By Bruce Bawer
This year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner speaks out.
Last Friday morning in Oslo, the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced that this year’s Peace Prize will be awarded to a Japanese organization called Nihon Hidankyo, which was founded in 1956 and which has campaigned ever since for the elimination of nuclear weapons. At a press conference in Tokyo following the Nobel Prize announcement, the head of Nihol Hidankyo, Toshiyuki Mimaki, declared that the children of Gaza are now undergoing the same kind of suffering that Japanese children experienced at the end of World War II.
An interesting observation – and a valid one. But what Mimaki neglected to add is that the suffering of Gaza’s children now, like the suffering of Japanese children then, is entirely the fault of their own governments, and indeed, in most cases, their own parents. October 7 of last year has been described as Israel’s 9/11; it could also be compared to Pearl Harbor – an unprovoked attack on the United States that fully justified our response.
Like Hirohito’s military, Hamas stands out for its sheer brutality, its indifference to the lives of civilians (not just the enemy’s civilians, but its own), and its obsessive determination to kill and conquer and destroy. Hamas’s hostage-taking brings to mind Japan’s POW camps, which made Hitler’s look humane. The utter mercilessness of Hamas’s actions of October 7 shocked the world – at least those people in the world who hadn’t been brainwashed into viewing Gaza as an “open-air prison” and Israel as the moral equivalent of Nazi Germany.
Another similarity: just as Japan’s ruthless militarism and empire-building enjoyed widespread support among the Japanese people – even though their leaders treated them as cannon fodder, persuading thousands of them, for example, to become kamikaze pilots – Hamas’s attack on Israel was cheered by the Gazan people, even though Hamas leaders, instead of spending foreign aid from around the world to better those people’s lives, used it to acquire weapons, build tunnels, and buy mansions for themselves in Qatar. Whatever you may think of Truman’s decision to drop atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the major long-term consequence of that decision, and of the humane U.S. occupation that followed, was the transformation of the Japanese people’s fanatical and dangerous militarism, emperor-worship, and doctrine of racial superiority into a sincere devotion to peace, freedom, productivity, and prosperity. General Douglas MacArthur, who governed postwar Japan, praised its people for having “undergone the greatest reformation recorded in modern history. With a commendable will, eagerness to learn, and marked capacity to understand, they have, from the ashes left in war’s wake, erected in Japan an edifice dedicated to the supremacy of individual liberty and personal dignity.” We can only hope that Israel’s surgical warfare in Gaza effects a similar change on the part of the Gazan people, although I’m not holding my breath. Why? Because the ideology that sent those monsters charging into Israel on October 7 isn’t confined to Hamas or Gaza but, alas, infects Muslims around the world.
In 2017 the Nobel Prize in Literature was presented to Kazuo Ishiguro, who was born in Japan – in Nagasaki, as it happens – but who has lived since the age of five in Britain, where in 2018 he was awarded a knighthood. Best known for the 1989 novel The Remains of the Day (which became a hit film starring Anthony Hopkins), Ishiguro is also the author of An Artist of the Floating World (1986), which is set in Japan during the period shortly after the end of the war. One of the striking things about the book is that its protagonist isn’t consumed with undying rage over America’s dropping of atom bombs; on the contrary, he’s eaten up by remorse over his active support, before and during the war, for the totalitarian regime that led the country into war and that cruelly oppressed its domestic critics. Other characters in the book have put the pre-war mentality behind them entirely and have embraced not just American-style democracy but also American culture.
Yes, the existence of nuclear weapons is terrifying. Ronald Reagan wanted to rid the world of them. Donald Trump has said that he feels the same way, and that if re-elected he would confer with Putin and Xi as the first step of a comprehensive, long-term effort to bring about the total elimination of such weapons. But of course finding a safe route from mutual assured destruction to a nuclear-free world is the diciest and most dangerous of propositions. I’m old enough to remember the peak days, late in the Cold War, of the reckless no-nukes movement, which was run by idiots who preached unilateral Western disarmament. Needless to say, that’s not the answer to the problem.
I don’t know anything about Nihol Hidankyo or Toshiyuki Mimaki. Perhaps it’s a responsible-minded group. Perhaps he’s a reasonable man. But his remark about Gaza suggests otherwise. In the decades between its founding in 1948 and the attacks of October 7, 2023, Israel tried to take a moderate approach to Muslim aggression. It pursued a policy that combined limited retaliation with attempts at peaceful coexistence. While the so-called Palestinians brought up their children to hate and kill Jews, the Israelis brought up their children to believe in common humanity, the power of kindness and forgiveness, and the possibility that Muslims who were determined to carry out a second Holocaust could eventually become their trusted friends. Over the decades, Israeli citizens were subjected to innumerable jihadist attacks that took the lives of a great many innocents. Yet Israeli policy remained the same: react proportionally and then move on. October 7 changed everything. Suddenly, Israelis realized that they’d been fooling themselves and that the only sensible way to respond to Hamas’s actions was to do – well, precisely what they’re doing now.
In the Pacific theater of World War Two, America had an alternative to atom bombs – namely, a long, slow invasion of Japan’s home islands. Such an invasion would have caused massive American and Japanese deaths. And even if the U.S. had emerged victorious, would such a victory have had the same powerful impact on the Japanese psyche as Hiroshima and Nagasaki? After the attacks of 9/11, America’s leaders could have targeted the Islamic world within hours in a way that could well have shaken the world’s Muslims to the core and caused hundreds of millions of them to abjure at once their religion’s more pernicious and primitive doctrines – just as Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which took about 200,000 lives, instantly and for all time eradicated the poisonous ideology that had led to at least 25 million deaths in the Pacific war. Instead, the U.S. government prosecuted very long, deadly, and expensive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that accomplished absolutely nothing even as that same government, in collusion with the corporate media and academic elites, aggressively whitewashed the very ideology that had inspired the 9/11 attacks.
So it is that the worldwide danger of Islam, 23 years after 9/11, is greater than ever. Compare that to Japan, which by 1967, 23 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was a free and prosperous American ally. Food for thought as the world’s media celebrate the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Nihol Hidankyo.
First published in Front Page Magazine
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One Response
Atom-balming Hiroshima and Nagasaki took the fight out of Japan, god-man Hirohito, depraved Tojo, and a long tradition of sub-humanity (rape of Nanking …).
Call it cauterization of a sick rotting culture that even maggots could not heal. Their
art, poetry, music, literature — lipstick on a rabid pig.
Hamasicks and their sympathizers need 5 minute in the same ovens in which the Hamasicks burnt to death living babies.