Year 501 (46 page)

The ban on such subversive thoughts was revealed on the Pearl Harbor anniversary in a striking way, to which we return (section 8). Another example is provided by a commentary on the anniversary by the noted Japan scholar John Dower, solicited by the
Washington Post
. Dower commented that there is “more than a little irony in observing Americans ramble on about other people's military violence and historical amnesia,” considering how Vietnam and Korea have entered officially-sanctioned memory. The invited column was rejected.
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Another pertinent question was omitted from the deliberations on the aggression launched by Japan on December 7, 1941: How did we happen to have a military base at Pearl Harbor, or to hold our Hawaiian colony altogether? The answer is that we stole Hawaii from its inhabitants, by force and guile, just half a century before the infamous date, in part so as to gain the Pearl Harbor naval base. The centenary of that achievement falls shortly after the opening of Year 501, and might have merited a word as we lamented Japan's failure to face up to its perfidy. Lifting the veil, we find an instructive story.

As long as the British deterrent remained in force, the US government vigorously defended Hawaiian independence. In 1842, President Tyler declared that the US desired “no peculiar advantages, no exclusive control over the Hawaiian Government, but is content with its independent existence and anxiously wishes for its security and prosperity.” Accordingly, Washington would oppose any attempt by any nation “to take possession of the islands, colonize them, and subvert the native Government.” With this declaration, Tyler extended the Monroe Doctrine to Hawaii. Its independence was also recognized by the major European countries and others, and confirmed by numerous treaties and declarations.

As the century progressed, the balance of power shifted in favor of the United States, offering new opportunities, as in Latin America. US colonists established a thriving sugar industry, and the value of the island as a stepping stone towards broader Pacific horizons became increasingly apparent. Admiral DuPont had observed that “It is impossible to estimate too highly the value and importance of the Hawaiian Islands, whether in a commercial or a military sense.” Plainly, our sphere of legitimate self-defense must be extended to include this prize. But there was an impediment: the independence of the island kingdom, and the “demographic problem” posed by the 90 percent majority of native Hawaiians (already reduced to one-sixth the pre-contact era). The colonists therefore undertook to guide and assist these people, so “low in mental culture,” and to provide them with the gift of good government—by their betters.

Planters' Monthly
observed in 1886 that the Hawaiian “does not yet realize” the “bounds and limits fixed” and the “moral and personal obligations attending” the gift we have offered them: “The white man has organized for the native a Government, placed the ballot in his hands, and set him up as a lawmaker and a ruler; but the placing of these powers in his hands before he knows how to use them, is like placing sharp knives, pointed instruments and dangerous tools in the hands of infants.” Similar concerns about the “rascal multitude” and their innate stupidity and worthlessness have been voiced by the “men of best quality” throughout the modern period, forming a major strand in democratic theory.
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The first Marine landing to support the colonists took place in 1873, just 30 years after Tyler's ringing endorsement of Hawaii's independence. After failing to take power in the 1886 elections, the plantation oligarchy prepared for a coup d'état, which took place a year later with the help of their military arm, the Hawaiian Rifles. The “Bayonet Constitution” forced upon the king granted US citizens the right to vote, while excluding a large part of the native population through property qualifications and barring Asian immigrants as aliens. Another consequence of the coup was the delivery of the Pearl River estuary to the United States as a naval base.

Exhibiting the “uniform” interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine that so impressed Secretary of State Hull, his predecessor James Blaine observed in 1889 that “there are only three places that are of value enough to be taken. One is Hawaii. The others are Cuba and Puerto Rico.” All were shortly to fall into the proper hands.

Regular military interventions ensured good behavior by
the
locals. In 1891, the USS
Pensacola
was dispatched “in order to guard American interests,” which now included ownership of four-fifths of the arable land. In January 1893, Queen Liliuokalani made a last ditch effort to preserve Hawaiian sovereignty, granting the right to vote in Hawaiian elections only to Hawaiians, rich or poor, without discrimination. At the order of US Minister John Stevens, US troops landed and imposed martial law—to support “the best citizens and nine-tenths of the property owners of the country,” in the words of the commanding officer. Stevens informed the Secretary of State that “The Hawaiian pear is now fully ripe and this is the golden hour for the United States to pluck it.” Long before, John Quincy Adams had used the same imagery with regard to the second of “the places of value,” Cuba, a “ripe fruit” that would fall into our hands once the British deterrent is removed (see chapter 6).

The US planters and their native collaborators produced a declaration proclaiming the conviction of the “overwhelming majority of the conservative and responsible members of the community”—who numbered a few hundred men—”that independent, constitutional, representative and responsible government, able to protect itself from revolutionary uprisings and royal aggression, is no longer possible in Hawaii under the existing system of government.” Under protest, the Queen surrendered to the “superior force of the United States of America” and its troops, abdicating in the hope of saving her followers from the death penalty; she herself was fined $5000 and sentenced to five years at hard labor for her crimes against good order (commuted in 1896). The Republic of Hawaii was established with American planter Sanford Dole proclaiming himself President on July 4, 1894. Each sip of Dole pineapple juice offers an occasion to celebrate another triumph of Western civilization.

Congress passed a joint resolution for annexation in 1898, as the US went to war with Spain and Commander George Dewey's naval squadron sank a decrepit Spanish fleet in Manila, setting the stage for the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Filipinos as another ripe fruit was plucked from the tree. President McKinley signed the annexation resolution on July 7, 1898, creating “The First Outpost of a Greater America,” a journal of the “conservative and responsible members of the community” triumphantly proclaimed. Their iron-fisted rule eliminated any residual interference by the “ignorant majority,” as the planters called them, still about 90 percent of the population, soon to become dispersed, impoverished, and oppressed, their culture suppressed, their lands stolen.
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In this manner, Pearl Harbor became a major military base in the US colony of Hawaii, to be subjected a half-century later to a scandalous “sneak attack” by Japanese monsters setting forth on their criminal path.

On January 2, 1992, the Institute for the Advancement of Hawaiian Affairs published a document entitled “The Cause of Hawaiian Sovereignty,” reviewing the history, in preparation for “the 100th anniversary of the overthrow of Hawaii” in January 1993.
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Short of a dramatic change in the reigning culture, that anniversary is destined to remain deeply buried in the memory hole, joining many others that commemorate the fate of the victims of the 500 year conquest.

4. Some Lessons in Political Correctness

Let us return to the public commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the infamous date, carefully sanitized and insulated from improper thoughts. Americans are much annoyed by the unwillingness of the Japanese to face their guilt for the Pearl Harbor crime, Urban Lehner reports in a lengthy
Wall Street Journal
article on Japanese “revisionism.” He quotes the Pearl Harbor memorial park historian on “the complete absence of a sense in Japan of their own history.” To illustrate “Japan's ambivalence toward remembering history,” Lehner describes a visit to the home of a “courtly” Japanese military historian, who “can't understand why the U.S. won't forget it. ‘If the US and Japan are partners, why talk about Pearl Harbor forever? That's what Japanese people are thinking,' he says. ‘Why do you keep reminding us?'”
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So the article ends, no comment being necessary on the unique sins of the Japanese exhibited with such clarity.

The
New York Times Magazine
devoted a cover story to this peculiarly Japanese malady by Tokyo Bureau Chief Weisman, entitled “Pearl Harbor in the Mind of Japan. “There is “little sound of remorse,” the subtitle reads, and “no commemorative ceremonies of the bombing in Japan.” The US will approach the event “from a completely different perspective,” Weisman writes, reflexively taking that perspective to be right and proper, no questions asked. His study of this topic exemplifies the general style and provides useful instruction in the techniques of Political Correctness, encapsulating many of the standard gambits.
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Americans were not always so clear as they are today about the simple verities, Weisman observes. In the late ‘60s, “guilt-ridden over the Vietnam conflict...American historians were more willing to question American motives in Asia. Today, their tone is much less apologetic”—the last word, an interesting choice. With the Persian Gulf war and the collapse of communism, “Times have changed,” and “Roosevelt's drawing a line in the sand is no longer seen as improper.”

Weisman's claims about the late ‘60s contain a particle of truth: younger historians associated with the antiwar movement did indeed begin to raise previously forbidden questions. They were compelled to form their own professional association (the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars), with very few senior faculty involved, to discuss subversive thoughts about possible flaws in “American motives.” Though they were the cream of the graduate student crop at the time, not many survived the authoritarian structure of the ideological disciplines; some were eliminated from the academic world in straight political firings, some marginalized in other familiar ways. The young scholars did receive some support in the mainstream, notably from John King Fairbank, the dean of Asian scholarship and a figure at the dissident extreme, often accused of crossing the line to Communist apologetics. He outlined his own position on the Vietnam war in his presidential address to the American Historical Association in December 1968, well after the corporate sector had called for terminating the enterprise. The war was an “error,” Fairbank explained, based on misunderstanding and naiveté, yet another example of “our excess of righteousness and disinterested benevolence.”
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One will find very little questioning of American motives in respectable circles then, or since.

Conventional falsehoods commonly retain their appeal because they are functional, serving the interests of established authority. Weisman's tales about the late ‘60s are a case in point: they buttress the view that the academy, the media, and intellectual life generally have been taken over by a left-wing onslaught, leaving only a few last brave defenders of simple truths and intellectual values, who therefore must be given every bit of support that can be mustered for their lonely cause, a project well-suited to current doctrinal needs (see chapter 2.4).

Like all right-thinking people, Weisman takes it as axiomatic that the US stance in the Persian Gulf and the Cold War is subject to no imaginable qualification, surely no questioning of “American motives.” Also following convention, he evades entirely the issue of shared responsibility for the Pacific war. The issue is not “Roosevelt's drawing a line in the sand,” but rather the decision of the traditional imperial powers (Britain, France, Holland, US) to dose the doors of their domains to Japan after it had followed the rules of “free trade” with too much success; and the US position, maintained to the end, that the US-Japan conflict might be resolved if Japan would permit the US to share in exploiting all of Asia, while not demanding comparable rights in US-dominated regions. Weisman indeed recognizes that such issues have been raised, making sure to frame them in a proper way. He does not refer to the discussion of the actions of the imperial powers in Western scholarship as events unfolded, or since. Rather, these are the ‘“startling” words of Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, hanged in 1948 as a Class A war criminal, who “defiantly defended the attack on Pearl Harbor as forced by ‘inhuman' economic sanctions imposed by Washington,” which “would have meant the destruction of the nation,” had Japan not reacted. Could there be a particle of truth lurking behind the thought? The question need not be answered, since it cannot rise to consciousness.

Weisman writes that ‘“of course, most American historians would have little trouble rendering a judgment on Japan's singular responsibility, if not guilt,” noting Japan's “annex[ation] of Manchuria in 1931,” and its “bloody sweep through China” in 1937 and later into Indochina, driving out the French colonial regime. No words here on the US attitude towards all of this at the time, except for an oblique hint: “Beginning with the decision to move naval vessels in 1940, the United States responded to Japanese military aggression with warnings and protests”—nine years after the invasion of Manchuria, three years after the murderous escalation in China. Why the delay? Weisman also puts aside other questions: Why were Western claims to their colonial domains stronger than those of Japan, and why did indigenous nationalists often welcome the Japanese conquest, driving out the traditional oppressors? Nor is he troubled by a simple fact of logic: If these were Japan's crimes, then why do we commemorate a much later event as the “date which will live in infamy”? Why is it “the tragedy of 50 years ago” that evokes Weisman's inquiry into Japan's flawed psyche?