Saturday, February 24, 2007

RISING SUN HAS UNRESOLVED SHADOWS






The following is from consortiumnews.com. See also

http://www.ideaworx.com/slatewiper/slatelinks.htm, and http://www.skycitygallery.com/japan/japan.html.

. "Commerce is War" has been a

post-War slogan of Japanese industry for the last sixty-plus years. The War is

not taught in Japan. I'd like to see -I'm not kidding - an anime version of WW

II without the cleaning-up of the Nazi-Germany of the East. Henry_Allen





Why US Shields Japan's WWII Denials

By Jerry Meldon
February 24, 2007

Editor's Note: Over the years, we have written a number of stories about Rev.

Sun Myung Moon's influence-buying schemes inside U.S. conservative political

circles – and the federal government's odd refusal to aggressively enforce laws

when Moon's operation is caught in legally questionable activities. [See, for

instance, Moon/Bush 'Ongoing Crime Enterprise'.]

In this guest article, Jerry Meldon examines the mysterious roots of the money

that has funded right-wing Asian politics since World War II and that has

sometimes spilled over into the United States:
On Feb. 19, Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Aso took exception to a U.S.

congressional resolution introduced by Rep. Mike Honda, D-California, calling on

Japan to “formally acknowledge, apologize and accept historical responsibility”

for coercing 200,000 Asian women into slavery as “Comfort Women” (wartime

prostitutes) for 3.5 million Japanese soldiers. Mr. Aso said he considers the

accusation groundless and extremely regrettable.

Six decades after World War II, can it really be that Japanese officials are

still distorting history and insulting the Chinese, Koreans, Philippinos and

others across Asia whom Hirohito’ s forces savagely brutalized and robbed?

And why does Washington turn a deaf ear?

The answers may be rooted in what transpired behind closed doors in Tokyo when

Japan was occupied by the U.S. military in the post-war years .

Sterling and Peggy Seagrave suggest a motive in their eye-opening – and at

times stomach-turning – 2003 book, Gold Warriors: America’s Secret Recovery of

Yamashita’s Gold. In the war’s immediate aftermath, Gen. Douglas MacArthur,

commander-in-chief of Allied occupying forces, secretly joined hands with

Japanese war criminals.

Rather than convict, imprison and throw away the keys, MacArthur coddled those

responsible for one of history’s bloodiest wars of aggression. When the U.S.

occupation ended in 1952, he released all those who were still in custody.

And it may have gone a lot further than that.

According to Gold Warriors, e ven as the United States “introduced democratic

reforms and a new constitution … [it ] put Japan back under the control of men

who were devotedly undemocratic … [insisting] that Japan never stole anything

and was flat broke … [when, in reality, America had given it ] huge infusions of

black money.”

Washington even had Article 14 of the 1951 Japan Peace Treaty state : “It is

recognized that Japan should pay reparations to the Allied Powers for the damage

and suffering caused by it during the war. Nevertheless it is also recognized

that the resources of Japan are not presently sufficient … [Therefore] the

Allied Powers waive all reparations claims of the Allied Powers and their

nationals arising out of any actions taken by Japan.”

As historian Christopher Simpson put it , the United States thereby insured

“that the vict ims of the war – rape camp survivors, slave laborers and POWs –

[would] be left with nothing.”

Furthermore, according to the Seagraves, “records of Japan’s looting and

economic conspiracy have been removed from Western archives and databases,

remain under secret classification and will not be made public for another half

-century.”

The cover-up notwithstanding, the Seagraves somehow penetrated the veil of

secrecy and reported that the source of the black money that MacArthur bestowed

on the Japanese. They wrote that after arriving in Japan, the general’s aides

located $100 billion in gold, platinum and other treasures that Hirohito’s

forces had systematically plundered from occupied Asian nations and buried deep

underground.

When MacArthur reported this to Washington, President Harry S. Truman’s brain

trust – which included John McCloy, who as U.S. High Commissioner for Germany

would authorize the early release of many Nazi war criminals – decided to devote

the fortune to covert operations such as the bankrolling of rightist political

parties and the recruitment of war criminals as U.S. intelligence agents for the

Cold War that was just beginning.

One of the most notorious crooks MacArthur embraced was yakuza godfather

Yoshio Kodama. With the exalted rank of rear admiral in the Japanese navy,

Kodama had overseen the wartime looting of Asia’s criminal infrastructure. In

the process, he stashed away a personal fortune estimated at $13 billion.

Arrested as a Class A war criminal, he made a deal with MacArthur’s intelligence

chief, Gen. Charles Willoughby. Kodama handed the CIA $100 million in return for

his release from Sugamo Prison. Returning to the underworld, he regained control

of the Asian heroin traffic.

According to the Seagraves and others, he also remained a CIA asset until his

death in 1984. It was apparently in that capacity that he became a major behind

-the-scenes political force, primarily in Japan but, indirectly, across the

Pacific as well.

Together with his fellow racketeer and Class A war criminal Ryoichi Sasakawa,

Kodama underwrote the creation of two Japanese political parties that later

combined to form the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). Except for a brief hiatus

when voters had had their fill of corruption, the conservative LDP has ruled

Japan ever since. According to sources cited by the Seagraves, the LDP secretly

contributed to the 1960 presidential campaign of Richard M. Nixon.

The LDP was not the only organization which Kodama and Sasakawa bankrolled,

that lavished the gangsters’ ill-begotten wealth on American politicians. They

also underwrote the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, which owns the

right-wing daily, the Washington Times.

When Gen. Park Chung Hee staged a coup and installed himself as South Korea’s

dictator in 1961, he designated the Unification Church to be his political arm.

Successive South Korean leaders have used it to influence U.S. foreign policy.

A 1978 congressional inquiry found that Moon’s organization, in coordination

with South Korea’s CIA-molded intelligence agency, the KCIA, paid off several

U.S. congressmen. Rep. Richard Hanna, D-California, and Otto Passman, D-

Louisiana, accepted approximately $200,000 each.

Hanna was slapped with a six-to-30-month sentence and spent a year behind bars.

Passman managed to have himself tried in his home town and was acquitted.

Fortunately for Reps. Cornelius Gallagher, D-New Jersey, and William Marshall,

R-Ohio, the five-year statute of limitations ran out before they could be

prosecuted. Three others congressmen were reprimanded for lying about their

gifts.

Kodama and Sasakawa, together with followers of Rev. Moon, also underwrote the

Asian People’s Anti-Communist League (APACL) as a propaganda mill for the

dictatorships of Taiwan and South Korea. In 1966, the APACL expanded to become

the World Anti-Communist League (WACL) . European neo-nazi terrorists and Latin

American death squad leaders attended WACL conferences in the 1970s and 1980s.

Ronald Reagan – whose 1981 presidential inauguration was attended by the

godfather of Central America’s death squads, Mario Sandoval Alarcon – sent the

following message to the 1985 WACL convention in Dallas:

“I commend you all for your part in this noble cause. Our combined efforts are

moving the tide of history toward world freedom. We must persevere and never

falter. I send all you who help in your crusade for liberty my best wishes. God

bless you.”

The previous year, Congress had blocked continued White House funding for the

counter-revolutionary Nicaraguan contras. Undaunted, the Reagan administration

solicited donations from private right-wing sources, including the two

organizations that Kodama and Sasakawa had spawned. WACL and the Unification

Church each obliged the Reagan team with generous donations that kept the

contras afloat.

In that same period, WACL also contributed heavily in the United States to

right-wing candidates running against progressive incumbents. One such

beneficiary, WACL conferee Steven Symms, unseated the chairman of the Senate

Foreign Relations Committee, Frank Church, D-Idaho. A prominent Vietnam War

critic, Church had chaired a 1975 Senate investigation that uncovered CIA plots

to assassinate foreign leaders.

Putting the pieces of the puzzle together, a picture emerges of CIA-controlled

Japanese wartime loot being funneled by Japanese war criminals, via rightist

Asian conduit organizations, to American politicians.

Maybe that explains why Washington turns a deaf ear when Japanese officials

sanitize their country’s wartime atrocities. After all, the bruised feelings of

a couple of billion Asian mainlanders is a small price to pay for keeping a lid

on the truth.

Jerry Meldon is an Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering at Tufts

University in Medford, Massachusetts. His e-mail is jerry.meldon@tufts.edu .

ANTI-SEMITISM: IT'S THE GOSPEL





Mel Gibson and the Gospel of Anti-Semitism

by Charles Patterson


The trouble with Mel Gibson's film "The Passion" is not the film itself, but the gospel story on which it's based. The gospel story, which has generated more anti-Semitism than the sum of all the other anti-Semitic writings ever written, created the climate in Christian Europe that led to the Holocaust. Long before the rise of Adolf Hitler, the gospel story about the life and death of Jesus had poisoned the bloodstream of European civilization.

The four gospels — Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John (there were others, but they didn't make it into the New Testament) — were written decades after the death of Jesus. Not only were they not composed in Galilee where Jesus lived or in Jerusalem where he died, but they were not written in Aramaic, the language of Jesus and the region where he lived. Instead, they were written in Greek more than a generation later in cities in the Roman empire like Antioch, Ephesus, and in the case of the earliest gospel (Mark) in Rome itself. As a result, these gospels are at a considerable cultural, linguistic, and religious remove from the events they allegedly describe.

The historical Jesus (as opposed to the Jesus portrayed in the New Testament and elevated to divinity by the Christian church) was a Jew, faithful to the law of Moses and the teachings of the prophets. He grew up and worked in Galilee, where Jewish patriotism was intense, and he was steeped in Jewish scriptures, oral law, and the spirit of the Pharisees, the leading religious teachers of his day. People called him "Rabbi" and, like many religious Jews, he expected the imminent coming of the messianic era, or the "Kingdom of God," as he called it.

Like other religious, nationalistic Jews before and after him, Jesus (whose Aramaic name was Yeshua) angered the Roman government because of his preaching, which was considered dangerous. On what turned out to be his final Passover trip to Jerusalem, Jesus was arrested and, upon the order of the Roman procurator, executed.

After his death, his followers — most of whom were simple fishermen and artisans — lived on in Galilee and Jerusalem. Called "Nazarenes" after Jesus's hometown of Nazareth, they continued to observe Jewish laws and wait for the coming of the Kingdom of God, which Jesus had promised. In Jerusalem it was James, the brother of Jesus, who headed the Nazarenes for the next thirty years until he, too, was put to death in 62 C.E.

However, the future of Christianity did not remain long in the hands of these Aramaic-speaking Nazarenes. It passed on to an energetic, Greek-speaking Jew from Tarsus in Asia Minor by the name of Paul. He had never met Jesus and wasn't greatly impressed by the Nazarenes he did meet when he visited Jerusalem. What won Paul over to the belief that Jesus was the Christos (the Greek word for Messiah) was a vision. After his vision, Paul traveled all over the eastern Mediterranean preaching his own understanding of Christianity, which was rather different from the Nazarene version. Unlike the Nazarenes, who lived according to Jewish law in Jerusalem and Galilee, Paul took his message to gentiles as well as Jews. As a result of tireless work and extensive travel, he planted Christian congregations in Asia Minor and Greece.

The differences between Paul's teachings and those of the Nazarenes back in Jerusalem and Galilee soon became apparent. Not only did Paul preach to gentiles, but he also did not insist that these converts submit themselves to circumcision or to any of the other demands of Jewish law. The Nazarenes were outraged when they learned about Paul's negligence, and they summoned him to Jerusalem for an explanation. In Jerusalem before the Nazarene elders, Paul acted as a devout Jew, observing all the details of Jewish law.

Paul never changed his mind about his mission to the gentiles and his opposition to having these converts treated like second-class citizens. In letters he wrote to his churches (now collected in the New Testament), he went so far as to claim that the law of Moses was no longer necessary, even for Jews, and that faith in Christ and his teachings was sufficient. He also believed that everybody in the churches — Jews and gentiles, slaves and free persons — should be equal. When people from the Nazarene church in Jerusalem arrived at his churches to try to convince the gentile converts to obey Jewish law, Paul denounced them as "Judaizers."

The conflict between the Nazarenes and Paul that divided the early Christian movement was decided by a stroke of history. The Jewish-Roman War (66-70 C.E.), which destroyed Jerusalem and its temple and killed many Jews, dealt a devastating blow to the Nazarenes, from which they never recovered. Whatever traditions and writings they possessed were lost or forgotten. Instead, Paul's churches survived and became the basis for a Christianity that quickly became separate from and even hostile to the Judaism out of which it emerged.

By the time the Christian gospels were written in the latter part of the first century, Jews and Christians were fierce competitors arguing over whether or not Jesus was the Messiah-Christ promised in the Hebrew Bible, and over which group — Jews or Christians — represented the "true Israel." By the end of the first century resentment and mistrust of Jews were so widespread in the aftermath of the Jewish revolt against Rome that the young Christian churches in the cities of the empire sought to distance themselves from their Jewish roots.

This desire to dissociate explains why hostility toward Judaism and Jews came to be written into the gospels. They told the story of Jesus in such a way that it seemed as if his real enemies were not gentiles, or even the Romans who put him to death, but rather Jews — Pharisees, priests, and the Jewish people in general.

This anti-Jewish point of view is evident in the Gospel According to Mark, the first of the gospels written in Rome shortly after the end of the Jewish-Roman War in 70 C.E. when anti-Jewish resentment was especially strong in the capital. In Mark's gospel Jesus is persecuted at every turn by the Pharisees and priests of Judaism. In fact, the very first person in the gospel to recognize his worth was not a Jew at all, but a Roman centurion present at his crucifixion, who proclaimed, "Truly this man was a son of God" (Mark 15:39).

Likewise, Mark's gospel pictures Pontius Pilate, the Roman procurator who ordered Jesus's execution, as someone who tried his best to be nice to Jesus. According to Mark, Pilate wanted to have Jesus released but was prevented from doing so by a mob of bloodthirsty Jews (the same people who cheered his entrance into the city several days earlier). By telling the story in this way, Mark's gospel put the responsibility for the death of Jesus on the Jews, not on the Roman government that ordered his death.

Matthew's gospel took this blaming of the Jews one step further. In this gospel Pilate's wife warns her husband not to have anything to do with wronging "that righteous man." Then, after the Jewish mob shouts for the death of Jesus (choosing to have the criminal Barabbas released instead), Pilate washes his hands in front of the crowd, saying "I am innocent of this man's blood." Here Matthew puts into the mouths of the crowd words that were to condemn later generations of Jews: "And the people answered, 'His blood be on us and on our children!" (Matthew 27:25).

The other two gospels — Luke and John — also portray Jews and Judaism as forces that persecuted Jesus and drove him to his death. Combined with the letters of Paul, these four anti-Jewish gospels make up the bulk of the New Testament, which Christianity considers to be a sacred and accurate account of history.

Not surprisingly, this negative picture of Judaism and the Jews continued in the writings of the Christians who followed. The fourth-century bishop of Antioch, John Chrysostom, widely respected as a "Doctor of the Church" and later canonized as a saint, preached fiery sermons against the Jews of his city, calling them "lustful, rapacious, greedy, perfidious bandits...inveterate murderers, destroyers, men possessed by the devil." Their synagogue was a place of "shame and ridicule," and Jewish religious rites were "criminal and impure." Why were the Jews so hateful? The answer, said Chrysostom, was in the gospel story: the Jews were hateful because of their "odious assassination of Christ."

In the Middle Ages the gospel story about the "assassination of Christ" was enacted annually in Passion plays staged outdoors at Oberammergau in Germany and many other places in Europe. These plays — forerunners of the Gibson film — enacted for their audiences the passion (suffering) of Jesus in all its gory details.

It is ironic and tragic that Christianity, which began as a Jewish sect, grew up to become such a dangerous threat to Judaism. To their credit, some post-Holocaust Christians have been trying to come to terms with the church's anti-Semitic past and get beyond it. In the early 1960s the Catholic Church's Vatican II pronouncement denounced anti-Semitism and stated that Jews of the past, as well as the Jews of today, bear no responsibility for Jesus' death. It was definitely a long overdue step forward, but this film has dealt a serious blow to these efforts.


Source: Reprinted by permission of the author. Patterson is author of Anti-Semitism: The Road to the Holocaust and Beyond.