Thoughts
on the Fall of Democracy on the occasion of the 71st Anniversary of
Hiroshima Day
“O
Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells;
help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot
dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with shrieks of their wounded,
writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with hurricane of
fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing
grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander
unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst.”
Mark
Twain “The War Prayer”
The day after the
terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, U.S. President George Bush declared a
“War on Terror,” claiming that this was not simply a terrorist attack but a
war. According to the results of a joint survey conducted by Physicians for
Social Responsibility (U.S.), Physicians for Global Survival (Canada), and
International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (Germany), the War
on Terror conducted by the multinational force led by U.S. forces has so far
killed at least 1.3 million and possibly more than 2 million people in the
three main war zones - Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq. Most of these victims
are civilians including many children and infants. A different survey estimates
the death toll in Iraq (total population 32.6 million) between 2003 and 2011 as
about half a million, 70% of which were civilians. About 60% of these civilian
deaths, including many children, were the victims of direct attacks with guns,
explosives, aerial bombings and the like, and the rest were deaths due to the
destruction of hospitals and other medical facilities as well as disease caused
by stress such as heart failure. It can be assumed that many civilian
casualties in Afghanistan and Pakistan have also been either director indirect war
victims.
The estimated death toll by the end of 1945 as the
result of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was 230 thousand, and
the aerial bombings conducted by the U.S. forces throughout Japan in the final
year of the Asia-Pacific War, including the atomic bombing, killed about 560
thousand people, predominantly civilians. How should we, citizens of Hiroshima,
conceive of 1.3 million deaths as the result of the War on Terror, even though
they were not victims of the nuclear war? The estimated number of Chinese and
other Asian deaths resulting from Japan’s 15 year-long war of aggression was
more than 20 million. How should we, Japanese citizens with this abhorrent
record, tackle the war of aggression that the U.S. together with other western powers
conducted in Iraq?
On December 14, 2011, with the completion of
withdrawal of the U.S. forces from Iraq, President Barack Obama made an
official announcement of the “end of the Iraq War.” Yet, in fact, not only Iraq
but also Afghanistan are still in a deep quagmire of war, causing many civilian
deaths almost every day. According to the estimate made by two terrorism
specialists, Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, the Iraq War “generated a
stunning sevenfold increase in the yearly rate of fatal jihadist attacks,
amounting to literally hundreds of additional terrorist attacks and thousands
of civilian lives lost; even when terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan is
excluded, fatal attacks in the rest of the world have increased by more than
one-third.” Indeed, jihad, i.e., terrorist attacks, conducted either by Islamic
fundamentalists or those influenced by such religious fundamentalism are now
spreading from Iraq and Afghanistan to northern Africa, the entire Middle East,
Southeast Asia as well as to the U.S. and Europe. Even within a month of July
this year, more than a dozen deadly terrorist attacks were carried out at
various places in the world, including Dacca in Bangladesh (22 deaths), Bagdad
in Iraq (213 deaths), Medina in Saudi Arabia (4 deaths), Nice in France (84
deaths), Munich in Germany (9 deaths), and Kabul in Afghanistan (80
deaths).
The recent chain reaction of terrorist attacks in
France, Germany, Turkey, Iraq, Afghanistan and many other nations is
undoubtedly a counter-attack by the self-claimed Islamic State (ISIL). This
reaction was against aerial bombings, which have escalated by Coalition Forces
led by U.S., French and British forces. Russian forces supporting the brutal
Bashar al-Assad regime of Syria were also involved. According to recent
research conducted by the Oslo Peace Research Institute, the number of direct
conflict fatalities increased more than threefold after the Western powers
initiated air strikes against ISIL and the CIA began its indirect military interference
in the war. In particular, aerial bombing conducted by the Coalition and
Russian forces against ISIL produced not only many civilian deaths but also
more than 4 million refugees by mid-2015. This aerial bombing is still
producing many more displaced people. According to information provided by the Office
of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the total number of
refugees in the world at the end of 2014 was 59.5 million, half of whom are
children. Compared to this, the number of European refugees forced to leave
their motherland during World War II was approximately 2.1 million. Therefore,
it is by no means an exaggeration to say that, currently, the world is in a
state of global war that can be described as “the Global War of Terrorism.” As
already explained, this Global War of Terrorism was initiated by the War on
Terror, and we are unable to see how we could end this horrific situation.
In retrospect, it is clear that, immediately
after the September 11 attack in 2001, terrorist attacks on civilians of the
nations of military power by violent non-state organizations such as al-Qaida
suddenly increased. In this sense, it can be said that the 9/11 incident
probably corresponds to the Pearl Harbor Attack that opened the Pacific War.
Yet the vital difference between the Global War of Terrorism and the Pacific
War is that the current global war is not a war fought between nation-states
equipped with immense and wide-ranging arms. It is an “asymmetric war.”
Non-state terrorist organizations such as ISIL, which do not possess massive
military power, are executing a strategy of indiscriminate terrorist attacks,
specifically targeting civilians of the countries of Coalition Forces and their
allies. Yet the nations armed with strong military forces are incapable of
defending the domain of daily civilian life. This is because military arms
possessed by powerful nations are designed to confront similar formidable
weapons of other nations, and are thus totally incapable of preventing and tackling
haphazard terrorist attacks on civilians using small arms. Terrorist groups are
clearly aware of this weak point in the mighty military powers like the U.S.,
France and Britain. The only viable defense strategy against such terrorist
acts could therefore be steady and continuous peace-building humanitarian
activities. It is only such activities that can eventually eliminate violent
terrorist organizations like ISIL.
Counter terrorist
attacks such as aerial bombings conducted by the Western military powers
against non-state terrorist organizations are, however, killing and injuring
many civilians in areas under the control of these repressive organizations. Of
course, atrocious and cruel conduct by non-state terrorist organizations carries
no legitimacy and cannot be justified. Yet many instances of so-called
“precision bombing” are also in fact indiscriminate attacks on pitiful
civilians oppressed by terrorist groups. The attacks by drone that Obama has
been vigorously promoting are no exception at all. Drone attacks may sometimes
kill terrorist leaders, but those deceased leaders are quickly replaced and
their terrorist activities continue. Furthermore, according to an article
published in New York Times on April 23, 2015, of 3852 people who were
hitherto killed by 522 Drone attacks, 476 were civilians. Even this data is
apparently an underestimation, and actual civilian casualties of Drone attacks
including medical doctors and nurses may be far more numerous. (According to
the information available at the website “The Intercept: Drone Paper,” for
example, 90% of drone-attack victims killed by Haymaker Operations conducted
between May and September 2012 in Afghanistan were not the “intended targets.”)
In other words, “precision bombings,” which always produce much so-called
“collateral damage,” are in fact “state terrorism” committed by powerful
military nations. Such acts of state terrorism create further indiscriminate
attacks by non-state terrorist groups on civilians, which are leading to
endless vicious cycles of terrorism. As a result, the world is now in a state
of political chaos and peril, in which no one can predict when and where a
violent act of terrorism might kill or harm people. There is no doubt that the
recent result of the British “Brexit” referendum and the attempted military
coup in Turkey are also closely linked with the ongoing Global War of
Terrorism.
Why are such horrendous, indiscriminate terrorist attacks
on civilians suddenly increasing in so-called “civilized nations” such as
France and the U.S.? How should we interpret such frightening phenomena? It is
noticeable that most perpetrators of such terrorist acts are either immigrants
or children of immigrants from the Middle East or the northern Africa. For
example, all of the nine men, who carried out indiscriminate carnage at the Bataclan
concert hall and outside Stade de France in Paris on the evening of
November 13, 2015, were French citizens born to migrant parents from Algeria or
Morocco. On July 14, 2016, a young man deliberately drove a cargo truck into a
crowd celebrating Bastille Day on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, killing 84
people and injuring 303. That man, Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, was born in
Tunisia but living in Nice on a French residency permit. As widely reported,
all these people were typical, ordinary young boys with little initial interest
in Muslim religious activities - they enjoyed, for example, dancing at discos,
playing football and the like. Yet, within a relatively short period before
committing the mass murder, they suddenly became radicalized with
fundamentalist Islamic ideas. Take the case of Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, for
example except for a short period leading up to the attack, he was completely
uninvolved in religious activities and not even a practicing Muslim. As the
French anthropologist Alain Bertho suggests, it seems that the religious
radicalization of these people was closely entwined with social and political
conditions which these children of migrants faced. It is almost certain that
these men felt that, despite the fact that they were French nationals born in
France, they continued to be treated as aliens, suffering from various forms of
discrimination. Many were forced to live in migrant ghettos in the outskirts of
Paris. Clearly illustrating such discrimination is statistical data that, in 10
years between 2005 and 20015, 102 migrants or descendants of migrants in France
died because of violence inflicted upon them by police; yet no police officer
has so far been prosecuted for such crimes committed against members of the
public. The fact that many young French minorities are unable to find hope in
their future in the country of their birth must contribute significantly to the
arousal of deep anti-social sentiment among them. As a result some of them find
a means to deliver their intense anger in the extremely violent form of a
non-western religious ideology, i.e., Muslim fundamentalism. In other words,
their radicalization can be called the “Islamization of anger.”
From 2003, France began engaging in military activities
in Afghanistan. From 2011, it started sending its forces to various places in
northern and central Africa, and from September 2014, French forces began joint
operations with U.S. forces involving aerial bombing in Iraq and Syria. As I
have already mentioned, coupled with bombing conducted by other Coalition and Russian
forces, French military intervention in these areas has contributed to driving
from their homelands a massive number of refugees. About 1.5 million
Syrian refugees have so far moved into Lebanon, where half a million
Palestinian refugees are already living. Jordan is hosting more than 664
thousands refugees on top of 2.2 million Palestinian refugees; and in Turkey
there are 2.5 million refugees who have very little hope of finding a safe
place to live. Because the Macedonian government relaxed its strict policy
against illegal immigration in June 2015, a large influx of refugees seeking
safe haven suddenly began moving into Western Europe, in particular Germany,
from Turkey through Greece and Macedonia. Yet many boats overloaded with
refugees sank in the middle of the sea on the way to Greece from Turkey, and as
a result thousands of people including many small children were drowned. Yet,
except for Germany for a short period, other EU countries including France were
reluctant to accept such large numbers of refugees. Eventually, in March 2016,
the EU evaded its responsibility by forging an agreement with Turkey to
forcibly return refugees, arriving in Greece via Turkey, back to Turkey. As
part of this agreement, the EU promised to pay Turkey 60 billion euros.
Indeed it is natural to assume that many young
“migrants” in France felt angry when they saw on TV every day many Syrian and
other refugees from the Middle East making frantic efforts to land on Greek
islands as well as dead bodies of babies and children drowned in the sea. In
some sense it is therefore also natural to presume that those radicalized
French terrorists showed their anger towards French people who were enjoying
themselves at a concert hall, a football stadium or in a street of celebration,
while paying no attention to the pain of unfortunate refugees. In particular,
their terrorist acts in the form of “suicide bombing” clearly express the
degree of their anger and despair as “migrants” in France.
(Of course I am absolutely against any form of terrorist
acts including suicide bombing, but I strongly believe it is vital to
understand the psychology of suicide bombers. On this topic, see the following
article: http://apjjf.org/-Yuki-Tanaka/1606/article.html)
On the other
hand, on the pretense of protecting “freedom and democracy,” the so-called
advanced nations are now vigorously introducing policies to limit or oppress
individual civil rights; to control public information and political ideas; and
to tighten national intelligence services. In fact, such “security policies”
are now allowing a small group of politicians and bureaucrats to monopolize
political power. Exploiting the popular fear of terrorism, they are now trying
to further intensify their political power by instigating racism against
migrants and minorities, and heightening nationalism. Over many decades,
Western nations (including Japan) have been promoting “freedom and democracy”
in their own countries. Yet, in this long historical process of so-called
“civilization,” outside their own countries – particularly in their colonies
and ex-colonies, they extensively used and are still using both military and
economic violence. As Sigmund Freud clearly
illustrated in his book Civilization and
Its Discontent, civilization itself produces anti-civilization and increasingly
reinforces it. It can be said
that, in response to such “civilized violence” (i.e. state terrorism), those
Western nations are now receiving a tremendous backlash – the “savage violence”
of terrorism. Ironically this backlash of violence is now destroying the
“freedom and democracy” of the “civilized” world. We must realize that the
Global War of Terrorism is therefore producing a serious crisis: the
obliteration of “freedom and democracy.”
Both the current immense popularity of Donald Trump as
Republican candidate for the U.S. President and the present political situation
of Japan clearly reflect this crisis of the breakdown of democracy. In the last
few years, the Japanese government under Prime Minister Abe Shinzo has moved
quickly to introduce undemocratic polices one after another, e.g., the
enactment of the Secret Information Protection Act; the decision to reinterpret
Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution in order to approve the exercise of the
right of collective self-defense; passing the unconstitutional Security-related
Legislation; the construction of a new U.S. military base at Henoko in Okinawa;
resuming operation of nuclear power plants, and so on. In April 2016, Abe also
abolished Japan’s long time policy of prohibiting the export of Japanese
military technology and weapons, and thus Japan’s military industry is now
being rapidly incorporated into the U.S. military-industry complex. In
addition, Abe initiated joint research into unmanned military planes with
Israel, the country that has an infamous record of indiscriminate and mass
killing of Palestinian civilians, in particular by aerial bombing. Based on
these highhanded policies, the Abe administration is rapidly strengthening and
expanding its military alliance with the U.S.. In actual fact Japan is now an
active participant in the War on Terror. While augmenting the military budget
every year, the budget for social welfare schemes has been considerably cut,
leading to an increased widening of the gap between rich and poor. Abe is now
seriously planning to abolish Japan’s peaceful constitution in order to drag
the Japanese nation deep into the Global War of Terrorism. We must act now to
overthrow the Abe administration as quickly as possible before it’s too late!
