One of life’s safest bets is that, following a visit by a Japanese premier to the shrine that honors the nation’s war dead, a lot of Chinese megacrooks and inheritors of the greatest murderer of all time will cry foul, and lots of buffoons of the neocon and liberal persuasion over here will echo them.  One particularly mendacious fraud, Daniel Sneider, who titles himself “associate director of research at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University,” enlightened us by saying that the recent visit of Premier Shinzo Abe to the Yasukuni Shrine is proof that the premier is still trying to push his patriotic remake of postwar Japan.

Oh dear!  Japan could be planning another Pearl Harbor!  The misleading and tendentious New York Times, of course, plays the visits up and never fails to mention Japanese war crimes in China and Manchuria.  The biggest war crimes of all—the dropping of two atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—are never mentioned, nor is Curtis LeMay’s firebombing of Tokyo, which incinerated mostly old men, women, and children in the thousands.  They started it, and we finished it, say sofa samurai over on these shores, but I for one am convinced about who started the war, and it wasn’t Mr. Tojo or Mojo, or Hirohito, for that matter.  It was FDR, a liar and war criminal par excellence, yet elected four times by the great American public.  But before I go on, I must declare an interest.  I love Japan and its martial tradition, love the concept of bushido, and have rarely met a Japanese person I’ve disliked.

Let’s face the facts: Roosevelt and his gang were anxious for war with Japan, and it all had to do with the root of all evil.  During the 1930’s Japan rapidly expanded her industrial production, while the rest of the world, with the exception of Germany, stagnated.  By 1941 Japan had become the leading economic power in East Asia, and her exports were steadily replacing those of the United States and Europe.  Japan had very few natural resources.  What she had was an honest money system, based on government creating the nation’s money and credit on an interest-free basis, eliminating the usury practiced by bankers and the phony overseeing of the banking system as practiced by the Federal Reserve in Washington.  Once the shackles of usury had been removed around 1931, the Japanese economy skyrocketed, as did industrial production.  But in July 1939 the United States unilaterally abrogated the Treaty of Commerce of 1911, thereby restricting Japan’s ability to import essential raw materials.  An aviation-fuel embargo and a ban on the export of iron and steel followed in 1940.  In July 1941 all Japanese assets were frozen after Japan had peacefully occupied Indochina, with the permission of Vichy France.  By means of an economic blockade, a noose was being tightened around Japan’s neck.  The United States, Britain, Holland, and China had encircled Japan through economic pressure, but naval forces in the region of the Philippines, Singapore, and Malaya had also been redeployed and strengthened.  Yet despite all the provocations, Japan attempted to negotiate with the great powers and made concession after concession in the hope of finding a peaceful solution.  The Japanese are not stupid.  They knew that Uncle Sam had the ability to produce warplanes and materiel little Japan had no hope of ever approaching.  Finally, war was decided on December 1, 1941, and we all know the rest.

Roosevelt got his war by ignoring the warnings that Japan was about to attack the fleet at Pearl.  He has the blood of American dead on his hands as well as those who died fighting Japan and Germany during the next four years.  His bloodthirsty successor, the ex-haberdasher Truman, did himself proud by dropping the A-bombs.  His excuse was that he did it in order to save American lives in the invasion of Japan.  Almost 70 years later, even after Stalin’s and Mao’s crimes of over 100 million dead have been revealed, what does Uncle Sam do?  He allows people like Sneider to stir the pot and, with the help of Hollywood, remind us of the little yellow men who mistreated pilots who incinerated their wives and mothers.

And more shock horror.  An Abe appointee recently said that the Tokyo tribunal following World War II was a means to cover up the genocide of American air raids over Tokyo and the two A-bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  The U.S. embassy called this preposterous.  What is preposterous is that we’ve bombed the hell out of countries as recently as ten years ago, including a Christian European country like Serbia, but 70 years after we committed a Mao-like crime in dropping two A-bombs on a defenseless population, we haven’t the guts to admit our fault but accuse the Japanese of nationalistic talk because they worship their ancestors and honor those who gave their lives for their country.  Americans who have served will agree.  Those who send others to do the fighting—and we know who they are—will not.  Banzai!