It is popularly said that history is written by the victors. It is not strictly true. The vanquished also write it, and when they do, they write it exactly the way the victors do: Demonize the other side and whitewash their own past. There is trouble though, when it is done too brazenly. Japan is in the midst of one now because of an official school history book that erases its monstrous crimes before its defeat in World War II. It has caused outrage particularly in China and South Korea which both suffered enormously under Japanese occupation. Mild protests have come also from many world capitals.
The Japanese government’s stubbornness in this matter reflects the sentiment that far from being the aggressor in World War II, Japan was actually one of its major victims, devastated by atomic bombs dropped in 1945 on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This battle for victim status has been, throughout history, an inevitable part of every aggressive nation’s effort to justify the crimes it committed while pursuing its war of greed or dominion. It comes in tandem with the effort to invent a noble cause for the war. The controversial book has passages suggesting that Japan’s militarism was an attempt to liberate Asia from Western colonialism and claiming that resource-poor Japan was pushed into a corner and used aggression as a last resort. That we know is sheer nonsense.
But we have heard it before, and did not call it nonsense. European colonialists came to Asia and Africa to “civilize” the natives, did they not, carrying the “white man’s burden”? And yes, the same as Japan’s victims, the colonized “natives” had too much wealth for their own good and the resource-poor colonialists were “pushed into a corner and used aggression as a last resort to get hold of them.” That is not an old story either. Right now, we have the United States “liberating” the people of Iraq — with a few more countries lined up for the same treatment — from tyranny, dictatorship, terror and whatever. And it too was “pushed into a corner” like Japan was. And, being resource-poor, it is helping itself to Iraq’s oil deposits through contracts that a future non-puppet government of Iraq will not be able to cancel.
The point here is that there are few states that do not have murky passages in their history which they remain reluctant to acknowledge. The British invented the concentration camp in which thousands of Boers died during the expansion of British power in South Africa; the Turks unleashed savage reprisals against a rebellious Armenian minority in 1916; Lenin and Stalin slaughtered millions by deliberate starvation, secret policeman’s bullet and the gulags; white settlers in Tasmania hunted the aboriginal inhabitants to extinction and the United States was an eager partner in the slave trade and butchered native Americans who stood in their push to the Pacific coast. These are only a few of the better known crimes committed by many countries which they would now prefer to forget.
Japan must stop whitewashing its past. So should others — with some stopping whitewashing their present also.
