Why the West’s rulers avoid Asia’s World War II parade
The imperialists “owned” it. They lost it. They thought they were getting it back. They lost it again.
As a class, today’s Western superrich know that their class ancestors up until the 1930s controlled and plundered all of East Asia and exploited its hundreds of millions of workers and peasants. Their colonial rule starved, beat and cheated the people they found living in Asia, but the colonialists censored that part of the story.
Japanese imperialism, which developed after the European brand, seized the Korean peninsula in 1905. It later waged war aimed at conquering China and replacing the Western colonialists elsewhere.
The Japanese military carried out massacres against local civilians. It also replaced Dutch rule of Indonesia, French rule of Indochina, British rule of Burma and Malaysia and pushed the other imperialists out of much of China. Japanese colonialism continued the brutality against the colonial peoples, as the Asian countries celebrating the parade in Beijing this Sept. 3 can testify to.
That the U.S. also waged war against Japan from 1941-45 was due neither to the U.S. rulers’ love for democracy nor its hatred for Japan’s military dictatorship. World War II in the Pacific was a battle between these two competing imperialist powers to control and plunder Asia and the Pacific. Besides the worker and farmer soldiers who died, this war cost the lives of tens of millions of civilians in Asia, including in Japan.
The Japanese occupation of Asia aroused a powerful resistance in the newly conquered countries. The national resistance movements — especially where Communist parties were leading them — waged heroic and effective guerrilla wars against the Japanese military. These movements made great contributions to the defeat of Japanese militarism.
Corporate media coverage of the 80th anniversary events will minimize this contribution by the Asian peoples and by the Communist parties. Just as in commemorations of the war in Europe, where the Soviet Union’s great sacrifices bringing about the defeat of Nazi Germany are minimized, so too the facts are distorted regarding the Asian theater of World War II.
The war among the imperialists for hegemony, while creating havoc and suffering for hundreds of millions of people, weakened imperialist rule. This in turn made liberation more likely for colonized peoples. While the imperialist powers attempted to reconquer the peoples they had plundered earlier, these interventions often failed.
It’s true that British, U.S. and French intervention massacred the local population and in some places stopped liberation from taking place. However, Communist-led movements succeeded in liberating China, much of Indochina and part of Korea, despite the continued imperialist war crimes in these areas. U.S. troops remained for decades in Thailand and Vietnam and are still in Japan and South Korea and again in the Philippines.
After the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991 and when China opened to the imperialist-controlled world market, the imperialists’ strategists said history had ended. They likely expected East Asia to fall back under Western imperialist control, perhaps this time in alliance with Tokyo. They were disappointed.
China, still with a socialist goal and held together by a strong Communist Party and peoples militia, has proved to be an opposing economic and diplomatic pole to the U.S.-West European-Japanese imperialist cabal that has dominated the rest of the world. An international meeting in Tianjin that just ended showed how China’s now powerful economy offers an alternative to the current imperialist domination of the world market.
The celebratory parade in Beijing further demonstrates the imperialist decline. It also revives the lesson that imperialist war can turn into a war for liberation of peoples and victory for the working class. That’s why the imperialists are so hostile to the parade.