Victory to the Victims

In 1994-95, as celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the last battles of World War II were spreading across the Pacific, I was in the U.S. Navy stationed in Japan. When the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Okinawa arrived in April of '95, Japan declined to join in any commemoration whatsoever. I suggested to my superiors that the U.S. Navy should raise the Yamato, the great Japanese battleship that was sunk in the Battle of Okinawa, and then sink it again. My suggestion was not passed up my chain of command.

The great controversy sweeping America over the past few years about all of the symbols, statues and memorials to the Confederate side in the Civil War is an important one. The past has a great deal to teach all of us, but exactly what is the lesson to be learned? Events of the past few weeks have shown us that some memorials mean different things to different Americans. 

Comparisons have been made with Germany and how the German people have come to terms with their much more recent past. The Germans have been scrupulous in their renunciation of Nazi ideals, and while there is still controversy about certain aspects of its treatment of the past, contemporary Germany is a model at how a society can come to terms with a terrible past.

Part of how Germany has dealt with its past was thanks to the U.S. occupation and its strict ban of any and all demonstrations or representations of Nazi doctrines after the war. The U.S. occupation of Japan was similarly strict, and its success at suppressing militarism and feudalism in Japan was startlingly thorough. But there were some compromises made by the U.S. in its pacification of Japan, like the immunity of the Japanese emperor from prosecution for war crimes, that have since caused problems for the full acceptance of the Japanese people of their responsibility for the war and for the horrific crimes carried out by Japanese forces in Asia in the name of their emperor.

Lately, Japanese prime ministers have openly visited the Yasukuni Shrine, a shrine dedicated to the soldiers, sailors, and kamikaze pilots who perished in the war. The memorial includes the names of more than a thousand Class-A war criminals. The German Kaiser was stripped of his title at the end of World War I, but the Japanese Emperor, in whose name all those soldiers and sailors and kamikaze pilots fought and died, remained on his Chrysanthemum throne.

When I lived in Japan one of the things I learned was that there are no war memorials anywhere in the country. There are, however, numerous peace memorials, the most famous of which is in Hiroshima, the site of the first use of an atomic weapon against civilians. The Japanese have used their defeat by Allied forces in World War II as the inspiration to become the greatest peaceniks in history. In their constitution, Japan limits their armed forces to a strictly defensive role. If you go to Hiroshima, you will find innumerable reminders of the terrible ending of the war, but no reminders of how or why it started. The Japanese like to think of themselves as the war's greatest victims. Foreigners are routinely reduced to tears by the exhibits in Hiroshima. Some American tourists even feel overwhelmed by guilt and find themselves apologizing for the dropping of the bomb. Harry Truman is sometimes represented as some kind of villainous, racist monster who cared nothing for the innocents who perished in a flash on August 6, 1945.

Similarly, many people in the American South like to think of themselves as the victims of Lincoln and his imperialist federal armies violating their sacred soil at the end of the "War Between the States," imposing crippling "reparations" on their broken economy - made worse by the loss of millions of slave laborers who no longer felt either compelled or obliged to pick the cotton rotting in the fields. The cause for which Confederate soldiers fought, which was nothing less than the freedom to buy and sell human beings like livestock, to break up their families, and to subject them to savage physical and mental abuse, became, for them, the Lost Cause, romanticized in fiction so horrible that one Southerner, D. W. Griffith, made a play called The Clansman into the first feature length motion picture made in America, The Birth of a Nation in 1915, in which liberated blacks were portrayed as apes who wanted nothing more than the liberty to rape white women and the heroes of the film, riding to the rescue of the film's virtue-threatened heroine, were the Ku Klux Klan, created right after the war by a former Confederate officer named David Bedford Forrest.

Over the past week, commentators have drawn comparisons between our extremely strange manner of remembering our calamitous civil war to the way that Germans remember the Nazis and the Third Reich. The parallel they should be drawing, however, is between Civil War memorials and Japan's peace memorials - between the unwillingness of Southerners to face the truth about the Civil War and the way that the Japanese have absolved themselves of all guilt for the disastrous war that they started, first by invading Manchuria in 1931 and by attacking the United States at Pearl Harbor in 1941. Some Japanese historians continue to argue that the attack on Pearl Harbor was "provoked" by American expansionism in Asia. (Coinciding with the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese forces also attacked U.S. bases in the Philippines.) To hear the Southerners and the Japanese tell their war stories, they were the great victims, not the villains.

As American historians have reminded us over the past few weeks, most of the numerous monuments to Confederate generals and statesmen found all over the South and even in Northern states were erected in the era of Jim Crow and were intended to be monuments to white supremacy. The American Civil Rights movement which culminated in the 1960s didn't change people's minds so much as it changed our laws so that the people who refused to accept the equality of black Americans could no longer commit acts to enforce their prejudices. 

In the state of Alabama, Martin Luther King Day (the 3rd Monday of January) is known as Martin Luther King/Robert E. Lee Day. Since the two holidays are so close together on the calendar (King was born on January 15th and Lee was born in the 19th), the governments of Alabama and Mississippi simply to incorporated them.(1) It is just one of many incongruities in the South, like accepting integration and affirmative action as the laws of the land and tacitly supporting the principle of racial equality, while Confederate flags and enormous stone and bronze monuments to "heroes" on the losing side of the American Civil War stand as eloquent rebukes to the law. Every one of them must come down, and the pedestals should be left empty to remind us of the emptiness of the ideas that they once supported.


(1) According to the official Alabama state website (www.al.com), "Alabama and Mississippi have celebrated Lee's birthday since the 1800s and King's since 1983. The Lee/King holiday is one of three Confederate-related days on Alabama's official holiday calendar. The state also marks Confederate Memorial Day on the fourth Monday in April and the birthday of former Confederate President Jefferson Davis on the first Monday in June."