Free Market Economics: Stealing from the Poor to Give to the Rich: An Anti-Robin Hood Story presented by Learn Liberty. Learn More: https://www.learnliberty.org/
Have you ever thought much about property rights? Many believe ownership protections primarily favor the wealthy, but it turns out that the wealthy and politically connected actually benefit more when ownership is vulnerable. Without strong property rights, those with the power are able to take property from those who lack such political connections. In places like Zimbabwe—where the government is able to confiscate profits, merchandise, and even businesses with ease—the lack of property protections has been one cause of the country’s decline. Today, Zimbabwe is the poorest country in the world, and eroded property rights are at least partially to blame. Prof. Dan Russell argues that “doing less to protect ownership turns out to be a really effective way to create poverty.” Perhaps property rights deserve protecting. Except, maybe, among Finnish race car drivers.
The company recently settled to pay up to $700 million in restitution and fines to settle with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. $425 million will go to those who were affected by the breach, which exposed social security numbers of nearly 150 million people.
The website where those affected can file a claim is now live.
To find out if you were one of the people impacted by the breach, Equifax has set up a tool to check.
If you were affected, you’ll have access to free credit monitoring and identity theft protection for up to 10 years. If you don’t want the credit monitoring, you can simply get a $125 payment. Update: Given the large number of people who have requested a cash payment as of July 31, the FTC says recipients may get less money than they anticipated.
“The public response to the settlement has been overwhelming,” reads an update on the FTC’s website. “Millions of people have visited this site in just the first week. Because the total amount available for these alternative payments is $31 million, each person who takes the money option is going to get a very small amount. Nowhere near the $125 they could have gotten if there hadn’t been such an enormous number of claims filed.”
Anyone who had expenses as a result of the breach, such as losses, accountant fees or freezing a credit report, can get a payment of up to $20,000.
“This comprehensive settlement is a positive step for U.S. consumers and Equifax as we move forward from the 2017 cybersecurity incident and focus on our transformation investments in technology and security as a leading data, analytics, and technology company,” Equifax Chief Executive Officer, Mark W. Begor said in a statement about the settlement.
Equifax’s disclosure of the 2017 breach sparked off intense criticism as it came to light that the credit bureau knew about the hack almost five months before it initially claimed and three senior executives sold off almost $2 million of their shares in the company before it went public with the information.
This article appeared in Reason Online on September 26, 2008
In the future, if you tell a student or a journalist that you favor free markets and limited government, there is a risk that they will ask you why you support dictatorships, torture, and corporate welfare. The reason for the confusion will be Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.
In a very short time, the book has become a 21st‐century bible for anticapitalists. It has also drawn praise from mainstream reviewers: “There are very few books that really help us understand the present,” gushed The Guardian.“The Shock Doctrine is one of those books.” Writing in The New York Times, the Nobel‐winning economist Joseph Stiglitz called it “a rich description of the political machinations required to force unsavory economic policies on resisting countries.”
Klein’s basic argument is that economic liberalization is so unpopular that it can only win through deception or coercion. In particular, it relies on crises. During a natural disaster, a war, or a military coup, people are disoriented, confused, and preoccupied with their own immediate survival, allowing regimes to liberalize trade, to privatize, and to reduce public spending with little opposition. According to Klein, “neoliberal” economists have welcomed Hurricane Katrina, the Southeast Asian tsunami, the Iraq war, and the South American military coups of the 1970s as opportunities to introduce radical free market policies. The chief villain in her story is Milton Friedman, the economist who did more than anyone in the 20th century to popularize free market ideas.
To make her case, Klein exaggerates the market reforms in question, often ignoring central events and rewriting chronologies. She confuses libertarianism with the quite different concepts of corporatism and neoconservatism. And she subjects Milton Friedman to one of the most malevolent distortions of a thinker’s ideas in recent history.
Exhibit A against Friedman is a quote from what Klein calls “one of his most influential essays”: “Only a crisis‐actual or perceived‐produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.” This, says Klein, is “the shock doctrine.” In a not‐very‐subtle short film based on the book, the quote appears over images of prisoners being tortured.
The quote is not, in fact, from one of Friedman’s most influential essays; it’s from a very brief introduction to a reprint of his book Capitalism and Freedom. And it is not a rationale for welcoming disasters; it’s about the uncontroversial fact that people change their minds when the old ways seem to fail. Friedman provides a telling example, which Klein neglects to quote: Young Americans joined him in opposing the military draft after the Vietnam War forced them to risk their lives on another continent.
She also distorts other Friedman quotes to support her case. She pretends that Friedman’s concept of “the tyranny of the status quo” refers the tyranny of voters, and that he believed crises were needed to bypass the democratic process. But for Friedman, the tyranny was something entirely different: an iron triangle of politicians, bureaucrats, and special interest groups (businesses, for example) that deceive voters.
Discussing Friedman’s proposal to reduce inflation through sweeping market reforms, Klein writes, “Friedman predicted that the speed, suddenness and scope of the economic shifts would provoke psychological reactions in the public that ‘facilitate the adjustment.’ ” This gives the impression that Friedman wanted to disorient people through pain in order to push through his reforms. But the quote in its entirety shows that Friedman had something very different in mind. If a government chooses to attack inflation in this way, he wrote, “it should be announced publicly in great detail.…The more fully the public is informed, the more will its reactions facilitate the adjustment.” In other words, if voters are not ignorant and not disoriented, but fully informed of the reform steps, they will facilitate the adjustment by changing their saving, consuming, and bargaining behavior. Friedman’s view was the opposite of what Klein claims.
Not content to misrepresent Friedman’s opinions, Klein blames him for various crimes committed around the world. Most notably, she links him to Augusto Pinochet’s brutal military dictatorship in Chile in the 1970s, writing that Friedman acted as “adviser to the Chilean dictator.”
In fact, Friedman never worked as an adviser to, and never accepted a penny from, the Chilean regime. He even turned down two honorary degrees from Chilean universities that received government funding, because he did not want to be seen as endorsing a dictatorship he considered “terrible” and “despicable.” He did spend six days in Chile in March 1975 to give public lectures, at the invitation of a private foundation. When he was there he met with Pinochet for about 45 minutes and wrote him a letter afterward, arguing for a plan to end hyperinflation and liberalize the economy. He gave the same kind of advice to communist dictatorships as well, including the Soviet Union, China, and Yugoslavia.
Klein twists this relationship beyond recognition, claiming Pinochet’s 1973 coup was executed to allow free market economists (“the Chicago Boys,” as the economists from Friedman’s University of Chicago were called) to enact their reforms. This false link is crucial for giving the impression that the Friedmanites have blood on their hands, since the most violent period of the regime came right after the coup. But Friedman’s visit, which Klein claims started the real transformation, came two years later. Klein insists on having it both ways.
The reality was that Chile’s military officials were initially in charge of the economy. They were corporatist and paternalist, and they opposed the Chicago Boys’ ideas. The air force controlled social policy, for example, and it blocked market reforms until 1979. It wasn’t until this approach led to runaway inflation that Pinochet belatedly threw his weight behind liberalization and gave civilians ministerial positions. Their success in fighting inflation impressed Pinochet, so they were given a larger role.
Klein could have used the real chronology to attack Friedman for visiting a dictatorship that tortured its opponents — a commonly heard criticism of the economist — but that’s not enough for her. To find support for her central thesis that economic liberalism requires violence, she has to make it look like torture and violence were the direct outcome of Friedman’s ideas.
Klein also blames Friedmanite economics for the Iraq war, for the International Monetary Fund’s actions during the Asian economic crisis of the late 1990s, and for the Sri Lankan government’s confiscation of fishermen’s property to build luxury hotels after the deadly tsunami of 2005. In a 576‐page book about such evils, why wasn’t there room to mention that Milton Friedman opposed the Iraq war, thought the IMF shouldn’t be involved in Asia, and believed governments should be prohibited from expropriating property to give it to private developers? Klein quotes from some interviews in which Friedman voiced these views, but she declines to mention Friedman’s long held positions that directly undermine her thesis.
Even though Klein is dead wrong about Friedman, she may well be right in her broader thesis that it’s easier to liberalize in times of crisis, and that there is a close connection between economic liberalization and political violence. It’s true that several dictators have liberalized their economies in recent years and that some of them have tortured their opponents.
But how strong is this connection? If we look at the Economic Freedom of the World statistics assembled by the Fraser Institute, a Canadian free market think tank, we find only four economies on the planet that haven’t liberalized at all since 1980, so obviously reform has taken place in all sorts of countries. But the statistics clearly show that most classical liberal reforms happen in democracies, not dictatorships. Klein never talks about such rapidly liberalizing democracies as Iceland, Ireland, Estonia, or Australia, where reforms were given renewed support in several elections. Presumably these countries just aren’t undemocratic and brutal enough. She does discuss Britain under Margaret Thatcher, but only to argue that Thatcher too relied on shocks and violence.
The Iron Lady won re‐election in 1983, Klein says, because of the boost she got from the Falklands War. She doesn’t mention another reason for Thatcher’s growing popularity: The British economy was improving rapidly at the time. A 1987 study in the British Journal of Political Science looked in detail at the timing of events and British voters’ perception of them, and made a strong case that the Tories gained only three percentage points from the war; the vast majority of the gain came from improved economic prospects. And the Falklands War certainly cannot explain why Tories won two more elections after that, nor why Tony Blair’s New Labour had to dress itself in Thatcherite clothes to be elected.
Naomi Klein usually exaggerates the economic liberalization that has been carried out by brutal dictators. She needs to demonstrate that Pinochet’s interest in market reforms was typical of authoritarian regimes — otherwise, her arch‐villain Friedman might have been right when he said that the surprising thing in Chile was not that the market worked but that the generals allowed it to work. So Klein ropes in the Argentinean dictatorship of 1976–1983. Based on those two examples, she claims the southern part of Latin America is where “contemporary capitalism was born.” She even calls the countries “Chicago School juntas.”
There were indeed advisers from the University of Chicago in Argentina; since there is strong global demand for Chicago economists, they have visited many countries. But their influence in Argentina was barely noticeable. In the Fraser Institute index of economic freedom, which gives scores from 1 (the least free) to 10 (the most), Argentina moved from 3.25 in 1975 to 3.86 in 1985. Compare this with the countries Klein mentions as superior alternatives to the Chicago Boys’ brutal “neoliberal” models: Sweden went from 5.62 in 1975 to 6.63 in 1985; Malaysia, one of the “mixed, managed economies” Klein prefers, went from 6.43 to 7.13. In 1985, after Argentina allegedly applied Friedman’s ideas, the country’s economy was less market oriented than all the Eastern European communist economies tracked by Fraser, including Poland, Hungary, and Romania. But Argentina tortured people, so in Klein’s mind it must have been on the fast track to free markets.
By Klein’s account, China is another country that violently imposed Friedmanite reforms. To make this case, she rewrites the history of the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, claiming the protesters were primarily opposed to economic liberalization, instead of one‐party dictatorship. According to Klein, the Communist Party, led by Deng Xiaoping, attacked them to save its free market program and advance yet more sweeping reforms while people were still in shock.
If the students were indeed protesting economic reform, they seldom expressed that grievance at the time. Instead, they demonstrated in favor of democracy, government transparency, and equality before the law, and against bureaucracy and violence. The protesters first gathered to mourn former Secretary General Hu Yaobang, one of China’s most important economic reformers. The protests soon grew to include everybody who wanted liberal democracy — both those who wanted more economic reform and those who wanted less. Klein equates the second element with the whole protest.
Chinese officials suppressed the demonstrations because they wanted to protect the party’s power, not because they wanted to liberalize the economy. The majority were economic conservatives who were skeptical of markets; some even refused to visit Chinese free trade zones on principle. And the economic reforms did not accelerate after the massacre, as Klein claims. For the first time since their inception, they stalled.
The most consistent free marketeer in the leadership, General Secretary Zhao Ziyang, was purged because he supported the protesters, and he spent the rest of his life under house arrest. (Friedman had met him in Beijing in 1988 and wrote him a letter of advice. For Klein, this is yet another meeting with a tyrant.) Zhao’s rivals — including Premier Li Peng, who was pushing for a violent crackdown on the protesters — then tried to roll the market reforms back and reintroduce economic controls. The conservatives blamed the unrest on the openness associated with economic liberalization, and Deng’s position in the party was weakened. Far from being the start of “shock therapy,” Tiananmen Square was almost the end of China’s economic liberalization. Klein writes that “Tiananmen paved the way for a radical transformation free from fear of rebellion,” but according to the Fraser statistics, China was actually less economically open in 1990 than it was in 1985.
Klein writes that Deng opened the Chinese economy “in the three years immediately following the bloodbath.” This is true only if “immediately” means “three years later.” Reform faltered so much in the years following the crackdown that Deng felt he needed to go outside normal channels and jump‐start liberalization in the spring of 1992, even though he was 87 years old and had formally retired. His “southern tour” was a trip filled with speeches and networking aimed at saving the reform program. The tour was not initially reported in the national media, since they were controlled by Deng’s rivals. Deng even found himself forced to write articles supporting his agenda under a pen name to get access. But he was eventually successful in winning local support and building alliances with provincial governors who favored liberalization. Only then did President Jiang Zemin reluctantly support Deng’s reforms.
To show that radical economic liberalization can happen only in dictatorships, Klein compares China to democratic Poland in the late 1980s and early ‘90s: “In China, where the state used the gloves‐off method of terror, torture and assassination, the result was, from a market perspective, an unqualified success. In Poland, where only the shock of economic crisis and rapid change was harnessed — and there was no overt violence — the effects of the shock eventually wore off, and the results were far more ambiguous.” Once again, the statistics tell a different story. According to the Fraser data, Poland actually took reform farther and faster. In 1985 its economy was much less open, with a score of 3.93 versus China’s 5.11. In 1995, both scored 5.3. In 2005 Poland was way ahead, with 6.83 to China’s 5.9.
Klein also exaggerates the free market elements in anything she can associate with a crisis. She writes that politicians used Hurricane Katrina to introduce “a fundamentalist version of capitalism” in New Orleans. The “fundamentalist” reform in question? The introduction of more charter schools. Not satisfied to exaggerate just the nature of the change, Klein also stretches its extent: She writes that the school board used to run 123 public schools but after the hurricane ran only four, whereas the number of charter schools increased from seven to 31. She doesn’t mention that these figures date to the period immediately after the hurricane, when the school board was much slower to reopen its schools. As of September 2007, ordinary public schools again outnumbered charter schools, 47 to 44.
The strangest thing about Klein’s suggestion that crises benefit free markets and limited government is that there is such a long record of the exact opposite. World War I led to communism in Russia; economic depression gave us Nazi Germany. Wars and other disasters are rarely friends of freedom. On the contrary, politicians and government officials often use crises as an opportunity to increase their budgets and powers. As one prominent economist put it while explaining his opposition to war in Iraq: “War is a friend of the state.…In time of war, government will take powers and do things that it would not ordinarily do.” The economist? Milton Friedman.
Friedman was right about the Iraq war: The Bush administration has used that conflict and the larger War on Terror to dramatically expand the federal government’s powers and expenditures. Bizarrely, Klein points to the U.S. after 9/11 as a major illustration of her thesis. She claims the terrorist attacks gave the Bush administration an opportunity to implement Friedman’s ideas by benefiting friends in the defense and security industries with new contracts and unprecedented sums of money. Klein never clearly explains how this could possibly be Friedmanite. In the real world, Friedman “had always emphasized waste in defense spending and the danger to political freedom posed by militarism,” in the words of his biographer Lanny Ebenstein. Somehow, Klein has confused Friedman’s limited‐government liberalism with corporatism.
As Klein sees it, in Bush’s America “you have corporatism: big business and big government combining their formidable power to regulate and control the citizenry.” This sounds like a healthy libertarian critique of the administration — something Friedman himself might say. But Klein thinks that Bush‐style corporatism is the “pinnacle of the counterrevolution launched by Friedman” and that the team that implemented it is “Friedmanite to the core.”
So even when the U.S. government breaks all the rules in Milton Friedman’s book, Klein blames Friedman. At one point she writes about the lack of openness in the Iraqi economy: “All the…U.S. corporations that were in Iraq to take advantage of the reconstruction were part of a vast protectionist racket whereby the U.S. government had created their markets with war, barred their competitors from even entering the race, then paid them to do the work, while guaranteeing them a profit to boot — all at taxpayer expense.” This would be an excellent Friedmanite critique of how governments enrich their friends at the expense of competitors and taxpayers — if it weren’t for the conclusion to the paragraph: “The Chicago School crusade…had finally reached its zenith in this corporate New Deal.”
For Klein, tax‐funded corporate welfare is the zenith of Chicago’s free market revolution. The idea seems to be that Milton Friedman likes corporations, so if governments give corporations contracts, subsidies, protection, and privileges, that must be Friedmanite. At times it seems like Klein thinks any policy is Friedmanite if private companies are involved. But you would have a hard time finding an economist more persistent than Friedman in warning how corporations and capitalists conspire against the public to obtain special privileges. As Friedman wrote in Reason in 1978: “Business corporations in general are not defenders of free enterprise. On the contrary, they are one of the chief sources of danger.… Every businessman is in favor of freedom for everybody else, but when it comes to himself that’s a different question. We have to have that tariff to protect us against competition from abroad. We have to have that special provision in the tax code. We have to have that subsidy.”
In the absence of serious arguments against free markets, we are left with Klein’s reasonable critiques of torture, dictatorships, corruption, and corporate welfare. In essence, her book says that Milton Friedman’s limited government ideals are bad because governments are incompetent, corrupt, and cruel. If there is a disaster here, it is not one of Friedman’s making.
If the Gateses and the Faucis and the representatives of the international medical establishment get their way, life will not return to normal until the entire planet is vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2. What many do not yet understand, however, is that the vaccines that are being developed for SARS-Cov-2 are unlike any vaccines that have ever been used on the human population before. And, as radically different as these vaccines appear, they represent only the very beginning of a complete transformation of vaccine technology that is currently taking place in research labs across the planet. This is a study of The Future of Vaccines.
US President Harry S. Truman, with consent of his top brass, ordered the atomic bombings of Japan in order to save one million US lives. The Japanese were fascists. They were religious fanatics who worshipped the emperor as their God and were prepared to fight to the death. This was evidenced by the Kamikaze pilots and vicious fighting in Saipan and Okinawa. The annual Hiroshima and Nagasaki commemorations are exercises in blame-shifting and obfuscation; the fact is that WW II in Asia and the Pacific was a war between aggressive Japan and everyone else, and in each case, Japan was the aggressor. Japan attacked the United States first.
~ An average US history professor
What a bunch of post-war revisionist nonsense. The above statement is pure US government propaganda. It contains almost as many outrageous lies as it does individual words. The only part of this statement that is absolutely true is, “US President Harry S. Truman ordered the atomic bombings.” This drivel, in many forms, has been repeated again and again to US schoolchildren over these past 60 some years to the point that even some (supposedly educated) US scholars have begun to repeat the mantra. This lie has been so overblown that, recently, the absurd amount of “saved lives” has ballooned from “one million lives” to “two million lives” to even the point where President George W. Bush has stretched it to “millions of lives.” At this rate, by the year 2025, the atomic bombings will have saved 20 million lives. America, this is a lie. It’s time you faced up to the truth about the war and the atomic bombings.
When in the history of mankind have people actually fought to their deaths for one man? I propose to you that this has never happened. It’s against human nature to do so. The only people who even made the outlandish claim that the emperor was a living God were a very few Japanese rightists — and Shinto priests (a very minor religion) — who merely used this idea as a means to forward their own imperialist agenda (as well as modern American apologists for the atomic bombings). The average Japanese never thought the emperor was anymore than a man — just like they do today. I would like to end this misconception of the Japanese people. All people — regardless of the political system they are living under — will, however, fight to the death if they believe that they are saving their homes and families. That’s natural human behavior.
Besides the obvious common sense of the preceding two paragraphs, I would like to put every piece of this fabrication to rest — From the idea that the Japanese were suicidal maniacs — To the excuse of dropping the atomic bomb to save one million American lives. Am I a scholar historian? No, I am not. But I do have some unbeatable advantages over just about every US historian who has ever written on the subject: I speak Japanese and I live with the Japanese. The other trump card I have is that there are still a very many everyday Japanese alive and well today, who clearly remember the war, with whom I have spoken.
This is the overall story of World War II from the Japanese point of view. Of course, this is an extremely long subject and it would take an entire series of books to cover it fully — and even with that the debate would continue and the A-bomb apologists will refuse to face facts — but for the sake of convenience for the reader, I will try to keep this as short and simple as possible.
US President Harry S. Truman, with consent of his top brass, ordered the atomic bombings of Japan in order to save one million US lives.
There are two lies in this one sentence. Yes, Truman did order the atomic bombings. Did he do it with the consent of his top brass? No. Did he do it to save one million US lives? No.
Let’s look at the comments of several of America’s top military and civilian commanders at the time; Admiral William Leahy, the World War II Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; General Douglas McArthur; Brigadier General Carter Clarke; General Dwight D. Eisenhower; and Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy.
First General Douglas McArthur:
Norman Cousins was a consultant to General MacArthur during the American occupation of Japan. Cousins writes of his conversations with MacArthur, “MacArthur’s views about the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were starkly different than what the general public supposed. When I asked MacArthur about the decision to drop the bomb, I was surprised to learn that he had not even been consulted. What, I asked, would his advice have been? He replied that he saw no justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed — as it did later anyway — to the retention of the institution of the emperor.”
“In [July] 1945… Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act… The Secretary, upon giving me the news of a successful bomb test in New Mexico, and the plan for using it, asked for my reaction expecting a vigorous assent.
“During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought our country should avoid shocking world opinion by use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at the very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of u2018face’. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude…”
In a Newsweek interview, Eisenhower again recalled the meeting with Stimson:
“The Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”
Ike on Ike, Newsweek, 11/11/63
Brigadier General Carter Clarke (The military officer in charge of preparing intercepted Japanese cables — MAGIC summaries — for Truman and his advisors):
“When we didn’t need to do it, and we knew we didn’t need to do it, and they knew we didn’t need to do it, we used them as an experiment for two atomic bombs.”
(Once again, considering the above, one has to wonder just where did this idea that the Japanese were ready to fight to the death for the emperor come from anyway?)
John McCloy (Assistant Secretary of War):
“I have always felt that if, in our ultimatum to the Japanese government issued from Potsdam [in July 1945], we had referred to the retention of the emperor as a constitutional monarch and made some reference to the reasonable accessibility of raw materials to the future Japanese government, it would have been accepted. Indeed, I believe that even in the form it was delivered, there was some disposition on the part of the Japanese to give it favorable consideration. When the war was over I arrived at this conclusion after talking with a number of Japanese officials who had been closely associated with the decision of the then Japanese government, to reject the ultimatum, as it was presented. I believe that we missed the opportunity of effecting a Japanese surrender that was satisfactory to us, without the necessity of dropping the bombs.”
~ McCloy quoted in James Reston, Deadline, pg. 500
World War II Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral William Leahy:
The above proves, without a shadow of a doubt, that many of America’s top military and civilian commanders disagreed with Truman (or didn’t even know about) the dropping of the atomic bomb, and all thought that the A-bombs were unnecessary. It goes without saying that many never considered the absurdist notion that the Japanese would fight to the death for their “emperor God.”
(The A-bomb was dropped) to save one-million US lives (?)
No. This is a complete post-war fabrication. As scholar Ralph Raico pointed out in Hiroshima and Nagasaki:
US military planners at the time foresaw the worst-case scenario as 46,000 US casualties.
This proves that the preposterous number of one million American lives saved is a ridiculous post-war belief. The total numbers of all US military killed in World War II stands at 405,000 and that’s for both the Pacific and European theaters. This number of one million lives saved is rubbish akin to the magician pulling a live rabbit out of a hat. The Japanese had no air force or navy and were starving with no food, oil, gasoline, or any other natural resources to keep up the war effort.
The Japanese were fascists. They were religious fanatics who worshipped the emperor as their God and were prepared to fight to the death.
These sentences are completely false. One must understand a bit of Japanese history — and have a bit of common sense — just to see how really outlandish these notions are. Let’s touch on Japanese history first:
The imperial Japanese family returned to the throne of Japan a mere 70 years before the outbreak of hostilities between Japan and the United States. The utter notion that the Japanese nation was prepared to “die for their emperor” is an out-and-out fantasy. The average Japanese did not feel any more affinity to the emperor than the average American feels for their president; or the British or Spanish for their King. Why would they? Japan’s Hirohito had only been emperor for 15 years by the time war started with the United States. His family had been placed back in power only 70 years before. In fact, according to the Meiji Restoration (the movement that returned the emperor’s family to the throne of Japan), the emperor was nothing more than a figure-head of state. In fact, the emperor himself fancied his position along the lines of modern British monarchy and was unwilling to get involved with the day-to-day affairs of running the country.
The Meiji Restoration was a chain of events that led to a change in Japan’s political and social structure. It occurred from 1866 to 1869, a period of 4 years that transverses both the late Edo and beginning of the Meiji Period. Probably the most important foreign account of the events of 1862—69 is contained in A Diplomat in Japan by Sir Ernest Satow.
The leaders of the Meiji Restoration, as this revolution came to be known, claimed that their actions restored the emperor’s powers. This is not in fact true. Power simply moved from the Tokugawa Shogun to a new oligarchy of the daimyo who defeated him.
Emperor Hirohito was the figurehead emperor of Japan. Before him, his father, Emperor Taisho, held that position for a mere 14 years. It is widely rumored that Emperor Taisho had the same ailment that many inbred European monarchs suffered from; namely “being crazy.” Now it doesn’t take too much of a leap of imagination to see where the average Japanese Joe — just like Europeans — may have felt some affinity for the emperor, but they certainly were not going to risk their lives for him. So, if this guy was not so revered and respected — as claimed in the west to this day, why then did the Japanese fly Kamikaze planes and fight so hard in Saipan, and Okinawa, etc.? More on the obvious answer to this in a moment.
But first, another point that has been lost on most people from the west in these last 60 years: The idea that the emperor is divine is a strictly Shinto religious belief. Japan was, and still is, a predominately Buddhist country. Buddhist’s do not believe man can be a God. As Albert Einstein wrote:
“Buddhism has the characteristics of what would be expected in a cosmic religion of the future: it transcends a personal God, avoids dogma and theology; it covers both the natural and spiritual, and it is based on a religious sense aspiring from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual, as a meaningful unity.”
Typical war poster regardless of country — Once again, no sign of the emperor — Just an urging to work harder for the war effort
(The Japanese were prepared to fight to the death) This was evidenced by the Kamikaze pilots and vicious fighting in Saipan and Okinawa.
It should be obvious, after reading the above, that even the wartime American military commanders did not believe this story. After many interviews with elderly Japanese, I can tell you why the Japanese fought so hard; and, if anyone can, Americans should be able to understand this: The Japanese fought so tenaciously because there were some people who were brainwashed by government propaganda — Soldiers believed they were fighting to save their families.
In Japan, as with every other country in human history, the most brainwashed people join the so-called military elite. In America today, these people join the Marines, the Green Berets, or some other “Cream of the Crop” military organization. The difference between the Japanese of 1944 and Americans today, is that the Japanese thought they were fighting on home soil. Americans are brainwashed to believe that they are protecting America while fighting on foreign soil. The Japanese stopped this kind of imperialist brainwashing in 1945. The United States has been doing this since 1898 and it continues right up until today. Witness events in Iraq and Afghanistan for proof of this.
As far as Saipan is concerned, many Japanese soldiers believed that Saipan was a part of Japan. Saipan became a part of the Japanese empire in 1918 — It was a convenient “gift” for supporting the allies against the Germans in World War One (Thank you, America and its allies). Okinawa (formerly Ryukyu Islands) became a part of Japan in about 1609. Of course the Japanese fought hard in these places. They were fighting on “home turf” — or so they believed. Regardless, something can be said for the idea that the Japanese soldier was fighting closer to home than the western allies were — The Japanese soldiers considered the Pacific War theater their backyard.
Aside from the militarists in Japan, then, the average soldiers fought only to protect their homes and families. That’s it. And that’s what every Japanese I’ve spoken to has said. In fact, my own Japanese mother told me that people from the southern part of Japan hated the emperor and the militarists because it was the people in southern Japan who were being discriminated against and sent off to do insane things like fly Kamikaze planes (Kamikaze pilots were, by the way, pumped full of drugs before flying on missions — that was the only way they could get those guys to do those missions).
Many Okinawans still to this day hold ill-will towards the emperor and his masters for what happened on their island. All of the elderly Japanese I have spoken to (12 in all) thought it was ludicrous when I told them that Americans were taught to believe that all Japanese would die for the emperor. All the Japanese I spoke to (yes, and these were regular people — not die-hard Marines) were shocked or laughed at this notion.
Mr. Nishikawa, now almost 90, who was a captain in the imperial Japanese navy, said it the best when he replied to me, “We wanted to protect our families and our homes. Sure, it’s a part of Japanese culture to say that we did care about the emperor in front of each other — that’s Tatemae (a kind of little white lie) — but no one really wanted to go to war. No one really cared about the emperor. We were merely told that if we won this war, then we could finally have peace. That’s all we wanted. We were sick and tired of war.”
We were told that if we won this war, then we could have peace? This should sound hauntingly familiar to today’s American.
Also, if one understood the true nature of how the emperor — as with all European Monarchs also — was so out of touch with regular people and reality — and had been all his life, you’d understand that emperor Hirohito — as figurehead of state — in a nation that respects the elderly — could have never stopped the generals from going to war anyway.
By the same rationale that the US government propaganda machine today sells American youth and the ill-informed American public on the idea of fighting for “your country,” the Japanese military-government did the same exact thing. They all do. That’s the nature of government. If you asked an American soldier if he would die for the president, that soldier would most certainly say, “No!” But if you asked him if he’d die trying to save his family, he’d say, “Yes.” What makes you think the Japanese were any different than the Americans? The average person, American or Japanese, were just about the same: Duped by their respective government’s imperialist government propaganda.
I have yet to find one shred of evidence that the Japanese government used this “Fight for the emperor” kind of jingoism in order to motivate the troops, let alone the average population.
A telling story about what the higher echelons of the Japanese military thought about the war comes from a well-known admiral who was known as “The Father of the Kamikaze.” Japanese Navy Vice Admiral Takijiro Onishi — the man who came up with the idea of Kamikaze — He wrote in October of 1944:
“Japan must surrender as soon as possible. Now, we lost Mariana Islands, so the U.S can attack Japan by using B-29 from Saipan Island and Chengdu in China. However, we cannot stop their attack because we have no aircraft. Also, all of our oil and aluminum will have been spent within 6 months… we cannot fight anymore, so we have to sue for peace as quickly as we can. However, historically, the U.S is a scary country because many Indians and native Hawaiians were slaughtered. If they come to Japan, we have no idea what will they do; therefore, we have to fight with them at Philippines even if we make a sacrifice of ourselves. The war at the Philippines is the last…”
“Historically, the U.S is a scary country because many Indians and native Hawaiians were slaughtered”? Yes, this is true. American imperial history shows why so many of the world’s people are afraid of Americans to this very day. The final slaughter of the American Indians happened not 50 years beforehand at Wounded Knee; and a coup d’tat in collaboration with the US marines dethroned the royalty of Hawaii in 1893.
The Japanese propaganda machine might have made claims that the Japanese were ready to die for the emperor, but it defies common sense to imagine that, even if they did, this was nothing more than a tool in order to exhort the troops to fight on — and an ineffective one at that. Common sense dictates that what the government says, and what the person on the street thinks is an entirely different story. I suspect, once again, that this is a postwar fabrication created by the United States as a convenient tool for relieving US guilt over atomic bombing war crimes. I would welcome any US historian to prove me wrong by showing me Japanese language documentation of such a propaganda campaign.
In World War II, the average Japanese citizen on the street couldn’t have cared less about the emperor. And there was no way they were prepared to die for him. Die for their family? Yes. Die for the emperor? No.
The annual Hiroshima and Nagasaki commemorations are exercises in blame shifting and obfuscation;
There are two enormous lies in this statement. The annual Hiroshima and Nagasaki commemorations are not exercises in blame shifting and obfuscation. That is purely American right-wing A-bomb apologist propaganda. I have been to a Hiroshima A-bomb commemoration. There was not a shred of blame-shifting. All speeches by guests were either recollections of the day’s events or wishes for a peaceful, nuclear-free future. Here is a report on speeches made at Nagasaki:
Fumie Sakamoto, a junior high school student home for lunch when the bomb struck Nagasaki, spoke to the crowd with resolve and anger. “The world around me was lost in a cloud of dust,” she said, and she ran for shelter in the forest.
“People, clothes ripped and torn, with gaping chest wounds, whose hearts were exposed and could still be seen twitching; people burned so badly one could not tell front from back,” she said. “The woods were full of such people.”
Sakamoto, dressed in a deep purple kimono, her eyes and voice sharp and clear, said doctors had told her she was bound for death and not worth treating. She somehow survived over a “long and painful road.”
“Yet war still persists on this Earth and, far from abolishing nuclear arms, I have heard there are even plans to develop nuclear weapons with new capabilities,” she said. “We have devoted our lives to demanding that there never be A-bomb victims again, but why are our voices not heard?”
Nagasaki Mayor Ichou Itoh chastised the United States for continued nuclear proliferation and Japan for taking cover in America’s nuclear fold.
“The nuclear weapons states, the United States of America in particular, have ignored their international commitments and have made no change in their unyielding stance on nuclear deterrence; we strongly resent the trampling of the hopes of the world’s people.”
Do you see any blame-shifting here? I don’t. I don’t see where they are talking about anything but the horrors of nuclear war and how mankind must abolish these WMD. To state otherwise is ignorant.
…the fact is that WW II in Asia and the Pacific was a war between aggressive Japan and everyone else, and in each case, Japan was the aggressor.
No one doubts that Japan was the aggressor nation over its Asian cousins — mostly China. In fact, until now, 4 Japanese Prime Ministers have officially apologized to China and Korea for the war and war atrocities; the last one being current Prime Minister Koizumi who apologized this year.
Taiwan had become a part of the Japanese empire — or part of Japan — depending on your slant, in 1895; a full three years before the Philippines became part of the US empire (where it remains until this day). But it is impossible to deny that Russia, then the Soviet Union, as well as the United States and several European nations weren’t involved with empire building in Asia. And, in turn, to claim that Japan was the aggressor nation over these western states — in Asia no less — is to be biased towards historical facts. Japan kicked the Russians out of Korea and Manchuria in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904—1905. This would end (temporarily) Russian imperialist ambitions in Asia. The United States is definitely not free of guilt; the USA had imperialist ambitions in Asia for over 50 years as witnessed by the US colonization of the Philippines in 1898 and the presence of US troops in China as early as 1927.
This was another catalyst for the Meiji Restoration; Japan feared being colonized by the west as the rest of Asia was. Therefore all of Japan had to unite under one government. After unification of the country, one of the very first priorities of the Meiji government was to industrialize in order to escape the same fate as the rest of the Asia continent.
By 1930, Japan was already well entrenched in China and Korea — with US blessings under the Treaty of Portsmouth in 1905. In 1937, hostilities between China and Japan would break out again. Considering that this war took place in China, it is common sense to assume that Japan was furthering imperial ambitions. The other powers involved with empire building in Asia, then, at the time of the start of World War Two were: France, Britain, The United States, The Netherlands, and Japan. To claim that Japan was the sole aggressor in Asia is to completely tell the history of the war conveniently from the victor’s point of view. Or as Gary Wills would say, “Only the winners decide what were war crimes.”
If Americans wish to use flawed excuses for justification of the atomic bombings, then allow me to show you how the same sort of logic was used by the Japanese military as an excuse for empire building in Asia. An excellent analysis of this use of flimsy justifications by both sides can be found in A Critical Comparison Between Japanese and American Propaganda during World War II. By Anthony V. Navarro:
It is hardly necessary to say that the basic policy of the Japanese government aims at the stabilization of East Asia through conciliation and cooperation between Japan, Manchoukuo, and China for their common prosperity and well being.
Sure, The Japanese invaded Singapore; they did the same in Malaysia — they kicked the British out. Yes, Japan invaded Indonesia and in doing so kicked the Dutch out. Japan invaded the Philippines too, kicking out the Americans. These places were all attacked around the same time as the attack on Pearl Harbor. But the question that needs to be asked is, “If Japan was the only aggressor nation in Asia, then what were American, British, Dutch, etc., armed forces doing in Asia besides protecting and/or expanding those nations’ empires?”
Japan attacked the United States first.
If you mean that the Japanese bombed the military base of Pearl Harbor, before the US bombed the Japanese, then this is a difficult question to answer (see #1 below). If you mean that Japan committed acts of war against the United States first, then the answer is a definitive, “No!” The United States committed at least two acts of war under international law against Japan before December 7, 1941. They were:
US military pilots — 40 from the Army Air Corps and 60 from the US Navy and Marine Corps — in a clandestine operation organized by and funded by the Whitehouse — flying bombing missions against Japanese forces in the famed Flying Tigers as early as 1937. These people did u201Cvolunteeru201D to fly for the Flying Tigers but they were paid employees of the US government. US pilots flying bombing missions for the Chinese was an act of war under international law by America against Japan. Even with the weak argument that these professional military men were volunteers (when they were actually sent by the US government), under international law, a nation is responsible for the actions of its nationals. To claim otherwise is hypocritical and completely irresponsible.
US initiated oil embargo against Japan. This is unquestionably an act of war under international law. The US was also totally hypocritical on this point as they forced the British and the Dutch to uphold the embargo, yet secretly allowed Japan oil from the United States as a way to spy on Japanese shipping. See: Day of Deceit by Robert Stinnett.
Counting the above two, then President Roosevelt had a total of eight plans to incite hostilities with the Japanese. The rest, as they say “is history.” There are a great many excellent books and articles on what really happened in World War II. The serious student (and professor) would do themselves and their country good to seek out the truth. Things are not as black and white as US public schooling and US history books would lead us to believe. The true causes of the Pacific War were the clash of the US empire in Asia and the Japanese empire.
There is really nothing that is new to the informed student of history in this article, except for one thing: The idea that the Japanese were fanatics that would fight to the death for their emperor. This is unquestionably a complete and total fabrication. The Japanese people that I spoke to, the people who still clearly remember the war, state uncategorically that this idea is false. The average Japanese — like the average person anywhere in the world — at any time in history — would act in a way that is common to human nature: To fight to the death to protect their families and homes. Only a few brainwashed fanatics in the military would have made a claim such as dying for the emperor. Even more to the point, the Japanese I interviewed were surprised to hear that this nonsense is being taught to American children in school. Where this fabrication initially came from is a good question. I would submit to you that this is also a post-war fabrication by apologists for the atomic bombing war crimes of the United States.
Of course the imperial Japanese Army committed atrocities in Asia. Those are unforgivable. That being said, though, committing atrocities is what all imperial forces do — and have always done. World War II Japanese atrocities were no different than what US imperial forces are doing in the Middle East today. Modern Americans should keep this in mind whenever they attempt to demonize the enemy for American imperialist gains — or to excuse US war crimes.
