'Tokyo Trial'

As Vexing As It Gets

Did you know, there were more A class war criminals found guilty and hung at the Tokyo Trials than at Nuremberg? Yeah, there were like 7 who were found guilty of all that Nazi atrocity and hung but there were 20 who got done for the A-class war crimes in Tokyo. The comparison may be vexing - it might even be odious for some - and in many ways it's one of those moments in history where people wanted apples and oranges to be the same thing when they were clearly dealing with apples and oranges. And that's a vexing thought.

This show doesn't really go into the ins and outs of the trial itself, rather, it explores the judges who presided over the trials and the inner conflict amongst the members of the tribunal. I guess it's one tack for tackling the rather uncomfortable problems of the Tokyo Trials. I've read a fair bit about the Tokyo Trials so this wasn't exactly going to be news but you always wonder how other people would characterise the same material that you've read.





What's Good About It

At least somebody wanted to do a show about it. It's hard getting this kind of content made anywhere on any screen. Some of the stuff in it is still contentious, so the show puts on a brave face and tries to wade into some of the murkier bits.

Some of the legal problems with running the tribunal in Tokyo gets an airing, and to that extent you have to say it does the turn of events some justice.

What's Bad About It

It loses heart pretty quickly when it comes to the details and points contention. It wants to explore the personalities of the judges and just exactly what legal points with which they were wrestling.

It's really uninterested in the people on the stand, and as such you don't get a nuanced look at just what the problem is with the format of the trials. Instead, historical footage of the real people on the stand are cut in against the actors playing the multinational judges. There's something quite hokey about the whole production.

What's Interesting About It

The Tokyo Trial was an attempt to put a legal framework around the war in the Pacific and then "get the bastards". They keep coming back to the charter which tells the judges that getting the bastards is the whole point, and yet they keep finding there are real gaps in the legal frameworks to even be trying the bastards at all. They are also working with the precedent of the Nuremberg Trials and quickly run into the same problem the Nuremberg trials ran into in terms just whose authority under which such a court works. Worse still, the possibility of not being able to cleanly put the bastards away might jeopardise the very fragile veil of legitimacy placed upon the Nuremberg Trials.

In essence, the judges are working, knowing they have massive problems, but in a classic "maintain the fiction" modus operandi, they press on to get the results they want; which invites the question, how impartial were these proceedings anyway? That is to say if the judge is out to get you, how can that be an impartial trial?
That brings me to...

Sir William Webb

Jonathan Hyde plays Judge William Webb. It's a thankless kind of role in as much as Webb had a pretty awful job of corralling justices from very different kinds of judicial cultures. There are two lines of thought with Webb in everything else I've read. One is that he was a very politically minded sort of justice, the sort where political considerations were equally valuable as purely legal considerations. As such, it is not surprising that he was friendly with Douglas MacArthur in his time Australia, and that somehow translated into his appointment as the President of the Military Tribunal. Unsurprisingly he was also a High Court judge, so he knew his way around politics quite well.

The other thing about Webb is that he was a Queenslander, home of the White Australia policy (and One Nation too), so it's actually hard to imagine even for a moment that he was impartial as he says he was. In many ways he would have been the most parochially minded of the eleven judges presiding over the tribunals. In terms of performances, I think Hyde's portrayal of Judge Webb is the standout in this series. He captures the peculiar cultural stink of a Brisbane Judge that vaulted to the top of the Tribunal, really well.

In many ways it was very astute of MacArthur to place Webb at the centre because they wanted a certain kind of verdict and Webb was certainly a judge who could drive at that verdict while maintaining the facade of impartiality. I don't know if one looks upon a man like Judge Webb as an ideal, but as political appointments go, it was superb. If you have a distaste for hypocrisy, then Sir William Webb was the worst appointment. That being said, the most interesting aspect of Webb's character might be that he was against the death penalty for any of the accused. You recognise the fundamental Australian-ness in that sentiment., and that part is at least a little edifying.

The Shadow Of Nuremberg

The eleven justices essentially labour under the influence of the events at the Nuremberg Trials. The entire legitimacy of the trials hangs upon Nuremberg, precisely because there were so few laws upon which to frame the proceedings. The palpable risk for the judges is that they can't look to be any more lenient than the judges at Nuremberg. The problem for them is that the men in the dock weren't quite the same calibre of suspects as the top Nazis. All the same, the Tokyo trials found guilty for 20 A class war criminals, as opposed to the 7 found guilty by Nuremberg.

The crux of the show is what constitutes an A class war crime, and the prosecution run it up the flag that the war of aggression is what is being tried. The judges have to then scramble to find legal precedent in trying heads of government and come up short-handed, so they decide to band together and run the gauntlet. It's not the most edifying bit of legal drama we've seen. It's very hard to be seen as impartial when you know you're working toward a guilty verdict from the justice's bench.

If the series is trying to make an appeal to exonerate the A class war criminals, it makes a pretty poor case. If it is trying to ask questions about the validity of the Military Tribunal itself, it does manage to hit its target.

Nanking Massacre What?

It's kind of contentious in Japan what people mean by the Nanking Massacre. The Nanking Massacre that the Tokyo Trial trial talks about is not what the Chinese propaganda machine loves to talk about. Namely, there was an incident where the Chinese POWs were taken down to the river's edge where they mounted a desperate resistance and were gunned down. Yes, it's an atrocity, but a) it wasn't planned that way b) it's not what the current day Chinese are claiming happened in the city of Nanking.

This portion of the trial is glossed over, but infamously, the Chinese were only only able to cobble together two witnesses for the entire trial, and both presented hearsay. The show then glosses over what exactly the nature of the atrocity was, and moves on to other topics, which is an interesting choice.

Just as an aside, to this day, the Chinese government - the Communist one in Beijing - will not release the alleged documentary evidence of the big massacre that they claim took place and none of which was presented at the Tokyo Trials. To be fair, the Chinese delegation at the Tribunal was from the Nationalists who did fight the Japanese. The Communists merely triggered the Marco Polo Bridge Incident by firing first and provoking return fire from the Japanese. For this, Justice Mei of China demanded Koki Hirota pay with his life. It's a bit rich, when you think about it, but then the whole Tokyo Trial has that problem.

Radhabinod Pal's Dissenting Judgment

The most crucial fallout from the process may have been Judge Pal's dissenting findings. If you go to the Wikipedia link there, you'll find that Pal's findings allegedly opens the door for right wing nationalists in Japan to question the legal foundation of the Tokyo Trials. As long as I've read about the trials, I haven't really found a reason to disagree with Pal's findings and I'm not exactly a right wing nationalist.

The real turning point in the Japanese decision-making leading up to the war was essentially the Hull Note. Pal rightly cites that document as being critical to the process that led to the war and places the culpability of the USA in that process of decisions. I imagine that would have been rather galling for the anglophones sitting with Pal, wanting to do a Nuremberg Trial to burnish their historic reputations.

As the world moves away from the colonialist history and into something we call post-colonial, Pal's dissent is going to take on a deeper meaning. The historians trying to talk down his dissent are going to have a harder time of it.

Henri Bernard's Dissent

Henri Bernard of France had a weirder cultural axe to grind. He thought the Showa Emperor should have stood trial, and the people in the dock in front of him were mere accomplices. He also thought colonialism was okay and so Japan had certain rights to prosecute her wars to protect her colonies. It's a mindset that sort of died hard with the French, in Dien Bien Phu Vietnam and Algeria, later on.

More interestingly, he claims that if the Emperor is getting off scot free without a trial, then hanging his subjects for their roles is clearly excessive. It's an interesting kind of judicial logic that only the French might conjure up; he also argues that conspiracy is an Anglo-American legal construct and no such thing exists under French law so he can't abide punishing Shigenori Togo for his part in the Tojo cabinet as conspiracy.

It's also interesting because not being the English-speaking ally and not having had French troops fighting the Japanese in the Pacific, Bernard was relatively free of the kind of mindset that saw the Japanese as enemies - which was in stark contrast to the English speakers, Patrick, Webb, Northcroft, Higgins, (and later Cramer who replaced Higgins) and MacDougall. As a voice of dissent goes, it's more like a dummy spit than a consideration in that, Bernard wants France to be able to do what France does, which is preside over colonies and spread French culture; and to that extent he can't really condemn the Japanese leadership for wanting to do the same.

Bert Rohling's Dissent

The miniseries is built around Bert Rolling's road to a dissenting opinion. It is a better argued dissent than Bernard's which is steeped in the culture from which it emerges. It is also not as perspicacious as Pal's dissent which squarely argues against the legal authority by which the Tribunal can even proceed. The most important judgements he dissented with were the civilian politicians, namely Kido, Hirota, Shigemitsu, and Togo. He also dissented on Field Marshall Shunroku Hata, which is a very nuanced kind of judgement. Hata's resignation in the Yonai cabinet brought about the Tojo cabinet that led to war. At the same time, Hata was instrumental in bringing the war to an end.

The name that really sticks out on Rohling's list is Koki Hirota who was Prime Minster at the time Japan went to war with China. The tribunal pretty much hung him on the statement he made that Chang Kai-Shek could not be negotiated with. He meant that in exasperation as Chang made it impossible to come to any terms to end hostilities, not because Hirota saw Chang as unworthy of negotiation. He was also lumped with the responsibility of the Kwantung Army going out on its own, crossing the Marco Polo Bridge. It is a bit much to be hung by the allies for that turn of events.

Anyway, the way Rohling saw it was that you couldn't be trying these people with post factum laws, but you could try them for their misinterpreting their job descriptions, part of which was to not start wars. That is to say, these subjects could be tried and found guilty for fucking up their job briefs. That's certainly a much better way to have approached the Trials, but of course he failed to persuade the Anglophone justices because the Anglophone justices really wanted revenge (and they just don't bother hiding it all that much).

The Anglophone judges really believed the charter they had was waterproof in its legality. Rohling disagreed necessarily because he was at least a proper scholar of legal arguments and their limits.

Did It Do Any Good?

If the fruits of the Tokyo Trials is the Hague and the International Court, then perhaps it was worth the effort. Personally, I am a contrarian on this topic, simply because if human rights are a real thing there should have been more people from the allied side in a dock somewhere getting prosecuted. The fact that didn't happen makes the Tokyo Trials pretty much a victor's justice. It's been argued elsewhere that bombing cities wasn't illegal so the allied command should not be tried. With logic like that, you sort of wonder how anybody can sit through hours of the Tokyo Trials taking seriously as a trial. What was, and what was not up for discussion - let alone trial - was actually quite messy:

However, in respect to Pal and Röling's statement about the conduct of air attacks, there was no positive or specific customary international humanitarian law with respect to aerial warfare before and during World War II. Ben Bruce Blakeney, an American defense consul for Japanese defendants, argued that "[i]f the killing of Admiral Kidd by the bombing of Pearl Harbor is murder, we know the name of the very man who[se] hands loosed the atomic bomb on Hiroshima", even though Pearl Harbor was classified as a war crime under the 1907 Hague Convention, as it happened without a declaration of war and without a just cause for self-defense. Similarly, the indiscriminate bombing of Chinese cities by Japanese Imperial Forces was never raised in the Tokyo Trials in fear of America being accused the same thing for its air attacks on Japanese cities. As a result, Japanese pilots and officers escaped prosecution for their aerial raids on Pearl Harbor and cities in China and other Asian countries.[21]

Yeah right. Lots of people escaped prosecutions, full stop. (You should see the doco about the 'Einsatzgruppen' on Netflix. It's frightening how few got prosecuted for anything.) The whole point of Pal's dissent and Rohling's as well, is that the allies didn't have a legal reference from which to prosecute the Class A war criminals as they saw them. So, the absence of laws applies equally to the Axis as well as Allied command. You can't try some of them selectively from the losing side and pretend this isn't victor's justice. Not if you want it to look impartial and universal.

It troubles me to this day that the people who end up at the Hague are tinpot dictators from Africa, or Bosnian Serb leaders who, like the Axis powers, were on the shitty end of the war and got lumped with their trials. Although I found those leaders odious, I still feel uncomfortable with the whole trials they went through. It reeked of being victor's justice from day 1 and the case hasn't exactly been made that it wasn't. Then there was the trial of Saddam Hussein in the wake of the Gulf War which looked more or less like a kangaroo court. These things keep discrediting themselves.

All the same, going forwards, if the Tokyo Trials contributed the notion that all nations have rules by which they must abide, even in war, then maybe it was worth going through with the charade. It's probably going to save somebody's life, somewhere in the future. Judging by the history since the Tribunals, it's hard to say the deterrent is working.

News That's Fit To Punt - 01/Aug/2016

The Rudd Rejection

It's already a fiasco, but this business of the Coalition Government not nominating Kevin Rudd to run for Ban-Ki Moon's office of Secretary General of the UN is already spinning wayward.

Kevin Rudd says he was told he had Malcolm Turnbull's strong support for his bid for the top job at the United Nations before the Prime Minister suddenly reneged on that commitment, according to private letters from Mr Rudd to Mr Turnbull, obtained by Fairfax Media.

In an explosive new development in the aftermath of the Turnbull government's official rejection of Mr Rudd's request for endorsement to run for the post of secretary-general of the United Nations, Mr Rudd has released letters, which, while only showing one side, suggest that agreements had been reached to support the Rudd bid, but that this support was suddenly withdrawn on May 1, just days before the election was called.

This is quite awkward.
Over the weekend, Peter Garrett was heard this first concert since returning to being a vocalist, that the world dodged a bullet when Malcolm Turnbull refused to back Kevin Rudd as a candidate. It's a bit cruel but I guess there's no love lost between Rudd and Garrett*.

It's not exactly a great move by Turnbull. Now he'll have a vindictive Rudd on his case and god only knows how that will play out. After all Kevin Rudd can be a spectacular media tart and if he signs up for something like Sunrise again to prefer his political opinions on a regular basis, it mightn't be long before he will actively say things to sway public opinion against the government. Rudd was always going to be better for everybody concerned, outside of Australia.

Anyway, Pleiades tells me this won't be the end of it because Rudd doesn't know how to quit. Not only that he has significant recourse with his international friends. Dr. Geoff Raby has an article in the AFR today that illustrates possible path back for Kevin Rudd. If the election/selection for the UN Secretary General does not conclude before the US election and if Hillary Clinton should win,therein every chance that a President Hillary Clinton might back Kevin Rudd for the job. At which point it's going to be an uneasy phone call for Malcolm Turnbull.

In a matrix of fifty-fifty coil flips, there's a 25% chance Turnbull doesn't have to revisit this issue, 50% chance that the issue remains irrelevant, but a 25% chance that he's going to have to eat crow.   That 25% however is looming larger when you think through the fact that the next Secretary General is being selected in sync with the next US President. The US will moe than likely delay the selection until after the election, and that Donald Trump is (for al his blather) unelectable. That means there is a great probability Malcolm Turnbull will be asked to revise this topic.


* - As a side note, I've been pondering for long time why as a fellow leftist Peter Garrett's stance on things have bothered me over the years. My old working theory was that he was a prat, but that seemed too simplistic. The most accurate representation of his position might be that he is a regressive leftist. Once you understand that about Peter Garrett, the rest of it is rather easy to decode. 

One Seat Majority

The last seat in the Lower House fell to the ALP, which means the Coalition have only a seat majority. One would surmise then that Malcolm Turnbull has no margin for error.

No Coalition MP will be able to cross the floor. Even an abstention would force the Speaker to cast a tie-break vote, creating the appearance of party weakness. Coalition discipline will need to be watertight. 

2212`1`12Coalition figures have been fond of saying that a narrow majority will enforce its own discipline. That's true in the sense that it forces the party to stick together like glue. But on whose terms will it stick together? 

Mr Turnbull's challenge of managing his right flank becomes that bit harder because the handful of lower house MPs who might actually take the rare step of defying party discipline at the point of voting in Parliament will need to be placated down to the last man or woman. 

Those passionate outliers within the party will be empowered by knowing Mr Turnbull cannot afford to lose a single vote.

Well... one would imagine that's a two way street. If the fringy-crazy want to threaten to cross the floor, it would be over a policy that the ALP may actually want, and would a fringy-crazy rightwing nut job MP want to cross the floor just to spite their moderate PM? There can't be that many bills that satisfy both the ALP and the Greens and the fringy-crazy right wing of the Coalition. Not even Bob Katter would cross the floor to do that. It's hard to image that fringy-crazy rightwing MP of the Coalition would be going that far as well, no matter how unhappy they are with Malcolm Turnbull.  

Of course Bob Katter's not happy Malcolm Turnbull hobbled Katter's friend Kevin Rudd's aspirations so maybe therein a scenario where Bob Katter crosses the floor (Katter's already signalled he's not going with the ABCC legislation).

Didn't Last The Week

In the last post I pointed out how untenable the Royal Commission that was announced was, having Brian Martin heading up the Royal Commission, and surely enough he's resigned.

Former Supreme Court judge Brian Martin has resigned as the head of the royal commission into the NT juvenile detention just days after being appointed. 

His replacements have been announced as former Queensland Supreme Court judge Margaret White and, following calls for an Indigenous co-commissioner, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner Mick Gooda.

Citing the need for public and stakeholder confidence in the joint Commonwealth-NT inquiry, Mr Martin said that criticisms of him had been "disingenuous" and ill-informed.
"However, notwithstanding the nature of the commentary, it has become apparent that, rightly or wrongly, in this role I would not have the full confidence of sections of the Indigenous community which has a vital interest in this inquiry," he told media in Canberra.

As teens like to say, "sure, whatevs". You have to love people putting up defences of their positions that fly in the face of reality. If it were exactly as he said it was, he wouldn't be quoting, would he? Both things cannot stand and one thing we know for sure is he's not doing this Royal Commission any more. You can't put a man in charge to investigate himself.

The Downside Of Identity Politics

Here's something about a statue going up in Ashfield.

It's the peace statue that is dividing Korean and Japanese community groups, with legal threats issued to a church minister and complaints escalated as high as the Minister for Multicultural Affairs. 

At the centre of the dispute is a statue commemorating the "comfort women" of World War II - the women and girls who were forced into sexual servitude for Japanese troops - which has been imported from Korea by a local Korean community group.

The group - called the Peace Statue Establishing Committee - plans to unveil the statue, which they describe as a "peace monument", at a traditional welcoming ceremony to be held at the Korean Community Hall in Croydon Park on Saturday. 

The statue, which cost $35,000 and was donated by a Korean benefactor, is about 1.5 metres high and depicts a Korean comfort woman sitting beside an empty chair, as a symbol of the victims who have since died.

And so it is that we come to the Comfort Women issue, exploding on the streets of Sydney. Really, we ought to ask, should this issue be played out in Australia? Should it be played out in Sydney?

Now, this statue was meant for Strathfield but was soundly beaten back by a presentation by the Japanese community. The main plank of the rebuttal, so to speak, was that there actually is no mythical girl who was forcibly taken away by the Japanese Army to be a sex slave prostitute. Except this is accepted as fact thanks to the Yoshida Testimony of 1982, as published in Asahi Shimbun. Since then there has been much research on this area to corroborate the Yoshida Testimony, and nobody has been able to corroborate any of it. There has even been a US Senate enquiry into it and the the US Senate recognised that there was no truth to the Yoshida Testimony. Seiji Yoshida himself made statements before his death to the effect that he had made it all up.

Last August Asahi Shimbun finally retracted the Testimony as false, which has led to a class action against Asahi Shimbun for insisting on its provenance for 34 years, providing ammunition for the claims that the comfort women were forcibly taken away by the Japanese government orders. It's been such effective bullshit that people in the west are refusing to give up that talking point, now that Asahi Shimbun has retracted the claim. The new of its retraction and what it means has been very slow in getting around the globe.

So yes, the statue is inflammatory. That's the whole point. It's primarily being put there to offend while proclaiming peace and remembrance or whatever. The people who want to put it up want to do so to stick it to Japan over stuff that happened in World War II. The people who don't want it put up are fed up with South Korea trying to stick it to Japan for an apology and an extra pay out.

Except as of 28th December 2015, there has been a new apology and an agreement to pay the claimants. The terms of the agreement stipulate several things including, this is the last discussion to be had on the topic of comfort women, their recompense, their status and as a bargaining point between South Korea and Japan. Part of the agreement was for the government of South Korea to work with the activist group to remove the original statue placed in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul.

Now, it should be noted that it is against international convention to stick a protest statue in front of another country's embassy, regardless of the cause. We don't do it, the Americans don't do it, nobody in Europe or Africa or the Subcontinent does it, Japan certainly does not do it in retaliation, not even Israel does it to the German embassy.

If the agreement of 28th December 2015 is to stand, the South Korean government has to remove the original of the statue. That's what they agreed and signed upon, and eight months later they're yet to do it. It is therefore in incredibly bad faith (and bad taste) to be sticking a replica of that very same statue in the streets of Sydney proclaiming it to be an act of peace. It's extremely disingenuous of this Reverend Bill Crews to be talking about apologies an peace.

Be that as it may, it should be asked of the Korean community if an equivalent statue ought to be erected in tribute to the Vietnamese comfort women the South Korean Army procured for itself during the Vietnam War.

During the Vietnam War (late 1960’s – early 1970’s) South Korea sent troops to Vietnam in an attempt to keep South Vietnam free from communism. It was reported later that many South Korean troops raped Vietnamese women and committed atrocities such as massacring farmers and aged people, and many others were forced into working as prostitutes for the South Korean soldiers. Many of these women would then later become pregnant and after these mixed Korean-Vietnamese children were born they were shunned by Vietnamese society and their soldier fathers returned to South Korea never to be seen or heard from again. The plight of these women was lost to history and not discussed until the late 1990’s when many of the victims began to speak out against the Vietnam and South Korean governments and demand recognition and compensation. To date the South Korean government has done little to acknowledge the issue but has continued to pursue further financial compensation from Japan for their own comfort women survivors and some say that their actions have become hypocritical and they are using the issue as their own political tool. In fact, South Korea orchestrated with Korean-American’s politically-driven campaign in the U.S. continent against Japan.

Yes, that's right.

I'd be okay with the statue going up in Ashfield if the Korean Community acknowledge what their troops did in Vietnam and build a plaque next to it, mentioning it. I doubt they would - it's all about bullshit nationalist fervour. So unfortunately for the Reverend Bill Crews, there's not much moral high ground going around there.

It's kind of pathetic people are still fighting over this terrain, seventy-one years after the conclusion of World War II, but that's what happens when identity politics is given full rein. 

Hiroshima Day

70 Years And Counting (Towards What, I don't Know)

This time of year always gets a little hairy with Hiroshima Day and Nagasaki Day and VJ day all coming within days of another. It gives you a sense how hurried the end of WWII was, back in 1945. Still, I try to shut out the commentary on what it means today because frankly, it's been 70years. I don't know how to break it to people, but 70years is history. It should be awarded some more objectivity than rehashed propaganda, but of course that's not what we get.

I was driving over to my parents place and on Drive with Richard Glover was Geraldine Doogue and Lisa Wilkinson. Richard Glover - a witty bastard any day of the week, respect - asked with a serious tone, whether dropping the bomb was worth it. Geraldine Doogue's answer gave me the shits. Essentially, she quoted some historian who wanted to know why we talk about the dead of Hiroshima more than the 25million victims of the Japanese military aggression; and the fact the Japanese were willing to fight to the death justified dropping the bomb, so doing so saved lives; and this makes it justifiable. Lisa Wilkinson thought that the point of wars was being a bigger bastard than the other guy, and so America was willing to be the biggest baddest bastard and that explained the bomb.

Central to this construction is this ongoing myth that the two bombs brought about the Unconditional Surrender of Japan. I say myth because I've read a fair deal of the meetings held by the Five Ministers in front of the Emperor. The Imperial Conferences were an abbreviated briefing of the Emperor to short circuit the need to have cabinet meetings followed by reports to the Imperial Palace. Obviously it evolved out of the necessity because the war situation changed so quickly and so often it was easier to have the Emperor in the room to rubber stamp decisions. It also meant the Emperor had to sit and listen to the ministers ague.

The five Ministers at the Imperial Conferences were the Prime Minister, the Army Minister, the Navy Minister, the Finance Minister and the Foreign Minister. By early August 1945, these meetings were fairly desultory. Kantaro Suzuki was the Prime Minister, a retired Admiral, who was charged by the Emperor Hirohito to bring the war to an "honourable end". Those thing are pretty hard to get when you're getting spanked, but nonetheless, that was his job.

There are transcripts and reports of these meetings. The Navy Minister was Mitsumasa Yonai, an admiral who was later exonerated at the Tokyo Trials; and the Army minister was Korechika Anami, who argued the line that the people of Japan were willing to die to the man, and so the only honourable end to the war was where everybody died for the Emperor. You can imagine how the Emperor might have felt about that, waiting to rubber stamp that horrible decision.

On the morning of the 6th of August 1945, they were having yet another one of these meetings. There is an interruption where it is reported that a new bomb has been dropped on Hiroshima and devastated the city with one blast. And it barely registers with the Five Ministers. I've read that passage at least four or five times and it is indiscernible that this new - earth shattering even - information affected the discussion. The sticking point in all of these meetings in August was what "subject to" meant in the Potsdam Declaration that demanded the unconditional surrender.

If the Allies meant "subject to" in general, then sure, that is what a surrender is; but if they meant "subject to"  as in the Emperor was going to be turned into a personal slave of Douglas MacArthur, then every Japanese person ought to die fighting to prevent such an outcome. Yes, it's weird, but this is what happens when things get lost in translation. So these grown men argued in front of the Emperor interminably while the cities were burnt by carpet bombings. And they kept arguing right on for another 4days like this, past not only the Hiroshima bombing but the Nagasaki bombing as well.

They were holding out hope that either Sweden or the USSR would step in as neutrals to broker a peace. Unbelievable as it sounds, that was the project being pursued by the Foreign Ministry in the first part of 1945. This scenario fell apart when the USSR advanced troops into Manchuria, breaking its Non-Aggression Pact with Japan on the 10th August. This was the news that changed the meetings.

There's a lot that could be said about Stalin, the USSR and its role in World War II, but I'll leave that for the serious historians writing about it. If there is one thing that is irrevocably clear is that Stalin's betrayal closed the books on Japan's war. by the 11th, the Japanese leaders made the executive decision to surrender to the Americans in the hope that Japan won't be overrun by communism (this too is a very big topic which I won't go into). Hirohito rubber-stamped that one quickly according to the Kido Diaries.

The point of all this is that it most definitely wasn't the two Atomic blasts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki respectively that prompted the surrender of Japan. And without that bit of justification, it is impossible to argue that dropping the two atomic bombs "saved lives". Yet the myth lives on because it is harder to live with the awful likelihood that the two atomic bombs were dropped on civilian population centres for nothing but absolutely gratuitous effect. I'm sure this is why Geraldine Doogue wants to hold tightly to the myth that the two atomic bombs were meaningful in history, that they saved lives by stopping the war. Uh, sorry, but no. It just ain't true.

In a perfect world, I would want the two bombs to be meaningful in a positive way. That they are not meaningful in the way that people want it to assuage their moral egos, does not take anything away significance from the event in history.  What I will say is this; it's been 70years since. I'm willing to let it slide into history. I ask not for tears to be shed for the civilians who copped it sweet, nor for revenge or retaining the grievances. I just want us to move past the bullshit propaganda that seeks to cast the bombings in a positive light. If you really want to come to terms with the events, that's the price.

No Nuance, No Peace

All of which is to say it really got my goat. What was said by Geraldine Doogue, was deeply offensive. If you can justify civilian casualties to end the war because that saves lives, you may as well make no distinctions as to who gets killed in a war and why. It's so Orwellian it's not funny.

Let's say for the moment you can justify bombing civilians because it ends wars (Doogue's argument, not mine). That would mean we would be free to bomb as many people as long as what came after the bombing was peaceful. We wouldn't have a leg to stand on in arguing against the Hanoi bombings by Richard Nixon, which of course was as unjust as they come, but all Nixon wanted to do was end the war once and for all. The Nazis bombed London, and that would be justifiable because they too were trying to end the war (by winning the Battle of Britain). We wouldn't be able to complain about collateral damage and civilian deaths resulting from Drone strikes, or the carpet bombing of Iraq using B-52s during 'Shock & Awe'.

And if you're allowed to bomb civilians to death - because it would end the war sooner to do so - then surely killing them en masse on the ground should be fine as well. Things like the 1995 Srebrenica massacre would not be war crimes, they would just attempts to bring the end of the war closer.

It's war. There is no "alright" kind of position to take on the state-sponsored violence that is war. If Geraldine Doogue wants to justify the state-sponsored violence carried out in her favour, then she's going to have to deal with arguments that justify state-sponsored violence carried out against her side. That means she has to support the case that the Nazis were right in wiping out civilian populations the Eastern Front, or that Russian pogroms were good; or that the Killing Fields of Cambodia were somehow good because they brought about peace in Cambodia.
Clearly it's an unenlightened position to hold.

The joke of course is that Doogue probably believes some of these examples are War Crimes. In which case she's essentially arguing War Crimes are justifiable if they take place in her favour, but not at any other time. It's this kind of exceptionalism that makes me sick to the gut talking about Word War II.

Asahi Newspapers Reported Falsehoods

Some Would Call This Lying

In 1982, Asahi Newspapers published an article based on the 'testimony' of one Seiji Yoshida who claimed that Korean women were forcibly removed to be made into comfort women. Seiji Yoshida wrote a book that claimed to be a confession of these acts during World War II. Since then the notion of 'Comfort Women' and sex slavery has flowered and people have been demanding apologies from the government of Japan. Asahi Newspapers in the mean time have cited Yoshida's testimony 16times to bolster the case that such forcible removals by the Japanese government and its agencies took place.

This naturally led to the South Korean government demanding more apologies and in the intervening years has contributed to a great deal of animosity between the two countries. As a result of this diplomatic fracas, the government of Japan ran an extensive investigation to find out just what happened. They interviewed a number of women who claimed to have been forcibly removed by Japanese military and police personnel - and so in the mid 1990s, Yohei Kohno issued a statement basically regretting these forcible removals. The "Kohno Statement" as it is known basically forms an acknowledgement that forcible removals took place, and expresses the usual 'deep regret'.

Even to this day, the Anti-Japanese rhetoric coming out of Seoul is based on this material. The picture that is emerging this week in Japan is that all this talk about "Japan must have proper awareness of its own history",  and "reparations must be made for Comfort Women" has been based on the Asahi Newspaper making these statements as incontrovertible fact. Never mind that nobody else has ever come forwards to admit they were part of such activities, or that there was ay documented evidence of such things taking place. The entire case for Seoul rests on the Asahi claims, which in turn rests on the 'Yoshida 'Testimony'. Any suggestions to reappraise the content and context of the "Kohno Statement" have been attacked as historic revisionism by the South Korean government and media.

The problem is, the Yoshida Testimony has been comprehensively debunked. Nobody can corroborate the Yoshida Testimony because it never took place. Investigations have been made into the women who fronted up for the interviews which formed the basis of the "Kohno Statement", and it turns out their stories don't line up with any of the movements of Japanese units and police during the times these things have been alleged to have taken place. None of it lines up. It was all a fabrication.

As  a result the Asahi Newspaper has issued an editorial retracting the publication of the article 32years ago. The editorial claims it was filled with factually incorrect material. An unkind person might call them lies. Asahi Newspaper has not apologised for sticking to their guns through the years, even when they probably realised some things were untenable in the 'Yoshida Testimony' wrong as far back as 1992.

They Sack You For Forging Evidence

In most countries there's  heavy penalty for forging evidence. For instance in Australia, the faked email ended Malcolm Turnbull's chances of ever becoming Prime Minister. It destroyed Godwin Grech's career at treasury. A similar thing happened in Japan .In Japan, a forged email destroyed the career of Hisayasu Nagata who ran with exactly the same sort of fake email as evidence as the Utegate scandal, and it brought down the listed company Live Door. The point is, these kinds of forging evidence gets you smashed in public life. Right now, Asahi Newspaper has been found to have done exactly that - run on unverified forged evidence - for 32 years and has been found out and is trying to get out of it by simply 'retracting' the article of 32 years ago.

There's simply too much time and history that has come out of this fraud. The entire country of South Korea has been banging on about 'Comfort Women' fir 32 years based on the very same information, trusting in the institution of Asahi Newspaper. The Government of Japan admitted to guilt it need not have admitted to because it never happened, just to maintain friendly relations.  Asahi Newspaper's ongoing insistence that the 'Yoshida Testimony' was factually correct has done untold damage to the reputation of Japan and all Japanese people around the world.

There are people running around accusing Japan of having systematically committed sexual slavery during World War II, and are alleging Japan is refusing to apologise for it. There are organisations in America building monuments to the kidnapped juvenile Korean girls pressed into prostitution that Seiji Yoshida imagined, claimed to have kidnapped, but never existed.  I can't talk to a Korean without eventually getting into arguments about what is "a proper recognition of historic facts". And let's be honest, these are vile-beyond-the-vilest of accusations. You'd hope that there would be a shred of evidence - but there isn't - and Asahi Newspapers has spent the last 32 years championing this load of bollocks as  God's own truth. It's one thing for South Koreans to want to believe this about Japan (it's easy to imagine the worst of people if you don't like them). What kind of outfit tries to pin this vile bullshit on their own people?

Just what kind of people work at Asahi Newspapers if they're willing to propagate this stuff for 32years, retract it, then try to carry on like nothing's happened?

In short, Asahi Newspapers can't expect to get out of this with a slap on the wrist. They're answerable for all of the misunderstanding between the governments in Tokyo and Seoul. The Diet should subpoena the editors and board members at Asahi, past and present to get an explanation. I hope they're forced to close and they all lose their jobs. Really, I do. If it happens next week it won't be soon enough.

News That's Fit To Punt - 11/Aug/2014

Gotta Admit I Was Wrong

Australia's contingent to the Ukraine went and returned in the last week and a bit. I know I sounded alarms about sending troops but sanity prevailed and nobody got shot at by east Ukrainian Separatists. This is a  good thing. The best thing about it was how Russia was blocked from turning the tragedy into a kind of political football to slam the government in Kiev. Sometimes your side shoots down a third party plane, it's not the other side's provocation.

Now that the Australian contingent is on its way home, Julie Bishop is saying all items are on  the table for applying sanctions to Russia. Of course,it's easy for Australia to play hard rhetoric because we don't really rely on oil and gas from Russia, unlike the NATO nations.  Germany in particular has been expertly perched on the fence playing both sides, mainly because the German industrial might is entirely dependent on the flow of energy from Russia. I guess it's a bit like Frank Herbert's 'Dune' where the catchcry is "the Spice Must Flow"; the oil and gas must flow for Germany to be Germany and in turn for Europe to be Europe.

All the same the smoke has barely cleared from the MH17 crash and there's a stench in the air where war is being talked about as a possibility. Maybe we're colouring ourselves into a picture where we might be more open to re-examining the history of the Twentieth Century and deciding that maybe we want to attempt to re-draw the maps. This month being the Centenary of the start of World War I doesn't seem to have really formed a precautionary consensus about the west avoiding wars, except in Germany.

Irony is running in all directions out of Ukraine. Place names like Crimea and Sevastopol are echoes of Imperial Wars of the Nineteenth Century. Here we are in the 21st Century and we find ourselves challenged by events there. Ukraine was the victim of intense Soviet era collectivisation and purges. So we find an ex-KGB officer ruling Russia wants to re-claim whole tracts of Ukraine as regaining the whole-ness of Russia. Germany was the catalyst for not one but two world wars - something for which it remains the butt of jokes today - and yet is trying its damned best not to start a third one. Vladimir Putin on the other hand is pushing as hard as Hitler once did, and we're appeasing him. It really is ugly.

Ebola On The Loose

Speaking of ugliness, there' the Ebola outbreak in Africa. Ebola is a viral disease and there's no vaccine or cure. So the medical teams working out there are essentially trying to keep patients alive by hydrating them through the illness, administering antibiotics to fend of secondary infections, and that that's about the sum total of what they've got as a way to combat the disease. The good news is that it's not as contagious as influenza which is a blessing. All the same, the disease is spreading rapidly in Africa and some people returning from Africa have reported in sick with signs of the disease.

Going into this last weekend, the WHO has declared the current Ebola outbreak an international health emergency. It's hard to get a picture of how this is going to be brought under control.

Back To Bombing Iraq


With ISIS running rampant in northern Iraq, President Obama has approved air strikes against ISIS. It's hard to say if this is going to benefit greatly, but it's one of those things the US tries when it can't solve things diplomatically. The rather unfortunate karmic twist being that it is back to Iraq for America's military. Having lived through a decade and a half of the mis-declared war on terror which led to the war in Iraq, it seems business is far from finished in the lands formerly known as the cradle of civilisation.  It's all a multi-layered failure of policy with repercussions that have demanded even worse choices.

Should America gone into Iraq in the way it did? - In hindsight, no.

Did America conduct a good campaign in Iraq? - no.

Should America have pulled out in the way it did?- Probably not.

And so here we are, doing airstrikes in Iraq again - all the bad decisions may have brought the rule of Saddam Hussein to an end, but it has given rise to the current situation which can be described as much worse than the terrifying tyranny of the Hussein family. Steeped in a kind of medieval bloodlust and Sadism, ISIS is busy projecting images of itself as people who do summary executions of prisoners and decapitations to demonstrate how fierce they are. ISIS is hell bent on dragging the world back to a kind of medieval sectarian nightmare. Our resistance to this notion is merely to do airstrikes and no commit troops on the ground. Whatever could possibly go wrong, one wonders.

Just as with Ukraine, the distant source of all this can be traced back to World War I, and how the world was carved up on the map, subsequent to that war. Upon the Centenary of the beginning of World War I, it seems much more vexing  than merely symbolic. That is to say, nothing ever changes, they only ever get worse.

Cowra, 70years On

Somewhere in the last week, Cowra had the 70th anniversary of the breakout. As with the observation above how nothing ever changes, I cannot but help but think about the detention camp they had in World War II being a cultural archetype in Australia, and that is why we detain asylum seekers in the manner that we do. When in a 'crisis' (loosely defined), what Australia does is put up a camp in the middle of nowhere with a barbed wire fence around it with security guards. When the RSL types intone lest we forget, one cannot help but think forgetting isn't a problem for Australia.

Cowra and its story was part of my life for a good decade as I researched the story but I will never forget the one night working with Brian A Williams and Geoff Murphy when Geoff pointed to a figure of those who died at Cowra, but not in the breakout. It turned out that there were on average 2 summary executions per week at Cowra. Japanese POWs were being shot - for whatever reasons - at the pace of roughly two a week. Given that communications were rudimentary I imagine the Japanese POW population had no understanding of why so many people were being executed. It might have even looked like a weekly lottery of death to those who did not understand English - and there were many of those.

This would explain the desperation felt by the POWs. If they were going to die, picked off one by one in summary executions, then it would be better to go out in one big blaze. Until that moment the motive for the breakout eluded me. I didn't understand the testimony by the surviving POWs that they felt like cornered rats. It rang hollow and untrue. Overwhelmed by the feeling of hopelessness, they said they decided to commit to an action that was by design and definition, futile.  Some climbed over the fence, and once outside, committed harakiri. Explaining that took some doing, except it's very easy. It was an act of defiance - that if one had to die, then at least one could control the means of that death by oneself. What would drive all that? Loyalty to the Emperor has been the explanation in official accounts, but I've never really been able to digest it as a fitting explanation.

Consequently, the understanding of the meaning of the Cowra breakout in Australian popular culture is grossly lacking. What remains of the Kennedy Miller rendition is filled with cultural stereotyping cliches, as well as an absence of logic to why the breakout took place or what it meant. It really is a terrible bit of film making and it's a shame nothing else got made. Other narratives over the years have skipped the brutal management of the camp. One imagines that if one poked too deeply into the nitty gritty of how Cowra camp was really run, one may find cause to think gross violations of some military codes - or even war crimes - were a regular thing and this in turn would be waking up terrible ghosts. In other words, nobody wants an honest discussion about what happened and why. The whole thing can't be consigned to historical obscurity and myth soon enough.

Today there is the garden. Reconciliation has taken place; yet mutual understanding probably remains a long way off.

$1 Computer, $3 Game

All Fucked Up On The Eastern Front

Some time ago, I inherited a 17" laptop PC from a company that went under, for $1. It's a little old now, and it's missing its battery so it needs the power point all the time, but it works just fine. In its heyday when it was new it was a $5k machine, but depreciation and writing it down and neglect brought the price down to $1 when I bought it off the dying firm.

Since then I've been putting on some old PC games for kicks. Some of them run, some of them don't. It's a shame that I can't run 'Baldur's Gate' 1&2 on it, but I did manage to pick up a copy of  a game called 'Commander' for $2.97 at Dick Smith last week. It's been a while since I've played a strategy game set in Europe, where you fight hard on the Eastern Front. So for less than a McValue meal, I've been having much fun with this game for a few days now.

The game dumps you in on the German side in 1939, so you're committed to marching into Paris and then doing your own Barbarossa, but once you're underway, the Eastern Front turns into a very nasty mess very quickly. Quite frankly, the Western Front is nothing like the bloodbath that takes place in the East, which to some extent is a reasonably accurate reflection of what really happened. I certainly haven't made it close to Stalingrad, but the equivalent stalemate blood-bowl bone-grinders are taking shape.

Once out East, the aim of the game ends up as trying to wipe out as many Russian units comprehensively at a faster rate than they can create units. The rate of attrition is quite horrendous. One imagines this was precisely the kind of nightmare scenario the generals on both sides faced. I know we in the anglophone world are much more familiar with D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge and all that, but what took place out East was probably 3-5 times more ferocious than anything the western allies faced. For the price of a sandwich, I guess I've been given yet another history lesson.

It Was 70 Years Ago Today

Corporal Hitler Taught The Band To Play

And it's definitely gone more out of style than in, but all the same, today marks the 70th Anniversary of WWII, which commenced with Hitler's Germany invading Poland. Naturally there haven't been that many good jokes about it since then.

Bette Midler said about her marriage to a German: "at nights I dress up as Poland and let him invade me"

Then there's the 'Fawlty Towers' "Don't mention the war" gag that culminates in:

"You mentioned it first."

"You started it!"

"No, you started it"

"No, YOU started it when you invaded Polant in 1939!"

Then there's my favorite "Not the Nine O' Clock News" gag where they declared: "In 1982 Germany became the first nation to win the Eurovision Song Contest with a song about love and peace, having started two world wars."

In that spirit, I bring to you some interesting headlines.

This one's from the BBC.

This is Poland's take.

Relations between Poland and Russia are currently thorny, partly because of differing historical interpretations of events at the start of the war.
Mr Putin added that the pair should "rise above the problems of the past... and solve the problems of the future".
He went on to talk about trade and energy co-operation between the two.
Earlier, Mr Kaczynski and his prime minister Donald Tusk joined war veterans beside a monument to the heroes of Westerplatte at 0445 (0245 GMT).
The ceremony marked the exact time on 1 September 1939 when the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein opened fire at point-blank range on the fort.
At the same time, the German Wehrmacht invaded Poland from east, west and south. The attacks triggered Britain and France's declaration of war against Germany two days later.

Poles, though, have long seen the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Treaty, signed a week before war started, as the starting gun for the German invasion, says the BBC's Jonny Dymond in Gdansk.

It's just as John Cleese thundered. Putin for his part condemned the Nazi-Soviet Pact. I don't really know what that does for anybody today, but there you go. A gesture by the man who tranquilises tigers.

"Our duty is to remove the burden of distrust and prejudice left from the past in Polish-Russian relations," said Mr Putin in the article, which was also published on the Russian government website.
"Our duty... is to turn the page and start to write a new one."

Memories of the 1939 pact - in which the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany essentially agreed to carve up Poland and the Baltic States between them - have long soured Moscow's relations with Poland and other east European states.

Within a month of the pact being signed, Soviet troops had invaded and occupied parts of eastern Poland.
"It is possible to condemn - and with good reason - the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact concluded in August 1939," wrote Mr Putin, referring to the two foreign ministers who signed the pact at the Kremlin.
It was clear today, he said, that any form of agreement with the Nazi regime was "unacceptable from the moral point of view and had no chance of being realised".

"But after all," he added, "a year earlier France and England signed a well-known agreement with Hitler in Munich, destroying all hope for the creation of a joint front for the fight against fascism."

Yes, yes, peace in our time and all that guff. What a load of Bollocks. It all rankles with somebody at some point in the story. WWII must be one of the most gripes-galore moments in human history, some of which are still being worked through in the Middle East. This next bit, caught my eye:

Mr Putin added that Russian people understood "all too well the acute emotions of Poles in connection with Katyn".
In 1940 Soviet secret police massacred more than 21,000 army officers and intellectuals on Stalin's direct orders in the Katyn forest near the city of Smolensk.
Moscow only took responsibility for the killings in 1990, having previously blamed the massacre on the Nazis.

That's very grand of him, I think, but I imagine Poles still think the Russians are assholes who sold them out to the Nazis and then fucked them up the ass. At least if not in that language, we find these sentiments:

Speaking at the ceremonies, Polish President Lech Kaczynski called the actions a "stab in the back."

"This blow came from Bolshevik Russia, in accordance with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact," Kaczynski said.

That view, widely held in Poland and elsewhere in Europe, has produced fury in Moscow.

In a newspaper interview on August 31, Putin called the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact "immoral." But he said Moscow had no choice but to sign the agreement to postpone war after Western powers concluded their own agreement with Germany. He said the 1938 Munich Agreement ended "all hope of creating a united front against fascism."

In Moscow on September 1, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov lashed out against a recent resolution by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe's Parliamentary Assembly, equating Nazism and Stalinism, calling it "lies" and a "rewriting of history."

"Even during the Cold War no one ever tried to put the Nazi regime and Stalin's dictatorship on the same footing," he said. "It never occurred to anyone to equate the Nazi threat, which meant the enslavement and annihilation of entire nations, and the policy of the Soviet Union, which was the only force capable of standing up against the war machine of Hitler's Germany and in the end ensuring its defeat."

You know what? I don't think the Russians are ever going to get a pass out of the Poles on that one, just as the Japanese are never going to get a pass out of the Koreans and Chinese (and everybody else they fucked up), just as the Germans won't ever get a free pass from most of Europe (even though Hitler was Austrian - Austrians get an easier time of it, really), just as the Americans are never going to live down Vietnam, and England's never going to be let off the hook for her Colonial rule in India and Hong Kong, and so on.

There's a joke about a guy called Kosta who says, "I built all those ships in the bay. Do they call me Kosta the shipwright? No. I built all those houses on the hill. Do they call me Kosta the carpenter? No. I built all the tall spires in the town. Do they call me Kosta the architect? No. (pause) I fuck one goat!"

Well, I think these countries all fucked  at least one goat, and that's the story of WWII. It's really not as edifying as all the heroic tales you see and hear and read.  All those heroics are in the service of fucking metaphorical goats.

Speaking of fucking goats, you might be amused by this entry in the SMH today.

Opposition leaders have historically struggled to get on the front pages of newspapers.

Why else do you think they undertake listening tours, sit down with toddlers for cups of pretend tea, go on cabbage soup diets and go on Rove Live?

But in NSW, Barry O'Farrell's profile problem is a little more boutique.

He can't get on the front pages because he can't think of a human behaviour venal enough to displace the members of the Government.

Think about it.

What would O'Farrell have to do, exactly, to get a gallop in the media these days?

Intimacy with a goat probably wouldn't even do it.

Yup. WWII sure helped forge the world we live in today. Either that, or it's just that kind of day.