The Japanese were U.S. allies in World War I (because they wanted to grab German colonies in east Asia). They had defeated both China and Russia in earlier wars. They felt they were as civilized and capable as Europeans. The Japanese delegation to the League of Nations proposed that the Preamble to the Covenant include a declaration for "the principle of equality of nations and the just treatment of their nationals." Which, if it had passed, might have meant a gradual end of colonialism, and a peaceful Japan.

Woodrow Wilson was chairman of the committee hearing the proposal. Wanting to defeat it, he ruled that the motion could only be approved by a unanimous vote. Eleven of the seventeen nations on the committee voted for the proposal, six against, with the U.S. and the "democracy" of Great Britain not voting for it. So the League of Nations was an openly imperialist, racist organization. [Meribeth E. Cameron et al, China, Japan and the Powers, The Ronald Press Company, New York. Pages 377-379]

In short Woodrow Wilson was a disgrace. And the history of the Democratic party is disgraceful.

You can argue the Barack Obama situation two ways. Democrats like the idea that the past is no concern of theirs, that the party is what they say it is today. Forget about all those votes for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; forget the lack of protest against the U.S. paying allies to trample on the sovereignty of Somalia. Hope for a new, brighter future in which even black men, as long as they are inoffensive and have two parents with graduate degrees and somehow get themselves a degree from Harvard Law School, can become President.

Or you can ask: why would Barack Obama devote himself to the Democratic Party when he knows it is the primary racist institution in the United States? If you are going to forget the past and reform a war crimes organization, why not work within the Republican Party, which at least has the merit of having opposed slavery and segregation?

Of course, what Barack and the Democratic majority in Congress do in the next four years will at least define the true, honest, current state of the Democratic Party. Maybe it will turn out better than I think.

If this democratic republic still exists a century from now, with the same system of two-party rule, rest assured that American citizens will be told that Barack Obama was a great President. Just as they will be told that George W. Bush was a great President. No matter what Barack does or does not do in office.

Remember the Wyoming!

Remember the Wyoming! These words echo down through American history, beloved by every patriotic school child ... not.

Remember the Maine! Yes, that's it. Leading Americans, including Theodore Roosevelt, had been lusting after Cuba and other Spanish colonial possessions for decades. A U.S. battleship, taking on provisions in the harbor of Havana, Cuba, blew up and sank in 1898. Given that it was filled with munitions, this was almost certainly an accident. If the Spanish had done it on purpose, they would have said so. Some time later, when the Spanish refused to peacefully turn over their colonies to the U.S., we declared war and grabbed Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines. Since the people of the Philippines had already thrown the Spanish out and so did not feel the Spanish could give it to the U.S., we then proceeded to kill some 2 million natives to make the islands safe for U.S. sugar growers [See Philippines, U.S. war against].

What was the Wyoming incident? The first glorious victory of the courageous, manly, oh-so-patriotic but peace-loving United States Navy over the cowardly, prissy, but aggressor, inferior Japanese Navy, is a fair summation of how it is seen by U.S. historians. The Wyoming incident took place in Japanese waters; it is also called the Battle of Shimonoseki and took place in 1863.

To understand the importance of the incident (because it is remarkably similar to so many other incidents in U.S. history) one has to back up a little bit, and also see it from the Japanese point of view. A little belief in ethical behavior, and the ability to distinguish between aggression and self-defense, is helpful too. A knowledge of pirates also helps.

To the European pirate states of the 16th century, what we now call the Americas were part of Asia. Conquest of the Americas was just a stepping stone to conquest of greater Asia. Before the British colonies even became the United States of America, Britain had joined the other pirates in trading, raiding, and trying to grab Asian territories. America's pirates, though they had a sea arm, for decades concentrated on grabbing the lands laying between them and the Pacific ocean. While supposedly fighting over a small strip of land claimed by both Mexico and Texas, the United States finally succeeded in getting its full Pacific Coast possessions in 1848 [See Mexican - American War]

The practice of U.S. pirates, like British and other pirates, was to send scouting parties in advance of conquests, usually disguised as traders or missionaries.

The rulers and people of Japan first encountered the Western pirates in the 1500's. After trading with them for some time, they decided they did not like pirate behavior. In the 1600's the Japanese limited trade with the west to a single trading post for the Dutch at Deshima.

In U.S. mythology Japan was a "closed" nation. The U.S. did Japan the favor of opening the door to our wonderful western culture. There are two things wrong with this picture: Japan was not closed and pirates like doors to be open so they can rape and pillage. Japan was trading with China and Korea, and it was trading with the Dutch. Japanese scholars were kept abreast of pirate politics and science by the Dutch. During the American Revolution, since they pirates they were most afraid of were the British, they cheered for George Washington. In the early 1850's two books about the United States of America were published in Japan, Meriken Shinshi and Amerika Soki. [China, Japan, and the Powers, p. 197].

There is no law that individuals or nations have to trade with any particular other individuals or nations. The "free" part of "free trade" means it is optional, in contrast to "forced trade." Japan had enjoyed a historic 250 years of internal and external peace in 1850. Her economy had developed and her population had grown. Her once-feared Samurai warrior class had taken up poetry, flower arranging, and local trade. Japan had some primitive cannon to defend her ports against pirates, but that turned out to be insufficient.

What Commander Perry brought from the U.S. to Japan in 1854 was not a better religion, or goods that the Japanese needed, but bigger cannon. To the Japanese, Perry's ships were big steamships armed with weapons of mass destruction, which Perry demonstrated (they had seen such guns demonstrated already by other pirates) and threatened to use. More important, Russian, British, and French pirates had these weapons, and the Koreans and Chinese were trying to acquire them. The Japanese Shogun and his advisers decided that they needed these new weapons if only to defend themselves. Under threat of violence, they signed the Treaty of Kanagawa which gave the U.S. pirates the right to take on provisions and trade at Shimoda and Hakodate.

The pirate nations, sensing weakness, began their systematic plundering. This may seem like minor plundering, under cover of some trading of goods, in retrospect, but it was minor only because Japan was distant and the pirates were pretty busy plundering India, Japan, China and, well, just about everywhere. The Industrial Revolution allowed the pirates to build really big pirate ships with really powerful guns very quickly, so it was just a matter of time before they would overrun Japan unless the Japanese came up with a workable defense plan. The basic Japanese plan was: minimize the piracy, maximize learning the methods of the Industrial Revolution.

In 1863 the Emperor Komei believed the Japanese were strong enough to ask to be left alone again. He ordered the expulsion of the pirates. The pirates, naturally, did not like that, and being pirates and pretty good soldiers decided they would show the Japanese that they were not ready to be treated as a first class western, that is pirate, nation.

The Japanese still mostly had medieval style cannon, but they had three small steam-powered war ships (ironically, made in the United State). As per the Emperor's orders, they tried to drive off the pirates, notably the U.S. flagged Pembroke (named, appropriately, after a college that trained high-ranking women pirate molls). The Pembroke escaped without casualties, not being equipped to take on the Japanese steamers.

The USS Wyoming was well equipped. It was nowhere near the size of the full-scale battleships in the U.S. fleet at the time, but those ships were fighting the Civil War (a sort of temporary falling out among the American pirates). The pirate captain was David McDougal. The Wyoming was almost 200 feet long, 33 feet wide, 15 feet deep and weighed nearly 1500 tons. It had sails, but it main form of propulsion was a steam engine turning a propeller. She sported 2 pivoting Dahlgren cannons with 11 inch bores and modern explosive shells, at that time the biggest gun in the U.S. Navy. She also had a 60 pounder and three 32 pounders. [China, Japan, and the Powers, p. 202-203]

To make a long story short, she wiped out the three smaller, more lightly armed Japanese vessels. Many of the Japanese shells hit the Wyoming, and she suffered five pirates killed and six wounded.

The pirate nations then ganged up on the Japanese. A fleet of French, British, Dutch, and American war ships attacked the forts in the strait of Shimonoseki on September 5, 1864 and destroyed them. The Japanese decided they were not yet ready to defend themselves against the pirates. So they signed the Convention of Shimonoseki, agreeing to give the pirates a ransom of $3 million and, of course, allowing the pirates to continue their "trade." [p. 203-204]

"Those who do not remember history are bound to repeat it." Those who want to repeat history try to make sure it is not remembered, at least by their potential victims.

More data:

The United States War Against Asia

Bibliography:

China, Japan and the Powers by Meribeth E. Cameron, Thomas H. Mahoney, and George E. McReynolds. The Ronald Press Company, New York, 1952.

Hawaii, Iraq, War and Peace

What does Hawaii have to do with the U.S. War Against Iraq?

This morning I posted the draft chapter The U.S. Conquest of Hawaii and Other Pacific Islands, which is part of my larger work The U.S. War Against Asia. I probably will not include the Iraq War I and Iraq War II or the War Against Terrorism or Afghanistan in the Asian War book. But I could, since technically Iraq and Afghanistan are in Asia. That goes back to those crazy Greeks, who defined Asia as all the lands to the East of their homeland.

In the U.S. war against Asia it is important to note that the broader context of the war is political, economic, and cultural. Before the Hawaiian Islands were invaded by the U.S. military they were invaded by U.S. Christian missionaries. Several of the major figures in the U.S. seizure of Hawaii were children of those missionaries who were born on the islands and became lawyers or businessmen.

While Hawaii was desirable as a way station for U.S. merchant shipping, it also began to produce an important crop, cane sugar. I am indebted to Luzviminda Bartolome Francisco and Jonathan Shepard Fast whose book Conspiracy for Empire details the role of the sugar industry in the Spanish American War and seizure of Hawaii. It is a sad commentary on the American book publishing industry that this book is quite rare, having never been published in the U.S. and being out of print in the Philippines, where it was published by the Foundation for Nationalist Studies in 1985.

At times the Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans saw "missionary" efforts as a prelude to colonization by European nations or the United States. The same is true of commercial relationships. Yet closed door policies proved to be even more disastrous than trade and cultural exchange. The military weakness of the Asian nations encouraged military aggression by, in turn, Portugal, Spain, Holland, England, Germany and the U.S.

The tragedy of Japan's westernization is a sad, related tale. To resist the Europeans the Japanese decided they had to control, and eventually conquer, their Asian neighbors.

Iraq too has been a victim of a system where all roads lead to failure. The collapse of the Turkish (Ottoman) Empire during World War I, while it liberated many subject states, meant that no single subject state could successfully resist Great Britain, Germany, France or the U.S. At best the Islamic nations could hope to play one off against the other. Iraq was at first a client state of Britain and then of the United States. Saddam Hussein started as a socialist, but became a U.S. puppet. While he did the U.S.'s dirty work invading Iran, he led a military and economic buildup of Iraq that also followed Turkey's lead in creating a secular, non-Islamic culture. He thought he had grown strong enough to cut the puppet strings, but he was wrong.

The key to solving the problems of the world is disarming the United States of America. It is true that some other evil empire might emerge, but disarmament is a likely course to a peaceful world. Sadly, Japan is now run by politicians who want to re-arm.

I hope that countries like Japan, China, Iran, Korea and Japan will only use their armies and navies for self-defense. But military establishments grown powerful create their own dynamics, as we have seen in the U.S.

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