In my latest book review for The Objective Standard, I look at Gary Bass's book on the post-World War II war crimes trial in Japan. The trial isn't well remembered in the United States today, but as Bass shows, it's certainly remembered in Asia--and for good reason: despite its many shortcomings, the trial represented a chapter in world history when the world's democracies took seriously the idea of defending civilization against savagery. While the Nuremberg Trials are today viewed as mostly successful in that respect, the Tokyo trial has a more mixed record. Excerpt:
Then there was the immense dissent by India’s Judge Pal, which endorsed the defendants’ contention that Japan had not aimed to conquer Asia, but only to “liberate” it from European colonialism. The reality is that the empire annexed some three million square miles of Asia and enslaved perhaps one-hundred and fifty million of its people, whom the Japanese considered racially inferior. But imperial leaders claimed they were only trying to unify Asia and free it from Western domination—and Pal apparently agreed. At the trial, former Japanese Prime Minister Tojo Hideki—the highest-ranking and most unapologetic of the accused—insisted his government’s true purpose had been to free Asia from “the oppression of western powers.” Pal accepted this argument, affirming that Japan was simply “defending itself” against the West when it invaded China, Korea, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaya, Singapore, the Philippines, and other countries, and downplayed such atrocities as the Rape of Nanking and the Manila Massacre.
In fact, although Bass doesn’t say so, Pal’s line of thinking not only affirmed the Axis view of the war, but also anticipated today’s fashionable “antiracist” ideology, which regards Western civilization as inherently “oppressive” and excuses non-whites for whatever crimes they might commit against Europeans (and, predictably, Jews). “Imperial Japan portrayed itself as an army of liberation, driving out white and wicked European empires under the slogan ‘Asia for the Asiatics,’” writes Bass. “Japanese intellectuals promised a wholly new order from that of the ousted white supremacists: rejecting a rationalist, materialist, capitalist, and imperialist Western world for a soulful, holistic, and traditional Asian civilization.” In other words, like today’s “Critical Race Theorists,” the empire employed the language of victimhood and “resistance” to veil its own essentially racist and primitivist nature. Pal blithely ratified this view, even characterizing the Japanese government’s official racism as “a necessary measure of protection for their own race.” Of course, the Nazis had said the same about their own anti-Semitic Nürnberger Gesetze (Nuremberg laws).
The perversity of his way of seeing things was perfectly encapsulated by the fact that he ended his dissent by quoting a politician who said that the cause defeated in war would be vindicated in peace “when time shall have softened passion and prejudice.” These words were more revealing than Pal supposed: The politician was Confederate President Jefferson Davis.
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